Insulin Resistance - A Deeper Dive
Understanding insulin resistance really could change your life! Please take the time to read this article, and perhaps read it a few times - it is complex.
By understanding this important bit of physiology, you will never have to go on a ‘diet’ again! Can you believe that?!
We have both lost excess weight in the past without counting calories or leaving out whole food groups and sustained this long-term.
This knowledge changed our careers from being disease managers to health educators and coaches.
We are excited to share this with you and help you get going on a new healthier lifestyle.
Understanding insulin resistance explains why you feel hungry all the time, are low in energy, and are prone to putting on weight around your middle.
Getting fatter around your middle (visceral fat) is often a symptom of a much bigger problem which increases your risks of many other metabolic diseases. It also explains why so many of us are suffering from metabolic diseases like diabetes, obesity, fatty liver, high blood pressure, and many more.
None of this is your fault either, we live in an environment that almost sets us up to have this problem. Many factors influence our risks.
Some are set up better genetically and socio-economically to navigate the environment we find ourselves in.
Humans are incredibly adaptive, but if you think about it, our modern world has changed more quickly over the past 100 years than ever before.
Earlier this century you would have been more physically active, eaten whole foods at regular intervals with minimal snacks, and fasted for longer overnight. As a result, people were generally thinner and fitter and these chronic metabolic diseases were much less prevalent.
We are now more sedentary, have easier access to calorie-dense, highly processed foods, which we consume at shorter intervals, work longer hours, sleep less, are less connected to each other, and are more chronically stressed than at any time in history.
The perfect storm for metabolic diseases and problems with managing our weight.
You can't necessarily change all these things, but understanding your fueling system and how things go wrong will change how you address your health issues.
Once you understand this - anything is possible. This understanding is better and lasts much longer than any magic potion!
What exactly is insulin resistance?
Simply put, it is a chronic and abnormally high level of insulin that develops in response to higher than normal levels of blood sugar, which are a result of the quality and quantity of the food we eat, and when and how often we eat it.
Add to that low levels of activity, high levels of stress, poor sleep and you've got the picture.
Insulin is the very clever hormone produced by the pancreas that allows energy into our cells and responds to our blood sugars to keep them at a reasonable level. When you are metabolically healthy your pancreas is set to produce just the right amount of insulin to deal with the incoming energy and it returns to a low baseline when not required.
This may work perfectly for a long time, you may remember when you were a slim energetic kid or even a young adult.
But slowly, over time, the way we eat and live catches up with us.
In our modern world, we overeat high-energy foods at frequent intervals and don’t use the energy we produce.
Our insulin system has to work very hard to keep things under control and you can see how things go wrong.
Insulin levels always fall much slower than our blood sugar levels. Over time this grazing pattern of eating with shorter overnight fasts will result in our insulin levels never really falling sufficiently before needing to respond to our next intake of ready fuel.
This also explains why that big latte and healthy-sounding muffin (maybe they mention carrots or apples in the ingredients) on your way to the office actually makes you hungrier mid-morning.
Bewildering until you know!
Your insulin level hasn't reduced far enough and now your body wants a further supply of energy to prevent too low blood sugars.
Once you start this rollercoaster of high blood sugar levels from quick fuel and corresponding insulin levels that don't get to fall low enough, you can see how this plays out.
It often starts with that first meal of the day.
Soon you find yourself constantly hungry and snacking between meals because your higher insulin levels will drive your appetite.
If you changed that first meal and ate a high protein/healthy fat meal with some fibre instead, you would quickly notice that you were getting to lunch without needing to snack. This is because this quality fuel (e.g. a meal based on eggs or full-fat plain yoghurt), does not provoke that high blood sugar peak and high insulin response.
Once you understand how this works, it is so much easier to fix things once and for all.
The next bit is crucial to understand.
More and more insulin is produced by the pancreas in response to the high blood sugar spikes.
Slowly over time, our cells become less and less sensitive to this.
Our metabolism compensates by further increasing our insulin levels to deal with the problem.
Once you have higher than normal insulin levels that your cells are less sensitive to, you may notice that you put on weight easier than before, particularly around your middle. You may find it harder to lose this weight and in addition, you are hungrier and crave high-energy snacks between meals. You feel tired, and may also sleep and manage stress less well.
Understanding this can help you to change your lifestyle.
You may still need to address your habits and change behaviours in the long term, but changing this bit first will make all the rest so much easier.
You may not have a metabolic disease, but you may be insulin resistant - this happens a long time before you are diagnosed with a metabolic disease.
A few other things to remember about insulin:
It is a really important hormone that allows your cells to use the fuel you are ingesting in your diet.
You can't live without it.
Insulin is keeping your blood sugar levels stable and in a fairly tight band.
Abnormally high levels of insulin have disastrous effects on your health in the long term.
To keep your energy and blood sugar levels normal, insulin is also responsible for storing excess energy in your muscles and liver, and in longer-term storage around your abdominal organs and under your skin.
This is useful should you need energy in the future and an important survival mechanism, but we are much less likely to use these long-term stores in times of food plenty.
Abnormally high levels of insulin over long periods means reduced sensitivity to insulin, needing more and more for the same effect.
This is the important bit to remember. These high insulin levels make you hungrier and more likely to eat more quick-energy foods.
N.B. you never get cravings for green beans!
You are now becoming a very efficient, hungry fat storer. You will store fat, particularly around your middle, and find it harder and harder to lose weight.
In the past, we were made to think that this was just because we were greedy, but now you know better.
We all tried very restricted calorie diets that worked in the short term, but because we didn't understand this mechanism, they mostly failed long term. They made us hungry and we failed time and again to make weight loss stick.
Never again.
Now you know you can do this very differently.
You will still need to work hard at changing both your diet and your lifestyle, but this time it will work in the long term.
Hooray!
The final bit of this is how you can start to improve or prevent insulin resistance today; feel better, manage your weight better, decrease your risks of developing chronic diseases, or even reverse some of these.
In a way, it could not be simpler.
You need to do things that allow your insulin levels to drop to more normal levels, and over time resensitise your cells to those lower levels of insulin.
This takes time but it is the only way to address the long-term issues around belly fat and your risks of chronic diseases.
It can even be used to help reverse these if you have already developed them.
You will lose excess weight as a result of addressing this issue, and this weight loss will be much easier to sustain because you will be addressing the root cause rather than just trying to restrict the calories that you consume.
Here is a very simple formula that you can start today:
Start by changing the quality of the food you eat. Eat whole foods rather than UPFs, particularly added sugars and sweeteners.
Mix your macronutrients at each meal. Base your meals around proteins and healthy fats and add some less processed carbohydrates and fibres. This mix will not only provide the nutrients you need, it will make you feel satisfied for longer and will result in lower blood sugar peaks and a lower insulin response.
Space your meals and stop snacking between meals. Fast for at least 12 hours overnight to allow your metabolism to clean up the daytime mess. This allows all the cleaning and restocking mechanisms to work and helps to keep your microbiome healthy which may turn out to be a very important mechanism in all of this.
Prioritise sleep and managing stress better.
Get more active.
All of these small changes will help to manage your blood sugars which in turn will help you to decrease your insulin response, and slowly over time, your cells will start to resensitise to lower levels of insulin.
Don't necessarily expect instant results, for many of us it took years of overeating the wrong foods with little or no exercise to get into this mess, and it may take a while to re-sensitise those cells.
It can sometimes up to 6 weeks before you notice any real improvement in fat storage. But you may sleep better and feel more energetic long before that.
The important thing to note is that with consistency it will work, and we hope to have just given you the missing bit of the puzzle that explains why it is so hard for many of us to live well in the environment we find ourselves in.
