Is Insulin Making Me Fat?

By Ronald C. Wichin, DC

Lifelong Health & Weight Loss

. http://www.herndon-reston-chiropractor.com/

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Is Insulin Making Me Fat?

Probably. This article will talk about insulin resistance and its related problem called syndrome X or metabolic syndrome. As you probably know insulin is the hormone that is responsible for removing sugar from the blood stream. Ideally, your body makes just the right amount of insulin to move the sugar from your bloodstream to your muscles where it can be used for energy. However, in many overweight people this does not happen.

In many overweight people the muscles are resistant to insulin's movement of sugar from the blood stream and instead insulin then directs the sugar to go to the liver where it is stored as fat. To put it another way, if you are one of those people that can eat anything and not gain weight (you are probably not reading this article) then your muscles work well with insulin and when you eat carbohydrates the sugar is burned by your muscles for energy.

For those of us that can just look at a plate of pasta and gain weight, insulin sends the sugar to the liver where it is converted to fat then stored in the body.

Recently, medicine has noticed that many times insulin related diseases (diabetes, hypoglycemia) occur with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity. This combination is now called syndrome X (also known as metabolic syndrome). To make the diagnosis of syndrome X you must have two of the following four conditions

Obesity

High Blood Pressure

High Cholesterol

Insulin related disease

The problems become aggravated because we eat a lot of carbohydrates both the good ones, such as apples, and the bad ones, such as doughnuts. When we eat these carbohydrates, our blood sugar rises and yet the body has difficulty moving the sugar to the muscles so the pancreas (where your body makes insulin) responds by making more and more insulin to try and force the sugar out of the blood stream which it does but it ends up going to the liver and being stored as fat.

As your pancreas continues to work overtime for many years, eventually it wears out and then we are on the path to diabetes.

So what do we do? We lose weight with a low calorie low carbohydrate diet (such as the Ideal Fat Loss program we use at my office), which burns fat and at the same time rests the pancreas and allows it to recover from its overuse.

The really good news is that as you lose weight and get insulin working better the other syndrome X problems such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol often improve too.