Dr. Boz [Annette Bosworth, MD] - Get rid of Insulin Resistance Once And For All

Insulin resistance means you've made way too much insulin and you've been doing it for too long. Let me teach you how to get rid of this nightmare for good. Insulin, that hormone that insulates, is required for life, and our privileged lives filled with abundant food makes it really easy to make too much insulin. There are three factors about your food that influence how much insulin you make: the type of food, the size of food, and the time of food.

Number one is the type of food. Here's the super secret: every single morsel of food that you swallow stimulates insulin. Yep, that's a fact. Stop eating food altogether and produce no insulin. Now, before you go on hunger strike, do this: sort your food into three categories, carbohydrates, protein, and fat. Of these three categories, the type of food that squeezes the most insulin out of your pancreas is carbohydrates. Carbohydrates cause the fastest and most robust amount of production of insulin. Protein comes in second, with a slower amount of insulin and not quite as high of a peak. Swallow fat, and your insulin is the slowest and least abundant. Notice how long it took for those insulins to return to normal: four to six hours, and this was measuring insulin in healthy people. Insulin-resistant patients take three to four times that. So if you're trying to produce less insulin, stop eating carbs, eat a sparse amount of protein, and eat mostly fat. Oh, that's the keto diet.

Number two is the size of your food, specifically the particle sizes within your food. If you grind up your carbohydrates, protein, or fat, all of them stimulate insulin. In fact, this chart is from powdered carbs, powdered protein, and powdered fat, and these were the healthy patients. Pulverize your carbohydrates for the greatest production in insulin. What's a pulverized carb? Flour, cornbread, sugar, especially the powdered kind. Patients with insulin resistance are already overproducing this hormone, and those protein shakes are not doing them any favors. If you crush or grind your protein into a powder and then blend it into a protein shake, you're going to stimulate your insulin as much as a handful of carbs. If you pulverize your fat, it will stimulate insulin. Foods made from coconut or almond flour may say on the label that they are low carb, high fat, and high protein, but your body will still produce the insulin, and that insulin will be high for hours. If you're insulin resistant, remove processed carbs from your menu. Chew your protein. Chew your fat. You cannot chew your food into the tiny particles found in that processed food.

Number three is the time of your food. Our pineal gland detects the rise in the sun. It's hardwired into our existence: sunrise signals our body to release stored glucose through our circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm causes a bump in glucose every morning to give our bodies some fuel for the first moments of the day. If you're insulin resistant, you top the charts. You, along with diabetics, produce the highest blood sugars of all. High blood sugars squeeze your pancreas for insulin, and you never even swallowed a bite. That is a dirty trick. If you're trying to reverse things, it's true you can't get away from that rise in insulin. It's linked to the rise in the sun. What you do have control over is the time you eat. Insulin-resistant patients find great success with only swallowing food in the mornings. This can be very difficult. When I tell patients to only eat breakfast, I tell my insulin-resistant patients to begin with this rule: eat when the sun is up. If they get home at night and the sun has set, it's too late to eat. Swallowing food at that hour keeps insulin and glucose high all night long, which makes the next day even harder, and that's where this cycle perpetuates and this problem becomes a nightmare. I encourage them to protect the dark hours from food and leave time for your body to recover. Your timer will restart at sunrise. The more empty hours of no food swallowed between the last bite and sunrise, the better my patients do. Restrict your eating by pulling all of the calories into the daylight hours, then advance your restriction by sliding the meal closer to sunrise.

If you're trying to reverse insulin resistance, stop making insulin: eat mostly fat with a sprinkle of protein, eat whole foods, not processed foods, and slide those calories as close to sunrise as possible. If you're looking for a grocery list for insulin resistance, I've got you covered. Check it out.