Insulin has a major effect on your weight loss. This is a peculiar hormone because it is equally effective for losing fat as well as gaining muscle. Which is why I call it a “double-edged” hormone.
The Purpose Of Insulin
Insulin drives nutrients in to your cells. It is the carrier of nutrients. So if insulin is not allowed to go inside your cells, neither is food.
Also, if there is not enough insulin in the blood, there is not enough food going into your cells.
Problems with insulin = starvation of cells.
Here Is How It Works
The food you eat turns to glucose…
Glucose then goes into your blood…
Your nervous system recognizes this through receptors on your cells…
Insulin is then released by your pancreas…
Insulin binds to glucose AND existing protein in your blood (in the form of amino acids)
Your cells open the doors on the cell walls which allow insulin inside… Insulin goes inside your cells and brings glucose and protein with it.
Muscle-Builder
This is how insulin acts as a muscle builder and fat burning. It enhances muscle growth, recovery, and repair by delivering to the muscles the raw materials needed for protein synthesis. It also inhibits muscle breakdown.
This is highly desirable for weight loss, health, fitness and wellbeing.
As long as the sugar in your blood gets used, it does not get stored as fat.
The food you eat goes to muscle because insulin drives it into muscle rather than store it as fat.
It is also what drives protein into your cells.
Let’s get into where the problem lies…
Death Dealer
The problem comes when you have excessively high levels or low levels of insulin.
Chronically high levels of insulin lead to death by way of diabetes and heart disease. This is done gradually and slowly and the road is riddled with poor enjoyment of life and addiction to food.
This is how most Americans are dying today.
When there is a lot of insulin in your blood and it is not allowed to go inside your cells, the next step for insulin is to get the blood sugar it has connected to and drive it to your liver.
Hypoglycemia
This action takes the blood sugar out of your blood. This is what you feel when you have a “sugar low.”
- Shakiness, anxiety
- Nervousness
- Palpitations, tachycardia
- Sweating, feeling of warmth
- Pallor, coldness, clamminess
- Dilated pupils
- Feeling of numbness “pins and needles”
- Hunger and growling stomach
- Nausea, vomiting and abdominal discomfort
- Headaches
- Impaired judgement
- Nonspecific dysphoria, anxiety, moodiness, depression, crying, fear of dying, suicidal thoughts
- Negativism, irritability, belligerence, combativeness, rage
- Personality change, emotional lability
- Fatigue, weakness, apathy, lethargy, daydreaming, sleep
- Confusion, amnesia, dizziness, delirium
- Staring, “glassy” look, blurred vision, double vision
- Flashes of light in the field of vision
- Automatic behavior, also known as automatism
- Difficulty speaking, slurred speech
- Ataxia, incoordination, sometimes mistaken for “drunkenness”
- Focal or general motor deficit, paralysis, hemiparesis
- Paresthesia, headache
- Stupor, coma, abnormal breathing
- Generalized or focal seizures
It also means your cells do not get the food it needs to grow and stay strong. It also means your muscle cells do not get their batteries recharged.
So very high levels of insulin will cause hypoglycemia and this leads to STARVATION of your cells
Hyperglycemia
Very low levels of insulin cause a lot of devastating problems as well.
If you get a bunch of glucose in your blood, and (for whatever reason) your body does not create insulin to deal with this blood sugar, the high blood sugar levels are damaging.
Shortness of breath, breath which smells fruity, Nausea and vomiting and Very dry mouth. The first three are the “classic” signs of hyperglycemia.
- Frequent hunger, especially pronounced hunger
- Frequent thirst, especially excessive thirst
- Polyuria – frequent urination
- Blurred vision
- Fatigue (sleepiness).
- Weight loss
- Poor wound healing (cuts, scrapes, etc.)
- Dry mouth
- Dry or itchy skin
- Tingling in feet or heels
- Erectile dysfunction
- Recurrent infections external ear infections (swimmer’s ear)
- Cardiac arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat)
- Stupor
- Coma
Roller-coaster
When a person cannot lose weight, they are usually seesawing between hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia. The muscle building, anti-aging, fat burning properties of insulin can never be used!
And you are exhausted from this seesawing.
Other Properties Of Insulin
At the same time, insulin makes it very easy to build fat. In a study published in Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology in 1978, rats that were injected with insulin had an increase in fat, and rats injected with glucagon (the hormone that does the opposite of insulin) had a decrease in fat.
A characteristic of insulin is there is either too much or too little. It is not secreted in precise amounts. It is always overshot. Then it takes the sugar supply away and brings your glucose level (blood sugar) too low. This is the state of hypoglycemia.
So What Causes It?
So the obvious burning question is… What causes the roller-coaster and how do I get Insulin to be the “Antiaging Muscle Builder.”
You can view insulin like a switch. When it is switched one way, you grow younger, leaner, stronger and firmer. When it is switched the other way your body ages faster and you open the door to many modern day degenerative diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, metabolic syndrome, atherosclerosis, etc.
As you continue to read this book, you will learn how to get the switch to the healthy side.
[…] contrast to insulin, glucagon raises blood sugar when it is too […]