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 importantly, when to stop eating.
Leptin not only controls hunger, but it is the hormone that tells the body whether it should burn away excess fat. This is one of the most critical messages that your body must hear to maintain normal weight and optimal health.
When leptin levels can be properly "heard", it alerts your brain and other body tissues that you have eaten enough and stored away enough fat, and it’s now time to burn off some excess fat. This feedback system is designed to prevent you from getting fat.
In order for leptin to be heard clearly, however, leptin levels must remain stable and low. When leptin levels spike too high, too often your cells stop listening to leptin. In medical terms, they become "resistant" to leptin’s message. When your brain and other body tissues don’t properly "hear" leptin’s message, your brain continues to believe that you must store away even more fat for a rainy day. It tells you, "Be hungry, eat, and store more fat. " Before too long, you will be fat.
When a person becomes leptin resistant, it takes more and more leptin to tell the brain that it’s satisfied and that you don’t need more food. Therefore, it takes more and more food to feel satisfied. The brain, not hearing leptin, frantically signals for more and more fat to be stored. Since leptin is made by fat cells, you have to make more and more fat to produce enough leptin to finally get its message across to the brain to stop being hungry and stop storing fat.
This creates a vicious cycle: you eat more because your brain doesn’t know how to tell you to stop; the only way you can stop is by producing more fat to make more leptin; you keep getting fatter and more insulin and leptin resistant; all of which just makes you want to keep eating more.
Most overweight people, and nearly all obese people, are not leptin deficient; in fact, they produce too much leptin. As a result, they become leptin resistant, much the same the way people with type 2 diabetes are insulin resistant.
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.
I often refer to my diet as a leptin sensitizing diet as opposed to a weight-loss diet. The fact is, you can’t do one successfully without the other. When leptin sensitivity is restored, you will stop storing excess fat and instead, start burning it off. Best of all, your hunger will be controlled, you will not have food cravings, and you will have a trim, well-toned body.
Studies show that excess leptin can interfere with the ability of your taste buds to taste sweets, so in order to experience a sweet flavor, you may have to eat more and more sugar, continuing your body’s sugar burning pattern. You are burning sugar, storing fat, and getting fatter.
Virtually all of the popular diets today are basically variations on the same two themes: (1) the high carbohydrate/low fat diet (heavy in grains, starches, salads, and fruit) or (2) the high protein/low carbohydrate diet (heavy in meat, fish, poultry, dairy, and eggs). Neither type is as effective as mine. No popular diet other than the Rosedale Diet has been shown to control leptin.
As its name implies, the high carbohydrate/low fat diet severely restricts fat intake. You can’t eat much protein because it is often high in fat, and you are forced to eat mostly starches (like pasta), grains, and salads. Many carbohydrates, even the ones you think are healthy, can cause those spikes in leptin that will make you leptin-resistant.
Carbohydrates, in any form other than fiber, are eventually metabolized by the body into sugar. In fact, carbohydrates start turning into sugar as soon as they hit the saliva in your mouth. It doesn’t matter if it’s a piece of fruit, a brownie, or a bowl of whole grain cereal, it still turns to sugar.
The all-the-protein-you-can-eat-diet fixates on eating protein and ignores fat. Your plate is piled high with meat of any kind, and as much as you like, but you are severely restricted in your carbohydrate intake. The dirty secret of high protein diets is that if you eat more protein than your body requires, the excess can turn toxic and can threaten your health. There is even growing evidence that a high protein diet significantly increases your risk of heart disease, another fact you won’t hear from proponents of these diets.
It may surprise you to learn that the protein the body doesn’t quickly use to repair or make new cells is largely broken down into simple sugars, which increases blood sugar and promotes insulin resistance. Furthermore, protein itself triggers insulin production, which can worsen insulin resistance. (That is why diabetics should never go on a very high protein diet.)
Protein is used to repair and rejuvenate the body, but the body can only use a limited amount of protein at a time. What isn’t used is largely converted into glucose (a form of sugar), and burned. What isn’t burned is made into fat: saturated fat!
To compound the problem, most of the protein we eat today, particularly beef and chicken, are grain-fed to fatten them up, not just grass fed as they were in the old days. Grain feeding produces animals much higher in saturated fat than normal. I often refer to the fat in grain-fed animals as "second generation starch," because the starchy carbohydrates that the animals eat will ultimately be stored as fat in us.
In contrast to other standard weight-loss diets, the Rosedale Diet focuses on fat; burning fat and eating fat. In fact, it allows you to eat up to half or more of your daily calories in the form of fat, as long as it’s the right kind of fat. Since fat is what gives food much of its flavor and texture, eating a high fat diet is hardly a hardship. You also eat protein on my diet, but in the right amount, because excessive protein consumption can be dangerous. You can also eat a fair amount of carbohydrate, but only the healthy ones that won’t cause the precipitous spikes in leptin that are so damaging to health.
Furthermore, not all fat is the same. Fat can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Some fat is bad, notably excess amounts of the most saturated fat, found in most meat and in full fat dairy products and omega-6 fats found in many kinds of vegetable oils. So too, are trans fats (also known as hydrogenated oils) found in fried and many processed foods. These "killer" fats can increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and a myriad of other health problems. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t like high protein and other low carbohydrate diets that do not distinguish between killer fats and good fats.
Trying to cut all fat out of our diets, we have eliminated the good fats: monounsaturated fats and omega-3 fatty acids. These fats are found in foods that are often restricted in other diets, but not on mine. On the Rosedale Diet, you can eat nuts such as almonds, walnuts, cashews and nut butters, avocados (yes, on my diet you can eat guacamole), fatty fish, non grain-fed beef, omega-3 enriched eggs, and high quality vegetable oils.
Our bodies thrive on good fat. Our metabolism needs good fat to burn bad fat. Our cells need good fat to work properly. Our brains need good fat to think. Most important, good fat lowers leptin levels, improving the quality of leptin signaling so that our cells hear leptin better, thereby controlling hunger. Remember, eating fat doesn’t make you fat; the inability to burn fat is what makes you fat. Good fat turns you into a wonderful fat burner. It is truly a miracle food.
Most people are good sugar burners because they’ve had a lot of experience doing so, due to our typically high sugar and starch diet accompanied by caffeinated drinks that drive the blood sugar even higher. Even when you are not eating, your body’s cells are still burning fuel to do their work. When you are a sugar burner, your body continues to burn sugar as its primary fuel and to store away fat. I call this phenomenon "metabolic momentum." The body continues to burn the fuel it is accustomed to burning.
Being essentially a 24/7 sugar burner can be very damaging. Your body can’t store very much sugar. To continue to feed its sugar habit when you don’t eat, your body will break down the protein in its lean tissues, including muscle and bone, into sugar. Your body would prefer not to destroy itself in this way, so it will make you hungry and make you crave sugar. This makes you more and more leptin resistant. And instead of burning off excess fat, you make more of it, and you store more of it away. Over time you end up turning your muscle and bone into sugar and fat as you get fatter, weaker, more frail, and flabbier. And you will always be hungry.
If you eat sugar (or foods that turn into sugar) and fat together, the body will burn the sugar and store the fat. Sugar and fat is a common combination - think of buttered toast! Our cells are hardwired to burn sugar first: no one knows why this is so, but there are probably good reasons for this. Excess sugar poses a far greater threat to your body than excess fat (which isn’t good either, but is not quite as bad as sugar - diabetes can kill you faster!).
When sugar combines with the proteins in your body (called glycation), it triggers chemical reactions that can be very damaging to healthy cells and can cause aging, disease, and death. Sugar burning also promotes the formation of potentially high amounts of toxic chemicals called free radicals, unstable oxygen molecules that can damage cells and ultimately lead to numerous diseases. My hunch is the body probably burns off sugar first as a defense mechanism to protect you from potentially lethal effects of sugar. The more sugar you eat, the more it becomes harder for our bodies to switch to fat burning mode.
By eating good fat, we can retrain our bodies to become fat burners. Being a fat burner has its advantages; once your cells begin to burn off fat for fuel, metabolic momentum takes over. Even when you don’t eat, your cells will continue to keep burning stored fat, making you feel more satisfied and less hungry. Needless to say, when you’re not carrying around all that excess fat, you’ll be trimmer, more attractive and healthier.
You become a good fat burner by burning fat. To do so you must limit your sugar and foods that turn into sugar (including starch and excess protein) and beverages that contain caffeine, especially for the first few weeks when your metabolism is learning to switch from burning sugar to burning fat. You need to break the negative "metabolic momentum" that is locking you into the toxic fat storage/sugar burning mode, and locking you out of fat burning.
I am a metabolic specialist who has devoted my career to treating diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. I am also a well-known specialist in the field of aging, and lecture on that topic as well. It is not unrelated to diabetes. In fact, my interest in diabetes was sparked by the observation that diabetics suffered from the so-called diseases of aging, such as arthritis, heart disease, cataracts, and even dementia at a much earlier age than normal. They even look older at an early age. From that realization, it dawned on me that the metabolic disorder of diabetes is a disease of rapid aging, and what we consider to be the "normal" diseases of aging are in reality due to an underlying disease of metabolic dysfunction. I have come to believe that leptin resistance is at least related to, if not at the foundation of the majority of disorders related to aging, including heart disease, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, arthritis, and even aging itself.
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.
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, as detailed in my book, The Rosedale Diet, almost magically controls hunger and eliminates food cravings. That is why it works so well and helps people create health and longevity.
Follow The Rosedale Diet 21 day plan to switch your metabolism from sugar burning to fat burning. The details of the diet plus information about recommended nutritional supplements and important blood tests to evaluate your body’s health and track its improvement are fully described in the book. I predict this will be the last diet book you will ever need to buy! Click Here to order the book.
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