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You might head over to the Whole Health source blog. The guy there, Stephan, researches into leptin. He did a recent podcast with someone and that's linked from there. He thinks that the problem is that leptin signalling can get overridden if you taste a food that your body remembers as rewarding. We like sugar, for example, because it gives us a buzz, and we'll go for that. It's been found that if you feed people through a tube that dispenses a meal-replacement liquid that tastes of nothing much interesting things happen. They can't taste, smell, or even see what they're consuming, so it has no interest for them. Then leptin signalling seems to work. You tell people to suck up as much as they like. A slim, healthy, and active person might take 3, 000 calories (as he would have of food). Obese people behave totally differently: they drink small quantities of the liquid—say, no more than 400 calories—and feel they've had enough. That's staggeringly low. No diet would offer you less than a thousand calories. And it can't just be that the liquid is unpleasant, so that people don't want it, because the healthy people do drink plenty of it. It seems that when the tastes and smells of food aren't intruding, people who need to eat less do eat less.
There are some interesting suggestions for people who've become leptin-resistant that come up in the podcast, like eating the same thing every day (as long as it's nutritionally balanced), because then it becomes more boring. You can also use less tasty cooking methods, and there are a few other suggestions. It'd probably get a bit tiresome if done for a protracted period, but it sounds like it can work. Maybe you'd want to check that out.
Originally Posted by DFH
