Can Insulin Make U Lose Weight

There are many misconceptions about insulin and how to optimise it.Many in the low-carb and keto communities believe the best way to reverse insulin resistance is simply to swap carbs for fat and even avoid protein!

Of insulin resistance (i.e. elevated blood glucose after eating) it may not address the root cause (energy toxicity) or improve your metabolic health.

As you will learn in this article, rather than simply avoiding carbs and protein, the best way to reduce your insulin is to prioritise nutrient-dense foods that lead to increased satiety. This will enable you to control your appetite, empower you to lose weight with less hunger and improve your body composition and metabolic health over the long term.

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Yes, insulin gets the blame for a lot of things! But, as you will see, insulin is usually not the bad guy in the story.

It’s great to have healthy insulin levels! But there is still a lot of confusion about the best way to do it.

As you will see below, insulin itself is not the fundamental problem. The root cause of all these issues is NOT insulin toxicity; it’s energy toxicity.

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Insulin is not the root cause in this whodunit mystery. Your body simply responds with more insulin when you have more energy stored in your body.

Unfortunately, we often eat more than we need to because modern foods are designed with a perfect combination of fat and carbs, with minimal protein and nutrients.

But don’t worry. There’s good news. This article will show you how to adjust your macros to maximise satiety and reverse your insulin resistance.

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But before we look at how to dial in your macros to reverse your insulin resistance, let’s look at the roles of insulin in your body.

However, it’s more helpful to view insulin as an anti-catabolic hormone that holds energy in storage and stops your body from breaking itself down.

Over the past twenty years, I have helped my wife Monica, who has Type 1 Diabetes, actively manage her insulin and blood sugars. Additionally, in December 2021, our 16-year-old son was also diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. So, insulin and blood sugar management are something I live and breathe every day.

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Both my wife and son manage their blood sugars on a lower-carb diet. The most surprising insight from getting up close with Type 1 Diabetes, that I hadn’t heard from anyone else, is that their bolus insulin requirement (i.e. related to the food they eat) is only 20-30% of their total daily dose. Most of their daily insulin (70-80%) is delivered as basal insulin. Basal insulin is the anti-catabolic portion of insulin that stops the body from breaking down, whether they eat or not.

Insulin is a signalling hormone, made in your pancreas. When insulin is released, it signals to transporter proteins within the cell to rise to the surface. These transporter proteins are the portals that let glucose into the cell.

We often liken insulin to a key and to a lock that permits glucose into cells to be used for energy.This was the analogy my wife Monica was taught when she was diagnosed with Type-1 thirty years ago. It was also taught to my son when he was recently diagnosed.

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. If your blood sugar rises well above normal healthy levels, your pancreas will pump out some more insulin to slow the release of stored insulin and help the glucose enter your cells from your bloodstream.

However, we don’t always require insulin to use glucose.This is because glucose also enters your cells without insulin via non-insulin mediated glucose uptake (GLUT1 transporters). This occurs when you’re active or your cells are hungry for energy. When you have depleted the glucose in your cell, the glucose simply flows from your blood into your cells – it doesn’t need to be ‘pushed’ by insulin.

The 2011 study by Krakoff et al. titledAssessment of Non-insulin Mediated Glucose Uptake: Association with Body Fat and Glycemic Statusshowed that83% of glucose uptake occurs through non-insulin mediated mechanisms like GLUT1 glucose transport.

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. If you weigh 70 kg, that’s more than 160 g of glucose (or carbs) per day. So, if you’re on a lower-carb diet, all of the glucose you eat can be used by your body without any insulin!

Some degree of insulin pushing glucose into cells is common for people with insulin resistance and elevated blood sugars. While this is considered ‘normal’ today in a world awash with diabetes and obesity, it is really a crisis management situation that would have been rare in the past before we had constant access to food.

The amount of insulin released after a high carb meal will be significant in someone with Type 2 Diabetes, however, their basal insulin levels will be even greater, especially if they hold a lot of fat in storage.

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Insulin also helps you use food to build muscle, repair your vital organs, and store fat. Some bodybuilders even use massive amounts of insulin to help them grow. They also have to eat like their life depends on it to prevent their blood sugars from crashing (because it does). This is NOT recommended if you value your metabolic health!

While insulin does play a role in building and repairing your muscles, it really works to stop your muscles from breaking down. That is, the primary role of insulin is its anti-catabolic role.

‘… physiologic elevations in insulin promote net muscle protein anabolismprimarily by inhibiting protein breakdown, rather than by stimulating protein synthesis.’ Gelfand and Barret, 1987 ‘… it is demonstrated that in healthy humans in the postabsorptive state, insulin does not stimulate muscle protein synthesis and confirmed thatinsulin achieves muscle protein anabolism by inhibition of muscle protein breakdown.’ Nair et al., 2006

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Imagine your body is like a giant water tank with a tap at the bottom that releases glucose and fat slowly into your bloodstream.

To better help us understand the role of insulin in our bodies, it’s useful to think of what happens to someone with uncontrolled Type-1 Diabetes, whose pancreas cannot produce enough insulin.

With no insulin, people with untreated Type-1 Diabetes release their stored energy (glycogen in the liver, body fat, muscle, and organs) into their bloodstream in an uncontrolled manner. Their blood glucose, ketones, and free fatty acids rise quickly, registering as high glucose in urine and ketones on the breath.

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Without adequate insulin to turn off the tap, they basically disintegrate. Glucagon, the opposing hormone to insulin, has a catabolic effect. When it goes unbalanced, it causes an uncontrolled release of stored energy into the bloodstream. Thankfully, people with Type-1 Diabetes can quickly return to normal if they inject insulin, and their livers can hold back their stored energy.

The before and after photo below shows the same child with Type-1 Diabetes before (left) and after (right) starting insulin therapy. Fortunately, it doesn’t take too long for the insulin to work and ensure that the food they eat is stored on their bodies again.

To bring things a bit closer to home, the photos below show my son Michael. In December 2021, we randomly tested his blood sugar, and it was 25.3 mmol/L (457 mg/dL)! Blood tests the next day revealed his HbA1c was 14.4% and his fasting insulin was 3. He weighed 77 kg at the time.

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The photo on the right shows him five months later after taking about 40 units per day of insulin at 90kg (13 kg heavier) with an HbA1c of 5.8% and dropping. The insulin per day stopped his body from breaking down. Along with some protein and weight training, the insulin also allowed him to rebuild his muscles and perform well in his first powerlifting competition.

Insulin often gets a bad rap because it makes people put on weight rapidly. However, the problem is not the insulin, but that it’s hard to match insulin doses perfectly to the foods they eat. This is especially true if they consume a processed, standard western diet.

People injecting insulin often over-eat more than they otherwise would after their blood sugars drop too low, because they have to compensate for injecting too much insulin. Once they refuel with highly processed fat-and-carb combo foods, they find their blood sugars are elevated, and they need to inject more insulin to bring them down again. This gives them a front-row seat on what we commonly refer to as the blood sugar-insulin roller coaster.

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The good news is that reducing processed dietary carbs enables people who inject insulin to match their insulin requirements to their diet more accurately. Type 1 Diabetes guru Dr Richard K Bernstein call this the law of small numbers and is key to achieving healthy, stable blood sugars and getting off the rollercoaster that can be brutal!

So, reducing carbohydrates until you achieve healthy, stable blood sugars (i.e. a rise of less than 1.6 mmol/L or 30 mg/dL after eating) is extremely helpful in managing hunger and appetite. But it’s only the first step to reversing insulin resistance.

Where they intentionally underdose insulin to lose weight.Yes, they lose weight, but they also see incredibly high glucose, ketones and free fatty acids in their blood. This is effectively a self-induced

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While