5 Ways to Lower Insulin Levels (naturally) for Weight Loss
5 Ways to Lower Insulin Levels
We know one of the key drivers of weight gain is raised insulin levels. In this video I’m going to give you five ways to naturally help lower your insulin levels that will help you lose weight. Hey carb dodgers, my name is Dr. Dan Maggs. I help people who’ve been struggling to lose weight achieve their goal of long-term sustainable weight loss. I had a life-long battle with my weight until about three years ago when I managed to find the solution. It is now my passion to share what I have learned from my own weight loss journey and from helping others through my medical practice with you.
5 Ways to Lower Insulin Levels
Last week we talked about the important shift from thinking about weight loss in terms of calories to in terms of hormones. If you didn’t see that video, I’ll link to in the description below and up here. In that video I focused in on the role of raised insulin in weight gain and the importance of maintaining low insulin levels in achieving long-term sustainable weight loss. In this video I’m going to give you five ways to achieve and maintain lower insulin levels completely naturally, no medications or anything like that. Let’s dive straight in with the big one. Number one, a well-formulated low carbohydrate diet. When we look at the overall scientific studies about weight loss, low carbohydrate diets consistently outperform low fat diets. And that’s not a surprise. Carbohydrates are the main nutrient that promotes the release of insulin in our bodies. If you eat carbs, your blood sugar level rises, your pancreas produces insulin in order to drive glucose into the cells and bring the blood glucose levels back down to normal again.
Now carbs can be found in the form of things like sugar, high fructose corn syrup, added into drinks or into foods during the manufacturing process. But carbohydrates are also found in high quantities in foods like potatoes, rice, pasta, bread, basically lots of white or beige colored foods. Now starch is just long chains of glucose molecules strung together, and whenever you consume starch, your body just breaks down this starch into glucose, which in turns raises your blood glucose levels. Now, not as quickly as sugar does, but it raises them all the same. The good news is that carbohydrates are not an essential nutrient for life. In fact, we are designed to survive without taking in any carbohydrate in our diet. We can make all the glucose we need within our bodies. But we can also get a small amount of glucose from non-starchy vegetables, things like broccoli, cauliflower.
There’s loads of different vegetables like that. I’m not advocating a no carb diet, just one that is low. Low means different things to different people. Everyone has a different tolerance to the amount of carbohydrate they can consume. Your tolerance will be different from mine. But it must be a well-formulated low carbohydrate diet. There is definitely a right and a wrong way to approach low carb diets, particularly if you want to make them sustainable for the longer term. See, when done correctly, a low carb diet will lead to low insulin levels which will allow you to use your own fat for energy. This in turn will lead to decreased hunger, meaning you naturally want to take in less food.
I’m an advocate of low carb diets that are predominantly real food which means unprocessed foods with an adequate amount of protein supplemented with healthy fats. And this is what I teach here on this channel and over at my website which is carbdodging.com. But all foods stimulate the production of insulin to a certain extent. And whilst a well-formulated low carb diet will keep insulin levels to a minimum, the second way to keep your insulin levels naturally low is to introduce fasting into your diet. Now fasting is the opposite of feeding. Insulin levels will naturally be low when you’re fasting. And we all do it every night for at least 10 hours and then break that fast in the morning, hence break fast, breakfast. Fasting has also been a part of many cultures throughout human history.
Whilst fasting days have largely disappeared from Western culture, many people around the world still observe fasting days for religious reasons. Extending the time we spend in the fasting state, low insulin levels, leads to longer periods where our bodies are able to access our own stored fat for energy. It doesn’t mean we’re simply starving ourselves. For example, I don’t eat breakfast.
In fact, as I record this it’s about 11:00 in the morning and I haven’t eaten since 7:00 last night when I had my last low carb meal. I’m really only just starting to get hungry. So rather than having a high carb breakfast cereal, my insulin levels are currently low and my body is just running on its own fat stores. Now some of you watching this will be thinking, “Yeah, I could do that. I am not really hungry in the mornings.” And others will be going, “No, I cannot do that.” Which are you? Let me know in the comments down below this video if you’re a breakfast person or not. Just type love breakfast or hate breakfast. I know we’ve all been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
But is that really true? Or is it just something that we’ve been told by the food industry to get us to eat breakfast cereal? Fasting can sound pretty scary, but there is a lot we can do to make it much easier. I like many people quite naturally fell into a pattern of fasting after being on a low carb diet simply because I didn’t feel hungry in the mornings anymore. The third way in which we can keep our insulin levels naturally low is through exercise. Now exercise is fantastic in so many ways. But when it comes to weight loss, there is some effects of exercise that I think are far more important than just burning calories. On that note, think about it, have you ever been hungry after exercise? Of course.
5 Ways to Lower Insulin Levels
You burn more energy and your hunger increases to compensate it. Hunger is just your body’s way of trying to correct the imbalance that you’ve created. And it might not be immediate, it might be days or weeks over which it corrects that imbalance. But as I discussed in my last video, this idea of burning calories has been over sold. I could probably talk to you all day about the positive effects of exercise on our metabolism, but there are two key things I want to mention here. Firstly, exercise increases the sensitivity of muscles to the actions of insulin. You need less insulin to take up the same amount of glucose. Secondly, exercise allows our muscles to use glucose without the need for insulin. It’s amazing. You’ll often find me talking about insulin allowing glucose to enter into cells, such as in this video where you can see the star shaped insulin molecule interacting with the surface of the cell in order to open up that channel where glucose can pass through. But one of the effects of exercise is to open up these channels without the need for insulin.
After exercise glucose just gets taken up by the muscle tissue without the need for insulin to ever be produced. Resistance training, lifting heavy weights, and short burst of a high intensity exercise are particularly good for activating these important metabolic effects of exercise. Much better than going out and running a marathon or a four hour bike ride in order to burn off calories. Now the fourth way to naturally lower insulin levels is to reduce stress. A little bit of stress can be a good thing. It prepares our body for action by doing things that are raising blood glucose levels. In short bursts at the right time that is normal. But being stressed for long periods of time will cause persistently raised blood glucose which will mean that your body needs to produce more insulin in order to respond. Now we’re not designed to live in a constant state of stress. And if you are, then this could seriously undermine your weight loss efforts. Now I can’t give you a one size fits all method to reduce stress.
5 Ways to Lower Insulin Levels
The causes of stress are different for everyone, but it is an important piece of the weight loss puzzle that’s often overlooked and can prevent weight loss even when you’re doing all the other stuff correctly. Now the fifth and final way to lower your insulin is to sleep well. There’s a reason for people who work night shifts are significantly more likely to be obese than people who don’t. Sleep deprivation causes excess glucose levels.
You’re putting your body under stress and your body will produce more insulin in response to this. It also affects other hormonal systems. It reduces the amount of leptin, one of the hormones that controls our hunger. We’re just more hungry after a poor night sleep and we just make better decisions about nutrition when we’re not tired. I remember as a junior doctor doing long shift at the hospital. I used to make terrible decisions about food, mainly because I was exhausted. Now if you’re serious about weight loss, then you must make getting enough sleep a priority. Now we often say eight hours.
5 Ways to Lower Insulin Levels
Some need more, some need less. Really you need what you need. Now you might be able to get away with sleep deprivation in the short-term, but longer term it will catch up with you. There you have it, my top five ways for reducing insulin, number one, low carb diet, number two, intermittent fasting, number three, do some exercise particularly strength and high intensity exercise, number four, stress reduction, and number five, get enough sleep. Now these are not only my five tips for reducing insulin levels for weight loss. These are really five foundational principles that I think are the most important lifestyle factors you can influence for enduring health.
