Appetite, cravings & loneliness
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast that's gonna tell you why you need a year in ten minutes so you can get cracking on with your day as well. So the question today I'm gonna answer is, is it a drug free way to reduce appetite? So we know now there's the semaglutide on the market. There's a lot of talk about it.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are using it. Really, it's a drug that is effective. It should be used in the right context. There's a lot of people who are obese who will benefit greatly from using it. We don't know the super long term effects, obviously.
Speaker 1:I mean, what I mean with super is, like, you know, five, ten, fifteen years. But we do know that how it works is it reduces your appetite, and it makes it easier for you to control your calorie intake, which means you can go into a calorie deficit. And if you can maintain your calorie deficit over time, that is how you lose weight. So the mechanism is it's a magic fat dissolver or something like that. It is simple.
Speaker 1:Your appetite comes down. Your calorie intake comes down. You're likely to be in a deficit. You're in a deficit over a long enough time for you to see weight loss. That's how it all works.
Speaker 1:Okay? So there's a drug before called metformin, Metformin, no Metax, speaking to us about Facebook Metformin, the metaverse Metformin, it's in use since the mid-1900s for diabetes and stuff like that I didn't actually know how it worked really until recently, there was study done in the nature metabolism, okay, and looked at like what happens when within these drugs and like what the lifestyle strategies that can help people eat less and help with appetite basically, like a drug free way. So the study worked like this. The scientists from Princeton, Harvard Medical School and Trinity College Dublin analyzed blood samples taken from 33 people aged 18 to 75. Some of the study participants had diabetes, some didn't, some had obesity, some were lean, some were taking metformin, others weren't.
Speaker 1:Okay, so they looked at other studies as well. Here's what they found. Based on the blood taken by the 33 volunteers coupled with the data extracted from previous research, the scientists noticed that participants who took metformin had elevated blood levels of a molecule called en lacto lactoylphenylene phenylenine or LACFA for short. Thank god for that. So according to the researchers, this elevation in LACFA helped people on metformin to feel less hungry between meals.
Speaker 1:So what can you find or what can you see from this finding? Okay. So you might be thinking if metformin increases lacfa is there other ways we can do it? Is there other ways we can do it that doesn't require drugs? And here's what the data says.
Speaker 1:You can't. So lacfa rises when we eat. So blood levels of lacfa rise and fall in lockstep with one satiety hormone like leptin and peptide YY. So lacfa and other satiety molecules are thought to serve as messengers to help tell the brain it's time to stop eating. Right?
Speaker 1:So lactate levels actually shot up according to his research by 220% after study participants munched on 10 dates, but only 3737% after they drank the same amount of calories and sugar. So there's something about eating, there's something about potentially eating something you're gonna be, as well. I would eat dates slowly with a grimace on my face going, why the hell am I eating this? But maybe some of you love dates. I don't know.
Speaker 1:But maybe it's those foods that we chew a lot. Maybe there's an there's a there's a it's the solid foods that we chew. Maybe there's something to that versus drinking. Okay? So obviously, we're just drinking something, it's not gonna fill us up.
Speaker 1:We know that anyway, like drinking our calories versus eating solid foods in the same calories. We're gonna feel fuller from the eating solid foods and drinking. And I see the opposites to when people struggle to gain weight, the advice is to drink more of their calories than to eat because it's easier to consume calories when it's in liquid form. So if you want to increase your lactate levels, maybe look at bunching on 10 dates as a snack, try it, I don't know, maybe it helps you, maybe not. But be mindful of your snacks.
Speaker 1:Be mindful of your calorie ratio of foods to drink, and see if you can consume more from solid foods. Exercise also boosts slack fee as well. Okay? So a lot of people actually are not hungry at all after intense exercise, and this can be due to this. Some people are very hungry after exercise, so it does actually differ.
Speaker 1:But research done by Stanford University saw that lack of a levels draws the most after study participants performed thirty second sprint intervals on a stationary bike. Very hard, guys. Let me tell you. You do that. You do eight sprints on the bike, thirty seconds with a minute or two minute rest between.
Speaker 1:You won't be walking out to that gym. Let me tell you. So yeah. But some of you might be really, really hungry after exercise. It depends on the person, but could be something you look you look into.
Speaker 1:You know? It could be something you say, yeah. Maybe on weekends, I do eat a lot. Maybe weekends like I struggle, but what if I put a morning workout in where I had high intensity interval training or I did some form of training, maybe that's gonna help. And then I have some solid meal an hour or two later, maybe that's gonna help me towards the evening.
Speaker 1:Okay? So there's things we can do naturally without drugs to, suppress our appetite. You know, for me, caffeine, coffee helps a lot. I know a lot of people find that as well. Coke Zero, Pepsi Max, those types of things for me are ideal.
Speaker 1:I utilize them a lot in my kind of, can appetite control. Some people with water helps, some people not. Some people with water makes some even unclear. Who knows? You know, it depends.
Speaker 1:So when you're looking at when you strip away what these drugs just generally do, it's just to reduce your appetite. It's all about uptake control. And I wanna touch on another study as well that I think is really important and I saw a TikTok video by this girl and she was doing a video of her running and she said that, nothing good happens in social nothing good happens in social events or nothing good happens at social gatherings, you know, go for a run and all that. And I'm like, if you look at total health, okay, if you look at your full and deep health, your social time and social connections are one of the most important factors of long term happiness and health without a doubt, okay? So, you know, when we're looking at nutrition and training, you need to be looking at social connection.
Speaker 1:Have we got friends, family? Have we got people in our lives that care about us? And have we got people in our lives that we care about as well? It's not just about take, take, take. It's about am I giving now to my community and the people in my life?
Speaker 1:Am I helping them? And am I we and it's not tit for tat. It's just out of love. You know what mean? In the book, Play Well With Others by Eric Barker, he shows the people were happiest after disasters.
Speaker 1:So New Orleans, after wars where the communities came together just to help one another out. There was no personal gain to be had. Everything was gone, destroyed. There was nothing to gain. It was just simply, I'm gonna help my fellow human being.
Speaker 1:And they felt a sense of unity, helped them feel very, very good in those times. Now we don't need to go that extreme, do we? We don't want those things happen. But there's a clear connection between our social connections and how we feel in our social relationships and our health as well. So this study looked at does loneliness cause cravings?
Speaker 1:Okay. So struggling with cravings, binge eating, food addiction linked to loneliness. Okay. But why? What is happening here?
Speaker 1:Is this something that happens in a lonely person's brain that messes with their relationship with food? Okay. New study published by the JAMA Network Open starts to answer this question. So they basically recruited only females. They were looking if they felt lonely or not and if they struggle in eating issues.
Speaker 1:The researchers used MRI scans to measure the participants brain activity while they showed them a variety of images, not in which areas lit up in response. So they were asked not to eat anything for six hours before the scan and then were shown images of savory foods, sweet foods, and non food items. Here's what the study found. Higher loneliness scores were associated with bigger brain responses to pictures of food. Right?
Speaker 1:Lonely individuals showed increased activity in the inferior parietal lobule an area of the brain involved in social behaviours and managing emotions. Lonelier people also tended to have higher body fat percentages and suffered more from psychological issues such as depression and anxiety, and the researchers suggest that loneliness might cause people to be more sensitive to their emotions, and because they're more focused on how they feel, they might also be more conscious of cravings and hunger. As a result, loneliness may amplify how much attention someone pays to food. So social health is vital. Loneliness has got a link.
Speaker 1:It tends to come in a package. Right? The chick is, you know, chicken or the egg. Do we really need to know what comes first, or do we just look at the package of things that comes along and goes, we can see what's going on here? It might be feeling lonely, leading to feelings of depression and anxiety, leading to not leaving the house or not doing any social plans.
Speaker 1:Definitely, they're not going to the gym or any fitness classes or any yoga plan, nothing of those sorts. Having no confidence to even join online classes maybe, just feeling down in the dumps, really not performing at work. If you've got kids on top, it's another added effect. Right? You know, when you look at that package deal, you're looking at a really tough outcome.
Speaker 1:You're looking at the inevitable outcome of this is a person really struggling, and their health is gonna hit rock bottom over time because of the stress. And on top of that, it's like a massive sledgehammer. So you got all that going on, and you're like, oh, we're not doing the fitness thing. We're not doing nutrition. Tracking is taking too much time.
Speaker 1:No. I just can't do it. And you got the stress of it all. Boom. Sledgehammer.
Speaker 1:Smash. That's really what's happening. Doesn't matter what's first all those things. It's to really understand and look, have I got these are these, like, features in my life right now? So impact of poor relationships is so severe, okay, that some experts have even said that physicians or doctors should screen for social isolation just as they screen for heart health and diabetes.
Speaker 1:Right? And one study even found that satisfaction with relationships at midlife is a better predictor of long term health than cholesterol levels. Okay. There's one study, and I may not say this the be all end all, but, you know, it's interesting. It's interesting.
Speaker 1:And about emotions change our behavior as well. Of course, we know this. Feeling sad, not sleeping well, eating issues, Rachel's child, oh, look at them. It's a concoction of hell. Right?
Speaker 1:And we need to take steps out of hell, and you gotta keep going, but you gotta be taking steps out of this place. Okay? This is kind of why when I'm thinking about these podcasts and thinking about who's listening and thinking about helping people and people I speak to in real life, you know, I hate the black and white thinking of fitness industry. Like, don't eat that food as processed. Don't eat that list junk for you.
Speaker 1:Don't eat chocolate by this and that. You know, there's some foods, there's some drinks, there's some moments in people's lives that gives them a sense of, you know, that cup of tea in the morning. Okay? I can't tell you. My mother used to have a cup of tea in the morning every morning with her best friend Christine, who unfortunately passed away.
Speaker 1:This had a big impact. And her husband, my step my stepfather stepfather, unfortunately, also passed away. That morning, a cup of tea with all of them sitting down, radio on, classic tunes, Radio Commavager, Tombo and the Borer, you know, and that cup of tea, sit down chat, even if the chat was not about anything relevant to an importance of life or something, it was just chitchat. Then after work, my mother be back, my stepfather would be back, and my mother's best friend would be back from work, and they'd have another cup of tea, then have a chitchat. And maybe my auntie would pop over.
Speaker 1:My other auntie would pop over. My cousin would pop over, say hello. And before you know, they chatted for an hour or two. Okay? And, like, when I think about it and I look at my mother now who has lost all of that out of her life, she still has it sometimes, just not as consistent.
Speaker 1:You think of that and, also, you gotta remember, cup of tea, some biscuits. You know what I mean? You know, if you were to bring, like, one of those gym bros over, proper and and, I mean, there's a lot of good people you know, the people who are black on my finger TikTok. You shouldn't be drinking that tea. You should definitely not be having any sugar in that.
Speaker 1:You should definitely not be on that biscuit. And it's like, you don't understand the context of us coming in. Do you know I mean? You telling people to not have that, and it's it's part of this ritual we have as humans. We if and your ritual involves some of these certain foods, fine.
Speaker 1:What you have to understand on top is that if you're trying to lose weight, you need to be in a deficit over time. So, like I mentioned, the with the appetite stuff. So sometimes you might realize, oh, maybe three biscuits, 300 calories is not worth it for me. So you you've you've gone a kind of contradiction where you've got these certain rituals you have on certain foods and is there they relate to happiness, relate to social connection. That's why drinking people are really connected to drinking because they socially connect over drinks and can we do it without drinks?
Speaker 1:Of course we can but it is a social lubricant so a lot of people turn to it. But this is why it's important not to demonize foods and stuff just on their own. It's in the context of your total health which involves the social element. So eating the dinners out with your friends and family on a Friday or Saturday, you might be like, I want to cut this out because I'm trying to lose weight, but then you're going to lose out on the social element or you're going to be out eating and stressing about the meal you have and causing the table to feel your anxiety. So the knock on effect might cause arguments.
Speaker 1:Well, come on about you only live once. You know, there's gonna be this kind of, again, another contradiction. It's about how do we moderate this? How can we weather these types of behaviors? And, I'm from the camp, you know, eat the food you genuinely like, track honestly, keep a consistent food log.
Speaker 1:If you are eating out on weekends, it's very easy to over consume. So perhaps you cut out the dessert, or perhaps you do look at the menu and pick a better option, protein first. But definitely foods you like to eat, and then to not catastrophize and to live factually objectively is to be like, here's my calorie intake from Saturday, 2,600 calories. My target was 2,002, full stop. Okay?
Speaker 1:You can maybe pull it back on Sunday or on other days if you want, or you can just wake up the next day, and maybe you have no social plans that day. And it's easy for you to get to targets. So it's about balancing it out, but the social element's important. And please don't demonize foods and tell people you shouldn't eat this, shouldn't eat that, because we do have a strong link to food. And for for sure people who are lonely, having cravings, and food is even more of an of a of a tender topic, it's important not to push those buttons more because you make people feel worse about things.
Speaker 1:Okay? Like, we get it. We all understand. We've all gone into the fridge. We've all been eating packs of crisps and chocolate all night.
Speaker 1:We've done all of us have done it, and we will do it again. There's people doing it frequently. They've got a big part of their life missing, the social element. And to tell them not to do something because it's stupid and shouldn't do this and shouldn't that's not gonna help them. You you gotta bring them back out and try and work.
Speaker 1:It's a very complicated thing. But it's something that I feel quite passionate about that the message is quite wrong out there. So, yeah, don't try and be perfectionist. It doesn't work. And if you see people struggling, for sure, don't try and push perfection on them and how they should behave because it's one step at a time out of hell, and we gotta go one step at a time.
Speaker 1:So that one step is just do a food log. Let's start there. No judgment. Anyway, hope this is useful. Have a good day, and I'll speak to you tomorrow.
