The winter is upon us. You know what that means. I know I sure do, because I’m already experiencing it in full force for some reason.  It’s an increased appetite. I guess that when the weather starts to grow cold, the leaves start to fall, the days get shorter, and the sky turns mostly grey, we look to food as comfort and as sort of an entertainment.

Let’s face it. Food adds “color” and spice to our lives. Its rich tastes, different textures and experiences, and scent, really add interest to our lives.  That’s why so many people have a hard time watching what they eat in the winter time. For those of us that live in cooler climates or areas where the weather change is pretty apparent, when the winter time kicks in, so does our appetite for bad foods.

Many times, starting with Halloween, we begin on a binge that tends to last all the way through to New Years. Not coincidentally, Halloween is also the time that most states turn their clocks back and the days become shorter.  This does mess with our circadian rhythm, or sleep patterns, which can also throw off our appetite and eating habits.

One of the ways you can help with this winter time tendency to eat more and to eat bad foods is to get light therapy in your life. You can either visit a tanning bed (only safely, no burning and no over doing it whatsoever, and yes I realize this is controversial), get some sort of a bed that emits UV light without tanning you.

Simply getting this light therapy can help lift the spirits and dampen the appetite. Studies have shown in many ways that SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, is largely due to inadequate sun exposure, which includes the actual light received by the eyes. Something about this light helps trip our positive feelings.

You can also supplement your diet with a good herbal appetite suppressant such as Hoodia or green tea. Both offer natural appetite suppression that can help you get the help you need to suppress the ravenous beast within from constantly sabotaging your weight maintenance goals.

Another way to suppress your appetite in the winter time is good old fashioned exercise. Exercising helps suppress the hunger hormones that are released more in the winter by elevating the feel good chemicals in the body.

Studies have recently shown that those that have more tendencies toward obesity or are already obese may actually have built-in brain limitations that thin people do not have. In other words, you may have genetic predispositions into being heavy if you are heavy and find it harder to control your cravings.

In recent research studies, brain scans show that when thin people are presented with images of high fat, tempting “naughty” foods, they actually activate a center of their brain that is associate with willpower and impulse control.

Contrary to this, heavy or obese people switched on the areas of their brain that are turned on when something presents itself that it high fat, sugary or otherwise tempting as far as food goes.  The conclusion is that heavy or obese people actually have a detriment when it comes to controlling their weight.

What isn’t clear is whether the cart comes before the horse in this case. For example, do people who are heavy aquire this inability to control their cravings over years of indulging in these fatty foods?  Maybe this indulgence actually causes a chemical change in the brain that reduces the ability to control one’s impulses.

Thin people on the other hand, especially thin people who have been thin for years or for the majority of their lives, may have always had their controls turned on. Through years of using these controls and not wavering from them, they may have maintained them.

It’s just like anything else – you don’t use it and you lose it. This may be the case with those who have willpower and impulse control, and those that have either never mastered it, or have let it go. 

Obese people may have a lesser ability to control their food cravings from the get go, making it harder for them to maintain a healthy weight from an early age. The ongoing misuse, or no use at all, of these built in controls, may result in a lifetime of obesity.

It seems that all vaccinations and other human medications start with research in mice, and this new potential “vaccine for obesity” could be the next big breakthrough that was borne out of research on mice. You heard that right, there may be a vaccine that helps to control weight in humans!

This interesting concept is to inject people with a concoction of hormones that helps to control a hunger hormone in the body that often stimulates our appetite and makes us eat copious amounts of food, even after we have stuffed ourselves silly.

Ghrelin is the hormone that this vaccination hopes to suppress, and by suppressing this elusive hormone, it could help those that have weight problems to control their weight more easily and lose weight by eating a lot less.

The mice that were injected with this concoction not only ate less than the mice that were not, but they also burned more calories than the mice that did not get the vaccine. What does this mean?

Well, that either the vaccine itself helps to stimulate some sort of fat or calorie burning mechanism in our body or that simply eating less is the factor that makes our bodies burn more calories. I’ll go with option B, since this has been proven that our body burns stored calories more when we reduce our caloric intake.

What is definitely intriguing about this vaccination against obesity is that the effects didn’t just wear off like any other drug. The effects appeared to stay with the mice for years after they were injected.  Not sure if they did this research over several years, but I would hope they did to be able to support that type of sensational claim!

Even more intriguing is how they developed the vaccine. They developed a way to help the body make its own antibodies against the hunger hormone ghrelin. That way, when the body makes more of the hunger producing hormone, the body’s vaccine-made antibodies would attack it and neutralize it, therefore making it powerless.

The translation? Reduced hunger, way less appetite and a much trimmer belly, waistline and all that other good stuff that goes with the ideal body type.  If this worked and did not have any serious side effects, it could definitley blast its way through the weight loss market and become a top seller…

Anorexia nervosa, the disease by which mostly women, very few men, starve their bodies of food, has long been though to be a disorder that is psychiatric in nature. From what I’ve observed, I believe this to be true.  However, there is a new theory that anorexia may not really be phsychologically motivated or intiated, but it may actually be more like a disease such as diabetes.

The controversial theory is that people with anorexia may actually be hard to convince that there is anything wrong with them psychologically because there really isn’t. The contention for this theory is more that it is a metabolic disorder, by which the body does not actually send the signals to the brain that it is hungry.

The motivation of the patient not to eat enough food, or to not eat at all, is not because of some sort of perfectionism or deeply seated psychological issue, but rather from a genuine lack of need for food. I disagree with this, because if this were the case, why don’t we have any anorexic children?

Anorexia always comes into play in adulthood, when we are able to develop psychoses about things, feel insecurities, and to feel the pressure to be perfect, whether it be from ourselves or from others around us.

If you watch a documentary on anorexia, most of the women afflicted with it started off looking very healthy when they were younger. It is only when they developed psychoses for one reason or another, that they stopped eating or greatly reduced the amount of food or even water that they took in.

I highly doubt that anorexia and bulimia were a big deal back when no one cared about weight and the media wasn’t constantly flashing pictures of beautiful, seemingly in control models and actresses in women’s faces 24/7.  In the olden days when your whole body was covered in clothes from head to toe and the only women you may have felt competitive with lived a hundred miles away, it was probably a lot easier to disregard these things about your own body image.

So, I just wanted to let you know that we have a new page dedicated to an exciting appetite suppression technology that uses the same type of science behind nicotine patches to help you suppress your appetite when dieting.

Nicotine patches work by continuously releasing nicotine into the blood stream, thereby taking away cravings for carcinogenic cigarettes from addicted smokers. This new appetite suppressant patch uses the same principle, only it releases a bunch of herbs and bio-active ingredients into the blood stream on a constant, even basis to reduce your appetite all day long.

The cool thing is, you just put the patch on and go about your day, instead of having to take pills every few hours so that your appetite doesn’t come roaring back twofold, as it often can when you forget to take a dose when you are taking pills.

So, see our new page on the patch for appetite suppression and see if it might be the right weightloss tool for you.