Insulin Resistance: What Is It, Causes, How To Fix It

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Fix Insulin Resistance And Turn Your Body Into A Fat Burning Machine For Life

On today’s episode of Live Lean TV, you’re going to learn about insulin resistance, including what it is, causes, and how you can manipulate and fix it to become a fat burning machine for life.

Before we get into that, you can also listen to this post over on our Live Lean TV podcast.

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With that said, let’s get into today’s post.

Table Of Contents: Jump To Links

The Importance Of Optimizing Your Hormones

Over the past few posts, I’ve been going into detail on the role your hormones play with your fitness results.

As I’ve said, in the short-term it’s important to be in a calorie deficit to lose fat and to be in a calorie surplus to build muscle.

However, if you really want to Live Lean for life, and turn your body into a fat burning and muscle building machine for life, in addition to calories, you also need to be focusing on long-term hormonal health.

It’s amazing how much responsibility the approximately 50 different hormones have on all the cells in your body.

Some of these hormones play a larger role in the fat gain or the fat loss process.

I’ve already done posts on the importance of the following hormones:

• Thyroid hormones
• Hunger decreasing leptin and hunger increasing ghrelin hormone
• Glucagon hormone
• Growth hormone (GH)
• Testosterone

Today I want to talk about one of the most important hormones that can help with this, insulin.

Here’s the truth about insulin.

What Is Insulin?

Insulin is a hormone secreted immediately from your pancreas following a meal.

The role of insulin is simply to control the amount of sugar in the blood by moving it into the cells, where it can be used by the body for energy.

Insulin can have a positive and negative effect on the body.

The Positive Side of Insulin

Insulin plays a major role in building muscle when produced in sufficient amounts.

After a good workout, your muscles are in a catabolic state, meaning they are broken down, and your body loses some muscle glycogen.

If muscle building is your goal, consuming a high glycemic carbohydrate after a workout creates an insulin spike, thus providing an excellent delivery system for the carbohydrates and the amino acids from the protein to reach the muscle cells.

This can help break you out of the catabolic state, and puts you into an anabolic state to help re-build a stronger muscle, and replenish your previously depleted muscle glycogen levels.

This is the positive side.

Now here is the negative side of insulin.

The Negative Side Of Insulin

Insulin plays a negative role when produced in excess.

When refined carbohydrates are over consumed, they break down into sugar and quickly enter the bloodstream.

A large amount of insulin is then required to clear the sugar from the bloodstream.

Here’s the thing.

At anytime, your bloodstream usually only contains approximately 4-5 grams of sugar in the blood.

That’s only about 1 teaspoon.

So think about what happens to your body’s hormonal balance when you eat a “low fat” refined carbohydrate like a cinnamon roll, that contains 60 grams of sugar.

Here’s an example of how eating that “low fat” cinnamon roll can turn into a belly fat filled mess:

1. 60 grams of sugar quickly enters the bloodstream.
2. A massive amount of insulin is then released to remove the excess sugar from the bloodstream.
3. Approximately 30% of the sugar (18 grams) can be burned as immediate energy.
4. Approximately 30% of the sugar (another 18 grams) can be stored as glycogen in your liver and muscle cells and burned as short-term energy, when the capacity is available.
5. Then the remaining 40% of the sugar (24 grams) can potentially be stored as long-term energy in the fat cells (i.e. body fat).

Insulin then releases a fat storing enzyme called lipoprotein lipase (LPL).

When this LPL enzyme is released, it is on a mission to store everything as fat, especially as belly fat.

Essentially it turns you into a fat storing machine!

The Spill Over Effect

Here’s an even scarier example that affects a lot of people.

Your muscle and liver glycogen tanks have a limited capacity to store short-term energy.

Remember the video I did on the Spill Over Effect?

When your glycogen tanks are already full, the following happens:

1. Once again, approximately 30% of the sugar (18 grams) can be burned as immediate energy.
2. But 0% of the sugar is stored as glycogen, since your glycogen tanks are already full.
3. This means potentially 70% of that sugar (42 grams) can be stored as body fat.

Here’s the take away point.

The next time you read a label that says cinnamon rolls are “low fat”, think again.

Your body is designed to burn stored fat for the majority of its energy requirements.

However, when you have continuous high insulin levels caused caused by over consuming refined carbohydrates, and not working out enough, your body continues to burn sugar for energy.

It then stores the excess sugar as body fat, rather than burning the already existing stored body fat for energy.

Another negative affect of insulin is how it reacts with other fat burning agents in the body.

For example, carnitine is a compound in the body that helps shuttle fatty acids into your cells mitochondria to be burned as fuel.

However, when insulin is in excess, it lowers the level of carnitine in the body, thus slowing your fat burning potential.

This leads to the topic of insulin sensitivity versus insulin resistance.

What Is Insulin Resistance?

If you’ve been struggling with fat gain and the majority of your snacks and meals are primarily comprised of carbohydrates, you may be suffering from insulin resistance.

Insulin Resistance simply means overtime, your cells become less affected by insulin.

Think of it this way.

The cells in your body have doors.

When you’re suffering from insulin resistance, the doors to open the cells are locked.

However, when you’re healthy and insulin sensitive, the insulin acts as the key to open the doors to the cells to let the nutrients in to be burned for energy.

When you’re suffering from insulin resistance, the keys don’t work to open the doors to the cells, so the pancreas continues producing more and more insulin.

In other words, when your body is suffering from insulin resistance, you don’t process carbohydrates well, therefore you’re more likely to store them as fat, rather than burn them for energy.

We can that a fail!

The opposite of this is insulin sensitivity.

What Is Insulin Sensitivity?

When your body is insulin sensitive, you process carbohydrates well.

This means you store them in the muscles and liver cells, and you burn them off for immediate and short-term energy.

We call this gains!

How To Fix Insulin Resistance

So how can you increase insulin sensitivity and turn your body into a long-term fat burning machine?

The major keys are simple.

1. Lower Your Carbohydrate Intake

The higher your carbohydrate consumption, the higher the potential for your insulin levels.

Depending on what your goals are and activity level, I usually recommend between 50-150 grams of mainly complex carbohydrates per day, with one high carbohydrate weekly cheat meal.

Here’s another tip.

2. Increase The Amount Of Protein In Your Diet

Replace the calories from carbohydrates with high quality sources of lean muscle building protein.

Protein does not induce insulin as much as carbohydrates, and can also help keep you feeling full, thus limiting your sugar cravings.

Depending on what your goals are and your activity level, I usually recommend starting with 1 gram of protein for every pound of lean body mass.

You can then go up from there.

Here’s another tip.

3. Add In 3-5 Resistance Training Workouts Per Week

Working out and building muscle can help improve insulin sensitivity.

After your workouts, insulin sensitivity can be at it’s highest, meaning it’s a great time to consume carbohydrates as your muscle and liver cells probably have capacity to store them for short-term energy.

If you don’t have a workout program yet, I recommend you take our quick Live Lean Body Quiz.

This is a workout program selector tool to choose the best workout for you based on your:

• Fitness level
• Access to equipment
• Goals

Here’s the last tip.

4. Improve Your Quality Of Sleep

The lack of quality sleep can increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol, which can then increase the cravings for insulin spiking, sugary foods.

Check out this post on the best foods to improve sleep.

Even though your genotype is fixed, the expression of your genes, known as your phenotype, is directly influenced by the foods you eat, your environment, and your lifestyle.

This means your phenotype can be controlled by your daily actions.

For example, the foods you consume, the amount of exercise you do, and the quality of the sleep you get, all stimulate your hormonal system to send fat burning or fat storing messages to your body.

No matter how much exercise you do or how little you eat, if those actions are excessive, they will throw your body’s hormones out of balance, which can turn your body into a fat storing machine.

Need Help With Your Diet?

If you’re not sure what to eat, how to eat, or how to make it taste delicious, check out one of our cookbooks.

You can check out our nutrition bundle which contains:

• Meal plans
• Recipes
• Step by step cooking videos
• Grocery lists gocheck it outget on the living wagon with us andcreate the body that you want andmaintain it forever so with that saidguys thanks for watching and Curt livein Lee

It has it all in there.

Go check it out here and get on the Live Lean wagon with us, create the body you want, and maintain it forever.

Keep Living Lean!