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Inflammation doesn’t only create insulin resistance. It also creates leptin resistance, which makes it even harder for you to lose weight.

Leptin is a hormone that responds to how much you’ve eaten and signals the brain that you’ve had enough (satiety is the technical term). Leptin also helps burn fat by cueing your metabolism to run faster when you have extra fat to burn and slowing down your metabolism when your body needs to hold onto fat. You can see how our ancestors might have needed this hormone to help adjust their metabolisms depending on whether food was plentiful or scarce.

When leptin is working well, you eat until you don’t need any more food and then you stop. When your system is leptin-resistant, you have a lot of leptin circulating in your blood, but your brain can’t ‘hear’ it. You end up with too much leptin in your blood and not enough in your brain. That’s the situation for the vast majority of overweight people. As a result, they experience increased hunger, food cravings and weight gain. Even though they’re overweight, their bodies believe they’re hungry and go into a state of fat storage.

If you want to lose that extra weight, you have to heal the leptin resistance. Healing inflammation will go a long way towards getting your leptin working properly again. And pulling the high-FI foods is key.

If you want to lose that extra weight, you have to heal the leptin resistance.

Meanwhile, if you keep eating high-FI foods, you continue to feed the problem. You might think you are making healthy choices with your nonfat yoghurt, omega-3–rich eggs and low-fat soy milk, but every bite of high-FI food is potentially triggering an immune response that could flood your body with inflammatory chemicals and start the whole cycle over again. So basically, any time you eat a problem food, you’re setting yourself up for weight gain.

Any time you eat a problem food, you’re setting yourself up for weight gain.

All of the top 7 high-FI foods are potential sources of inflammation, which is why it’s so important to pull them from your diet. Once you do so, your inflammation will disappear, your symptoms will disappear – and those extra pounds will disappear, too.