The diagnosis of insulin resistance means the rules have changed in your body. You gain fat effortlessly, and what might have worked to keep fat off in your younger years no longer works. Luckily, the new rules do not require Navy SEAL-level discipline or an exercise routine.
Reversing insulin resistance takes these three rules. Number one, track insulin, not calories. You may have heard the rebuttal that your body does not count calories, and It's true, but it does not make you unaccountable. Instead of obsessing on calories in versus calories out, we need you to focus on how much insulin your body is producing.
Your body needs just one equation to be true to put fat onto your body. It needs to have an elevated insulin while consuming food. The presence of insulin tells your body to put that energy into liver, muscle, or fat cells.
If you eat a bunch of food and your insulin doesn't rise or barely moves at all. We call that type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetics actually fall victim to an eating disorder called diabulimia. They purposely manipulate their insulin dose and under-deliver the dose.
When they do this, it makes it impossible to store energy as fat. You can imagine how tempting it would be to eat anything you want and not gain any fat. But this eating disorder is deadly.
Their body is starving from the inside of their cells out. They can metabolize no glucose and can only live off of fat. Once those fat storages are empty, they literally die of a ketoacidosis process, a form of extreme malnourishment. So for those of you injecting insulin, this video is not for you. But for the rest of us, it illustrates that insulin is not necessarily the enemy, but it's something we're making way too much of.
And as a result, we're plumping up all of those fat cells. Unfortunately, insulin is very volatile and sends you back and forth to the lab several times before I know exactly what it's doing. We'll get to estimating your insulin here in a minute, but for now, I want to arm you with the knowledge of what makes insulin rise, causing you to store fat.
The types of food matter. Carbs cause the highest spike in insulin, whereas protein causes a lesser spike, and fat causes the lowest spike in insulin. So that means we're eating fat first and a lot of it. Don't look at the calorie count. Remember, when you're consuming high fat, that metabolism starts to hike up.
Not only does it have the lowest production of insulin, but it's the best return on energy per bite. Eating fat has the lowest amount of insulin produced, and when you consume fat in a low insulin state, it really boosts the metabolism. Again, you need the insulin to store it as fat. Without that insulin, you get to use it as energy. And that's how metabolisms get boosted on a high-fat diet.
Years of chronically elevated insulin will take years to reverse. So stay focused on the high fat. We'll shift focus later on in this story.
I've done experiments where I've added a quarter cup of MCT, or medium-chain triglycerides. And although I had added 500 calories to the day, I lost weight because of that boosted metabolism. in the presence of the reduced insulin production. So eat the fat, keep those carbs low, under 20 grams per day. Number two, don't eat after dark.
The timing of those fat-based meals has a profound impact on your insulin production. Remember that even fat produces a little bit of insulin and so does the consumption of protein, as well as waking up in the morning, that morning rise of cortisol, where your brain intuitively knows that the sun is rising. sends a stimulus to your liver where the production of glucose enters your body. And this spike in glucose results in a spike in insulin if you're insulin resistant. We want to front load those meals earlier in the day.
Put that consumption of food in the daylight hours. The closer to sunrise, the better. Eating after sunset has a higher cost to those with insulin resistance.
The longer you get between your last bite of food and the time you go to bed, the better your insulin will be the next day. And number three, we have to measure it if we want to change it. If we want these rules to stick, we must measure the metrics so we can study the improvements.
Earlier I said the measurement of insulin is messy, and indeed it is. It's very volatile. So the best proxy for insulin is to measure the two molecules that it controls the most, that being glucose and ketones. Measuring glucose and ketones at the same moment helps us use that metric in combination to predict what your insulin is.
We call this the Dr. Baas ratio. a derivative of the GKI or glucose ketone index. The Dr. Baugh's ratio uses the glucose divided by the ketones, and the lower the Dr. Baugh's ratio, the lower the insulin. The best part of using this proxy to insulin is it also measures the impact on insulin.
This is something I can't do in one check of insulin, but I can do when I look at what your glucose and ketones are doing over time. The best time to measure this metric is first thing in the morning. There's less noise in your data when you wake up in the morning and measure those two points of information.
Use those to track how is your insulin doing after last night's sleep. Alright, you're looking for the best foods for insulin resistance? Check out this video where I've got the top 7 ready for you.