Hello and welcome to another episode of the Upgrade You podcast. It is just me again today.

I'm not sure exactly what Jonathan is, but he said he was going away for the weekend, so hopefully he's having a good time.

I've been left to answer your brilliant questions again this week and and I hope that some of you have got involved in the finishes this week that Jonathan's been putting up.

Some of them, I have to say, pretty brutal, and I would consider at least half a workout in themselves.

But we do like to challenge you guys, so I hope that you're enjoying that.

First question this week is from Anna and she says in the long term does your hunger reduce

along with your weight. Essentially if I'm freestone lighter, am I always going to want to

eat the same amount as I did when I was three stone heavier?

So basically, will I always be hungry when dieting?

And this can be pretty demoralising if you believe that you will be,

especially if you think that it's unsustainable because you feel so hungry.

And it's one of the reasons that a lot of people fall off track or go off their diets.

So I have some good news. This isn't necessarily the case and there's numerous reasons for this and I'll go through a few of them just now. So number one would be your sensitivity to satiety signals. So satiety being the opposite of hunger. As you lose body fat, you will become more sensitive to your hunger and satiety signals.

So one of the mechanisms by which this happens is your brain's ability to read leptin.

So leptin is a hormone that is produced by our fat cells. And in theory, the more leptin that you have, the less your drive to eat

should be. Because leptin being there is a sign that you have ample energy in stored body fat.

However, this obviously doesn't exactly happen because otherwise no one would

be able to eat overweight and we wouldn't have this drive to eat if we were overweight. So

chronically high levels of leptin leave the brains less sensitive to leptin, which means it isn't able to turn off these hunger signals.

Sorry, can't really speak today.

So leptin, the brain can't sense leptin as well as it maybe should, which means it can't turn off hunger signals.

And this is sort of known as

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