In this blog post I want to give you the “Readers Digest Condensed Story” on insulin because the more you understand about this amazing hormone the easier it will be for you to shed the unwanted pounds of fatty flesh. You must become an expert in insulin if you really want to make progress with losing the fat and keeping it off!
Most people already know that insulin plays a role in how the body utilizes blood sugar and people who lose the ability to produce insulin ultimately become diabetic. It is a lesser known fact; that insulin’s role is much more broad. In fact, insulin’s primary role is to carry energy and building blocks into the cells. During our evolution, Mother Nature was not so worried about lions, tigers and bears. Our survival as a species, was far more likely to be challenged by famine and starvation. Thus, rather than developing big fangs and claws we instead developed hormones whose main role it was to protect us from starvation.
One such hormone is insulin.
Aside from carry sugar into the cell where it can be burned for energy, insulin has many other roles including:
- Moving fat from the blood into the fat cell for later use.
- Closing and locking the door to fat cells so that your body can not burn the stored energy
- Carrying proteins into muscle (a good thing when you are trying to build muscle)
So you can see that insulin causes a double whammy to our ability to burn fat. First, it causes more fat to be stored and second it prevents the fat from being burned. That is the perfect storm for gaining fat.
Now that you know this you can see that keeping insulin low for as long as possible throughout the day is a key tactic for winning the battle of the bulge. The key to keeping insulin levels low is twofold:
- Decrease carbohydrate intake as much as humanly possible. This includes all refined carbohydrates: bread, pasta, rice, cake, candy and cereals.
- When you do eat carbohydrates, eat carbohydrates that are low on the Glycemic Index or Glycemic Load.