Humans are intelligent creatures. It’s easy to look at an overweight body and know that it doesn’t need more energy. When we witness this overload of energy, we attempt to intervene using our intelligent thoughts to force a change in that body – that is, to force the body into an energy deficit so that it lets go of that extra energy.
If the statistics reflecting the overweight population tell us anything, it is that this approach has failed us and that a new approach is necessary.
It turns out we can’t just control fat stores by consciously calculating energy consumed and energy expended – at least, not in a healthy fashion that can be sustained once we let up on this conscious control. From the first two articles in this calorie balance series (see first installment), we know this to be true, that consciously consuming less and consciously trying to burn more very often does not work. If anything, cutting back our calorie intake and focusing on burning more energy often backfires, leading to a body that believes it is starving, and in turn one that is focused on holding onto energy.
The problem with the method of attempting to consciously control calorie balance is that it overlooks the complex network that is human metabolism. The reality is that the body has been designed with systems in place to keep tight control over the energetic demands of the body.
In the previous article, I attempted to unravel this complex network, along with reasons why calorie balance can backfire because it sends the wrong signal to this network.
The important questions that follow are these: how do we send the correct signals to the body so that it understands it has extra energy to burn? Then, how do we get the body to burn that stored energy (fat), instead of seeking energy from more food? That is how we lose weight, not by starving the body, but by instead getting the body to know it has stored fat, to release it, and oxidize that?
An Approach to Effectively Addressing the Excess Fat Accumulation Problem
To lose weight and keep it off, the body needs to understand that it has excess fat that it needs to lose. Then, it has to be put in a situation where it is able to release this stored fat, and finally to burn that fat (i.e. oxidize this released fat in the mitochondria for ATP synthesis).
Accomplishing this task may not be so simple, but by boiling it down to a few specific hormones, we can understand how the body is primed to pack on the pounds. In the previous article, I discussed the complexity of this hormonal network (i.e. the endocrine system) so that you can form a new mindset that you can use to approach the metabolic network as the complex, dynamic system that it is. This means leaving behind the mindset that the system can be overruled by simply minimizing total energy input (calorie restriction) or by maximizing energy output. Instead, by understanding how our actions affect specific hormones, we can help program the body for fat loss.
But there is one specific hormone that I held off on discussing because it deserves a thorough discussion of its own. This signaling mechanism may be just one piece of the big picture, and yet, when it becomes dysregulated (as appears to be the case on 50% of the population), it has the power to drive the progression of poor health and modern disease.
I reached this conclusion when I realized that there is one factor within the body, blood sugar, that can easily get out of a healthy range and quickly put the body in a life-threatening situation. Because of this, the body has evolved with a system in place to ensure that blood sugar does not rise too high. No matter what else is going on in the body – no matter what other harmful situations the body may be facing – tissues throughout the body are going to act in line with making sure blood sugar does not elevate too high.
It’s time to dig into this, along with the repercussions of this dysregulated signal. This means it’s time to talk about insulin.
The one thing that is overriding all signals.
When I think about insulin’s function in the body, I think of it as serving two main purposes:
- Insulin elevates in response to elevated blood sugar to communicate to tissues and organs throughout the body to act in their own specialized way to lower blood sugar.
- Insulin serves as the body’s primary signal for energy storage. When it is elevated, the bulk flow of energy will be driven into storage.
The body uses two primary sources of fuel for energy: carbohydrates and fats. Carbohydrates get stored as glycogen in muscle, but in high quantities get transferred into long-term storage by being converted to fat (de novo lipogenesis) and stored in fat cells (adipocytes).
There is an important biochemical concept to understand regarding how energy is regulated. In the first biochemistry lecture I listened to, there was ONE takeaway that the professor wanted the students to understand. One key thing, out of everything discussed that semester, that the students needed to know: too much glucose in the blood is toxic, and therefore maintaining glucose levels in the blood is the body’s priority.
You may have heard that glucose is the primary energy source for the body, and in turn, that you should be eating more carbohydrates and less fat because the body prefers carbohydrates. This has an element of truth to it, but is far from correct. Glucose is the primary source of energy because it is used up first. It is used first not because the body has more affection for it, but because it is toxic when levels rise too high.
This means that if we eat a mix of carbohydrate and fat, the body is going to prioritize dealing with the glucose from carbs so that it doesn’t go wreak havoc on the body.
To handle blood glucose levels, the body uses a hormonal mechanism, in which insulin plays the main part. Simply put, when glucose levels are elevated, insulin is released, which causes the storage of that glucose. When glucose levels are low, insulin levels are low, and energy is free to be released from cells.
Keep in mind that to lose weight, we must reprogram our bodies to a state in which we burn fat, rather than continuously store fat. If one is obese, he/she is in a state where energy is continuously stored. If one is lean, he/she is in a state where the body’s energy stores are utilized as a fuel source.
The rest of this article is on this last point – we must reprogram our bodies to burn fat, rather than chronically storing it.
How do we do that? It begins with keeping insulin levels low.
Insulin and Energy Flow
Understanding insulin is really quite simple – to make it even simpler, I’ll only be talking about food’s effect on it. I’ll leave the effect of exercise and other factors for a later discussion.
When we eat certain foods, blood sugar elevates and, in turn, insulin is released from the pancreas. When that energy has been stored away sufficiently, levels fall down.
When insulin levels go up, the body stores both glucose and fats: fat is stored away primarily in adipose tissue and glucose is stored as glycogen or converted to fat and also stored away in adipose tissue.
When insulin levels are low, cells can release fat and oxidize it as a fuel source.
I said it’s simple, but I’ll repeat it because it is the key to everything we’re going to discuss. When insulin levels are elevated, the body is told to store fat. No matter what else is going on in the body, high insulin means fat storage. Only when insulin levels are low can that energy be released and utilized.
So, to address a significant problem with a simple answer: why are billions of people struggling with weight management? Because the insulin signal is constantly being turned on, putting the body in a chronic pro-energy storage mode.
When it comes to addressing the problem of excess fat accumulation, the answer seems, to me, to be really quite simple – at least, in theory:
To lose weight in a healthy manner, the body needs to release excess stored fat and to oxidize it as a fuel source.
The problem is that it becomes difficult to accomplish this in practice. There are many reasons for this, but for now, I want to focus on one particular challenge that we must overcome:
When it comes to creating a healthy body (which is, after all, the goal here at Your Health, Reprogrammed), we are not going to be successful only by understanding the logic behind a simple concept.
We have an entire lifetime of being told poor information regarding how we should be making healthy decisions (see Gaps and Limitations of Energy Balance in Weight Loss). Losing weight in a healthy manner becomes both a challenge of understanding how we can make the right decision while also overcoming prior frameworks that have been deeply programmed in our minds.
What I mean is, understanding how we can lower insulin is fairly straightforward. But when it comes to taking action aligned with these ideas, we have to overcome decades of misconceived information telling us to do differently.
Overcoming this challenge will likely take a multi-faceted approach. But here, with the rest of this article, I hope to provide you with a deeper set of information that you can rely on as you go about your life making healthy decisions that lead to lower insulin levels.
A deeper diver into insulin
The fact that chronically elevated insulin levels is a sure way to keep the body in fat storage mode is a simple concept. However, the many mechanisms by which chronically elevated levels of insulin drive the progression of poor health and disease is complex. Moreover, when it comes to reversing the progression of this poor health, which may include the build-up of excess fat in your body, we have some work to do.
I want to dive into this pathway that is the progression of energy dysregulation and tie it into our actions so that we can go through life with a clear understanding of how our actions impact the flow of energy throughout our bodies.
Let’s dive in.
Remember that one crucial thing my biochemistry professor talked about? Elevated blood sugar levels is toxic for tissues throughout the body, and therefore, when it comes to metabolism, keeping blood glucose concentration low is of utmost importance.
From an action perspective – if we eat a diet high in glucose (or anything that easily gets converted to glucose, like high levels of certain proteins), then nothing else really matters. The body will ignore other signals in order to take care of the primary problem at hand – blood glucose levels must get back to normal.
To begin diving into how our poor dietary choices wreak havoc on our body’s ability to regulate energy in a healthy manner, I want to make sure you understand how this system is supposed to work – that is, how it was designed to function over millions of years as our ancestors ate real food, much of which was plant matter.
When we eat plants, which are mostly composed of complex carbohydrates, glucose is slowly released into the bloodstream. With the slow release of glucose, a modest release of insulin leads to temporary storage of that glucose as glycogen.
Since the body understood that it had sufficient energy stored, because the complex network that manages energy balance was functioning, that glycogen would get burned off throughout the day, so that when the next meal came around there was room to store more glycogen.
However, the world today is not made of individuals eating a real, whole foods-based diet. It is made up of individuals eating industrial foods – foods that, if anything, are great at dumping glucose into the bloodstream and spiking insulin.
When we consume almost any industrial food today, loaded with refined grains and often with high quantities of protein, our bloodstream gets overloaded with glucose. When the blood gets overloaded with glucose, insulin levels spike, telling cells throughout the body, including cells in the muscle, liver, and fat cells, to store all that energy. Some of this gets stored as glycogen, but much of it gets converted to and stored as fat.
The storage component is enough to make us consider our actions, but we must also keep in mind that when insulin levels are high, the body has to forget about burning any of that excess fat that has been piling up.
Rather, this new energy needs to be stored and only glucose can be oxidized. Oh, you’re telling me you’re 50 pounds overweight, and you just worked out for an hour. And you skipped breakfast? Good for you, but you just sent a huge load of glucose into the blood with that post-workout smoothie or energy bar, so energy storage it is!
Remember, when low levels of glucose enter the blood from the consumption of low-glycemic foods like whole vegetables, then the body stores this energy as glycogen. But when industrial foods are consumed, containing high levels of refined carbohydrates, then the body’s response is very different. Since we can only store a finite amount of glucose as glycogen, the rest of the energy, regardless of the macronutrient it came from, gets stored as fat.
This mechanism – the storage of fat from high levels of carbohydrate – is a major problem leading to many of the diseases that plague us today (e.g. heart disease and diabetes). For more information on how it causes heart disease, check out my article on atherosclerosis. For now, just keep in mind the simple fact that fat storage is a result of the consumption of foods that cause high levels of insulin.
If I could end this awful tale of insulin right here, I think it would paint a fairly awful picture of how dangerous glucose and insulin can be when elevated in a chronic pattern. But unfortunately, I have to keep going, because it gets even worse. Insulin isn’t only at fault for constantly stuffing fat cells, but it is also at fault for keeping you in a vicious cycle of stuffing your face with the very thing that is going to raise insulin!
The carbohydrate cycle
So where are we – we’re trying to lose weight, so we eat less, exercise, and then resupply with a load of carbs that we’ve been told the body needs immediately following a workout. All that glucose causes a spike in insulin, which puts the body in fat storage mode. The glucose gets whisked out of the blood and stored, and the sensor for glucose levels in the blood says….
“Uh-oh, there’s so little glucose in the blood! This isn’t good – we need glucose!!!!”
Now the logical mind would say, “Hey, you just stored all that energy, just release some of it.”
But what does that body say?
All it sees is very low levels of glucose in the blood. And the easiest way to get it – slam down a candy bar, or chips, or anything close. Just do it quick!
“Whelp, time to start up ole ghrelin. We need to eat!”
And before you know it, your hand is in a bag of chips as you’re whisked along through this vicious carb cycle.
Understanding insulin dynamics is an important step to making healthy decisions. but when it comes to taking action that produces meaningful results, we have to understand our patterns of behavior that drive the progression of unhealthy pathways.
This cycle of blood sugar and insulin spiking is a problem that most individuals must overcome if they are going to create healthy habits that lead to healthy bodies.
Moreover, these carb cycles are likely to be the reason you can’t lose weight. It is likely the reason why you get so frustrated with yourself – why, no matter how hard you try to resist that candy bar, you still end up finding yourself reaching for it, unable to stop your arm as the candy bar goes straight to your mouth.
Eating insulin-stimulating foods sends the signal that energy needs to be stored (i.e. increase fat mass). But it gets even worse, because eating too much insulin-stimulating foods causes a large release of insulin, which depletes the blood of energy, causing the signal to be let off to eat more food.
It is highly likely that you are familiar with this cycle – it may even be the cycle that runs your life. You might be one of those that can’t go more than a couple hours without a snack, and might have to constantly nibble throughout the day to avoid an energy crash. Do you find yourself headed to the vending machine, even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t eat any candy today? Do you find yourself with your hand in your desk, pulling out that stash of chips, even though you gave yourself a pep talk about how you could make it through the day without them?
You may have every intention of eating “healthy,” but when that crash comes, you may regularly find yourself frantically searching for anything to stabilize your blood sugar.
The reason so many people struggle with weight is not because they lack the willpower or discipline to control how much they eat. Rather, it is that they are stuck in this cycle that then drives behavior from a very primal level.
Even though you may think you can overpower urges with willpower, when it comes to primal instincts, the frontal lobe (conscious decision making) is NOT in control – your hormones are. And if your body senses that you are starving due to low blood sugar, then it is going to react by getting what it believes it needs – more glucose.
Fixing the cycle
Now there are several different ways we can fix this carb cycle problem.
I’ll start with what we hear from the mainstream – from our doctors, nutritionists, and all others stuck in the carbohydrate paradigm: eat several, smaller meals a day. Don’t go more than a couple of hours without a snack. The body needs a constant supply of glucose so you don’t crash, and the meals should be small enough so that levels don’t rise too high.
Let’s think about that for a minute. We want to lose weight, yet somehow doing so involves sending a constant signal to store fat. Yes, it makes sense to keep insulin levels low by eating smaller meals. But it doesn’t make any sense for weight loss because, in doing so, you send a constant supply of glucose through the body, giving a constant signal to insulin to store energy. I don’t know about you, but that seems rather silly to me.
Could we come up with a better solution? Like, maybe we could stop eating those insulin-spiking foods. We could stop telling the body to store energy, say, by stopping the glucose, and therefore the insulin, from ever entering the body.
That makes more sense to me, what do you think?
To lose weight, we must minimize the secretion of insulin. To lose weight, we have to stop telling the body to store fat. To lose weight, we have to let the body burn energy from fat stores.
The logic is that simple. Now the difficulty lies in implementing it.
That’s where the real work begins.