HORMONES AND DIETING
I have realised I did not say enough about the role of hormones in my posts about dieting. I apologise for this. I did quite a lot on how the brain slows metabolism to counter rapid weight loss and how permanently harmful crash diets are for your long-term weight control. All forms of crash dieting were shown to be harmful to your ultimate health and happiness. Your brain launches a series of initiatives to return you to your former weight before dieting, and then often adds some more weight just in case you try again. This protective initiative by your brain to combat changes to your body and return it to its previous condition is called “homeostasis” and is the reason why new habits must be formed slowly and only one or two at a time until the brain accepts the “new you”.
The brain employs other means to maintain homeostasis besides changing your metabolic rate to counteract rapid dieting.
Hormones, as we all know, are very powerful chemicals even in tiny amounts that help to regulate homeostasis and how we function — including our appetite. They are monitored generally by a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. Very simply, a small number of hormones discovered to date stimulate our desire to eat more while a larger number lessen our hunger. The brain is playing conductor to this orchestra of hormones that defend the homeostasis of our body weight. It appears that if the brain becomes dissatisfied by rapid weight changes, such as caused by crash dieting, different sections of the orchestra will be stimulated to play faster or more loudly to counter this. The important thing for us right now is not to get hung up on the hormones themselves and what they do and how to change them — it is a complex picture still under investigation and hormones are far too powerful for us to try to manipulate without courting serious side-effects. There may come a day when biologists produce something like the contraceptive pill that will genuinely control hormonal hunger, but this is unlikely soon because the picture is complex. It is far safer to slowly change our eating habits until the brain accepts the “new you” and adjusts the orchestral presentation itself.
