When people want to start losing weight, they usually start by changing their eating habits. But before you even consider going on a diet, you should do your research carefully because not every diet will guarantee significant weight loss in a short period of time. A low-carb diet however will definitely help you reach you weight loss goals more effectively.
People who crave foods that are high in carbohydrates often overeat but a low-carb diet will naturally help to suppress your appetite and make it easier for you to keep it under control. This type of diet consists of mostly healthy fat and good protein. When your body becomes depleted of glucose which normally is supplied by carbohydrates it will start burning stored fat instead to produce energy, which will obviously result in weight loss.
Appetite Versus Hunger
Before we actually get into how a low-carb diet suppresses appetite, let’s have a look at what appetite actually is. There is a huge difference between hunger and appetite – the first term is defined as the physiological need for food, while the latter is considered to be the desire for food.
It’s actually the desire for food that makes us overeat and gain weight. For example, eating a small bowl of pasta is an easy way to relieve your hunger. Nonetheless, appetite might make you want to eat a larger bowl of pasta than would actually satisfy your hunger.
Low Carb – Low Hunger
Consuming a low amount of carbs directly affects your blood insulin levels. When you consume a lot of carbohydrates, you always experience a spike in your insulin levels, which increases your food cravings.
This makes most people get into a really bad cycle of consuming too much food and ultimately gaining weight. So, by consuming fewer carbs, you will actually lower your blood insulin levels, and naturally suppress your appetite.
If you’ve tried dieting or losing weight before you may have resorted to or considered appetite suppressants but it’s not really tackling the underlying problem and it’s much healthier to eat real food than to take a pill. Although there are some natural appetite suppressants on the market over the counter or prescription one usually have undesireable side effects.
Despite the fact that low-carb diets are proven to be effective when it comes to weight loss, it’s still not very popular among the general public. The main reason behind this is that people find it extremely hard to stop eating bread, pasta and other foods high in carbohydrates. It can take time to retrain your brain so you don’t crave these foods. .
In order to lose weight in a short period of time, you will need to break that cycle and ignore those cravings. After all, you will stop craving these foods soon after you stop consuming them.
A study conducted by the Department of Experimental Medicine of University of Lund, Sweden showed that the main reason why you can achieve rapid weight loss with a low-carb diet is because of appetite suppression. The study lists three reasons behind the suppressed appetite:
· The high-protein content of the diet
· The ketogenic nature of the diet
· The absence of hunger-promoting carb components like fructose and/or sucrose
Leptin And Hunger
Researches from St. Louis and Japan (Banks WA1, Coon AB, Robinson SM, Moinuddin A, Shultz JM, Nakaoke R, Morley JE, et all, Triglycerides induce leptin resistance at the blood-brain barrier) found that blood fats known as triglycerides interrupt the passage of the appetite regulating hormone leptin across the blood brain barrier stopping it from signaling the body that it has had enough food.
Low carb diets result in a dramatic reduction in triglyceride levels, so that leptin can get to the brain to successfully reduce hunger.
The reduction in triglycerides happens pretty fast once carb intake is reduced, and is one of the main reasons that low carb eaters have a substantial reduction in hunger. As an added benefit, once leptin gets to the brain it boosts thermogenesis (fat burning) and so the metabolic rate increases.
Low carb eaters are not white knuckling it through caloric restrictions as they do on the many high carb/low fat plans.
Final Thoughts
While some people believe that low-carb diets cost more money to follow than eating processed carbs, this is just a popular misconception. Actually, processed food, convenience food and other high carb boxed foods often costs more than the types of produce, meats and fats that are eaten on a low carb plan.
