Pure and simple, the better you are at regulating insulin, the better life you will live. I’m not talking about destroying your body to the point where you have to check your blood sugar 3x/day and regulate the spikes with an extra injection of insulin. Even if you’re a type 1 diabetic with an insulin pump, your choices can have a dramatic effect on the amount and frequency of usage.
If I’m speaking at an event and the topic of insulin arises, which it most likely will, people are quick to blurt out, ‘it regulates sugar.’ Yes, you are correct but this just scratches the surface to how insulin will impact your life, for better or worse, in sickness and in health.
Weightloss Rollercoaster
Yes, it is true that insulin reacts to elevations in blood sugar. As blood sugar levels rise, this is a signal to your nervous system that you have more energy than is needed at this point in time. You can either drastically increase your energy demands by sprinting and doing box jumps or you can rely on insulin to store it for later.
Your body will first store it in the liver and muscles in the form of glycogen. If you added up all the stored energy in your liver and muscles, it may last you 24 hours. This is why exercise alone, though fantastic for brain development and nervous system regulation, often fails as a weight loss strategy for many people. Someone is looking to burn off that spare tire. Unless you plan on exercising non-stop for 24 hours, you may not get past the stored energy in your liver and muscles to touch the stuff around your midsection.
What kills your 6 pack dreams even more is that you reward yourself for all that hard work you just accomplished. You know better than to eat garbage. Instead you go for the ‘healthy’ low fat, low calorie goods. In reality, you just ate a 1/2 cup of sugar, which gets redeposited back into your liver and muscles. Since you didn’t use ALL your stored liver and muscle glycogen during exercise and just consumed more sugar than you burned off, you added another layer of insulation for the winter.
The stored energy that targets the butt, gut, and thighs isn’t glycogen, it’s stored in the form triglycerides. You’ve seen these on your lab work. Because it’s fat, I’m sure your well intentioned cardiologist told you to eat a diet high in complex carbohydrates and low fat. “If we need to eliminate fat, than we have to lower our fat intake.” The only thing that cardiologist did was keep himself in business with advice that resembles assisted suicide. Since ‘diet and exercise’ didn’t work for you, then you have no hope other than taking drugs. Sound familiar?