30 ■^ EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE ROSEDALE DIET
tentially debilitating disease characterized by the thinning of bone. It’s
important to remember that your cells are eating even when you are
not. Your body continues to burn fuel to do the work of maintaining life
long after you have stopped eating, even when you are sleeping. If your
body is used to burning sugar, it will continue to burn sugar. Your body
can’t store too much sugar away at one time—instead, it converts extra
sugar and stores it as fat. So what’s a body to do when it prefers to eat
sugar, but it has already burned up what you ate at your last meal? It
will look for sugar from other sources, and the protein in muscle and
bone is the ultimate source. Moreover, high levels of leptin actually in-
hibit the ability of special cells called osteoblasts to make new bone. If
you want to prevent osteoporosis, the first and most important step is to
restore leptin sensitivity so that you can stop burning sugar and break-
ing down your lean mass and start making new bone. (Please see page
192 for more information on osteoporosis.)
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you are likely to be suf-
fering the symptoms of leptin resistance, and the devastating effects of
being a sugar burner as opposed to being a fat burner. If you are leptin
resistant, your metabolism is malfunctioning and your health will be se-
riously compromised. In Chapter 3, The Vicious Cycle, I explain why
leptin resistance is so dangerous, and why it is so important not to ig-
nore these telltale symptoms.