Wishing you Great health and happiness
For many people insulin resistance is on the road to type two diabetes. But the relevance for weight loss is that it is a part of metabolic syndrome X which includes weight gain and high blood pressure.
Every cell in your body responds to insulin. It is secreted by your pancreas in response to high blood sugar levels. But over time for many people when the insulin attaches to a cell the lock fails to open and it is as if there has been no insulin at all.
So the pancreas sends in more insulin and soon the flood gates open, but the result is that all of this insulin pulls your blood sugar down too fast and this makes you feel tired, grumpy and most of all hungry. So you eat again to feel better.
All this blood sugar has to go somewhere, some of it is burnt for energy but most is converted to long chain triglycerides and deposited as fat.
This cycle goes on and on and there you are trying to lose weight right in the middle of a problem that by its very nature is making you hungry and stressed.
Most people follow the old worn and useless principles of eating a low fat diet and trying to eat less calories. The problem is that when you lower the fat in your diet it has to be replaced with something else, and that is some form of carbohydrate.
All carbohydrates become sugar in the body and this makes your insulin resistance worse. This single issue has contributed to the significant increase in obesity and diabetes since the 1970’s.
In some circles people are taking a drug called Metformin which is used by diabetics and is hailed as an anti-aging elixir, and it works by reducing insulin requirements.
There is however a proven and possibly safer way to take the pressure off your pancreas and to allow your body to recover its normal ability to manage sugar. All you have to do is stop eating processed foods and big fruit smoothies.
Processed foods by their nature are loaded with sugar, and a fruit smoothie is a massive fructose hit to your liver. Processed foods often hide the word sugar behind such terms as dextrose, galactose, sucrose, corn syrup, maltose, lactose and glucose, plus other creative names used to disguise sugar.
On a food label you read the total carbohydrates and this gives the real amount. But if you stop eating processed foods then you also get to stop reading food labels.
Giving up these foods is not as difficult as you may imagine and the benefits can be considerable for both weight loss and general health.
Wishing you Great health and happiness
Ian & Dr Susan Newton