Role of Insulin in Weight Loss

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?