Insulin Resistance: the reason why you can't loose weight

  • Do you often feel tired, have no energy to do anything, know you should do some exercise but just can't because of lack of energy?
  • Do you often get extremely hungry and feel you would fade out if you can't eat right at that moment?
  • Do you get strong cravings for sweets or bread?
  • Do you suffer from rapid mood changes, poor concentration, poor memory, irritability or even depression?
  • Do you suffer from sleep disturbances?
If your answer is yes to one or more of these questions, you may suffer from insulin resistance, which if left untreated, can ultimately lead to Type 2 Diabetes.

What is Insulin Resistance?

Food intake leads to increase of insulin levels. Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas, which is essential for sugar to enter our body cells and be used for energy production. In a healthy body insulin will bind to the insulin receptors on the surface our body cells and stimulate the cells to allow glucose to stream into the cell and be used for energy production.
In the insulin resistant body this mechanism fails: insulin is still produced as a result of the meal but long term expose to too much sugar has made the insulin receptors on our body cells insensitive. This means that a much larger amount of insulin is required to get the cells to let glucose stream inside to be used for energy production.
As a result we have three very undesired effects:

1. We feel tired and have very low energy
2. Because insulin is not achieving anything and the sugar levels are still high, our body produces heaps more insulin. Even though this may still not achieve the desired effect, insulin has other effects, which it does achieve - much to our grief:
  • Stimulation to convert sugar into body fat
  • Suppression of a hormone called glucagone, which is our best friend while losing weight: it helps overcome hunger by stimulating a whole machinery in our body
  • Suppression of Growth Hormone, which is required to build new muscle tissue
3. Even much worse: We have all the glucose floating around in our blood. It will get used on other ways: functional proteins such as haemoglobin and metabolic enzymes like binding glucose. However, this destroys their normal activity and even worse, they can build insoluble aggregates and in the long term cause cataracts and gangraene, which is commonly seen in untreated diabetes.

We end up fatter and fatter with less and less energy to do anything about it.

What causes Insulin Resistance?

In the industrialised countries diets tend to be high in refined carbohydrates and processed foods tend to be abundant. Fast foods are popular and high in refined carbohydrates (for example buns in hamburgers and whoppers) and sugar. Softdrinks are commonly consumed. All of this leads to a very high consumption of sugar (either directly as sugar or in the form of refined carbohydrates which are broken down to sugar as soon as they are chewed in the mouth). In the average individual this leads to a huge stress of the insulin receptors on our body cells, which would be constantly stimulated if they would not just shut down, i.e. become resistant to insulin.

How can insulin resistance be fixed?

Our long term overload with sugar has "trained" our insulin receptors to just ignore insulin. The only way to fix this problem can be to drastically reduce the amount of sugar including refined carbohydrates, in our diet, so that our insulin receptors become aware of it again. A diet very low in carbohydrates requires some caution if maintained over a long period of time. Read more...

For a long time we have been ignoring the role of sugar and refined carbohydrates, which is strange because back in the 1970's we already appreciated the fact that not all carbohydrates were equal and that white sugar and refined carbohydrates could sabotage a weight loss program whereas complex carbohydrates such as whole grain bread, muesli, nuts enjoyed to the equivalent calorific value, would not have this effect.