Hi! This is Kiran Krishnan, research microbiologist and spore formulator. I'm here to talk to you about weight management and appetite suppressing, and dealing with potential weight gain during the holidays.
A lot of people ask me, "Once the holidays are done, how do I jumpstart my weight loss routine?" Everyone wants to get back in shape and get ready for that spring or summer bikini season, I'm sure. Right?
A couple of big things:
Microbiome and Appetite
Microbiome plays a huge role in your body's composition. It also plays a huge role in appetite. It plays a huge role in whether or not your body's burning fat. So, let's talk about each one of those.
The first one is your appetite itself. There's a hormone called ghrelin that's produced in your body - it's considered to be the hunger hormone. When ghrelin levels are high, you keep eating. Even when you're full, as long as ghrelin levels stay high, you will keep eating, because that's how powerful that hunger hormone is.
Now, the signal to shut off the ghrelin production once you've had enough food in your gut is a signal that comes from the microbiome, that deals with the gut-brain connection. So, if your microbiome's not functioning properly, if you've got too much inflammation in the lining of your gut, if your gut is leaky, those ghrelin signals don't actually get produced.
And even if they do get produced, they don't make it to your brain. So, even though you're eating and you're satiated, your brain keeps producing this ghrelin hormone or stimulating the production of ghrelin hormone, so you keep overeating beyond the point of being full.
So, that's one big thing that you can actually target with the use of the right probiotic, like Just Thrive Probiotic. In the study we published last year, we saw that in people with leaky gut, the ghrelin response was nonexistent, even after taking in a 2,000 calorie meal. But when we gave them the probiotic for 30 days, what we saw is that after we gave them the meal, the ghrelin levels dropped almost 50%. That's exactly how your body should be responding to the presence of food entering your system.
The Fat Burning Cycle
Now, the next part is whether or not your body chooses to burn fat for energy or looks to burn sugar. Now, the way you can ... you can trigger fat burn is through the production of something called butyrate. Butyrate is a short-chain fatty acid that's produced in your large intestine by good, friendly bacteria.
One of the jobs of the spores is to not only produce butyrate itself, but it increases the population of bacteria that actually produces butyrate for you.
So, what happens with butyrate is once it's produced in response to eating a meal, butyrate gets into your system, it actually interacts with your fat cells, and it turns on something called AMPK. AMPK actually stimulates all of the cells in your body to burn fat for fuel. So, you become a fat-burning machine if you have adequate butyrate production, especially in response to a meal.
And what we saw in a recent study we submitted for publication is these spores increase butyrate production by over 50%. Now, one of the interesting things about that is we ... when we added a prebiotic, and a specific one we call Precision Prebiotic, it actually increased butyrate production by 110%. So, both are really effective and will go a long way to getting your body to trigger itself to use fat for fuel.
So, you've got the ghrelin, in terms of the cravings and the need to stop eating. Then you've got the butyrate production to help your body burn fat.
Food Cravings
Then you have another aspect of the cravings, which is something called leptin. So, leptin is another hormone that your body is supposed to be producing at high levels once you have food entering your system. Now, again, leptin is dependent on a healthy noninflammatory microbiome in order for it to be produced at adequate amounts in response to food. So, if you can upregulate leptin after a meal, it means you're going to stop eating, you're actually going to start burning fat for fuel, and your body's going to be satiated for much longer. You won't need to eat again for some time. And that's exactly how we're supposed to function.
Again, leptin requires the function of a healthy microbiome.
So, if you can keep all of these systems working well throughout the holidays, it'll have a significant impact on your ability to jump into a healthier diet in January, and start burning fat, start losing that weight, start improving your eating habits as well. You don't want leptin, and ghrelin, and AMPK, all of these things, to falter too much during the holidays because we are naturally going to be overeating, we're going to be eating sweets, we're going to be eating things that we don't normally eat, hopefully.
Take Your Daily!
So, the use of Just Thrive Probiotic throughout the holiday season will help manage these functions within the body, and then you can jumpstart those healthier habits in January, with your leptin, ghrelin, and AMPK functioning properly. That way, you will know when to stop eating, you will be satiated for longer, and your body's going to burn fat for fuel.
That will give you the leg up you need on your weight loss management program!
