I can make you fat. Actually, I can make anyone fat. How? By prescribing insulin. It won’t matter that you have willpower, or that you exercise. It won’t matter what you choose to eat. It’s simply a matter of enough insulin and enough time.
— Jason Fung, M.D., The Obesity Code 1
What Conventional Diets Overlook
Over the last several decades, obesity has increased in populations across the globe. In response, advocates of one diet or another have been overreaching to make sense of our increasing waistlines and promote their (often self-serving) solutions.
Low-fat — "It's the fat in our diet that makes us fat and gives us heart disease."
Low-carb — "It's the carbs, not the fat."
Vegetarian — "It's the meat, not the carbs."
Fitness Industry — "It's too many calories, not enough exercise."
To some degree, any one of these diets can work, at least for a while. We know this because people have undeniably lost some weight by cutting fats or carbs or meat or even calories and, of course, by running marathons. Other than obliging dieters to achieve increasingly excruciating levels of willpower and self-discipline, these diets have little in common except for two things:
- They restrict food.
- They fail to treat the underlying cause of obesity.
This second issue is why these diets tend to either flop in the long term or cause even bigger problems.2
What Makes Us Fat?
Hormone imbalances make us fat. No amount of counting calories or exercising will correct a hormone imbalance if (1) we're still eating foods that significantly raise our blood sugar, and (2) we are eating all the time. Both of these conditions are essential for weight gain. Eating high-carbohydrate foods alone will not result in obesity. Eating frequent low-carbohydrate meals will also not result in obesity. Eating all the carbs and sugars you can swallow all the time will absolutely lead to weight gain if you are otherwise healthy and have a functioning pancreas.
Insulin — The Fat Storage Hormone
Fat is fuel. Food is also fuel. Human beings like other mammals evolved to store fat to survive during times of scarcity. Our bodies can burn our internal fat stores in the same way we use batteries (stored energy) when there is no other source of energy — in other words, when there is no food. To survive by burning fat, we must first be able to store fat. That is what insulin does. Insulin is a hormone produced by the beta cells of the pancreas. It regulates our blood sugar and pushes any extra glucose we don't immediately use for energy into our fat cells for later use. In short, insulin is our fat-storage hormone.
Unfortunately, our fat cells can't both store fat and burn fat for fuel at the same time. Think of the process as a one-lane road — either in our out, but not both ways. This means that when insulin is flowing through our bloodstream, we can't possibly burn fat. When insulin is present, we are fully in fat-storage mode.
To burn fat, we need glucagon, the fat-burning hormone. Glucagon is produced by the alpha cells of our pancreas. When glucagon is present in our bloodstream, it signals our fat cells to release their energy (fat). Insulin reciprocally regulates glucagon. When insulin goes down, glucagon goes up. When insulin goes up (after a meal), glucagon goes down and fat burning stops.
Despite all the ads and articles about fat-burning "superfoods", the only way to increase glucagon secretion and stimulate fat burning is to reduce insulin.
Insulin and Two Types of Diabetes
There are two very different kinds of diabetes and, frankly, it's rather unfortunate that they even share the same name.
Type 1 Diabetes is the inability to produce insulin. People with this type of diabetes cannot put on weight because there is no insulin to funnel glucose to their cells and store some of it as fat for later use. They are medically treated with insulin injections. Left untreated, they would become incredibly thin and die.
Type 2 Diabetes is the inability to use insulin. These folks have become insulin resistant. Their cells no longer respond to the level of insulin in their bloodstreams, which means they have ever-increasing levels of free-floating glucose. Left untreated, insulin resistance can lead to pre-diabetes > obesity > type 2 diabetes > and worse. Unfortunately, the standard treatment for type 2 diabetes has included prescribing insulin to patients who already have plenty of insulin but can no longer use it efficiently.
Understanding Insulin Resistance
People become insulin resistant from regularly consuming foods that cause big insulin spikes. Every high-carbohydrate meal they eat introduces more glucose into their systems. The glucose triggers more insulin to be produced. Because their systems are constantly flooded with insulin, their fat cells (and to some degree their muscle and liver cells) cannot keep up. These cells become inefficient on purpose as the body naturally adjusts to too much of the hormone. This is what it means to become #InsulinResistant.
The inability of resistant cells to absorb glucose leaves too much glucose in the bloodstream. The abundance of glucose triggers the pancreas to respond the only way it knows how — by producing more insulin to deal with all the free-floating glucose. Because insulin is the fat-storage hormone, insulin-resistant individuals remain in a fat loop and continue to produce insulin they can't use because of the glucose they can't absorb.
The Perfect Storm: How We Got So Fat
Both insulin resistance and #obesity result from a catastrophic combination:
- too many refined carbs which spike insulin, and
- too many meals over long periods of time
➥ INSULIN + TIME = FAT
Contributing factors to this perfect storm are:
Processed food — food companies have been stripping protective fats and fiber (which lower insulin response) from foods while adding sugar. Sugar spikes insulin.
Constant eating — snacking is a relatively new concept in human history. Because most foods cause some insulin response and because we eat all the time, our systems never get a break from all that insulin.
Too much stress — everything from life-threatening situations to a lack of sleep (or a lack of perspective) can result in stress which raises our cortisol levels. #Cortisol is the #stress hormone. It floods our bodies with glucose (energy) to prepare us for a fight-or-flight response. Because cortisol triggers glucose, and glucose triggers insulin, stress makes us fat.
Where Do We Go from Here?
One — don't blame the victim.
Years of misleading research, bad advice, and lousy food have done more to increase waistlines than anyone's lack of willpower or self-discipline. Keep in mind that people who are insulin resistant are suffering from malnutrition. In fact, up until about the 1950s or 60s, obesity was considered a disease of malnutrition. An obese person's inability to absorb glucose and release the energy in their fat cells not only results in an increasing lack of energy but also in an inability to properly absorb vitamins and nutrients. This means fat people are generally starving.
Two — understand how hormones, and especially hormone imbalances, have resulted not only in obesity but also in yo-yo dieting.
People fail in their diets not because of a lack of self-discipline, but because of an abundance of insulin. They're fighting their hormones. Think back to when you were a teenager. Try to remember just how freaking persuasive hormones can be. By realizing what your body is doing and why, you can start working to change your body chemistry and rebalance your hormones, instead of fighting them. That takes a whole lot less willpower.
Three — stop counting calories, because this approach assumes your body responds the same to a calorie of fat as it does to a calorie of protein or carbohydrate.
All calories are not the same. A hundred calories of pure fat cause zero insulin response. A hundred calories of protein cause some insulin response and a hundred calories of carbohydrate cause measurable, and sometimes significant, insulin response.
Now that you know how food affects insulin and insulin affects weight, you can appreciate why counting calories and attempting to burn off your morning donut is such a futile effort. To lose weight, we need to forget years of "recommended daily allowances." Weight loss isn't about numbers, it's about chemistry, specifically hormones. Rather than calorie reduction, focus on insulin reduction for successful and sustainable weight loss.
In the next post in my #IFKeto series, we'll discuss ways to reduce insulin production by restoring insulin sensitivity to kick-start #weightloss.
✋ Update: The next post in the series Unraveling the Mystery of Insulin Resistance is available now on #Steemit.
Fung, D. J. (2016). Obesity Code, the: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss. Greystone Books, Canada.
Low-fat diets, for example, ushered in an era of new foods that replaced healthy, protective fats with trans fats and toxic amounts of #sugar (or mounds of toxic sugar), including high-fructose corn syrup. Eventually, sugar found its way into just about every food, even prepared meats, soups and other savory dishes.
Who I Am
I'm a design researcher, and a science and social science buff. I study what, how, and why people do what they do; what, how and why they avoid doing other things; and ways to improve the process. I focus on #nutrition, biochemistry, food anthropology and food politics. Over the course of the last several years, I've become an evangelist of #fasting, intermittent fasting, low-carbohydrate lifestyle and #ketogenic dieting. And yes, you can love fat AND hate meat and still get a meal out of it. So, I am also an accidental mediator between vegans and bodybuilders.
THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. Please don't take it as such. Before trying anything I discuss here, it's important you first consult with your physician/nutritionist/counselor/life coach/family. These writings are the result of my research and personal experimentation and are not meant to advise you, especially if you are pregnant, if you are a child, or if you have a medical condition. That said, if your healthcare provider is still recommending low-fat and not low-sugar, it may be time to look for another doctor.
— @Sprat