So those of us who have used calorie restricted diets to lose weight, no, the hunger is the enemy of weight loss. And the hunger created by the leptin response to the reduced calorie intake will sabotage your diet. If you're overweight and you have been for years, then you will be leptin resistant as well. And what this means practically, is that although there is leptin in your body, because your fat is making the leptin and you have more fat than you should you have a blunted lit blunted leptin response, so that even though there is leptin floating around, your brain is shut off the sensitivity to leptin and it's not hearing the leptin and because the brain and now things that you're starving, because it's not hearing Lipton say that you carrying extra weight Or that you for the hunger signal is going to be triggered by the brain.
So it's not even harder to diet. Hunger means calorie counting diets are unsustainable, and coupled with the fact that there are insufficient vitamins coming in, because low calorie foods generally the processed local foods are historically very low nutrients. They don't, they don't supply enough of the necessary vitamins and minerals for proper cellular function. So magic candle function starts to drop off. Due to poor vitamin B and magnesium intake. Insulin is going to take time to normalize.
And in fact, it's never going to normalize if we continue to eat the wrong food, even if we're eating tiny quantities. And the result of this is depression, poor motivation, exhaustion, withdrawal, and very often we become I'm obsessed with food, because we're not getting enough of it. We think about it all the time. So now when we do eat, the chance of rebound gluttony is very high and then added complications of dieting just to make things even harder. When we eat less, and maybe force ourselves to exercise more, the impact on our body is multi dimensional. Low nutrient intake results in number one, put toxin elimination, and increased toxins are going to lead to weight gain.
Secondly, poor mitochondrial function. Now, of course, as I discussed at the beginning, your mitochondria are responsible for your energy output they they are the factories that push out those little ATP pockets, but they need special cofactors such as vitamin B to function properly. So if you're not getting enough vitamin B in your dyes, the match The contract cannot function properly, and they're not putting out enough ATP, and your energy is going to deplete with low nutrient intake. Number three, this is the same with our immune function. with poor nutrient intake, our immune function also cannot function properly. So we become weaker, depressed and we get sick quicker.
And of course, if we get sick, we're not likely to exercise at all. And we very often when we sick, we tend to eat comfort foods. So that is also a little bit of a double whammy. Plus, if we're eating less and exercising more, we may be consuming less protein than we need. Now the body will always find protein. So if we don't take in enough in our diet, our body will start to take it from our muscles.
And this leads to muscle wasting, which is called sarcopenia. And we get better so we seem to be getting bigger but in fact muscles are getting thinner and thinner. And with a low muscle function, our metabolic rates start to drop off. And studies such as the Minnesota experiment have shown that calorie restricted diets result in very little weight weight loss over long term, and they generally have a rebound weight gain. Plus, calorie restriction impacts on stress, which results in cortisol release, and cortisol triggers fat accumulation, especially around the middle and I will discuss cortisol and stress in a short while