health eating

Obesity is at an all-time high in the United States. Part of the reason why so many people are overweight and obese is that we tend to overeat, even when we aren’t hungry. In the last blog, we told you about grehlin, which is a hunger stimulating hormone.

Another hormone that regulates food intake is leptin, which tells your brain when you have had enough to eat.. For more than 50,000 years, humans relied on leptin to send signals to the brain to regulate what we ate. If the brain isn’t able to accurately read the messages that leptin sends it, you continue to feel hungry.

Eating too much sugar hinders our brain’s ability to read l¬¬eptin messages. Excess sugar calories are stored as fat, which releases leptin. The chronic elevation in leptin levels eventually leads to leptin resistance. As a result, the brain continues to send you hunger signals, even when you have had enough food.

Additionally, eating sugar triggers the production of your brain’s natural opioids, a key initiator of addiction. Essentially your brain becomes addicted to the sugar-induced opioid release. The abnormally high stimulation of your brain’s pleasure receptors by a sugar-rich diet generates excessive reward signals and overrides normal self-control mechanisms.

Limiting sugar intake is the one of the most effective way to stop overeating.

If you are thinking about getting pregnant soon, it is important to pay special attention to nutrition.  Not only will eating well while planning to have a baby increase the likelihood of becoming pregnant, it will also lower the risk of pregnancy complications and improve the health of your future child.  Here are some tips:

• Eat a balanced diet:  Make sure your diet contains high quality proteins, carbohydrates from fresh vegetables and fruit, and healthy fats like olive oil, nuts, and avocados.  Organic foods are a better choice because they do not contain pesticides, hormones or antibiotics that could affect the health of the fetus.
• Take supplements:  Most people are deficient in Omega-3 fats, which support fetal brain and eye development.  Omega-3 fats are found in fish, free range eggs, and grass-fed meat.  You should also take prenatal vitamins, which make up for any nutritional deficiencies in your diet.
• Use caution with beverages:  Sodas – even diet ones – contain sugar and artificial sweeteners, which can be harmful to babies.  You should abstain from alcohol because it decreases fertility and can have negative consequences on the fetus.  While studies regarding caffeine are mixed, it has been linked to miscarriage and low birth weight in babies, so use caution.  The best thing to drink is plenty of water.