FIGHT THE GREHLIN GREMLIN
While the research on ghrelin and diet is limited, recent studies have shed some light on potential dietary strategies that may help to control your appetite and fight the grehlin gremlin.
Supplementing with around 20 grams of oligofructose—a subgroup of the fiber known as inulin—per day split into small doses with each meal may help decrease ghrelin levels, energy intake, blood glucose, and insulin levels.
Eating higher-protein meals, which are well-known for increasing satiety through several different mechanisms, can help reduce ghrelin levels.
When dieting, following a high-protein, low-carb plan may help you control appetite and reduce hunger by keeping ghrelin levels low.
Calorie-cycling diets may be a novel strategy to help control some of the metabolic adaptions to weight loss. For example, prolonged dieting reduces leptin and increases ghrelin, HOWEVER this is not the case with hCG fortunately.
A sensible approach to calorie cycling may be a 4- to 6-week dieting phase with at caloric maintenance. If your maintenance calories are set at 1,500 you’ll likely be consuming around 800 calories during your dieting phase before returning back to 1,500 for a couple weeks to give your body a break.
Along with supporting leptin and ghrelin levels, this strategy may also provide psychological benefits. By breaking your diet into smaller chunks, it becomes easier to focus and adhere to, compared to a 12-week (or more) continuous diet, although having said that, the Bettabods Protocol may be used continuously until desired weight loss is achieved unless you decide to break for Phase 3 which is the maintenance phase.
One of the few studies on this topic to date investigated minicycles of 11 days dieting and 3 days at maintenance versus continuous dieting.16 Despite total calorie intake being the same between groups, the group that dieted for 11 days and maintained for 3 days lost more weight! Interestingly, these individuals even kept the weight off during the maintenance phase.