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I was doing some research for my HFCS zealotry and ran into an interesting theory: the ingestion of corn syrup affects insulin and leptin levels, thereby interfering with the body's ability to understand that it is full. Insulin I understand, but leptin? I had no idea, so I checked in with my trusty super smart obesity researcher friend La Wade and got the scoop.

I wish I would have taken notes during our conversation, but essentially leptin is a recently discovered protein that acts like a hormone to regulate satiety. La Wade said that there are maybe ten people in the entire world whose bodies don't produce any leptin and they are super obese and always ravenous, but the rest of us have the protein in varying degrees. She said that overweight and obese people actually tend to have high leptin...fat cells produce the stuff in relative proportion to their abundance, so generally speaking, the more fat you have, the higher your levels of circulating leptin.  Only about 10% of obese people have significantly lower leptin than would be predicted from their fat mass. This seemed confusing, but La Wade explained that your body automatically will adjust to an increase in leptin and create a bit of a resistance to it, so the trick is really to find a way to make brains more accommodating to the levels of natural leptin in one's system. Sadly, that's a trick that scientists are still working to master. Until then, what can you do to help your body deal with leptin?

• Get lots of sleep. Being sleep deprived not only makes you cranky, but according to Laura Lewis, sleep-time is when your body cranks out leptin. If you miss your zzzzs, you're going to think you're hungry when you're not.

• Burn daylight along with fat. Researchers think that your body burns more fat when you exercise outdoors, possibly linked to "an increase in leptin produced during a sun run."

• Eat salmon! Research has shown that omega-3s help improve the body's response to both insulin and leptin.

• Change your eating habits. The anti-inflammatory diet was designed to optimize leptin production and decrease leptin resistance. It's got a hokey name but the food choices are pretty sound.