1. My trainer told me to not worry about high blood glucose or insulin because most overweight people have those issues and they go away when they become lean.
Ask your trainer why "most" overweight people have these issues but not all. That's the key question that reveals their BS. Outliers don't make the rules but they certainly break them.
Everyone knows what reverses insulin resistance and diabetes - body fat loss. I know that these coaches and trainers want to make statements like these in order to appear confidant in their protocol but the reality is that everyone knows this. What is not known is how to achieve it. We know that proper blood glucose regulation is the key but we simply don't know how to regain and sustain it long enough to affect body fat in everyone.
So, yes you have to worry about your high blood glucose and insulin because that's what's driving your condition. These issues do not go away because you become lean, instead you become lean because these issues go away.
2. A coach told me that loosing fat and gaining muscle is the key to reversing insulin resistance.
Like I said above, everyone knows what reverses insulin resistance and diabetes but no one yet knows how to achieve it, especially in the long term. There are many different treatments but they have all failed so far. You need a properly working metabolism to lose fat and build muscle. The key to this is proper blood glucose regulation. It doesn't happen through magic.
The overweight/obese metabolism doesn't want to lose fat and it breaks down all its muscle. It’s very difficult to reverse this, once it begins, and many different lifelong approaches have to be implemented together in order to have a chance to.
3. My neighbor was recently walking and suddenly had a heart attack. They discovered she had a 99% blockage in a main artery. She had started doing "keto" a while back, was doing great with weight loss, and then this happened.
Heart disease is mostly genetic. I am pretty sure that there was heart disease in your neighbor’s family history. Having said that, people who have a genetic predisposition for heart disease have to be very careful of their lifestyle choices and keep in mind that some of these choices can put them at greater risk for developing this disease. Lifestyle choices like smoking, for example, puts everyone at risk for heart disease but it is especially malignant for the people who already have a genetic predisposition for it.
A lot of genetic heart disease is caused by poor lipid management in the body. Lipids are very complex but basically these people have LDL and apolipoproteins that do not function as they should. Certain lifestyles can effect the function of these proteins but for the most part their function is genetic. That's why these people have long family histories of heart disease. For some of these people, consumption of saturated fats has an adverse effect on their lipid profiles. "Keto", as is followed online by buffoons, is an ultra high saturated fat diet. If your neighbor was one of the people who have these genetics, then yes, she very well could have exacerbated her disease by eating all that fat. It doesn't mean she wouldn't have developed it anyway, it just means that she sped it up.
You should never follow a diet willy-nilly because you saw someone online recommend it since the odds are that the diet is not correct. Even a diet like veganism which is toted as benign is everything but. It can cause you serious health problems. Your neighbor should have gone to her doctor and had the proper testing done in order to see how this diet was affecting her lipids. You cannot guide yourself by simply having "low cholesterol". That's not enough to know how the diet is affecting you. Your cholesterol could be low and doing nothing but building plaque in your arteries, just like your insulin could be low and doing nothing but building fat around your middle. Having less or more of something doesn't make it good or bad. What it's doing is what determines this.
4. My friend was obese. His diet is carb based because in his culture it’s a tradition to eat bread, beans and other carbs. About a year ago he started making YouTube walking videos, giving tours of his city. These walking tours take anywhere from two to three hours of walking every day to every other day. I recently visited him and when I saw him, I nearly fell over. I didn’t recognize him. This man is in perfect shape now. He looks athletic! He said he was surprised himself as he never could have guessed making these videos would cause this to happen. He never changed his traditional diet either but he reversed his prediabetes anyway.
This is not surprising as exercise has long been known to reign supreme when it comes to metabolic health. Diet is only a palliative treatment for metabolic syndrome/diabetes but exercise actually reverses the pathologies associated with this condition.
Many studies have consistently shown this in diabetics. Without any diet changes, diabetics can make significant and long lasting improvements to their condition with exercise alone. We have also seen this in athletes. Athletes can have the worse diets in the world and still be in perfect metabolic health, as long as they can continue exercising. Exercise is great at preventing metabolic conditions.
The profound effects that exercise has on glucose regulation is what sets these metabolic benefits into motion. These effects go well beyond glucose control and actually changes the way insulin functions. To compound the benefits, exercise affects leptin in a positive way, more than any diet can. Add to that mitochondrial energy balance and improvements to body composition and you have a system wide metabolic effect that cannot be matched by any diet. Exercise goes where no diet can.
5. Everyone is always arguing over one diet or another but does it truly matter when it comes to obesity? There is no diet that is best for obesity.
Diets are all shim-sham when it comes to obesity because no diet can promise a restoration of leptin expression. Leptin expression is all that matters. This is why you cannot expect much from any diet but you also can't take any diet off the table, unless it hasn't worked for you before. If it didn't work once, it won't work twice. The premise is that your chosen diet will improve blood glucose regulation enough to enhance leptin expression.
The diet you choose affects your overall health and certain diets have to be followed due to allergies or other conditions that are exacerbated by the consumption of certain foods. But when it comes to obesity, diets are only palliative since obesity has no known cure. In fact, exercise reigns superior in its beneficial effects on obesity than any diet.
The path to restoring leptin expression, for the obese, is paved in blood glucose regulation. So the only diet that is best for obesity is one that helps preserve and/or stabilize blood glucose regulation. Proper blood glucose regulation simply means that the body is able to keep its blood glucose steady, without large disparities between highs and lows. A healthy body makes glucose when needed and not when it doesn't.
The best diets for achieving this are low in carb, moderate in fat and adequate in protein. This is because these diets have three very important benefits:
- They don't interfere further in the body's ability to regulate its blood glucose through the introduction of dietary glucose, whether in the form of sugar or starch.
- They minimize the storage of fat by no longer converting dietary glucose into fat. This is good since leptin under expression is not allowing for the burning of stored fat, so you don't want to add to it. Getting fatter only causes a further disruption in blood glucose regulation through an increased insulin demand.
- They allow the body to preserve and rebuild the lean muscle mass it's losing through excessive catabolism, restoring insulin/glucagon ratios and insulin's pulsatile function.
- They reduce systemic stress through the consumption of suffice calories, helping to break the starvation adaptation which is metabolic syndrome.
So even though you can affect blood glucose through multiple avenues, including caloric restriction, and they all can have some benefits, the most profound effect occurs from low carb diets because they target multiple glucoregulatory systems and they can be sustained for the long term. Obesity can only be treated with a long term solution that does not reinforce starvation.
6. If blood sugar rises too high, after a meal, it means you ate too much or ate the wrong thing.
You ate too much and you ate the wrong thing if what you ate is pizza. In that case, it’s not the amount of pizza that caused this but the pizza itself.
You can try to negotiate with the pizza and only have one bite so there isn't such a large abnormal rise in your postprandial blood glucose, but you will have some abnormal rise regardless. This will cause your insulin function to continue to deteriorate over time and this will further effect your blood glucose regulation. Soon you won’t need the pizza at all to see high blood glucose. You would just wake up in the mornings and see it. That can’t be solved by negotiating with your sleep and sleeping for just an hour a night.
Postprandial (two hours after a meal) blood glucose should technically be back to fasting levels. Of course, people with metabolic syndrome cannot achieve this so the rule of thumb is for blood glucose to not go over 140 mg/dL postprandial. You would be better off if you can keep it below 100 mg/dL. You want to avoid a blood glucose fluctuation of more than 40 points, whether up or down, but this is all very difficult to do when you are already insulin resistant. A healthy person would be able to control this much better in order to avoid becoming insulin resistant. Once you are already there, everything falls apart. The center does not hold.
A lot of people blame these postprandial blood glucose rises on what they ate or how much they ate, but I don't want you to focus too much on that. As long as you are eating a proper low carb diet and maintaining your macros, what or how much you ate becomes irrelevant. You can be on a zero carb diet and throw in caloric restriction to boot and still have high postprandial blood glucose.
This is because the high postprandial blood glucose, that a person with metabolic syndrome experiences, has mostly to do with their insulin function, not with what or how much they ate at any one single meal. These people simply do not have the correct first phase insulin response to stop glucagon's catabolism of their own body.
Insulin is not only anabolic. It is also anti-catabolic. So every time these people eat, whether it's doughnuts or rocks, they will have a rise in insulin which causes a rise in glucagon but their insulin does not rise high enough to stop glucagon’s action. The more glucagon breaks down their body into glucose, in an uncontrolled manner, the higher the glucose in their bloodstream rises. This problem exists with or without the doughnuts presence. That's why many people who are strict carnivores still see rises in their blood glucose, even with no carb consumption whatsoever.
Diabetes is not a carb disease. It is a blood glucose regulation condition caused most commonly by an improper diet. The malignancy in the doughnuts is not necessarily that they cause blood glucose to rise after eating them but that this rise causes a prolonged insulin release/expression which will then drop blood glucose 100 points or more, during the night time fast. It's this drop that begins the adaptation process.
Erratic and large disparities in blood glucose, postprandial and then fasting, deteriorate insulin function and blood glucose regulation over time, increasing the body’s propensity to store and preserve body fat. This is because these drops in blood glucose signal starvation and sparing fat is anti-starvation. This wasn't caused by any single blood glucose reading. This is something that occurs chronically in the long term. I'm talking decades.
So, the purpose of taking a dietary approach to control this effect is not to focus on single blood glucose readings in the short term but to improve insulin function in the long term. The improper diet is what caused this "insulin resistance" and that's what you want to reverse. For this reason, stay away from doughnuts. They interrupt the body’s glucose homeostasis whether you eat one or a dozen.
You also need to stop obsessing over single blood glucose readings and begin to reverse insulin resistance. You can develop advanced diabetes while twiddling with your postprandial blood glucose. We see this all the time with "low carb diabetics". They carry around their meters constantly and end up dying of diabetes complications regardless. Blood glucose meters give you important information about how diabetes medications are affecting you. That’s why you need to check your blood glucose often as blood glucose medications, including injectable insulin, can drop your blood glucose rapidly and without symptoms, which can possibly kill you. You need to make sure you are dosing diabetes medications properly. That's what the meter is for, not to see how onions or a tomato affects you.
For people who are not diabetic but are simply overweight/obese and/or have metabolic syndrome, the meter can show them in real time how doughnuts are not helping them. Some people need to see actual proof that pizza is unhealthy, in any quantity, before they even consider giving it up. Most people think that pizza just causes them to gain a few pounds a year but isn't actually killing them. Well a blood glucose meter can help convince them otherwise.
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