How To Lower Insulin Levels
Hitler? Bill O’Reilly? Gloria Allred? Andrea Dworkin?
Nah, while evil, they’ve got nothing on how dastardly carbs are. Carbs are the enemy of mankind!
Why?
Because carbs are what’s keeping you away from the body of your dreams! For proof, just look at what happens when you go full retard on the no carbs thing and do keto or the Atkins diet. Yeah, it’s voila, hello sexy!
Want the truth about carbs?
Well, they don’t make you fat!
What’s actually responsible for whether you gain weight from what you eat is how you respond to insulin. So while you think you need to manage your carbs and are doing everything to do so, what you really need to do is spend more time learning how to lower your insulin levels.
Insulin is a powerful hormone that’s produced in the pancreas and released into the circulatory system in proportion to the amount of carbs you eat. Among its functions are to help regulate blood sugar levels and act as the major gatekeeper when it comes to nutrient partitioning.1To understand what nutrient partitioning is, think of insulin playing traffic cop and telling nutrients where to go. Ahhhhhhh, now you get it!
Being insulin resistant means that your body doesn’t use glucose from food as energy and store it as glycogen in the cells of the liver and muscles. Rather than storing glucose there to tap for immediate fuel, the body instead stores most of it as fat for future use. This not only happens with glucose, indicating that you have an inefficient metabolism and low carbohydrate tolerance, but can occur with protein as well. When this happens, the amino acids meant to repair and build up muscle find their way elsewhere. In either occurrence, the ingested but unused nutrients get stored around your abdominal organs, such as the liver, pancreas, and kidneys, thus explaining your belly that looks like it’s on its third trimester!
The common reaction to this sorry state of affairs is to severely reduce carbs, the source of energy that fuel your everything — e.g. breathing, walking, picking your nose, using your brain to think of ways to finagle mouth stuff out of your cold clam of a partner before bed.
Lowering carbs certainly gets people to lose weight, until they one day see the scale not moving, resulting in them cutting carbs even further.
They repeat this process as many times as possible until they finally succumb to eating carbs again because their energy is in the toilet. And when that happens, what do we have?!
Yeah, the scale shoots back up.
Gadzooks!!!
Little do they know that the higher scale reading isn’t because of fat from the evil carbs. Nope! It’s due to the regaining of water weight — AND MORE!!! — that was lost by the absence of carbs.2After all, carbs hold water! That means that the scale going down had little to do with actual fat loss and more to do with water.3The scale going down might also have to do with decreasing muscle mass if their genius also informs them to go on a very low calorie diet.
By no means am I including you in the dumbfuckery above because I know you’re smarter. But that’s what you people do. You They point the dreaded finger of blame at carbs and then take drastic action against them, as if they’re the reason why you’re they’re gaining fat and finding difficulty losing it. But carbs are clearly not the cause of what’s going on. Instead, because the body isn’t listening to the chemical message to uptake glucose and amino acids in the cells, the solution is to lower your insulin levels and become more insulin sensitive.
Don’t know how to lower your insulin levels and improve insulin sensitivity?
Before you throw on the Notebook with Drake playing softly in the background, there are a number of things you can do to improve sensitivity. Below, I’ve highlighted just a handful of simple tricks you can make part of your daily routine without radically changing your life.4That is, if you don’t already watch the Notebook with the dulcet tones of Drake providing ambiance.
ONE
Reduce carbs.
WTF?!?!
Yup, you read that sentence right!
Reduce carbs!!!
I know I just said that carbs aren’t at fault, so their reduction is a mistake. But I lied. Carbohydrates are to blame. Shoot me!!!
…but before you do, be mindful that not all carbs are created equal.5Also, before you shoot me, remember that murder is also ILLEGAL!!!
The guilty party isn’t complex carbs. Nope, not carbs of the starchy or fibrous kind. The dastardly villain of all waistlines everywhere is the simple carb fructose. So since ALL carbs aren’t bad, acting without prejudice against them and removing them all across the board doesn’t make sense, for reasons mentioned above.
What does make sense is being discriminatory. That means cutting out soda, fruit juice, sports drinks, fruit smoothies, and table sugar; avoiding agave and processed foods containing high-fructose corn syrup; and possibly limiting yourself to 1-2 pieces of whole produce per day.
TWO
Change your food order.
I don’t know about you, but I have a habit of saving the meat for last whenever I sit down to eat. And that’s not optimal.
Studies have shown that when eating a meal, eating the protein, fat, and fibrous vegetables before touching the starchy carbs results in significantly lower blood sugar levels as opposed to when eating carbs first.6Blood glucose showed a decrease by 29 percent after 30 minutes, 37 percent after 60 minutes, and 17 percent after 120 minutes, all when consuming a meal in the outlined sequence.
So as bad as you want to be like me, DON’T!!!
Instead, time your carb consumption by chowing down on that chicken, beef, fish, and greens ahead of your rice, pasta, and potatoes.
THREE
Adding a tablespoon of acetic acid or about 6 grams of cinnamon extract to your higher carb meals makes a world of difference.7 Not that I’m doubting your chemistry knowledge, but acetic acid is vinegar. In diabetics, pre-diabetics, and normal healthy folks, vinegar has been observed to boost insulin sensitivity in general and, in particular, dampen the glucose and insulin response to carbs by 19-34 percent following a meal.
As for cinnamon, it too increases insulin sensitivity and lowers blood sugar by slowing the digestion of carbs and decreasing their glycæmic index for as much as 12 hours after a feeding.8Again, not that I’m doubting your knowledge, but the glycæmic index is a measure of how fast simple and complex carbohydrates break down into sugar in the bloodstream.
Don’t care for vinegar or cinnamon?
You can get similar results from green tea and other spices like fenugreek and turmeric.9You can also eat specific foods that lower insulin resistance. These include a number of fruits (e.g. apples), vegetables (e.g. broccoli), legumes (e.g. black beans), nuts (e.g. almonds), whole grains (e.g. oatmeal), lean meat (e.g. chicken), and omega-3 fatty fish (e.g. salmon) with a low GI index.
FOUR
I’m about to lie again.10Hey, it’s what I do! What can I say, I’m a pathological liar just like your mother. She’s proud of you, she says? HA!!!
I said I’d recommend things that you could do without radically changing your life. But here I am about to tell you that not only do you have to go to the gym but that you also have to lift weights with greater intensity.
It so happens that strength training depletes glycogen stores and reduces the amount of insulin needed to replenish them. That means the body is more receptive to carbs when in this state. As such, you can eat almost anything postworkout without fear of the body storing the glucose as fat.11That doesn’t give you license to be stupid about what you eat, though!!!
Another incentive to train harder than you do now has to do with muscle. Muscle, which is metabolically expensive to build and maintain, is a major energy whore. How much of an energy whore? More than the soul-draining person you’re romantically involved with? Well, it accounts for the consumption of about 70-90 percent of the glucose in the blood even when you’re not active. So the more muscle mass you have…
…well, you can figure it out.12Psst…the more muscle mass you have, the lower your blood sugar levels.
Lowering your insulin levels and improving insulin sensitivity has the benefit of not only accelerating fat loss and muscle gain but can also (1) augment your performance in the gym; (2) help you sleep better and wake up feeling refreshed; (3) speed up recovery from training or injury; and (4) prevent a slew of health problems that we don’t really give that much of a fuck about because we’re all about the aesthetic.
Who knew being sensitive was such a good thing?!?!
Sure, dudes will make fun of you and women will friend zone the hell out of you for your sensitivity, but at least you’ll look BANGING AS FAWK!!!13Trust me, fellas. ALL women want a jerk, irrespective of the lies they tell themselves and the imbecilic brain between your ears that’s stupid enough to believe them.
Glossary: diet, gym, hormones, intensity, metabolism, muscle