GETTING TO THE HEART OF OBESITY

The Rosedale Diet works because it corrects the underlying metabolic aberration at the root cause of both obesity and premature aging: hormonal dysfunction. Hormones are chemical messengers that direct all body activities, including how much you eat, and ultimately, whether you are fat or fit. Your hormones can work for you or against you. The wrong diet creates hormonal imbalances that trigger hunger and food cravings, the main problems that prevent people from losing weight and keeping it off. The right diet—the Rosedale Diet—almost magically controls hunger and eliminates food cravings. That is why it works so well.
Hunger is a powerful force. As I tell my patients, following a diet while trying to fight hunger is like trying to hold on to the edge of a cliff and hoping that gravity will go away. Eventually, you’re going to let go. If you’re hungry, eventually you’re going to eat and chances are, you’ll overeat to make up for lost time.
How does my diet curb hunger? The Rosedale Diet is specially designed to control the key hormone that regulates both appetite and weight loss. That hormone is leptin. Leptin is produced by your fat cells. It tells your brain when to eat, how much to eat and most important, when to stop eating. Leptin is also critical for many of the body’s most important functions, including the regulation of blood circulation, the prevention of blood clots, making new bone, regulation of body temperature, and reproduction. In fact, if a woman produces too little leptin, sh
e will stop menstruating, and therefore will be unable to conceive. Very recently, leptin amazed the scientific community when it was found to be able to rewire critical and central portions of the brain to better do its bidding. The more scientists research leptin, the more they learn about how vital it is to life.
As hormones go, leptin is the new kid on the block. In fact, it’s so new, most of your doctors may not have heard of it, or are unsure what it does. Yet, I consider leptin to be so important for the health and wellbeing of my patients that I always measure their leptin levels, and if I have any say in the matter, doing so will become standard medical practice within a few years. Measuring leptin is easy—it’s a simple blood test—but it tells me volumes about my patients’ potential for gaining weight and the ease with which they will be able to shed excess pounds. Blood leptin levels indicate how well leptin is functioning in your body. High fasting levels of leptin (from blood taken after waking and before eating breakfast) mean that leptin is not functioning well, and therefore, unless leptin is brought down to a healthy level, losing weight and keeping it off will be an insurmountable challenge. Low fasting leptin levels mean that leptin is able to do its job and that your body won’t sabotage your weight-loss efforts by making you constantly hungry.
More important, leptin levels are a bellwether as to how well a person is aging. If their leptin levels are high, it bodes ominously for their health, and that bodes poorly for longevity. In fact, remember those calorie-deprived laboratory animals that were much healthier and lived well beyond their normal life span that I described earlier? They had very low leptin levels compared to their well-fed peers. Fortunately, it is easy to lower your leptin levels without starvation by following the Rosedale Diet, as I’ll describe later.