Losing weight can often become an unsuccessful game of trying to hit a moving target.  It's usually because most people don't know the things to do "in concert" together so their body predictably burns excess body more easily during each 24 hour period.  Here are 5 things you can start doing right now to help your body burn your excess body fat.

Over the past decade, a new "secret" discovery in how your body regulates it's body fat percentage emerged that has almost gone unnoticed by most people trying to lose weight.  The reason?  Researchers don't quite know how to effectively take advantage of this discovery... until now.

Leptin - The Single Most Important Hormone When It Comes To Your Weight

Your fat cells actually produce a hormone called Leptin that tells your brain whether you need to gain or lose body fat.

Leptin is known as the "fat-hormone", as it is actually made right in your white adipose tissue or stored fat. Following a meal, leptin is released from your fat, enters your blood, and travels up to your brain delivering a message that you are full and how much fuel you have on hand to make energy for your body. 

This function is why leptin has a major role in helping you survive a famine, which isn't such a big deal now but was priority number one for a very long time. The leptin your fat produces is like a gas gauge in your car. You have no way of knowing how much fuel is in your car's tank without looking at the gauge. Likewise, your brain has no idea what you look like in the mirror, it uses the amount of leptin entering your brain as its gas gauge.

Problems occur when you eat in a way that clogs leptin entry into your brain.  In other words, eating the wrong way causes leptin to think you are starving - a faulty perception of starvation. This creates huge problems for your body, making you tired and increasing your food cravings - which lead to weight gain, inflammation, and increased risk for many diseases.

Most Diets Ignore The Impact Leptin Can Have On Your Metabolism

Most popular diets start out by having you cut calories without any regard to your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). This works in most people for a while as your body is set to burn the amount of calories you have been eating. After a few weeks of eating less, however, your metabolism begins to reset to the new amount of calories you are eating, at which point weight loss tends to slow down or stop. If you indisciminately restrict calories without knowing your Resting Metabolis Rate (RMR), you can induce a true state of starvation.

The problem with losing weight based only on calorie restriction is that when you start eating more food after you finish your diet, even what you would consider a normal amount of food, then leptin thinks the starvation period is over and leptin will command that a significant portion of what you are now eating goes back into fat storage. This mechanism was important for survival in earlier times, but in modern times it causes yo-yo dieting.

The way out of this rut is to eat in harmony with your leptin levels so that as you lose weight you are not activating the "starvation machinery" that will slow down your metabolism long before you get to your goal weight and also cause you to gain all the weight back you just lost.

5 Things You Can Right Now To Lose More Weight And Stubborn Body Fat

While both our highly-acclaimed Weight Loss Boot Camp Programs and Genesis Eating Smart Weight Loss Coaching Program take this new "secret" discovery into account and are designed to work in harmony with the hormone leptin in your body, here are 5 things you start right now to see better results from your weight loss efforts:

1. Don't eat after dinner. Finish eating 3 hours before bedtime. Never go to bed on a full stomach. Allow 10-12 hours between dinner and breakfast.
   
   For approximately the first 6-8 hours after eating our evening meal, the body is burning up the calories from that day. The most effective fat burning time (i.e. stored fat in our thighs, bums and tums) is between approximately 8 and 12 hours after eating your last meal of the day (Dinner).
   
   If you have a little snack before bedtime, or have your evening meal too late, the leptin tells the brain that no energy is required, and no fat burning will occur in the latter part of the night. So that little snack, however healthy it may have been, puts paid to any fat-burning that night.
   
   

2. Be sure to eat at least 3 meals per day. Allow 3-4 hours between meals. Try to fit in 1-2 snacks between your major meals.  During the first three hours after a major meal, insulin is in charge of storing the calories from the food we have eaten. During this time we are not in 'fat-burning mode'.
   
   You can start by eating four meals per day, instead of just three. In time, with regular exercise added, you will more and more often be able to eat throughout your day and refrain from snacking at night.
   
   

3. Don't eat large meals.  The idea behind this is to not give the body more fuel than it can use. Regular "large" meals over 500-600 calories leads to leptin and insulin resistance, and thus easy weight gain.
   
   One of the best techniques for reducing the size of meals is to eat slowly and chew really well. It takes the brain ten to twelve minutes to realize you are full. If you really can't slow down, then put down your knife and fork for 5 minutes when you've eaten about half your food. Don't feel you have to 'clean your plate' if you have had enough - you becoming overweight and unhealthy doesn't help anyone.
   
   

4. Eat protein at your breakfast meal.  This keeps the body in a calorie-burning mode. Eating a balanced protein-carbohydrate breakfast supports blood sugar levels so that late afternoon energy crashes are minimized.
   
   These energy crashes are often the result of eating a breakfast with too many carbohydrates and very little protein. If you eat a high carbohydrate breakfast, and are leptin resistant, you are more likely to overeat generally, but particularly at night.
   
   

5. Reduce the amount of starchy carbohydrate eaten.  This does NOT mean cutting out all, or virtually all, carbohydrates. We do need carbohydrates to maintain health.
   
   However, eating too many starchy carbohydrates at lunchtime may cause you to be ravenously hungry before dinner.  Further, eating a lot of starch in your dinner meal sends a signal to your brain that you are "eating for activity" that's coming up.  The problem is that people tend to be less active after their dinner meal and those starchy carbs then go to storage... fat storage.

Implementing these 5 changes in your daily eating plan will start bringing your body's leptin levels back into balance and help you achieve more predictable weight (fat) loss you've been working toward.  Good luck!