Leptin Resistance and Me (and probably you)

This is your diet on too few calories.

For those keeping score (read: your life is even more drab than mine), I’ve been trying to get extra-lean (under ~10% bodyfat) for a couple of months now and was making slow (but steady!) progress.

However! It appears that, over the last 2 weeks, I’m in a dead stall and not losing anymore weight according to the scale **AND** the calipers, so I’m going to have to take some drastic, gastronomic, measures.

My potential options are:

A. Introduce enough cardio to kill a Kenyan marathoner.

B. Binge eat like Jack Black prepping for a Marlon Brando bio.

C. Skillful application of Jack Daniels and a scalpel.

D. All of the above, which should get me a one-way ticket to 6 months of AA, a lifetime sub to Insulin-A-Day-Keeps-the-Pancreatic-Failure-At-Bay and years of intense psychological treatment…after barely surviving multiple surgeries and escaping the ICU w/ three out of four limbs still in working order. And a new nickname: Lefty.

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is B, because of fun little thing known as leptin resistance.

I’m not going to bore you w/ the gory details, but the basic idea is that your body thinks you’re trying to starve it to death (and since I have body dysmorphic disorder, it’s right!), so in order to get everything back to an even-keel (and so I can get my anorexia-like descent to sub-7% bodyfat back on track) I’ll partake of all those things you’re *Never Supposed to Eat While Dieting!(TM)*:

1. Fistfuls of el hombre de Mexico’s favorite (now impossible to get) treat, Pop-Tarts.

2. Sacrificing half-a-dozen cows to drain enough cream from them to create a few dozen gallons of that sweet elixir of life, cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream.

3. A wide assortment of candy that, under normal circumstances, would get me a lifetime sub to Insulin-A-Day-Keeps-the-Pancreatic-Failure-At-Bay.

In all, I’ll consume about double a typical day’s-worth of calories (a bit over 4k), almost all in delicious, simple, pancreas-pummeling sugar! (Oh, and some protein because I’m all about fat kid/skinny kid on a teeter-totter-like ‘balance’.)

The net result, if I live, is that I should see an almost immediate drop in bodyfat come day three, and a resumption of normal bodyfat eradication on a roughly 2k cals/day diet that features none of the things you’re Never Supposed to Eat While Dieting!(TM). (Thank God.)

The downside is, of course, when you’ve conditioned yourself to the point where sweet stuff just isn’t remotely appealing is that it’s going to be a hellish chore trying to shovel that much garbage down my throat for 2 days. (Yes, I know: nobody reading this is feeling any sympathy for a ‘plight’ that includes all-you-can-gorge buffets and fields of Skittles, but I will persevere, if not for myself, but for science (but mainly myself).)

The moral of this (long-winded and grating) story is that if you find yourself stalled out on a diet for any more than 2 weeks you, too, probably need to implement this sort of regimen to get the plumbing back into normal tolerances, i.e. boost leptin levels back to baselines so that your body is tricked into thinking you’re not trying to starve it to death (stupid body, you’ll never learn! Mwahahahaha!).

---

Cross-posted to Facebook and A Board With No Name.