DID YOU KNOW THAT YOUR BODY ONLY HAS ONE MECHANISM TO LOWER BLOOD SUGAR OTHER THAN EXERCISE? Insulin.

But what happens when that one mechanism that you have begins to fail?

In today’s blog, we are going to unpack the concept of insulin resistance. I believe it is one of the most important and critical topics in all of medicine for the next 20 years.

TO BE DIABETIC IS TO BE INSULIN RESISTANT. Most people think you just wake up one day with diabetes. This is just not the case.

Diabetes is actually a continuum, or spectrum. This means that you become diabetic over the course of five, ten, or fifteen years.

The spectrum begins with mild insulin resistance that progresses to a blood sugar of 126, or seven teaspoons of sugar in your bloodstream – just two teaspoons of sugar above a non-diabetic.

In order to do understand insulin resistance, we first need to answer some critical questions.

WHAT IS BLOOD SUGAR? Blood sugar is a mechanism by which we deliver fuel or energy to our body so that we achieve the primary goal of all living things, which is to stay alive.

Blood sugar is energy.

WHY IS SUGAR SUCH A BIG DEAL? Because sugar is the simplest, most readily available, form of energy that our body uses to keep us alive, which is our body’s primary goal.

Once our blood sugar hits a level of 100, or 5 teaspoons of sugar, the body begins to store the rest as fuel for later. This is for 2 reasons: a blood sugar of 7 teaspoons = diabetes and we need a mechanism to survive famines. So, in efforts to not to waste any of the sugar while not giving you diabetes in the process, the body pushes it all excess sugar into fat.

SUGAR IS CONVERTED INTO FAT THROUGH ONE STEP. One intermediate step is all it takes to take sugar and drive it into a fat cell. This is hugely important.

So how does insulin resistance occur?

In order to answer that, we need to understand normal first. In other words, what does our body normally do by design in the presence of elevated blood sugar? When your blood sugar rises above 100, a signal is immediately sent to your pancreas to release the hormone insulin.

Insulin does two things – it lowers blood sugar by driving it into the cells, and it coverts sugar to fat.

So as blood sugar normalizes, insulin goes away completely and you have this relationship in a normal scenario where…

SUGAR RISES, INSULIN RISES, SUGAR FALLS, THEN INSULIN FALLS. This is normal.

Over time, as blood sugar remains elevated even in the presence of insulin, the body release even more insulin to correct the high blood sugar, and then your blood sugar drops. But our body starts resisting insulin which results in a chronically elevated blood sugar.

THE MORE INSULIN RESISTANT YOU BECOME, THE HIGHER YOUR BLOOD SUGAR AND INSULIN LEVELS BECOME. The basic premise of insulin resistance.

But why is this a big deal?

Insulin resistance is a chronic progressive disease, which means, if left alone, it not only doesn’t go away, it gets worse. And eventually, our blood sugar becomes so elevated that we diagnosed with diabetes.

This is how tightly our body controls blood sugar. It’s super important to be alive but we want no extra because we don’t want diabetes.

TO BE DIABETIC IS TO BE INSULIN RESISTANT. You are just profoundly insulin resistant with diabetes as opposed to mildly insulin resistance with pre-diabetes.

An out of control diabetic is also insulin resistance, they’re just out of control. They have the inability to respond to any level of insulin that their body is able to produce.

And what happens to those people when they go the physician? What does your doctor put you on when your pancreas is working overtime and you can’t produce enough insulin to get that s