In contrast to insulin, glucagon raises blood sugar when it is too low.

While insulin converts sugar to glycogen, glucagon converts glycogen (a form of sugar stored in your liver) to sugar.

The key: Unlike other methods of creating sugar in the blood, glucagon does so by breaking down body fat.

When your blood sugar gets too low, glucagon will go to work trying to raise your glucose levels. It does this by getting glycogen stored in the liver and breaking it down.

Liver glycogen depletes in about 24 hours without food. Physical activity will shorten this period.

When glycogen (the form sugar is stored in your liver) in the liver depletes, and glucagon is in your blood, it causes your nervous system to use body fat to create glucose.

Due to the rise in blood sugar, insulin is increased again to shunt the sugar in to the cells. When the muscles have had their fill and stop taking in glucose, insulin will shunt blood sugar back into you liver.

This means if you deplete the liver of glycogen, you eliminate a source of sugar. Without this, there becomes only three other sources: from your food, from inside your muscles and from your body fat.

What we want to do is get your glucose from your body fat. But we don’t want sugar to come from your muscles. That will be age-accelerating.

Glucagon Muscle-Destroyer

If your body is preventing your body fat from being broken down, glucagon will create blood sugar from the glucose in your muscle. Your muscle protein is broken down to amino acids and then converted to glucose. This is the muscle destroyer aspect of glucagon.

What Affects It?

• Where sugar is the trigger for releasing insulin, protein is the trigger for releasing glucagon.
• Protein, however, also triggers insulin at about a 30% strength compared to sugar.
• So you don’t want to consume large servings of protein at one time.
• Glucagon is also triggered by too little food.
• Glucagon is also another fat-burning hormone secreted after intense exercise.

Ghrelin is the opposite hormone to leptin.

It does not directly cause your body to store fat.

But it causes enough problems with weight loss and self-control.

Ghrelin is a hormone created and released by the stomach. It’s probably the reason why appetite suppressants are created in the first place.

It is called the hunger hormone because it sends the signal to your brain that you need to eat.

If this hormone is increased, you will feel hungrier. If it is decreased, you will not feel as hungry, regardless of how much food you actually have in your stomach.

Causes of Increase and Decrease

Believe it or not, it is sleep.

Medical scientists from Stanford and other universities found people who consistently slept five hours or less per night had on average about 15% more Ghrelin and 15% less leptin levels than those who slept 8-hour nights.

They also demonstrated the less you sleep, the more you weigh, and the higher your BMI, which means the higher your likelihood of premature death from any cause.

With high levels of “The Hunger Hormone”, you can eat and never feel satiated

When I hear my clients talk about cravings for food, I ask how much sleep they get.

The answer is always something like, “Sleep? What is this thing you speak of?”

So if you are trying hard to eat right but find it very difficult because you experience bouts of voracious appetite, there’s nothing wrong with your willpower.

In fact, I am anti-willpower when it comes to weight loss.

The cause is Ghrelin and the cause for the increase for Ghrelin is lack of sleep.

Find a way to solve those two things and you will see a reduction in appetite.

The thyroid gland is located on the front of your neck. Right under where the Adams Apple is for men and where it would be for women.

Thyroxine is another powerful hormone which burns fat.

It is called tetraiodothyronine (T4) and  is the main hormone secreted by the thyroid gland.

The function of this and the other thyroid hormone, triiodothyronine (T3), is to increase the rate your body will convert carbohydrates to energy. It also causes protein assimilation.

Thyroxine increases the amount of energy your body spends. This means given the same amount of work or effort you put forth, a greater amount of thyroxine will cause more energy to be spent, and vice versa. When people talk about “spending” or “burning” more calories, this is what they are referring to.

It also makes the cells use more energy per unit of time. This hormone makes the rechargeable batteries that I talked about it “Fat Burning Roadblock #2″larger and makes more of them. So if you imagine your car engine replaced with an engine twice as powerful, you will see your car go very fast but the bigger engine will use a lot more gas. So you will need to fill it with more gas.

This is what thyroxine does to your cells. Instead of gas, you are using food and body fat.

A Few Things Which Increase And Decrease Thyroxine:

• Iodine. Iodine is an element needed for the production of thyroid hormone. The body does not make iodine, so it is an essential part of your diet. If you do not have enough iodine in your body, you cannot make enough thyroid hormone.
• Intense exercise. Any exercise where you are pushing the boundary of how much weight you are lifting or how long you are doing the same exercise will raise this. I will give the specific details in the last section of this book. Doing the bare minimum exercise won’t work. Without pushing the limits, the thyroid hormone amounts do not change.
• Avoiding overtraining or prolonged stress. Stress and prolonged strain will reduce thyroid production.
• Cleaning your Liver. All your hormones pass through your liver before they are used by your body. The liver is the main gland which stimulates your thyroid.
• If your liver is clogged up or fatty or underperforming in anyway, the hormones will be weakened or not be used all together. This can be a case where there is an adequate amount of hormones produced but they cannot be used because of the liver.
• Detoxing. You will read a lot more of this later in the book. Almost every toxin (which is a poison) in the environment and in your foods affect your thyroid and/or prohibits your ability to use them. By removing these toxins you can see a dramatic change in your appearance and in how you feel.

Adrenaline is the hormone which starts the process of breaking down body fat.

 It is the prime instigator of fat breakdown. After this, other hormones continue the process of breaking down fat to be used for energy and body tissue.

Adrenaline is produced by the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are two star-shaped cones on top of each kidney.

It’s also called epinephrine. The term epinephrine is derived from the Greek roots epi- and nephros, and literally means on the kidney, in References to the gland’s location within the body. 

When in the bloodstream, it rapidly prepares the body for action in emergency situations.  Adrenaline boosts the supply of oxygen and glucose to the brain and muscles, while suppressing other non-emergency bodily processes (digestion in particular).

It increases heart rate and stroke volume, dilates the pupils, and constricts arterioles in the skin and gastrointestinal tract while dilating arterioles in skeletal muscles.

It elevates the blood sugar level by increasing catabolism of glycogen to glucose in the liver, and at the same time begins the breakdown of lipids in fat cells.

Like some other stress hormones, adrenaline has a suppressive effect on the immune system.

A Few Things Which Increase And Decrease Adrenaline:

• Adrenaline is increased by intense exercise. Exercises like sprinting, jumping, lifting weights and resistance exercises. The more consistently this is done, the more adrenaline you will produce.
• Adrenal Fatigue. The problem with low adrenaline in all cases is the adrenals are fatigued and underperforming. The only exception is some kind of physical problem with the gland.

Testosterone is another hormone which regulates the production of fat and muscle.

Specifically, it builds lean muscle,

and burns fat rapidly. Testosterone changes your body shape into the shape you want it to look like.

This hormone is created in the testes, adrenal glands and in the ovaries. It is a fat-burning hormone.

It increases mental and physical energy. For men, lack of it will feel like a visible mental fogginess, lack of motivation.

A Few Things Which Increase And Decrease Testosterone:

• Sleep (REM dream) increases nocturnal testosterone levels.
• Similar to growth hormone, resistance training increases testosterone levels (however, prolonged strain of any kind, especially endurance exercise like marathon running, decreases testosterone!)
• Lowered oxygen levels in the body reduce testosterone levels.
• Zinc deficiency lowers testosterone levels (but over- supplementation has no effect on serum testosterone.)
• Acute depression decreases testosterone levels.
• Cortisol reduces testosterone.

Similar To Growth Hormone

The above list looks very similar to what increases human growth hormone (HGH). This is because testosterone follows where human growth hormone (HGH) goes.

Human Growth Hormone (HGH) is a very powerful hormone that changes the chemistry of the body so that it starts using fat for energy instead of just sugar.

It literally reduces the age of your metabolism.

It is the most anti-aging, fat burning, muscle building focus restoring and emotionally uplifting of all the hormones.

Studies have found that there is an inverse relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and HGH. For each increase in BMI of 1.5 kg/m2, there is a 50% decrease in the amount of HGH secreted per day.

What Else Does HGH Does For You:

• Increases calcium retention, and strengthens and increases the mineralization of bone
• Increases muscle mass. Don’t worry ladies, the muscle will grow in all the right places)
• Promotes lipolysis (breaking down fat for fuel)
• Increases protein synthesis. Your food goes to muscle, rather than body fat
• Stimulates the growth of all internal organs excluding the brain
• Promotes gluconeogenesis (creation of “new” blood sugar as opposed to simply releasing blood sugar) in the liver
• It stimulates the immune system.

It doesn’t take much to see how this affects your weight loss and fat loss. All the above allows your muscles to recover faster, grow stronger, and burn more fat.

Makes Your Metabolism Younger

Human growth hormone has been regarded as an anti-aging agent.

You can take identical twins who are obese and give only one of them this hormone and their fat will seem to “vanish” and their face will get more chiseled, the waist will get smaller and the muscles will grow in all the right places.

Growth Hormone Over Time

As a person grows older, the amount of HGH produced decreases. The graph below shows the natural decrease of HGH in your body over time.

I am not advocating a 70 year old should be able to look, feel and perform like an 18 year old. Not at all.

What I am saying is the levels of HGH in people today en masse are dramatically lower than normal. Both men and women and even teens are registering lower levels of HGH.

And in cases where there is too much growth hormone, it is synthetic growth hormone put into the body from eating animal meat injected with growth hormone, or from injected HGH supplementation.

The problem here is this is not “human” growth hormone. This is synthetic hormone not intended for humans. This can and does contribute to “abnormal” cell and organ growth in the body.

What Promotes HGH?

• Deep Sleep. Most HGH is secreted in deep sleep
• Resistance training
• Low levels of blood sugar (hypoglycemia)
• Dietary protein

What Stops HGH Secretion?

• Lack of sleep
• Lack of deep sleep
• Sleeping when exhausted
• Eating high glycemic index foods before sleep
• Chronic stress
• High cortisol levels(a hormone which is caused by stress)
• High blood sugar
• High Insulin levels
• Lack of sleep

I’m sure you want more detail on how to increase this hormone. Don’t worry, there are ways to naturally boost all these hormones!