The Vicious Cycle: From Fat to Fatter ■^37leptin, they will stop listening. Over time, cells become desensitized to
leptin, or leptin resistant. In order to get their message heard by the
brain, fat cells have to produce more and more leptin so that they can
“yell” louder and louder. This requires more and more fat to be made
and stored. Because your brain has become “hard of hearing” to leptin
there are no brakes on your appetite; you get hungrier and hungrier, eat
more and more, get fatter and fatter, produce more and more leptin....
You get the idea. You get stuck in a most vicious of cycles. To further
compound the problem, when your body is being told to make more and
more fat, you won’t burn it off, and you’ll be forced to burn sugar. This
triggers carbohydrate cravings to supply all that sugar, leading to more
and more carbohydrate consumption, leptin spikes, and leptin resis-
tance. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, studies show that excess leptin
can interfere with the ability of your taste buds to taste sweets, so in or-
der to experience a sweet flavor, you may have to eat more and more
sugar, continuing your body’s sugar burning pattern. You are burning
sugar, storing fat, and getting fat. Even Superman would have trouble
resisting the hormonal urges forcing you to eat and eat and eat.
■ (^) A MODERN EPIDEMIC
Leptin resistance is a relatively new phenomenon, aggravated by very
recent changes in the modern diet. We have followed the medical pro-
fession’s advice to eat less fat and to eat more carbohydrate. The food
industry reaps the greatest profits from starchy carbohydrates (pasta,
bread, cereals), which require far less money to preserve than foods
high in fat, such as meat and fish, which require refrigeration during
transport and in grocery stores.
The problem is, the human body was never meant to use sugar as
its primary fuel: Sugar is the body’s turbo charger fuel, the fuel you are
supposed to use mostly when you need a sudden burst of energy. You’ve
undoubtedly heard of the “fight-or-flight” response, which is sometimes
called the stress response. The fight-or-flight response is our body’s pre-
historic method of dealing with stress. It is the mechanism that enabled
our ancestors to escape from a saber-toothed tiger, kill a woolly mam-