We are told that obesity comes from eating too much and not exercising enough! We are told that we have no willpower or self-control.
We are told that most obese people who ate too much will get diabetes.
Americans die eight times more frequently from diabetes than from melanoma.
People become obese despite exercising three or four hours every single day, and following the food pyramid, put out by the government, to the letter and still gain a lot of weight and develop metabolic syndrome. They become insulin-resistant.
You can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods it takes in, deciding to burn it or store it. Failure to produce enough insulin is contrary to life. And insulin resistance, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effort of insulin trying to do its job. Once you’re insulin-resistant, you’re on your way to getting diabetes, which is what happens when your pancreas can’t keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin. Now your blood sugar levels start to rise, and an entire cascade of pathologic events sort of bends out of control that can lead to cancer, heart disease, even amputations and Alzheimer’s disease.
You can reduce your insulin resistance by changing your diet and losing weight.
What is the true relationship between obesity and Insulin Resistance.
You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of our cells to converting food into fuel and taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately. When we become insulin-resistant, the regulation in that balance changes. So now, when insulin directs a cell, to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says, “No thanks, I’d actually rather store this energy.” And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells, it’s probably the safest place to store it. So for many of us, about 75 million Americans, the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat, not the reverse, getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat.
Is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity, at least in most people? What if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening, an underlying epidemic, the one we ought to be concerned about?
We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don’t have insulin resistance. And by the way, they don’t appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people. Conversely, we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant, and by the way, they appear to be at even greater risk for metabolic diseases. So if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance, and you can be lean and have it, this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what’s going on.
What if we’re fighting the wrong battle, fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance? Even worse, what if blaming the obese means we’re blaming the victims? What if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are all wrong?
It’s more likely too much glucose: blood sugar.
Now, we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run, and there’s even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly. Is our increased intake of refined grains, sugars and starches that’s driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but through insulin resistance, you see, and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising.
This why you have to start living the Vida Low Carb!
