there's a single hormone responsible for every patient who walks through my clinic with belly fat a slowed metabolism and brain fog insulin it's the hormone that dictates how food is stored as fat without any insulin you could eat as much food as possible and still lose weight when you have too much insulin you can practically gain weight by looking at food we don't want zero insulin that's called type 1 diabetes but in my obese patients teaching them to lower their insulin causes effortless weight loss in this video I'm going to show you how insulin works in a healthy patient what happens when insulin becomes dysfunctional and then how to get it healthy again we're going to specifically focus on fat cells these cells are the first ones to become insulin resistance when this pathology begins next you'll find glucose in our story and a glute 4 receptor those glute 4 receptors stay inside the cell and they're not going to rise to the cell membrane until insulin binds to the insulin receptor those glute 4 receptors act like a straw and if there's more glucose outside the cell it siphons into the cell feeding the cell with glucose and removing it from the bloodstream as soon as the insulin breaks away from that receptor those straws tuck back down into the cell in that type 1 diabetic when there's no insulin present glucose builds up in the bloodstream trying to get into the cells that are hungry for it but without that insulin binding to the insulin receptor the glucose is trapped in the bloodstream and can't get into our fat cell or any other cell for that matter it's during that time where that cell is actually starving because no blood sugar is allowed inside the cell when patients go from a normal insulin level to an insulin resistant level what that really means is they kept making more and more and more insulin along the way those beta cells deep in your pancreas are making insulin how much insulin they make is based on that activation or stimulus from the body here's what happens in those obese patients those beta cells are working overtime making way too much insulin for the body but it's the amount required to get the glucose into the cell the consumption of carbohydrates especially processed food is the stimulus to make insulin in fact any food you eat makes a little bit of insulin but for the most part the bad actors are processed carbohydrates and this is what happens in my patient with belly fat a slow metabolism and brain fog that insulin is far higher than it should be and it got there at the same time the blood sugar continued to rise it's taking a lot of signal for that blood sugar to get into the cell it is dangerous to have a high blood sugar too high of blood sugar will also kill you so your body is trying to save you from yourself by getting the blood sugar out of the bloodstream into a fat cell it's there that you'll take that sugar and turn it into fat the other sneaky problem that happens as this insulin rises is your mitochondria are going from a really healthy looking version to a broken version this broken mitochondria wastes energy and ages your cells now let's look what happens it's taking five insulins to bind to those five receptors before our glute 4 receptor rises to the cell membrane and acts as a straw to allow that blood sugar into the cell as a few blood sugars zip into the cell one of those insulin no longer bind and what happens yeah the straw tucks back in that straw is used to a really loud noise to allow blood sugar into the cell and when only four insulin rebinding instead of five it will not rise to its job this leads to higher blood sugars and those high blood sugars are going to find any other way to get out of the bloodstream this leads to a much higher triglyceride level whose fault is that well you can blame your liver your liver quickly takes those blood sugars turns them into strings of fat and then we try to deliver those to the cells so let's lower the patients insulin that's where the results will come from the first step of that is to lower their carbohydrates the drop in carbohydrate consumption also dropped your blood sugar this is a good thing with less carbohydrates around you actually stimulate less insulin now with only three insulin instead of five they bind to their receptors but nothing happens those straws do not respond they've been trained that they don't rise to that cell membrane until there's five insulin and without a proper stimulus they rattle and shake and ask for fuel but nothing happens the glucose cannot get in that time when the blood sugar can't get in is very stressful to the cell but if you wait just long enough they will turn those strings of fat into ketones they can fuel the cell without that glute 4 receptor rising to the surface you know what else can enter that cell free triglycerides so what happens in the first few days of a patient entering a ketogenic diet they lower their blood sugar because the carbs are less and then their insulin lowers because the carbs are less and then they suffer a little bit until the ketones show up once ketones are in circulation your body uses that as fuel and your brain your heart and your body feel a little better but the real health benefit comes when you stay there when they stay with a lower carbohydrate intake and they train their bodies to work in a state of ketosis using a better fuel for their brain their body and their fat cells during that season where that insulin was high your fat cell could fill with triglycerides but they could not get out that triglyceride could enter the fat cell without the help of the glute 4 receptor and it was a perfect place to store that extra sugar that you turned into fat yes this is how we all get fat our fat cells swell with fat now that we have you on a low carbohydrate setting and there's ketones in circulation things are changing inside your fat cell you have the ability to take that fat and circulate it as energy it can now exit the fat cell because of that lowered insulin at first when you lower the insulin the fat cell is a little stunned it really can't do much of anything to help you but once your body adjusts to this lower level of insulin you can circulate fat as energy those ketones came from strings of fat where'd you get the fat well you ate fat especially in the setting of low carbohydrate keeping that insulin low and eventually that fat cell becomes your friend and those triglycerides are now the source of eternal energy and ketones this is when my patients sing praises their belly fat shrinks their brain is fueled by a way better source so that brain fog slowly goes away over the first 10 days of a ketogenic diet and finally the metabolism that's been sluggish slowly starts to build up over the first 3 to four weeks of a ketogenic diet now that you know how insulin resistance happens from the inside out click here for the steps to reverse insulin resistance once and for all