If You Want to Lose Weight Then Reverse Your Insulin Resistance

Insulin resistance has become an epidemic with an estimated two-thirds of the population suffering from it. Symptoms of insulin resistance include abdominal fat skin tags and sugar cravings after eating. When untreated insulin resistance can lead to type 2 diabetes, PCOS, and heart disease. This may sound scary but insulin resistance is reversible with a few diet and lifestyle changes. I’m going to show you an example of what three days of eating might look like for insulin resistance.

Welcome back to my publication! If you like this post please give it a clap/thumbs up and feel free to share. Make sure to subscribe and follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook where I share new posts every weekday! I’m going to start by giving you a bit of a background about what insulin resistance is and how you can reverse it through diet and lifestyle.

What is insulin resistance? Insulin is a hormone that is responsible for keeping our blood sugar levels in check. When we eat blood sugar goes up and then the pancreas releases insulin. Insulin is responsible for pushing the excess glucose out of your bloodstream and into your cells. As your cells pick up the glucose your blood sugar levels return to normal. Insulin itself is not evil. It plays a very important role in the body and without it, our blood sugar would rise to dangerous levels which is the problem that type 1 diabetics face. Their bodies do not produce insulin at all so they have to inject it. Insulin resistance occurs when our cells stop responding to insulin in the way that they should. Your cells are not accepting the glucose so your pancreas creates more insulin to deal with it. As a result, you have high circulating insulin levels which leads to a lot of side effects such as making it difficult to lose weight, storing weight around your abdomen, and dark skin patches in skin folds. The high insulin can deal with the glucose for a while though, which is why insulin resistance often goes undiagnosed. Practitioners are mainly focused on fasting blood sugar and do not often test fasting insulin. The problem is that insulin resistance starts years or even a decade before you start to see a change in your blood sugar. Insulin resistance will almost always lead to type 2 diabetes if you let it progress enough, but if you know that you are insulin resistant you can stop it before it gets to that point. The reason we become insulin resistant is due to our bodies creating too much insulin for our cells to handle.

The way to reverse insulin resistance and improve insulin sensitivity is to reduce the amount of insulin your body is producing. Two ways you can do this include reducing carbohydrates, especially refined ones because they stimulate insulin the most, and intermittent fasting which are the two strategies we are going to focus on today.

Now when you reduce carbs in your diet it’s really important to increase fat. This way of eating is also known as the keto or ketogenic diet because when you reduce carbs your body starts producing ketones for energy, which is a natural and even beneficial metabolic process.

Let’s talk about bulletproof fasting. This type of fasting means you replace breakfast with a high-fat coffee drink. This drink keeps your insulin low but gives you a boost in ketones and energy which keeps you going until your first true meal. If you don’t drink coffee you can make a bulletproof tea or matcha instead or just skip it altogether and do a true fast.

I often get asked if low-fat diets are effective at reversing insulin resistance. There have been numerous studies comparing low-fat and low-carb diets in the context of insulin resistance, diabetes, and weight loss and low-carb diets come out overwhelmingly on top. There is no comparison between the two. One study compared three diets. The first is seventy percent of calories from carbs and ten percent from fat. The second is fifty percent from carbs and 30 percent from fat. The final was a ketogenic diet with less than five percent carbs and over 60 percent fat. All three groups ate the same amount of calories over eight weeks. The keto diet group lowered fasting insulin by 33 and the moderate carb group by 19. There was no change in fasting insulin with the high carb group.

If you enjoyed this post please remember to give it a clap/thumbs up and comment down. Comments, claps, and likes help to support my publication!