Your goal is to switch the fuel your body is running from burning sugar to fat fuel.
The hormone insulin determines whether you are going to burn fat or burn sugar. Keep insulin low to burn fat. When it goes higher your body will burn sugar.
To lower insulin lower your carbs and eat less meals, they can be larger meals just not as frequent.
Why, because every time you eat you trigger insulin. Every time you eat carbs you trigger insulin. The goal is to lower your insulin. The combination of less meals and low carbs is very, very powerful.
In this video, Dr Hallberg goes over the underlying causes of type 2 diabetes, how to reverse it through nutritional ketosis, and most importantly, what the research says. What follows is the condensed transcript.
Carbohydrate intolerance and insulin resistance.
What does these terms mean?
To understand, let us start with insulin. Insulin is a hormone our fat storage hormone. You can’t store fat without insulin. Insulin is what helps us dispose of blood sugar from our circulation into the cells where it can be used. When we eat insulin rises different amounts depending on what we eat, to help us dispose of blood sugar.
It’s important to understand what the insulin response is to the different macronutrients and what we see is the same thing that happens with blood sugar, which makes sense because if our blood sugar is rising, our insulin is going to need to go up as well to dispose of that blood sugar, pushing it into the cells.
So what we see is that with carbohydrate consumption insulin goes up a lot. Peaks quickly and drops fast. With protein it gets a lot better. Look at what happens when we consume fat – nothing there’s not an insulin response. That’s going to be important as we make our food choices – what actually happens with insulin and blood sugar when we eat.
The first thing that I think we need to start with, is understanding how much sugar is actually in our blood or our circulation at any given time. The average adult has five liters of blood running through their circulation at all times. If you think of a two-liter of soda I mean this is a lot of blood and in that blood their sugar. But actually the amount of sugar is a lot less than most people think.
An average blood sugar – most people realize a good one would be less than a hundred but less than a hundred what?What does that mean in a context that we can wrap our head around? If you do the math on this what that means is five grams of sugar dissolved in five litres of blood. Not much, especially when you realize five grams actually is just a teaspoon. What’s supposed to happen after we eat is when blood sugar starts to rise, insulin rises and helps us dispose of sugar into cells where it can be used. But remember I said that’s what’s supposed to happen in a system that’s functioning normally.
But now let’s get into insulin resistanceand the food choices that we make. Now most of you realize that a soda is not a good food choice. Right. We can all accept that. A can of sugared soda is not gonna be healthy for us. We know it’s gonna cause our blood sugars to rise. Why? It’s full of sugar.
Other carbohydrate food choices that we sometimes think are healthy for us are full of just as much sugar. If we compare a can of soda to a cup of brown rice, the brown rice has more sugar than the can of soda. More. It’s amazing.
Let’s take a look at what happens if we eat a cup of brown rice. You might have thought that was a good choice for two reasons, Number one it’s low fat, number two it’s actually pretty low calorie. A cup of rice only has about 200 calories.
Foods that we think are healthy for us, we’ve been told are healthy for us, if we have insulin resistance they’re still not a good food choice.
So for someone who consumes a cup of brown rice but is insulin resistant, here’s what we found – a cup of brown rice contains 45 grams of carbohydrates. That’s 9 teaspoons of sugar. You remember, in our system there’s one teaspoon. What is our system to do with nine teaspoons rushing in from a supposedly healthy food? What our body does is insulin levels rise and as insulin levels rise it helps push the sugar into the cells, so that our body can keep the 1 teaspoon at a teaspoon.
That’s what’s supposed to happen but in someone who is insulin resistant insulin isn’t doing its job.So as those 45 grams come rushing into our circulation, we’re unable to dispose of them as we should. So our body’s response to that it’s just make more and more insulin.
Our insulin levels, they rise and they rise. We’re carbohydrate intolerant. So we have to be very cautious here and not presume that some of these healthy carbs are actually just that. Because when the carbohydrates are high and we are insulin resistant. They’re gonna cause a problem either way. They haven’t gotten high enough and we can dispose of the sugar for a while. But years, maybe even decades later our system can’t keep up any longer and our blood sugars start to rise. That’s now diabetes.
Let’s talk about carbohydrate tolerance vs. carbohydrate intolerance.Some people have a high carbohydrate tolerance. What does that mean? When they consume foods, specifically carbohydrates their insulin levels will rise, they need to, to dispose of the sugar coming in into the cells. But they don’t need that much insulin because their carbohydrate tolerance is high.
Now, for people who have a low carbohydrate tolerance who are carbohydrate intolerant, if they consume the exact same food, let’s say a cup of brown rice. What’s gonna happen with their insulin levels? They’re gonna go up dramatically, because their body is resistant to the insulin and therefore they need a lot more of it, a lot more insulin, a lot more of our fat storage hormone to dispose of the same amount of carbohydrates. So what we see here two very different things – high carbohydrate tolerance, low carbohydrate tolerance.
With low carbohydrate tolerance this is driven by insulin resistance causing our body to need to make much more insulin, much more fat storage hormone.What does that do? It puts us into a vicious cycle. So for someone who has a low carbohydrate tolerance if they eat carbohydrates over their tolerance, what happens is they need more insulin. So our body releases more insulin and this actually leads to the insulin resistance getting worse.And around and around we go. People get stuck in this, they get stuck in this vicious cycle when they have a low carbohydrate tolerance driven by insulin resistance.
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Doug McGuff, MD is co-author with John Little of the book “Body By Science”. Here is Part 1, next week will be Part 2 of the 2 part presentation.
BODY BY SCIENCE 5 (The Science Of Fat Loss — Part 1)
In Part 1, Doug McGuff, MD describes the actual science underlying how the human body loses body fat, providing a summary of the key points of Chapter 9 of “Body By Science.”
Here is the transcript so you can follow along.
A good component of the book (BODY BY SCIENCE) is devoted to an area where some of the worst confusion exists and that’s how exercise relates to fat loss, because our whole notions of fat loss are actually turning out to be very flawed.
What we used to think of is a very simple: calories in minus calories out.
It is not that way at all as any female that’s ever crossed the threshold around 35 to 40 can attest to that because the exact same diet and exercise activity that kept them in good shape. Once they cross that threshold suddenly seems not to work.
So, well and what we’re coming to understand is that fat loss is very much a hormonal event, hormonal metabolic episode. Not only is our current thinking about it flawed, we have to think about our exercise and dietary regimen in a way that creates the hormonal environment that’s permissive for fat loss.
The biggest fatal flaw in the way people think about fat loss is the notion that calories in minus calories out, that this calories out component can be significantly affected by exercise, by the notion that I get on this treadmill. I look at it and these calories tick off and after 40 minutes 300 calories are gone and there went that piece of key lime pie. It absolutely does not work that way.
Think about it. If we were really that metabolically efficient we would starve to death in the process of shopping at Buy Low much less in the process of hunting and gathering. What the treadmill is not showing you is when you plug in your weight it’s asking for your weight because it’s calculating your basal metabolic rate, which tells you how much you would have burned just sitting there and then it’s adding the activity rate to that and giving you this total but it’s not telling you burn 300 calories because of this activity. You may have burned 25 to 50. So it doesn’t really amount to much. And once you understand the hormonal environment that makes fat gain and fact loss happen you can see how it’s not even the right question.
Now, if I took each of you and we dumped you out in the woods and we said hunt and gather and bring back to me over the course of the week everything that you’ve hunted and gathered and we took accounting of everything you brought back to me we would assign percentages to all the different macronutrient groups: protein, fat, carbohydrate. And we would add it all up and what we would find is of what you brought back to me the smallest contribution would come from carbohydrate. Okay, I hear y’all going, oh no he’s going to start on the Atkins thing. No, it is not what we’re talking about.
But you do have to keep this in mind that is the smallest contribution that you would bring back to me from hunting and gathering in any environment. So we take that fact and we have to realize that the body is going to predicate the signal to store body fat on the macronutrient that is least abundant because if you have the least abundant thing in more than adequate supply then it is safe to store body fat. So what we’ll find is that body fat storage is predicated on the hormone insulin. What insulin does is it takes blood sugar that is circulating in your blood and moves it into the cells of your body. In particular the largest storage reservoir for that glucose is your muscle cells.
So if there’s an abundance of carbohydrate that will get moved into your muscles cells until they’re completely full. Once they’re completely full, the muscle cells will decrease the sensitivity of the insulin receptors on their surface so that no more sugar can be brought into their because it mucks up the metabolic machinery. It is sort of like pouring pancake syrup on the keyboard of your computer.
What happens then is the glucose starts to stack up in your bloodstream, which sends a more powerful signal for insulin to rise up. And insulin’s major signal is nutrient storage and you will start to store body fat. Well, when the time comes for you to mobilize body fat your insulin levels have to drop because the enzyme that moves body fat out of fat cells called hormone sensitive lipase and what hormone sensitive lipase is sensitive to is insulinIf your insulin level is too high in your bloodstream even at a calorie deficit you will be physiologically unable to mobilize body fat it will shut it off.
So right now the problem with obesity in our society is really a problem in how we handle sugar and it’s a problem of insulin sensitivity, which needs to be restored back to normal.
Come back next week for
BODY BY SCIENCE 5 (The Science Of Fat Loss — Part 2)
In Part 2, Doug McGuff, MD, discusses the facts underlying an effective fat loss program and the role of high-intensity strength training in making the process more effective. This is the conclusion of a two-part video based on the content of Chapter 9 of “Body By Science”.
Doug McGuff’s Biography
Doug McGuff, MD became interested in exercise at the age of 15 when he first read Arthur Jones’ Nautilus Training Bulletin No. 2. His interest in exercise and biology led him into a career in medicine. In 1989, he graduated from the University of Texas Medical School at San Antonio and went on to train in Emergency Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences at Little Rock where he served as Chief Resident. From there, Dr. McGuff served as Faculty in the Wright State University Emergency Medicine Residency and was a staff Emergency Physician at Wright- Patterson AFB Hospital.
Throughout his career Dr. McGuff maintained his interest in high intensity exercise. Doug realized a lifelong dream when he opened Ultimate Exercise in November, 1997. Over the past 19 years Dr. McGuff and his instructors have continued to explore the limits of exercise through their personal training clients at Ultimate Exercise.
In addition to his work at Ultimate Exercise, Dr. McGuff is an Emergency Physician for the Greenville Health System and is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Greenville. Dr. McGuff lives in Seneca, South Carolina with his wife of 32 years, and their two children, Eric and Madeline. https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160929/
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