Cholecystokinin Is Your Friend
Cholecystokinin (/KOH luh SIS tuh KYE nin/) is an important hormone that tells your brain that your tummy is full and that it’s time to send out the signal to stop eating now. It’s the reason you’ve had people tell you that it takes twenty minutes for your body to realise that you are full — because it takes about that long for this hormone to get from the intestines (where it is secreted) to your brain. Cholecystokinin is produced when the intestines encounter fat or protein. But when carbohydrates are ingested, very little cholecystokinin is produced. For that reason, it’s very easy to overeat carbs — they don’t trigger the “I’m full” hormone as well as protein and fat do.
Insulin (/in SOO lin/ or /in SYOO lin/) is another important hormone, because it is secreted in response to carbohydrate and protein in the digestive tract. Carbohydrates rate a semi-truck-load of insulin; protein rates a pickup-truck-load. Fat? Fat doesn’t even rate a Yugo’s worth. When you ingest fat, your pancreas ignores it completely.
So we see the delicate balance that the body maintains. On the one hand, a hormone that doesn’t seem to know that carbs are food and should make us feel full. On the other hand, a hormone that does nothing when copious amounts of fat are poured into the body.
How do you want to trigger your hormones?
By eating carbs, you bypass the one that is supposed to tell you that you’ve eaten enough. Thus, you eat scads and scads of carbs and never feel satisfied. And the influx of carbs causes your body to over-produce insulin — which tells the liver to convert the carbs into simple sugars that it can then convert into energy and store in fat cells.
By eating proteins and fats, and only small amounts of carbs, you trigger the “I’m full” hormone while providing your body both short- and long-term sources of energy — but you provide less of the short-term energy that has to be used or stored immediately.