The NATURAL, SCIENTIFIC secret to WEIGHT LOSS!!! (Ghrelin, Leptin, and Dopamine explained)

Hey, what's wrong? I've been trying to lose weight. Nothing I try works. I just can't do it. Here, try this. Michael's Secret Stuff? Well, I guess it's worth a shot. I've tried everything else. Sorry guys, couldn't resist. There are so many different magic pills, fad diets out there, each trying to come up with some newfangled way to get you to lose weight, and somehow none of them work. To me, it's amazing how some people go to such extreme lengths to lose weight and ignore a basic biological principle. Right now, I'm going to show you a very simple trick that you can implement today that doesn't cost any money, and you won't even have to starve yourself. It's based on the proper understanding of three chemicals in your body. A peptide called ghrelin, a hormone called leptin, and a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Understanding how these three chemicals interact in your body, you can then make a simple change to get the results that you want. Let's take a look at how this works. What's up everyone, I'm Michael Kamalu, medical student at Mayo Clinic. I've had a lot of people ask me for nutritional advice and how to cut and lose weight. And while you've likely heard of a thousand different strenuous diets or magical weight loss pills, I never advise nor do anything myself that is not healthy, sustainable in the long term, and proven by medical science. And that, guys, is the key ingredient to Michael's Secret Stuff. A proper understanding of how your body actually works, and leveraging that to reach your goals. And in this case, there is a very simple strategy to losing weight for those of us who have a tendency to eat just one too many cookies. Let's walk through that cookie, shall we? When you eat, the taste buds in your tongue send signals to your brain, which releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is responsible for pleasure and drive. This dopamine hitting the brain results in the thought, dang, that was good, I want another one. Meanwhile, this cookie makes its way down your esophagus to your stomach. Now, why do we eat in the first place? Because we feel hungry. And what actually causes that hunger? Well, when your stomach is empty, it produces a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin is a peptide hormone that travels in the bloodstream up to your brain. And there it hits a structure called the hypothalamus, which recognizes it as meaning you are energy deficient and thus need to eat. Now, what happens when your meal starts filling your stomach is it expands. All those little ridges you see in there flatten out. And through a complicated process that we don't need to go into, this stretching of the stomach signals to those cells to stop producing ghrelin. But here's the catch. Because ghrelin is a hormone and has to travel all the way from your stomach to your brain, it takes a solid 10-15 minutes for your brain to recognize that your stomach has stopped producing ghrelin. And if you're like me, you can pound a lot of cookies in 15 minutes. If you take a minute and think about it, you've almost certainly experienced this phenomenon. You're hungry, there's cookies, you eat one. Dang, that was good. There's that dopamine release in your brain. So you eat another one. You feel like you're starving and you could eat the entire box of cookies. But before you can reach for another one, you get distracted for a little bit. And after 5-10 minutes, you come back and realize that you're actually not that hungry anymore. That right there is the magic of understanding ghrelin. So I told you the solution to overeating is simple and here it is. Whatever you're eating, eat more slowly. Take a few seconds between each bite. Give your stomach the time to expand and send the signal to your brain that you have eaten enough. We were all born with an incredibly intelligent body that knows exactly how much energy it needs to function at an optimal level. We just need to learn how it works and work with it, not against it. Now, where does leptin come in? You may or may not have heard of a spike of interest in leptin supplementation for weight loss. Leptin is a hormone secreted mostly by adipocytes, which is another name for fat cells, and has the opposite role of ghrelin. It tells the hypothalamus that you're full or have enough energy storage. So some people out there have started marketing leptin supplements as a way of tricking your brain into thinking that it's full. And here's why that doesn't work. A study published back in 2006 found that ghrelin, the hunger hormone, actually blocks a leptin pathway through the hypothalamic NPY1 pathway. Now, you don't need to know what that is or what that means, other than if you are legitimately hungry, your stomach is empty and producing ghrelin, that ghrelin will keep leptin from having any action on your hypothalamus. And thus, the leptin supplementation does nothing. So the secret, my friends, is not to starve yourself. All this hype about intermittent fasting or juice cleanses may have their place and their benefits, but what I advocate for is long-term sustainability. One of my personal mottos is don't eat less, eat smarter. And as we just learned, that not only includes what food you're eating, but the rate at which you eat it. Guys, if you thought that was helpful, please leave me a like or a comment. Share with any of your friends who have wanted to lose weight but have been unsuccessful with all the fancy fads. There's a lot more where this came from, so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of these videos. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me on Instagram, and I'll talk to you then.