Role of Insulin in Weight Loss

Role of Insulin in Weight Loss

Sugar..!!

Mozzarella Cheese 

If you’ve read Dr. Eades’ or Dr. Atkins’ books, you might have developed a serious dislike for insulin. For those with metabolic issues, insulin often sits at the heart of the dysfunction. What most low carb dieters believe is that insulin causes the carbohydrates you eat to be stored as body fat. Lower your insulin levels and your body will burn your fat stores instead. Unfortunately, that isn’t how the role of insulin in weight loss works.

How Insulin Works

Insulin is a hormone that is secreted by the pancreas for a variety of reasons. The need to get glucose into your body cells and return your blood sugar levels back to normal is only one of them. Many low carbers refer to insulin as a nutrient-storage hormone because it encourages the body to use any toxic levels of alcohol or glucose first and store the fats and/or proteins you eat for use later on.

If you eat a high carbohydrate meal, the glucose the body doesn’t immediately need is turned into glycogen and stored in your liver and muscles. How large your storage capacity is depends on how much lean body mass you have, how full your glycogen stores already are and your body structure. On the average, glycogen storage capacity is about 300 to 400 grams of carbohydrates.

When you eat, blood sugar rises in accordance with the amount of glucose produced by those foods as they’re broken down into useable forms in the stomach and absorbed through the walls of the upper small intestine. If your blood glucose level rises above 100 mg/dl, the pancreas releases the insulin it has stored to handle the rise. This is known as first stage insulin release. The storage is determined by the amount of insulin it took to deal with your previous meal, not your current one.

Receptors are proteins that live on the surface of your cells. When insulin is secreted, it binds or attaches itself to these receptors. That attachment turns the receptor cells on and alerts your muscles and liver that glucose is available for use or storage. When you’re insulin sensitive, it only takes a small amount of insulin to get the glucose into your body cells. That keeps your glucose level from rising very high. In most people, their blood sugar level after eating remains below 100 mg/dl most of the time, and it never rises above 120 ever. When you’re insulin resistant, however, it takes a much larger dose to activate the insulin receptors.

Once the glucose passes into the body’s cells, insulin levels return to normal. If the glucose doesn’t move quickly enough, the body will release additional insulin to help. This occurs between 15 and 30 minutes after eating and is called second phase insulin release. In a normal metabolism, this process works smoothly and efficiently. Even those who have slight metabolic irregularities, hereditary defects or mild insulin resistance continue to make enough insulin to do the job within an hour after eating. The body simply adapts to the amount of insulin needed to keep your blood glucose levels normal.

Role of Basal Insulin

Beta-cells are the cells inside the pancreas that make and secrete insulin. Throughout the day, these beta-cells release a tiny burst of insulin to keep the body primed to handle glucose when it arrives. This is known as basal insulin. This constant steady stream also helps the liver determine when the glucose level in the blood has dropped too low. When basal insulin levels dip, the liver converts glycogen into glucose and releases it into the blood to keep blood sugar levels steady. When there are no glycogen stores available, which is typical on a low carb diet, the liver will convert dietary amino acids or protein stored as muscle into glucose instead.

How Insulin Affects Weight Loss

When insulin response is sluggish or not effective, it can take two to four hours or more for the body to produce enough insulin to get the glucose levels in the blood back to normal. While insulin is elevated, body fat stores cannot be mobilized for fuel because glucose is always utilized first. In addition, when the body doesn’t recognize circulating insulin, the liver can interpret that as low blood sugar and dump even more glucose into the blood that the pancreas has to deal with.

As long as your blood glucose stays above 100 ml/dl, insulin secretion continues until it can correct the situation. For many insulin-resistant or pre-diabetic individuals, blood glucose and insulin levels never return to normal until the middle of the night. While those who go on low carb diets understand that carbohydrate restriction lowers insulin levels, most dieters focus on the state of Ketosis rather than insulin.

Carbohydrates are broken down into glucose during digestion. That raises your blood sugar and requires insulin to be secreted. The amount of insulin you need in addition to your basal insulin levels depends on the amount of carbohydrates you eat. When you eat fewer carbohydrates, less glucose is produced during digestion, so less insulin is required to process it. The more normal your insulin response is, the more body fat you can mobilize and use for fuel.

Low Carb Diets, Ketosis and Insulin

When you have insulin resistance and consistently consume a high level of carbohydrates almost every day, your basal insulin level will increase. The higher your basal insulin level, the more difficult it is to lose weight. The Atkins Diet starts you off at 20 net carbohydrates per day. Dr. Eades’ Protein Power LifePlan uses 30. Both of these carbohydrate levels will cause your basal insulin levels to fall quickly. They will also generally eliminate blood sugar spikes provided you are not eating too much protein.

With Atkins, you add back carbohydrates gradually until you find your carbohydrate tolerance level that will allow you to lose weight at the rate you want. At your critical carbohydrate level for losing, you stay just below the threshold where your insulin level ceases to function adequately. This is very different from the state of Ketosis.

Originally, Dr. Atkins defined Ketosis as the presence of ketones in the breath and urine. He believed that when the urine testing strips turn purple, that meant his patients were burning their body fat stores for fuel. What the test strips actually show is that you are not ketone adapted. Ketones are being lost, but they are not the type of ketones the brain, heart and kidneys prefer and can use efficiently. For that reason, most low-carb dieters begin to spill fewer ketones into their urine as the diet continues. At which time, many dieters also stall.

So what does that mean?

How Important is Ketosis?

How Important is Ketosis?

Questions??

How important is Ketosis to a Low Carb Diet?

There is an awakening that’s beginning within the low-carb community. It’s an awakening to the realities of Ketosis, it’s importance in weight-loss success, and the rude awakening that we might have somehow deceived ourselves as to what Ketosis actually is and does. While the state of Ketosis is not necessary to achieve a healthy weight, it’s interplay with insulin resistance and fat metabolism is not always understood.

When Dr. Atkins was young, he was one of those kids who could eat anything he wanted and not gain weight. In the early 1960s, however, he found himself with three chins looking 15 years older than he was. That was a critical turning point in his life. He had to face what he’d become: a fat man. Although he knew he needed to do something about his condition, like most of us, he was afraid of being hungry. He didn’t want to reduce his portion sizes and go on a low-calorie diet. He wanted magic.

As a doctor, he knew that hunger was at the foundation for most diet failures. As a cardiologist, his medical training wasn’t in nutrition and metabolism. That allowed him to be more open to the new possibilities he was seeing in the medical literature of that time. In his search for a diet that wouldn’t make him hungry, Atkins ran across a study that suggested a metabolic defect in the way the body handled carbohydrates was the cause for most overweight. This type of diet was called a ketogenic diet.

In the 60s, a few people discovered by accident that carbohydrate restriction worked. Even though cutting back on bread, potatoes and dessert was a popular low-calorie notion at that time, counting carbohydrate grams was relatively new. I can remember the before-and-after-pictures, the convincing advertisements coaxing you to buy the dieter’s secret homemade diet booklet printed off in the garage. They promised you their book was the last diet book you would ever buy. Spiral bound, they were sold through back-of-the-magazine advertisements. I know because I bought one.

What intrigued Atkins in the 60s, however, wasn’t these 60-gram carbohydrate-restricted diets that closely resembled what William Banting did a hundred years prior. What caught Dr. Atkins’ attention was Ketosis. It might surprise you to learn that Dr. Atkins did not actually create his metabolic diet. In fact, one of the scientific papers he looked at during the 60s was a study Dr. Alfred W. Pennington had done for the DuPont company on several of their employees. It was Pennington who came up with the idea that a carbohydrate metabolic defect sat at the heart of overweight and obesity – not Dr. Atkins.

Dr. Walter Lyons Bloom was also doing work during that time that centered on the metabolic changes a carbohydrate-free diet produces. When Dr. Atkins read that the disappearance of hunger that happens a few days into a fast also occurs on a no-carb diet, he was hooked. It was exactly what he was looking for: bacon and eggs for breakfast with plenty of meat and salad for lunch and dinner. So, in 1963, Dr. Atkins tried Dr. Bloom’s no-carb diet, which included checking for ketones in the urine.

At that time, Dr. Atkins did experiment with returning a small amount of carbohydrates to his diet after the zero-carb start. That widened his food choices and made the diet more tolerable. He believed that as long as the urine test strips were turning purple, he was burning his body’s fat stores. Through trial-and-error, he learned that he could eat about 35 to 40 grams of carbohydrates per day and still turn the test strips purple if he added them back gradually enough. That also included an occasional Scotch and water before dinner.

Because of his fear of hunger, he ate several small meals throughout the day. At the end of six weeks, he had lost 28 pounds! That caused some mixed emotions. He felt excited and satisfied with the weight loss, but he also felt resentment towards what he believed was deception by the medical community. What he had discovered was that focusing on calories was not the only way to lose weight, but the idea was a bit obscured because of the effects that Ketosis has on the body.

To him, it felt like he was eating all day long. He ate as much as he wanted to eat and he ate often, so the low-calorie theory had to be wrong. But is it?

Dr. Atkins was not ketone adapted. His body had never used the alternative metabolic pathway before, so it was dumping extremely large amounts of Acetoacetate ketones into his urine. These ketones are not the type of ketones that the brain, kidneys and heart use very well, so the body gets rid of them. Eventually, after adaption, the muscles will convert Acetoacetate ketones into a more usable form and fewer Acetoacetate ketones will be cast off, but initially that doesn’t happen, so weight loss can be rather dramatic.

This early diet that Dr. Atkins presented to the world was a ketogenic diet. It placed the body in a state of Ketosis and kept it producing ketones in the urine as a sign that the body was continuing to mobilize its fat stores. Unlike the 60-gram carbohydrate diets popular during that time, Dr. Atkins’ diet focused on those who were more insulin resistant than those who could lose weight easily at higher carbohydrate intakes. That’s what made his diet different. He cut the carbohydrate sources low enough and added some of them back gradually enough that everyone who tried his diet at that time succeeded.

He believed that the urine test strips coincided with Ketosis. If the diet wasn’t working, you were doing something wrong. He based his opinions on his personal experience, the experience of his co-workers and the experience of his patients at that time. Ketone adaption changes the playing field a little bit, but it doesn’t rule out Dr. Atkins’ belief that we need to stay in Ketosis for the length of the weight-loss period. Since his original diet was ketogenic, it was designed to remain ketogenic. That makes Ketosis extremely important to the diet’s outcome. But why?

Bloom’s diet was only a three-day diet. It wasn’t created to treat insulin resistance. It was a study that was designed to observe the metabolic effects that occur when you cut carbohydrates completely out of your diet. It included bacon and eggs, meat, salad with an oil-and-vinegar dressing, and nothing else. Dr. Atkins took that study diet and added additional no-carb or very low-carb foods in a specific way. The design was perfect. It taught the dieter exactly how many carbohydrates would continue to ensure weight loss. What wasn’t perfect was implementation outside of Dr. Atkins’ office.

Hence, we have a multitude of low-carb dieters today who struggle, stall or give up part way to their goal. That’s the reality without the magic. It also begs the question, “What happened?” There’s more than simple ketone adaption standing in our way. If the Atkins Diet worked in the 70s, why doesn’t it still work today? If Ketosis is essential to success as Dr. Atkins believed, are we even in Ketosis today? Maybe we aren’t. Maybe we just think we are. Maybe we’ve been deceived into thinking that a low-carb diet is always a ketogenic diet.

Granted, you don’t have to be in Ketosis to lose weight. You just have to be in a calorie deficit. But if Ketosis worked for Dr. Atkins and his patients, why is it not working for us?

What Can I Eat on a Low-Carb Diet?

What Can I Eat on a Low-Carb Diet?

Questions??

Low Carb Chocolate 
Cream Cheese Pie

One of the main goals of switching to a low-carb diet is to learn how to make healthier food choices.

But let’s be honest. 

Most of us were raised on peanut butter and jelly spread on a couple of slices of fluffy white bread, a glass of kool-aid, and a Ding Dong. At least, that’s what lunch was like for me as a kid. 

When I first became converted to low-carb diets at the age of 19, it was with a Big Mac in one hand and a large, sugary, Dr. Pepper in the other.

When you’re 19 and overweight, the Atkins Diet works miraculously.

Read more »

How Does Alcohol Affect Fat Metabolism?

How Does Alcohol Affect Fat Metabolism?

Questions??

How Does Alcohol Affect My Metabolism?

Alcohol plays a large role in many of our lives. We have a drink when we come home from a hard day. We have a drink when we go out to dinner or want to celebrate a special occasion. We even have a drink when we just want to relax and kick back with a few of our friends. Alcohol is probably just as interwoven within traditional American society as food is, but if you’re attempting to follow a low carb diet, what does that mean?


How does alcohol affect fat metabolism?  

Dr. Atkins’ Views on Alcohol

When Dr. Atkins’ wrote his first low carb diet book back in the early 70s, he believed that alcohol was the number one problem with weight control. Although it isn’t actually a carbohydrate, he handled it as if it were:

“But this is one diet where alcohol acts just like a carbohydrate. It makes your body discharge insulin and stops you from putting out FMH.”

FMH stands for fat-mobilizing hormone. Due to the initial metabolic advantage experienced before the brain adapts to using ketones for energy, Dr. Atkins believed in its existence. FMH hasn’t turned out to be true. There is no fat-mobilizing hormone. However, alcohol does complicate what a low-carb diet is attempting to do because of its toxic effects on the body.

In the 70s, low-carb dieters were counseled to count each ounce of 100-percent alcohol as 20 total grams of carbohydrates. That equaled about one ounce of distilled alcohol or four ounces of wine. Later on, as more information about how the body metabolizes alcohol became available, the restriction was relaxed.

Alcohol puts your weight-loss efforts on hold until after its metabolized. Therefore, the 2002 version of the Atkins’ diet allows you to occasionally indulge in a glass of wine or shot of distilled alcohol provided you count the carbohydrates. A 3-1/2 ounce glass of wine contains about 4.3 grams. Like all additions that you include after completing Induction, Atkins also cautions that if you stop losing weight, it’s best to cut it out.

How Metabolism Works

When you eat or drink something, the body can either oxidize those nutrients or store them for later use. All nutrients except for alcohol can be stored. Some nutrients such as dietary fat are more easily stored than others are. That’s because the body is better at storing triglycerides than it is at storing carbohydrates or protein.

Despite what most people believe, body-fat storage isn’t static. The body constantly moves triglycerides into and out of your fat cells as needed. When you eat a meal, what the body doesn’t need immediately for energy or repair is stored. Since dietary fat is the easiest nutrient to store and your fat stores have an unlimited storage capacity, fat gets taken care of first. It doesn’t matter if you’re following a low-carb diet or not. Metabolism works the same way.

Dietary fats not immediately needed for energy are placed in storage until the body can use them. Vegetables and other incidental carbs are quickly converted into glucose and sent to the brain or burned. If you eat more carbohydrates than your body can immediately use, they are converted to glycogen and stored in your liver or muscles. In the meantime, the liver begins converting about half of the protein you just ate into glucose. It can also burn amino acids themselves for energy if needed.

Gluconeogenesis takes a little time to complete plus the liver needs energy to do that, so as insulin levels return to normal and glucose supplies run low (liver glycogen can only hold about 50 grams of carbohydrates), the body pulls the fat back out of your fat cells and oxidizes it for energy and other purposes. Metabolism is a dance between glucose, protein and fatty acids.

What a low-carb diet does is correct elevated insulin levels, if applicable, improves insulin sensitivity if that’s a problem for you and sets up a metabolic situation where your body has to predominantly burn fats for energy rather than other sources. Whether those fats come from dietary fat or your fat stores depends upon the number of calories you eat on a daily basis. As Dr. Eades has consistently said, low carb keeps the door to your fat stores open, but if your body doesn’t need to use your fat stores for energy, it won’t.

What Alcohol Does to Your Metabolism

There is no way for the body to store alcohol. When metabolized, it’s converted into acetate – which is toxic. Acetate oxidation is 100 percent. The body will rev up your metabolism and do everything in its power to burn the acetate as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Alcohol metabolism takes precedence over everything else. While many like to point out that dietary fats are stored when you eat them along with alcohol, any carbohydrates or proteins you eat along with the alcohol are also stored. The body puts all dietary metabolism on hold when alcohol is around. That’s why the Atkins’ Nutritionals folks tell dieters that weight loss is simply placed on hold when you drink. What they don’t tell you is that everything you eat with that alcohol will be placed in storage.

Because the body metabolizes alcohol aggressively, it carries a high TEF score – about 20 percent. TEF is the amount of calories it takes to metabolize the alcohol. Of the calories that alcohol provides, one-fifth are used during the metabolic process. That’s not enough to make up for the increased fat storage, but it helps. In addition, alcohol carries an odd ability to increase insulin sensitivity. Probably, because that’s how the body is able to get protein, carbohydrates and dietary fat stored so quickly.

What You Can Do

If you’re having problems with weight gain or losses and you’re drinking alcohol on a regular basis, you might want to take a close look at your dietary habits during those occasions. Although the bottom line is always about the number of calories you’re consuming on a regular basis, many people lean towards a high intake of fatty foods and carbohydrates while drinking.

Keep in mind that protein is stored as muscle rather than body fat. Heading off the body’s tendency to move everything into storage when alcohol is around can be made easier by cutting way back on your dietary fats and increasing your consumption of lean proteins on the days that you drink. While munching on un-breaded chicken breast strips may not be as exciting as hot wings and bacon-wrapped jalapeno poppers, sometimes keeping your weight manageable requires trade-offs.

In addition, eating lean proteins such as low-fat cottage cheese, tuna mixed with sour cream instead of mayonnaise, pork loin chunks or a protein shake made with cottage cheese rather than heavy cream can help fight against alcohol’s lack of satiety. While an occasional drink or celebration is nothing to worry about because weight loss will continue as soon as the alcohol is metabolized and calories return to a deficit, if you need to drink more often, then the best way to handle the situation is to keep a close eye on your calorie and fat intake.