Do you know what has been driving your weight problem your whole life?
You have more body fat than you want. You have tried to eat less. You have tried to burn it off with exercise. Neither has worked dependably well.
Do you know why the extra fat is there in the first place?
It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
We have been led to believe it is because we have eaten too much and didn’t exercise enough. I was a fat baby and a fat child. Did I just eat too much from day one? Is that really what happened?
No. It is not what happened.
It is not a matter of eating too much food as if food is all one thing. It is a matter of eating too much of a certain kind of food, and in my case, before I drew my first breath my mother was eating too much of that certain kind of food which caused me to be born behind the proverbial 8 ball.
The food I’m talking about is highly refined carbohydrates (grains, sugar, highly processed commercial foods). But why are they a problem? If it were just about calories, couldn’t you eat the same amount of calories in cookies as you do steak and weigh the same? It turns out, no. You can’t. Or, at least, you won’t. One of those foods is self-limiting, the other makes you hungry for more food. Cookies beget more cookies.
The lack of explanation by the people providing healthcare of how refined carbohydrates affect you hormonally, is, I believe, what has perpetuated the struggle with obesity so many of us have fought for decades. We didn’t even know the dragon we were facing.
We thought it was all about calories when really it was all about hormones; one hormone in particular: Insulin.
Insulin is a hormone released by your pancreas in response to an increase in your blood sugar. Your blood sugar likes to have about a teaspoon of glucose (sugar) floating around in it at any given time. When you eat and your blood sugar goes up, out comes insulin to help that sugar move from your blood into your cells/tissues to be used or to ultimately be stored as fat.
If your blood sugar is frequently high because you consume too many refined carbohydrates, your insulin will also frequently be high. Unfortunately, perpetually high insulin leads to your body becoming less sensitive to it.
It’s like if you move from the country to the city. At first, the traffic and people noises outside will be really loud to you because you are not used to them. You will be highly sensitive to them. But, after a while, you lose that sensitivity and you barely notice the noise.
That is kind of what happens in your body. Your tissues become resistant to insulin. After years and years of eating too many refined carbohydrates, the regular amount of insulin needed to get your blood sugar down doesn’t work anymore so your pancreas releases more. And more. And more. Over time, your body is swimming in the insulin that your pancreas has been dumping out to try to manage all the sugar you have been consuming.
Why does that matter?
Insulin is a fat storage hormone. When it is high, we don’t use our fat storage for fuel, we get hungry. We get hungry for more refined carbohydrates, specifically. It becomes a vicious cycle of too many carbs, fat storage, weight gain, and hunger for more.
The dragon we are facing when it comes to weight loss is insulin resistance. Until we get our insulin down, we are unlikely to lose weight or maintain weight loss. We are also at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
So how do you get your insulin down?
Well, that’s the whole ballgame. And here it is. The 5 Step plan to try to reverse insulin resistance:
- Reduce the refined carbohydrates you are eating. (Sugar, grains, ultra-processed foods) Dramatically.
- Eat less frequently. (Stop snacking and stick to eating only meals.)
- Exercise at any level. (This helps with insulin sensitivity among many other things.)
- Manage your stress. (Okay, this one is obnoxious. I get it. “Yeah, okay Heather, I’ll just go ahead and check that off my to do list.” But, regular exercise is a step in the right direction for this one.)
- Get good sleep. (Again, I know, easier said than done for many. Do your best.)
There you go, that’s the recipe for weight loss.
(Of course, I’m not your health care provider. If they’ve given you different advice, that’s between you and them.)
If only just knowing what you need to do to reverse insulin resistance were enough… Alas, it is not.You gotta actually do those things if you want to lose weight (and keep it off). Consistently.
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