You have just finished a long hard day at work, and return home to a familiar smell wafting from your kitchen. Someone has prepared your favourite meal for supper, fettucine alfredo. You serve yourself a heaping portion and proceed in devouring it, barely slowing to enjoy the pasta in all it’s creamy glory. You finish your plate, and are left thinking that if you ate another morsel, you may explode! However, only a few short hours later you have a craving for something sweet? A cookie perhaps?
If this sounds like a familiar situation, fear not, for this is the work of insulin, the bodies Master Hormone. Sounds menacing doesn’t it? Insulin has earned this title, as it is the key player in both the processing of carbohydrates, and the body’s inflammation response due it’s control over what gets into and out of cells. Inflammation is an underpinning element in many diseases and immune deficiencies. Control your insulin response, and you can help control inflammation.
Fun fact: Carpel tunnel syndrome is an inflammatory response to insulin resistance.
Back to carbohydrates. When we eat a meal rich in carbs, blood sugar levels increase as the carbohydrates are broken down into their basic components – sugars. As blood sugar levels increase, insulin is released in response. Insulin is a storage hormone which moves glucose (sugar) from the blood into the muscles and fat cells for use as energy. In order to visualize this relationship better, take a look at the picture below.
The red and green shaded boxes point out the discrepancies between the peak blood glucose and peak blood insulin levels. This creates a lag in the time it takes for both processes to reach normal levels again (red box).
It is this lag time in normalization of insulin levels which gives us those sugar cravings after carbohydrate rich meals. This is because blood sugar levels are normal but we still have insulin present in the blood and that insulin needs something to do – without sugar to store it gets bored! So it has the effect of asking the body for more sugar. That’s why we get hungry even though we just ate a few hours ago.
If you read my post on triglycerides you will remember that carbohydrates get broken down into simple sugars (glucose) for use as instant energy. When your cells have absorbed all the glucose that they need, a process that is facilitated by insulin, the gatekeeper hormone, the excess is converted to glycogen via the liver. Glycogen is insulin’s antagonist in that it releases fatty acids from storage in response to protein and hunger, and acts to normalize energy levels.
Insulin is also very important for muscle gain (many bodybuilders artificially inject insulin to gain mass), but if you are constantly causing an insulin response by consuming lots of carbohydrates, you run the risk of developing insulin resistance.
Like many processes in out bodies, insulin has an effectiveness threshold, a level at which our bodies perform optimally. The mechanism is analogous drug tolerance, and why drug addicts never again reach the pleasure if their first high with out significantly increasing the intake levels. Our bodies are very quick at adapting to over stimulation, and if insulin is constantly in your blood stream, your cells develop a resistance. Your body tries to counter act this by pumping more insulin into your blood stream.
Why is this bad?
When too much insulin is in your blood stream, and resistance occurs, nothing gets into or out of your cells. This means that all the glucose from the carbs you keep consuming is turned directly into glycogen. Since glycogen stores have limited space in your muscles and liver, the extra glycogen is converted to fat, which has unlimited storage space (especially in the abdomen and love-handles). Furthermore, with nothing getting into, and more importantly, out of your cells, your body can not get at the fat it has already stored for use as energy, and thus tells you to eat more carbohydrates. It’s a vicious cycle, but one that you can get out of.
You have to learn how to control the insulin response to some degree. If you can decrease the amount of sugar you dump into our blood, thereby decreasing the size of the peak in blood glucose levels, the insulin response will decrease accordingly. By leveling off the peaks and valleys in insulin during the day you’ll be able to exit that ‘hunger rollercoaster’ that plagues millions, and reduce your risk of developing insulin resistance.
So how do I manage my insulin levels?
- Lower your carbohydrate intake and CUT THE SUGAR! I can not stress this enough. If you want to lose fat, and increase your insulin sensativity, this must be your first step.
- Choose your carbohydrates wisely. Leafy green plants, and other vegetables that are high in fiber do not trigger a large insulin response.
- Eat carbohydrates in conjunction with fats and protein. Both fat and protein do not cause much of an insulin response and will slow it’s release.
- Get some good sleep!
Chronic high blood pressure, prolonged exposure to low level stress, and lack of sleep all impair tissue sensitivity to insulin. Understanding the relationship between insulin and glycogen is important for understanding why fat loss while maintaining a high carbohydrate diet is nearly impossible. Hopefully you now have a better grasp on what happens when you eat that twinkie, and why saying “it goes straight to my hips” is not just a figure of speech.
If you have further questions, head over to the Ask a Question page and leave one.
Fun fact: Have you ever noticed how long distance runners, while usually very trim, never really get “six pack” abs? This is because the layer of fat around the abdomen is typically cause by increased cortisol levels, a stress hormone that is triggered by lack of sleep and over training.
Related Topics
Tags: blood insulin, blood sugar, carbohydrates, fat loss, glycogen, insulin, insulin resistance, insulin response, muscle gain
