Four Hormones

Anyone who has struggled and recovered relatively long term will tell you that there is no recovery, only an ongoing effort to not gain, separated with periods of more effort to lose. Some say that there are periods of remission. I believe that the difficulty with recovery is that obesity is not understood; it is a complex and chaotic issue with many channels and processes, and there is so much misdirection that few have the endurance to find a solution and to stick to the solution. Eating is not a logic driven process; therefore we cannot reason ourselves out with useless concepts like “eat less, move more.” We need to understand that obesity is a disease of excess fat accumulation, driven by hormones, and that some can be addressed by food, but not all. Some is emotional, some is knowledge based. We need to understand our specific causes of our overeating, provide ourselves with an alternate coping skill or philosophy, remove the cause and correct the damage. We need to understand the desires, cravings, hunger and the motivations for eating and overeating. To this end we will explore this problem and offer a number of partial solutions that have worked to some degree. 

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Causes of obesity

1. Not Enough Adiponectin
Adiponectin tells your body to burn fat for fuel, but the more fat on your body, the lower your adiponectin levels. Untrue. There is a correlation between adiponectin level and obesity, not causation.  To break the cycle and kick start your adiponectin, take a high-quality magnesium supplement or eat lots of seeds and green, leafy vegetables. Fill up on fiber, not calories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiponectin

2. Insulin Imbalance

We have all heard how insulin overdose and insulin resistance cause overeating. We also know that high glucose and high insulin combined yields a pleasant relaxant with short term effect. This provides relief from anxiety, stress, emotional discomfort etc.

3. Too Much Ghrelin (excessive hunger, could it be irrational hunger, aka false hunger))

Ghrelin is the hunger hormone. The more you have in your system, the hungrier you are and the more fat your body stores. New research indicates that lack of sleep increases ghrelin levels, so get 7-8 hours of shuteye. But skip the caffeine and energy drinks, because the resulting crash slows your metabolism and makes you feel hungry, even when you're not.

4. Cortisol Overload

Cortisol is necessary for a fight or flight situation (what about freeze), but too much increases your cravings for sweets, stores body fat, breaks down muscle tissue, and can cause depression. Reducing stress is the best solution — if you can find the time to do it in your busy schedule.

We all understand how stress and tired contribute to overeating. So what is the solution. No TV, go to bed instead. Learn to cause others stress rather than yourself.  But there are many more hormones involved.

One of the areas that provided me remission is looking at individual philosophy, the way we individuals think. This has provided relief a number of ways, one concept at a time, in a iterative process. The prerequisites must be learned before the core material. Often, I believe, my problems stem from some missed concept that other people have, which I just missed, ignored, did not grasp, or have forgotten. I expect most people are the same. So what we must do is to go through our understanding, our beliefs, values, our belief system, one line at a time, and compare that to others. When we find a discrepancy, we can then examine the problem concepts and figure out which is better, right, wrong, troubling. 

The purpose of this to understand enough to recover; to push this issue, disease, problem, behavior, whatever handle we choose into remission. One of the helping concept is a sense of purpose in life, urgent, pressing, and unrelenting. This sense of purpose, at the level of the individual, is what drives us, why we get out of bed in the morning, why we struggle throughout the day, until we fall back in bed at night. If we have that driving urgent burning desire to do something, then we are ready for remission. Without that I could not recover in a lasting way. It is that urgent purpose that drives me out of the kitchen and to my office. At a society level, our purpose is to flourish and reproduce, improve the conditions for people to live in, up to some comfortable but not decant style. Minimalist, yes. Frugal, yes. Anything more, they will need to do for themselves.