Insulin Resistance Diet

Insulin resistance is nothing more than when your body cannot do what it’s supposed to do when insulin is present in your blood. Usually this coincides with high levels of blood glucose. Insulin basically acts as a transport vehicle for various nutrients. When you eat something, it gets released from the pancreas, grabs hold of whatever is in your blood stream and transports it to its final destination. But when you are insulin resistant, your body’s cells do not recognize insulin. Therefore, your body needs to pump out more insulin in order for your cells to open up. Sometimes, they still won’t open up.

Therefore, you have high levels of blood glucose which can cause a host of problems for you. Most of the time, this will just get dumped into your adipocyte cells AKA increasing the amount of fat you have on your body. This is not good. Being insulin resistance has been linked to Diabetes Type II, obesity, heart disease and strokes. You want to be as insulin sensitive as possible. Now is there a way to increase your insulin sensitivity through diet alone…Well yes and no. Exercise plays a crucial role in increasing insulin sensitivity, especially right before you sit down for a meal. The reason for this is because of the activation of GLUT 4 which is a transporter found in your fat cells and muscle cells. In order to make sure that whatever glucose is circulating in your blood ends up in your muscle tissue to be used for glyogenolysis, you need to perform some type of exercise or muscular contraction. This brings GLUT 4 to the surface and allows glucose to pass through the cell wall to be used for energy.

Another way to increase insulin sensitivity is by following a low carbohydrate diet. When you follow a low carbohydrate diet, your body releases less insulin over time. Therefore, when it does get released, it’s a lot more sensitive to its effects as opposed to if you’re eating tons of carbohydrates throughout the day and not exercising that much. There is also a lot of anecdotal evidence pointing to the old adage of eating 5-6 small meals a day as possible increasing one’s insulin resistance even more over time. The reasoning is because each time you have  a meal, whether It be large or small, your body’s blood glucose levels spike.

Insulin get’s released each time to bring these levels back down to baseline. But if you do this 5-6 times a day, then that is a lot of insulin that is getting released. Even if you are healthy, over time this can lead to an increase in resistance since your pancreas is working so hard. This has been demonstrated even in individuals who are extremely lean. Now many people, trainers, and fitness enthusiasts are recommending someone to eat the old way of 3-4 large meals a day instead of breaking them up. The larger the meal, the lower the spike in blood glucose levels and the less of a rollercoaster effects one would have.

All in all, an insulin resistance diet is not hard to follow, but there are steps you can take to increase your body’s sensitivity without really sacrificing much at all. I would definitely be following a lower carbohydrate diet throughout the day, eating 3-4 larger meals as opposed to 6 tiny meals a day, and exercising at least once a day to increase insulin sensitivity through GLUT 4. One clever way to increase this even more is to exercise for 5 minutes before each meal doing some sort of total body movements for around 30 repetitions with just your body weight. For example you could do 30 body weight squats and 30 pushups before each meal to bring GLUT 4 to the surface. Try it…I’m sure it will work.