Leptin does more than prevent or reverse obesity

If you’ve been working on your circadian health, you’re already working on on your leptin levels, too

Hi, folks! Just a quick post today as I had an aha! kind of moment.

One of my ⚛️ Quantum Tier subscribers was asking me about the connection between circadian health, hormones, and relationships.

This led me to dig up one of the the papers I often reference inside the Circadian and Quantum Childbearing Year program (and other times I’m teaching about how the circadian rhythm influences not only the hormones and things going on inside our bodies, but also the way we may feel like acting) for her.

Yes, we obviously have some level of control over our actions, but we also can see trends based on hormonal flux, etc.

So usually this is the graphic I’m usually pulling up from the research paper because oxytocin is such an important regulator of childbirth and early life development, and it has ties to circadian health we don’t fully understand yet (but definitely are curious about):

To read these graphics, you look at the arrows and the ones with the points show activation, and the ones with the blunted ends show inhibition.

Anyways, I was reading this article with new eyes today and went back to some of the earlier graphics.

If you are following other influencers in the circadian health community, you know leptin is a hormone that gets a lot of talk-time.

But if you (like I have) have gone to do your own research on leptin, you find out it’s kind of a dead end in the mainstream.

Why is this?

Why do some people pin so much on leptin and want so deeply for you to understand it, while others so completely ignore it?

Circadian health is the answer.

As

Musings of a WiseWoman

so accurately stated in one of her recent posts:

Your doctor won’t prescribe you a sunrise.

There’s no fertility clinic with a reimbursement code for “light in the morning” or “eat dinner before dark.”

It turns out, medical manipulation of leptin is both complicated and not yet really understood well enough to be universally effective when using drugs and the like. For example:

Leptin and leptin receptor play an important role in body weight maintenance and energy homeostasis. Leptin’s involvement in many peripheral biological functions, as well as in autoimmune diseases and cancer increased the interest for the design and development of leptin-based drugs acting as leptin-activity modulators.

The studies reported in this review cover the main developed strategies to date to modulate leptin signaling including leptin muteins, peptide-based leptin receptor antagonists, neutralizing antibodies and nanobodies¹.

Now, look at this graphic below, and notice what that recent review of leptin-modifying intervention I shared above fails to mention:

The circadian rhythm regulates leptin.

I’ll share more about leptin and pregnancy soon because it’s really interesting what happens across the trimesters, but first I thought it might be helpful to share this little bit of foundational knowledge here about it’s relationship with the circadian rhythm.

Leptin is not just the “obesity hormone,” just like cortisol is not just the “stress hormone” and melatonin is not just the “sleep hormone.”

To understand any hormone, or the endocrine system as a whole, you must first understand the ins and the outs of the circadian rhythm.

As we all know, light has a more powerful effect on the circadian rhythm than any known drug! I’ll be sharing more about leptin soon—be sure to sign up if you haven’t already.

1. Greco, Marianna, Marzia De Santo, Alessandra Comandè, Emilia Lucia Belsito, Sebastiano Andò, Angelo Liguori, and Antonella Leggio. “Leptin-Activity Modulators and Their Potential Pharmaceutical Applications.” Biomolecules 11, no. 7 (July 16, 2021): 1045. https://doi.org/10.3390/biom11071045.