Well, April was tough (I’ll explain the reasons in another email or blog post), but I’m hoping for sun and flowers in May. So, let’s kick the good times off with more educational material on the plague of our times: insulin resistance!
Two weeks ago, I completed filming for my Insulin Resistance course for a company that plans to launch in Fall 2025. We filmed over three full days and got 10 hours of content. The course pulls together everything I know about insulin resistance and metabolic health (there are over 100 references). We talk about food, of course, and exercise, but also the impacts of sleep and stress on our metabolic health.
We discuss self-compassion, motivation, and mindset in the 10-hour session (which should be edited down to about 6 hours, hopefully). We also address common obstacles using the Theory of Change model and other tools from my psychotherapy practice. This is because insulin resistance is a holistic problem that must be addressed holistically, through mind, body, behaviours, emotions, and biochemistry.
A few weeks ago, I released a podcast interview with Dr. Ali Chappell, PhD, on her Low-Insulin Lifestyle. It garnered much interest, probably because we’re all trying to clear away the food noise and figure out how to eat and nourish ourselves in this metabolically deranged day and age.
I received many questions about the podcast, so I decided to release a sister episode, a (much) shorter version of my insulin resistance course, that provides more details on how to approach healing your metabolic health.
I even created a PowerPoint for the occasion. Think of it as a free, access-anytime webinar to help educate you about insulin resistance.
Episode Chapters:
Introduction to Insulin Resistance
The Holistic Course on Insulin Resistance
Understanding Insulin’s Role in Health
The Vicious Cycle of Insulin Resistance
Symptoms of Insulin Resistance
Testing for Insulin Resistance
Insulin Resistance and Mental Health
The Blood Sugar Roller Coaster
Managing Blood Sugar Levels
The Role of Protein in Diet
Individualizing Dietary Approaches
Navigating Dietary Changes
The Importance of Lifestyle Support
Transcript:
Talia:
[0:01] Hello, everybody. I am Dr. Talia Marcheggiani.
Talia:
[0:06] I’m a naturopathic doctor and a registered psychotherapist now. And last podcast, we interviewed Dr. Ali Chappell, who talked about the low-insulin lifestyle that got a lot of attention, a lot of interest. So a.
Talia
[0:30] And the podcast was all about the impact of certain foods on our insulin levels with this underlying theme of insulin resistance. And I decided to do a presentation today on insulin resistance, the plague of our times. I recently just recorded a 10-hour course for a project that should be released this fall. I also have a microbiome course with the same company. A 10 hour it was 10 hours of filming on insulin resistance um and it was a it was an amazing course i had a lot of fun producing it we filmed it over three days and i feel like it was just a very holistic course where we talked about diet and we also talked about obviously exercise and sleep and stress and but we even rolled in things like self-compassion and motivation, and overcoming obstacles and long-term management, the stages of change. And it was just this all-encompassing, very holistic course. I’m really excited to let you know when it comes out. And so based on that research that I did, I had hundreds of references. And one of the people that I reference is Dr. Ali Chappell. But based on that, I decided to do a presentation on insulin resistance itself.
Talia:
[1:52] Because insulin resistance is the plague of our times. So ultimately, all of the health fluencers and everyone that’s talking about health is in some way or another addressing insulin resistance. And if they’re not, then they’re missing a huge layer of what’s going on with our health. Ever since, you know, doing my course, thinking about insulin resistance in a more holistic, but also in a deeper way. I’ve come to understand, and trying the low-insulin lifestyle and looking at the impact of insulin on my body, I’ve come to really appreciate the level at which insulin resistance plays a role in our health and conditions like adrenal fatigue or, you know, even estrogen dominance, these kind of naturopathic conditions that tend to have different names over time, you know, candida overgrowth, SIBO. I’m not saying those conditions are only insulin resistance,
Talia:
[2:56] but my stance is insulin resistance until proven otherwise. And we’ll get into why in a second. So I’m Dr. Tali Markajani, metabolic doctor, and let’s get into it.
[3:16] So insulin resistance let’s just do a quick overview because we didn’t really get into this with the dr ali chapel of course i mean she had a lot of great analogies but essentially insulin is a peptide so a series of protein of amino acids that creates a protein it acts like a hormone in the body its main function is glucose control so insulin’s job is to shuttle glucose from the blood into our cells. When we eat, we break down the carbohydrates from our food. This raises our blood sugar. And insulin’s job is to make sure that our blood sugar stays within a normal range. When our blood sugar goes too high, our body doesn’t like that. That’s toxic to the body.
[3:56] But we also need sugar for energy. So insulin’s job is to get that sugar into the cells through the cellular receptors. So it’s like a lock and key. You have insulin, the hormone or peptide that, you know, enters into the lock of the cell receptor. And it makes all of these different things happen within the cell, allowing glucose to get in. Glucose goes into the mitochondria. It does the whole, remember the glycolysis, the Krebs cycle, and then it moves along the electron, well, the NADH and all of the components that are produced, move along the electron transport chain with the power of oxygen, and make ATP, which is the energy currency of the cell. So our body uses glucose for energy.
[4:48] So insulin’s job is to make sure that glucose can get into the cell or it can be used for energy, but it also keeps glucose within a range in our blood. It prevents glucose from going too high in the blood.
[5:00] Now, when we become insulin resistant, one of the mechanisms is that we are spiking our glucose too often, so we need to call on insulin too often. And even though you need insulin to survive, if your pancreas, the hormone that makes insulin, or sorry, the organ that secretes insulin, if it’s not functioning, you don’t make insulin, such as in the case of type 1 diabetes, juvenile diabetes, you waste away and die unless you inject insulin into your body to do the important work of allowing your body to absorb, allowing your cells to get glucose. But when you have healthy functioning pancreas and you’re calling on insulin over and over again to manage repeated blood sugar spikes this can create some resistance in the cell where instead of having in this example you have two receptors on the cell now your cell takes one away and you just have one receptor and it’s harder to stimulate that receptor you need more insulin in order to do that. So then your insulin levels start to climb, and eventually your body has a hard time managing glucose levels.
[6:15] This starts off in muscle cells and fat cells and liver cells, where there’s a whole other cascade that we get into in my course. I don’t know if it’s relevant here, but essentially fat cells become overstuffed, because when your body needs somewhere to put that glucose and if it’s not burning it, it starts to turn it into fat. So it loads fat cells up with glucose that gets turned into fat. Then those fat cells become so overstuffed and insulin resistant that they start leaking fat. This creates inflammation in the body, elevates triglycerides, and it starts to create an inflammation, causes more insulin resistance. And there’s a whole bunch of vicious cycles that can occur with this imbalance in our body. Because one of the things that my friend and I were talking about, my friend who’s a medical doctor, whose clinic I used to rent, she was like, why would this happen? Like, why would our body respond in this way? Why do we, you know, rather than establish homeostasis where everything stays within a healthy balance, why does our body kind of spiral that when you have all these blood sugar spikes, you know, it’s hard for our body to figure out what to do. And I think it exposes this weak point in our physiology, because our bodies were designed and evolved through millennia of periods where starvation was commonplace. And it’s only in the modern era…
[7:38] That we’re exposed to so much caloric density in our diets. And there’s a bunch of other things that have occurred in our diets over the last hundred or so years, and that is the increase in processed food and endocrine disruptors, chemicals in our environment that trigger inflammation and that mess up our insulin receptors. We’re a lot more sedentary. We don’t have the muscle sink anymore that we used to.
[8:06] We’re a lot more stressed and we are consuming a lot more refined starch and sugar. And as a result of sort of the 1970s shift in our diet that told us to consume five to 11 servings of grains a day and to restrict our fat and our animal foods. So ultimately our protein. So our diet became very carbohydrate heavy and deficient in other macronutrients like fat and protein. We became more sedentary. We became more stressed. So these are just a few things. And stress is another cascade. So cortisol’s job is to raise, it has lots of jobs, but cortisol stress hormones job is to raise our blood sugar. So that calls on insulin in the absence even of food to try to bring blood sugar under control. So you create this vicious cycle when you’re extremely stressed out. When you have a lot of inflammation in your body, that triggers a release of cortisol to manage the inflammation, which again triggers insulin to be released. And inflammation independently can cause insulin resistance. And again, you know, and then the more insulin resistant you are, the more inflammation you have because the more your fat cells leak, and then the more insulin resistant you become.
[9:22] Sarcopenia, So being skinny fat or not having enough muscle on your body, you don’t have this great glucose regulator of muscle that helps to manage blood sugar that often works independently of insulin. And then again, you become more insulin resistant, starting off in the muscle, and this creates this cascade where your body is storing more fat and not making muscle. You know and then this blood sugar roller coaster where if you’re repeatedly spiking your blood sugar then your insulin is being called on to bring blood sugar down that triggers hunger and cravings for sugar and so on and so on um so because of all of these different things, we are 88 to 94 percent depending on the study that you look at insulin resistant so in our society, 88% of people, or up to 94%, according to some sources, are insulin resistant. And this does not mean that you have diabetes or pre-diabetes even. You can have completely normal sugar.
[10:34] And so this is often missed. Okay, so this is really important because we don’t test fasting insulin on a regular basis, which when we’re looking at the hormone insulin, that indicates more accurately if we’re insulin resistant than just simple blood sugar.
[10:53] And insulin resistance, it has a lot of different impacts on the body. So one of the big ones is Alzheimer’s disease or otherwise termed type 3 diabetes. So the inflammation and the effect of getting energy into our brain can cause dementia. And so, you know, it used to be thought that Alzheimer’s was caused by plaques and tangles in the brain. And so drugs were geared towards reducing these plaques and tangles, but turns out that they are more likely smoke present at the fire, or even maybe even fire trucks present at the fire. They may actually be there to support the brain, but the brain’s damage is occurring because of insulin resistance. So both insulin in and of itself is toxic to the brain cells, and then ultimately when blood sugar is not controlled, that’s toxic to brain cells.
[11:50] So ultimately, we’re not able, when we’re insulin resistant, we’re not able to access energy, right? So our body is not good at bringing glucose into our cells. And therefore, you know, and eventually we end up with elevated glucose. But even before that, we’re not able to access that glucose. So think about it being a case of you’re storing energy because insulin is a storage and anabolic hormone, you’re storing energy very easily, but you’re not able to tap into that energy to break it down. And so you’re sort of starving in the land of plenty.
[12:27] Mental health issues, there’s a whole field that’s emerging called metabolic psychiatry that looks, and a lot of, in this field, there’s a lot of studies on the impact of ketogenic or extremely low-carb diets on mental health, so things like depression, anxiety, and ADHD, but also schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, so some of the more severe mental health conditions. And a lot of really amazing results have come out in a few studies that have been done. And so some theories about this is that things like depression, anxiety are the result of energy poverty in the brain. So the brain is unable to really access glucose properly. ADHD being one example of glucose hypometabolism. So the brain is not able to really use glucose. and it, you know, becomes dependent on this sort of ups and downs of glucose.
[13:29] And then in order to get energy, so there’s another vicious cycle that possibly can occur that in order to get energy, individuals with this type of glucose hypometabolism seek sugar in their environment. They rely on sugar and so they’re constantly spiking their blood sugar in order to like perk their brains up.
[13:50] Cardiovascular so these cardiometabolic diseases so and when we talk about metabolic health or metabolism we’re referring to insulin resistance metabolism is our body’s ability to use food for energy so glucose fat protein and insulin is a key hormone that allows us to use that that food especially carbohydrates for energy, and to store that energy in our cells. So any disease that’s associated with the cardiovascular system, which is impacted by insulin resistance, or any sort of metabolic issue, so obviously type 2 diabetes, but also cardiovascular disease, stroke, atherosclerosis, heart attack, hypertension, you know, any heart issue. And this is because insulin is inflammatory, And so it creates inflammation in the blood vessels. It also shifts our cholesterol balance. And so what we often think of as a disease related to consuming cholesterol or consuming a high-fat diet, bacon, cheese, is actually, in fact, likely driven by the inflammation and high insulin levels that are a result of insulin resistance. And so this creates an issue with how our body is metabolizing energy and our inflammation levels.
[15:15] Insulin resistance impacts our reproductive health, hormonal health, and sexual health. PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, is an insulin resistance condition that causes infertility and other symptoms, hormonal imbalance, so more testosterone-like symptoms, and lack of ovulation. Erectile dysfunction is related to insulin resistance, which creates more viscous blood and prevents blood flow to the reproductive or sexual organs.
[15:45] Again, because we need energy for everything in our body. So anything that is highly dependent on energy, our liver function, our brain function, our cardiovascular health, our muscular health, all of these organs that require a constant energy turnover are going to be energy impoverished in the presence of insulin resistance because insulin is not functioning properly to allow us to access our energy from food. So instead, we’re just storing the energy for fat as fat, and we’re not breaking it down. Many cancers are also associated with insulin resistance because many cancers feed off of glucose. And then again, insulin is an anabolic hormone, causes the growth of things. Yes, you need anabolic hormones. You need there to be anabolism or the growth of things to store, to build, but you need a balance of both. You need to also be able to break things down so that you can tap into something called autophagy, where you’re clearing out damaged and dead cells. You’re able to clear out, you know, cancerous cells or precancerous cells, and you’re able to engage in repair as opposed to always storing, storing, and building.
[17:06] So we have a lot of different symptoms of insulin resistance because it affects every cell in the body and therefore it affects every hormone in the body or every organ in the body. And because insulin is a hormone, our hormones talk to one another. We have a very reductionistic view in medicine. So we like to just look at like, what does one hormone do? What does insulin do? And then that’s the end of it. And what happens when you replace it or what happens when you take it away?
[17:38] So in the case of type 1 diabetes, that kind of makes sense. The pancreas isn’t producing insulin, so you have to inject insulin into your body. There you go. Cut and dry. So a lot of things in medicine have this reductionistic kind of solution, and we can look at them reductionistically more or less, and more or less we can solve them reductionistically. But insulin resistance is a cascade, it’s a network, it’s a holistic issue.
[18:03] It is involved with these vicious cycles. As our body’s trying to compensate for an imbalance, it creates more imbalances, right? So, you know, we’re stressed, and so there’s insulin resistance that’s caused as a result of that, and then that insulin resistance causes more stress because we can’t access our energy and we can’t mount a proper stress response and that causes it. So it’s like this vicious cycle that then starts to impact our inflammation levels and our cravings and our sleep. And so we have this whole mess that’s impacting all of our organs, our behaviors, our psychology, our emotions, our mental health, as well as our physical health and our behaviors. So when we look at insulin resistance, it’s impacting everything. It impacts our skin. We get things like skin tags, right? So, we get random growths of the skin, turnover of the skin, inflammatory conditions of the skin, like psoriasis, eczema. A condition called acanthosis nigricans is the kind of this darkening or purplish pigmentation of the skin is really common sign of insulin resistance. Rosacea, a key symptom of insulin resistance is this is visceral fat. So fat around the organs, particularly the liver, the pancreas, this is like a harder inflammatory fat. It’s not the type of fat you can pinch.
[19:22] Um, but you will be storing all kinds of fat with insulin resistance, but this key is the visceral fat. And we can measure visceral fat by, you know, roughly by doing a waist to hip ratio, where you, you know, you trace a tape measure around either the thinnest part of the waist or the belly button, whatever makes most sense to measure. And then you measure the widest part of your hips. You divide the waist by the hips. Or is it the other way around? It’s a bigger number on top of a smaller number on top of a bigger number. And then it should be 0.7 or less.
[20:00] Um so right so the idea is that you have a waist that’s smaller than your hips, and if it’s large and so this is for women i believe the number is one is one for men um and and the idea is that you you know the the larger the waist or the bigger the waist circumference the more likely you have visceral fat and the more likely there’s insulin resistance there’s also visceral fat often shows up on the face. So we often have facial fat when we have visceral fat in it. It’s because of some inflammatory mechanisms. In blood work, we see elevated fasting insulin. Very interesting, and this is a huge feature in the Dr. Ali Chappell interview, but also something really frustrating in my work as a naturopathic doctor, that we simply don’t test fasting insulin. So I do as an ND, but it is never tested in routine blood work. People are often gaslit into being told that their blood sugar is fine, so they don’t need to test it, or for whatever reason, they don’t need to test it. It’s a relatively cheap test. I order it as part of a comprehensive panel, but individually, it’s about $30 plus a lab fee.
[21:15] And it tells you, quite frankly, are you insulin resistant? Because if you’re insulin resistant, the first thing that happens is your fasting insulin starts to go up. And your fasting insulin causes its own set of problems. Like I said, it encourages fat storage and it prevents the breakdown of energy. Your body is saying, store, store, store, store, store, don’t spend. So you’re not spending energy and therefore you’re in this kind of energy impoverished state. You’re more inflamed. You’re having a harder time managing your other hormones. So testing fasting insulin is very, very helpful because you’re not always going to see an elevated fasting sugar when you have insulin resistance. Eventually, your fasting sugar, once your insulin is no longer functioning at all and it cannot control your blood sugar, you’ll start to see an increase in blood sugar. And so this represents a later stage on the continuum of insulin resistance, the latest stage being a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.
[22:21] Which is where your blood sugar is now at a point that it’s a cutoff. I believe it’s 6.5 millimoles per liter. And so you’ve hit this arbitrary cutoff, and now you have type 2 diabetes. But in the meantime, the cascade or the problem of insulin resistance, nothing special changes when you have type 2 diabetes. It’s only a point at which your blood sugar reaches a certain number, but the underlying root of disease may have been manifesting for 15 to 20 years, and that is this insulin resistance where the cells are no longer responding properly to insulin, and you’re seeing an increase in insulin levels. Even earlier than an increase in fasting insulin is an increase in postprandial insulin. So you consume a meal of starch or sugar, it’s about seven you can do a glucose challenge where you consume 75 grams of glucose it’s this disgusting drink they have you drink and then you measure your insulin and your glucose at 30 minutes at an hour at two hours and you will see the very very earliest stages you’ll see this rise in insulin after like a very high rise in insulin after consuming the sugary drink, your blood sugar will be normal but your insulin will start to rise and actually, this is the stage of insulin resistance that I found myself on in another patient who was experiencing a lot of weight gain, seemingly out of nowhere.
[23:51] And, you know, she hadn’t really changed much. She was kind of in like perimenopause. She had a relatively sedentary job, but was eating otherwise healthy and was just noticing a ton of weight gain. So we did her fasting insulin and tested her HOMA-IR,
[24:08] the homeostatic measurement assessment of insulin resistance. So it’s a measure of insulin resistance that looks at your fasting insulin and your fasting glucose, and it gives you a number to tell you the relationship between the two of them. So we did this patient’s fasting insulin, and it was actually quite low, and we calculated her HOMA-IR, because her blood sugar was obviously normal. She did not have diabetes or type 2 diabetes. And we did the HOMA-IR, and that was also normal. She was quite insulin sensitive when we just looked at her fasting levels. But how often are we fasted during the day right and this is part of the problem, because I don’t know about you but when I wake up I eat and then I keep eating until I go to bed and I do a pretty good job of spending 12 hours in a fasted state most nights meaning that, you know if I eat my breakfast at 7 I try to stop eating by 7 p.m at night so that I just give my digestive system and my body a chance to repair and reset and not just be digesting constantly.
[25:18] And it also gives my insulin a chance to settle down. But for the other 12 hours, you know, if I’m getting a large spike of insulin after eating, then I might be in this kind of high insulin state all day long. And when I fast, my insulin looks normal, but that’s not the state that my body normally lives in. So we had the idea of not doing a glucose challenge, but having her just eat a normal, healthy meal and then testing her fasting insulin an hour later. And we did find that her fasting insulin was elevated. Well, it was her postprandial insulin was elevated.
[25:55] So that would be the very, very first stage of insulin resistance. And some people notice that visceral fat is even the first stage. Before you even start to see insulin on blood work in the numbers, you see the symptoms where you’re just noticing this increase in waist circumference, and the driver of that would be insulin. This often happens during the perimenopausal transition because estrogen and progesterone, more estrogen than progesterone, but both of them to some extent, have an impact on our insulin sensitivity. So estrogen makes us more insulin sensitive. And when you go through perimenopause and your estrogen levels start to decrease, you become just de facto more insulin resistant without changing anything. And this is why so many women present with the concern of increased abdominal fat. They’re like, I haven’t done anything. I’m noticing this change in my body composition, and it’s so frustrating, and I don’t know what’s going on. And we do look at estrogen, obviously, whether it’s hormone replacement or other things that we can do. But the big thing to consider is, okay, there may be a time, this might be a time now to refocus on insulin. What was working for you in the past?
[27:16] Given now that your estrogen is lower, is likely not going to cut it anymore. And we need to start shifting lifestyle in the direction of supporting insulin sensitivity.
[27:28] So other signs in the blood are, you know, fasting glucose, obviously, when you’re in the later stages will start to be elevated. And then elevated triglycerides. Triglycerides are part of a cholesterol panel. They are the fat in the blood. So this is when the fat cells become overstuffed, particularly in the liver, we start to see an elevation in fasting triglycerides. And, you know, it’s funny because sometimes patients will come in and they’re like, my doctor says I have, I’m thinking of one patient in particular, she said, my doctor said I have high cholesterol. And so we looked at her blood work and actually have two patients with the exact same thing. Two had elevated, they both had elevated liver enzymes, showing that there’s something going on with their liver. Their liver is not happy. Their liver is experiencing inflammation. The liver is struggling in some way. That’s what elevated liver enzymes tend to tell us. And, you know, their liver’s not working properly. There’s some inflammation in the liver. The liver’s not able to process these triglycerides. And they both had elevated triglycerides. And that was the only thing abnormal in their cholesterol panel.
[28:36] And their doctor put them on a statin, which we know’s main job is to reduce LDL, cholesterol, one of the cholesterols, but total cholesterol as well.
[28:46] And, you know, has an impact on triglycerides, but not a large impact. And it’s not the therapy, in my opinion, for elevated triglycerides. It’s certainly not the first line that I would recommend. I would recommend first supporting the liver, figuring out what’s going on there. In one case, it was Tylenol overuse. In another case, it was insulin resistance that was causing fatty liver. So it’s first supporting liver and then addressing insulin resistance if it’s present. And in one patient, it was. But certainly not a statin. It’s not addressing the root or even the issue. And again, this is reductionistic, right? It’s like cholesterol, statin.
[29:27] Ignoring the fact that there’s a lot of different things going on in a cholesterol panel. And statin may be the answer for some particular people who make a lot of LDL cholesterol and they have scary high levels despite having low inflammation. And even then in that case, I would argue that we might not be that concerned about their LDL if they have low inflammation and they’re insulin sensitive. But those people would probably be the people who would benefit most from a statin just to keep them from overproducing the LDL cholesterol that they genetically overproduce. The other thing that we’ll see in blood tests are inflammatory markers elevated, and these can be elevated for various reasons, and they won’t always be elevated in insulin resistance, but we tend to see inflammation, and so that would be a reason to look at why there’s elevated inflammation.
[30:20] And you know other symptoms that we see insulin resistance affects our brain so we have brain fog it affects the health of the blood vessels we get hypertension or high blood pressure we see mental health issues for various reasons we know depression is an inflammatory condition in the brain there’s low levels of inflammation that create this um kind of like low mood an issue with serotonin and dopamine metabolism that presents the symptoms of depression, right? Low mood, sadness, apathy, you know, disinterest in things that previously brought you joy, anxiety, we know has a lot to do with this blood sugar rollercoaster triggering the autonomic nervous system.
[31:08] We get fatigue when we’re insulin resistant because we can’t, again, we can’t access our energy properly. We have difficulty losing weight because we are constantly telling our body to store, store, store, and not use. We get fatty liver and fat on the organs. I am convinced that adrenal fatigue, until proven otherwise, is insulin resistance. And my friend actually came to this conclusion when she went on the low insulin lifestyle. After I introduced her to Dr. Allie Chappell, she was like, she’s like, I no longer get that crash from 2 to 4 p.m. And she’s like, so what I thought was adrenal fatigue that I was managing with like salt and adrenal herbs and stuff like that was in fact insulin resistance. And it’s interesting too, because a lot of the adaptogenic herbs, the adrenal herbs, a lot of them have, I mean, one of the impacts of cortisol is to raise our blood sugar. So a lot of these adaptogenic herbs will raise blood sugar and it gives you kind of this boost, right? And that’s that 2 to 4 p.m. crash. We always tend to gravitate towards sugar or carbohydrate snacks during that time, unless you can take a nap or something. But it’s like this sugar crash that we get. And again, when you’re insulin resistant, you know, you’re having trouble managing your blood sugar. Maybe you had a lunch that had too many carbohydrates, you got a huge insulin spike, and then you get this huge crash from 2 to 4 p.m.
[32:30] Estrogen dominance. Again, you know, this whole sort of, PCOS thing where we’re putting on more body fat and our estrogen level, like, you know, we have heavier periods or more painful periods or, you know, this weight gain. So, even though estrogen increases insulin sensitivity, a lot of these symptoms of excess fat gain or heavy periods or irregular periods that we would tend to call estrogen dominance, this might be, in fact, insulin resistance, PMS, PMDD. Again, that’s not a known fact that those conditions are caused by insulin resistance, but knowing that insulin resistance messes with your hormones, messes with energy production, messes with your neurotransmitters, with your brain function, with your liver, which is responsible for processing hormones like estrogen. It affects your digestive system, which we know digestion is a highly energy-intensive activity. So if you’re not able to access and use your energy, you’re going to have issues with things that require a lot of energy, like digestion, like reproductive health and sexual health, hair growth, skin health, all of these things.
[33:49] So it’s sort of like every symptom in some way we could argue is connected to insulin resistance and so my advice is when patients are presented with a whole bunch of things as we do a fasting insulin test as part of routine blood work in order to assess and also given that 88 to 94 percent of us have some sort of metabolic dysfunction it’s fair to say we should definitely rule this out because the norm would be, or at least the common thread would be insulin resistance, is having some role to play in what someone’s experience is.
[34:29] So the blood sugar rollercoaster, throughout most of my naturopathic practice, I’ve been harping on this idea of blood sugar because our body does not like to have high blood sugar. This is toxic, and it doesn’t like low blood sugar, right? Low blood sugar triggers cortisol, triggers an autonomic fight or flight response, right? The sympathetic nervous system response, and that triggers cortisol, and then your blood sugar goes up, and then you’re craving, and you’re going on this roller coaster. And this is the case with anxiety. I see it time and time again um you know anxiety until again until proven otherwise is a blood sugar roller coaster phenomenon brain fog adrenal fatigue all this is connected to our blood sugar and supporting blood sugar has been really important in my naturopathic practice to support people with mental health concerns and then you know as a psychotherapist um.
[35:33] Psychotherapy is extremely effective it’s an amazing tool and modality and we really we get deep and we sort through the emotional experience and and you know the how we think and our self talk and our boundaries and we do all that stuff and uh you know but then if there’s, if a if a psychotherapy client is like having a croissant for breakfast and then a sandwich for lunch, you know, there’s only so much psychotherapy we can do without really addressing their blood sugar.
[36:09] So, you know, so many of us are on this blood sugar roller coaster day in and day out, right? You wake up and then you’re kind of nauseous and you’re anxious and that’s low blood sugar. It’s your cortisol trying to kick into gear. Then you have, you know, the typical breakfast. I, When I was a kid, I would have cereal and skim milk, like sugar cereal often. And I don’t know how I survived. But yeah, I was like daydreaming. I was like not focused. I couldn’t, you know, figure out what was going on in math. Yeah, and then I remember we had lunch and I probably made myself a sandwich. Sometimes it would have meat in it. There’d always be a sugar treat. It wasn’t a horrible lunch, but yeah, it was back in the 80s or 90s. It was kind of the height of our nutrition disaster.
[36:58] And so, so many of us still do that, right? Cereal for breakfast or toast or croissant or just kind of a carb breakfast, you know, something easy on the stomach. You wake up, you don’t have much of an appetite. You’re anxious. You just want to eat something quickly, a banana, whatever. So, your blood sugar goes up and then your body releases insulin, it comes crashing down, and then over time, you become insulin resistant because insulin stops responding effectively to, or sorry, the cells stop responding effectively to insulin. So, you need more and more insulin to create the same effect on cells. So, you end up with high insulin levels, and this triggers more sugar cravings, and so on and so on.
[37:39] And this impacts our brain. We can’t think clearly. We have brain fog. We feel anxious. we feel stressed out, we feel irritable, and we suffer from inflammation. So the blood sugar roller coaster, horrible. There’s always this New York Times article that I reference, and it’s called, Do You Have Decision Fatigue? And it talks about these parole board members who would make weird decisions just right after lunch, like that 2 to 4 p.m. They were like, I don’t know, Some guy was caught stealing and like, you know, same offense. And then all of a sudden there’d be this different parole decision right after lunch. And then when they gave them a snack, everything kind of settled. So they decided, they figured out that this decision fatigue they were having where they just couldn’t make a decision, they couldn’t think clearly, was caused by low blood sugar. And, you know, blood sugar is important. Our brain needs a steady stream of consistent energy. And so if we’re on a blood sugar roller coaster and our blood sugar is dipping, our brain is starved of nutrients and we can’t think, you know. And if your brain is particularly sensitive to this, you know, so someone with neurodivergence, anxiety, depression, you’re going to experience this all the more profoundly.
[39:03] And it’s going to feel impossible to make a decision. You’re going to feel completely overwhelmed. You’re going to feel like you cannot handle what’s going on. Um you know i had a uh another patient i’m thinking of who you know always struggled with mental health his whole life things would be good good good and then like kind of in the afternoon would get this hit of depression really profound existential depression that left him like feeling like if i don’t medicate this like i can’t function it’s horrible and we determined that yeah like that he it was a blood sugar crash ultimately blood sugar was low he hadn’t eaten for a while lunch wasn’t that substantial and breakfast wasn’t that substantial so he was going on this blood sugar roller coaster and so many of us in north america we backload our food so we eat our biggest.
[39:57] Best meal at dinner and we spend the rest of the day on a blood sugar roller coaster so i preach this all the time i’ve talked about this in courses and i was really jealous when i discovered as many of you’ve heard the glucose goddess so somebody whose entire brand is focused on blood sugar and her whole thing is that she puts on a continuous glucose monitor so this is something that measures creates these graphs here that show your blood sugar going up after you eat and she’s showing you all these different like permutations and combinations of of food and how food impacts blood sugar and so that’s really cool and i was really jealous just like five million followers. I’m like, why didn’t I think of this?
[40:37] Even the name Glucose Goddess, genius. She does a lot of good work. She’s a biochemist. I have referred tons of patients to her work.
[40:45] And so things that she talks about are, you know, apple cider vinegar prevents you from getting this glucose spike, the sour in the vinegar, the acidic acid, it helps to kind of slow this glucose absorption.
[41:00] When you add fat, fiber, and protein, so she calls this putting close on your carbs, it tends to blunt the glucose response. So fiber, how does that work? Well, fiber, it kind of creates this coating and it’s harder to access the glucose. So you don’t get this crazy spike of glucose into your bloodstream.
[41:25] But we’ll talk about what fat does in a second. And, you know, so, but, you know, to regulate blood sugars, if you’re just looking at blood sugar, then this makes sense because you’re, if you’re adding clothes to your carbs, you know, you’re, you’re adding fat and protein to your carbs, you’re not going to get this huge blood sugar spike, which is great.
[41:44] So you’re not going to be on this blood sugar roller coaster. It also slows and delays gastric emptying, so the sugar that you’re eating is sort of metered out over time. So again, you’re maintaining this steady glucose level, and that’s great. And we’ll talk really quickly about the blood sugar impact of food. There’s different ways to measure this. So you have the glycemic index. The glycemic index is like how quickly does a food spike your blood sugar? So glucose straight glucose has the highest glycemic index, like table sugar, pretty high because it’s just a glucose and fructose molecule. Your body, your digestive system splits that and then it absorbs the glucose. Starch as well, like white rice or white bread, these are, starch is a long chain of glucose. And again, when you cook it, it kind of breaks it apart. And when you digest it, it breaks into individual glucose molecules, spikes your blood sugar. When you add fiber to it, you get a slower rise in glucose. So, you know, I don’t know what has, like, I mean, brown rice is going to have a lower glycemic index because of the fiber on it.
[42:57] The glycemic load is probably a better measurement because it takes into account how much sugar is in the food. So, for example, watermelon has a high glycemic index. The sugar raises your blood sugar very quickly, but there’s not a lot of sugar in watermelon when you’re eating a normal serving. Watermelon has a lot of fiber and a lot of water, and it also has some good nutrients, too. So the glycemic load is ultimately what Glucose Goddess is looking at. In her graph, you’re seeing, okay, you’re having chickpeas, and you’re seeing both the index, I guess, because you’re seeing, okay, how quickly does her, and this is her body, how quickly does the glucose rise in her blood, and how long does it stay elevated?
[43:43] And so she shows in this case just chickpeas, which have a lot of starch in them. They also have some fiber and some protein, but not as much protein as people think. So the starch is broken down in the chickpeas, and you get this rise in glucose. And then she says, oh, if you mix, if you blend it, you’re pulverizing the fiber, and so you’re actually accessing the carbohydrates more easily. So you’re increasing the glycemic index. So look at that. Look how much faster my blood sugar rises. And then she says, but if you consume hummus, you add fat to your blended chickpeas. Look at that. You barely get a rise in blood sugar. So, wow, that’s so cool.
[44:26] So, ultimately, adding fat lowers the glycemic index, and it looks like the glycemic load. But, so I always had this suspicion, because one of the things we are not measuring is the insulin index, right? So we’re not measuring insulin at all with a continuous glucose monitor. We’re not looking at all at how insulin looks after eating. And this normally is fine because usually when glucose goes up, insulin goes up, and when glucose is flat, insulin is flat, but not always because there’s a few foods that will spike insulin or that will impact insulin but not impact blood sugar.
[45:13] And what happens when we spike insulin is we actually see, because insulin’s job is to lower blood sugar. So under this glucose goddess post is this is where I first was exposed to Dr. Allie Chappell, where she reminds us that adding fat to starch enhances the insulin response. And this is the reason you see a drop in glucose on your graph. And she’s like, I saw a similar post with bread and butter. And so adding butter to your bread doesn’t make your bread healthier, but it will flatten your glucose response so you’ll have a prettier continuous glucose monitor graph because your insulin is being spiked and that’s flattening the glucose response but it’s insulin that’s causing the issue i mean insulin is what’s causing fat storage insulin is what’s preventing you from accessing your carbohydrates to burn them and accessing fat stores to burn for energy.
[46:08] And so yeah and you know it’s okay so it’s not like i didn’t know this um but i guess i didn’t understand the impact of it and this is an important lesson for me even a holistic practitioner a naturopathic doctor who routinely tests people’s insulin levels who understands the importance of insulin who has seen elevated homa ir in all types of people who is looking at insulin resistance and considering that as a factor and assessing symptoms of it. But I was looking at it as kind of an isolated thing that can occur. I was not looking at it as like a blanket issue that is occurring across all of my patients and should be assessed in essentially everyone who have the symptoms and some signs of it.
[46:53] But yeah, I was aware of insulin and the impact of insulin on food. And I was even aware of the insulin index, which looks at the impact food has on our insulin levels. So how food spikes insulin. And I knew that, yeah, obviously white bread is going to spike your insulin because it spikes your sugar and that spikes insulin. But I also knew that things like skim milk were potent generators of insulin or created an insulin release. And so, I kind of knew, okay, you know, stuff that doesn’t necessarily have a lot of sugar has an impact on insulin levels. And so, what we know is that carbohydrates have a high insulin index, right? So, starchy carbohydrates, starches and sugar.
[47:46] Protein actually has a moderate impact on insulin. So, it will not spike your glucose. So, it’s not going to change your glucose monitor, but it will have an impact, a moderate impact, about 20% release on your insulin.
[48:02] Fat will not have an impact on insulin or blood sugar. So if you consume olive oil, if you just drink a bunch of olive oil, it’s not going to do anything to your insulin and it’s not going to do anything to your blood sugar. But when you add fat to starch, it will accentuate an insulin response.
[48:20] So it is going to impact fat storage. And we knew this from adding fat and sugar was a potent way to store fat. So, you know, so this was something that I knew, but I never really kind of connected this to Glucose Goddess’s work. And so I thank Dr. Allie Chappell, and this is how I found out about her. So Allie Chappell, her, she created, because she works with PCOS, she created this idea of like, okay, foods that spike insulin are starches. Okay. So rice, not just white rice all rice bread flowers you know potatoes sweet potatoes um so kind of like tubers and grains essentially and legumes sugar so table sugar added sugar but also whey protein so unfermented dairy so milk um you know whey protein powder because whey protein stimulates a peptide called IGF-1 or insulin-like growth factor 1. And again, we know that insulin is a storage hormone. So whey protein is used for muscle building because we need insulin. We need IGF-1 to stimulate muscle protein synthesis.
[49:40] But if we’re trying to keep our insulin levels down, maybe we should be weary or maybe we should just be aware of the fact that whey protein can stimulate an insulin release and it won’t have any effect on your continuous glucose monitor. This was a whole debate that Dr. Allie Chappell got into and we’ll talk about
[49:57] it when we talk about protein in a second. It was also part of my conversation with her, And I think it’s a little bit where we differ, but I’ll get into that. Foods that don’t spike insulin are non-starchy, colorful fruits and vegetables. Okay, so leafy greens, colorful stuff.
[50:17] Fruits contain fructose, so they don’t have as much, rather than glucose, which is what starch is made of. So it doesn’t have as much of an impact on our blood sugar levels and our insulin. Our liver converts fructose into glucose eventually, but it doesn’t create this big glucose spike and an insulin spike. You will see a rise on a continuous glucose monitor when you consume fruit, but you’re not seeing as much of a rise in insulin. And fruit also has fiber, so it’s managing the glycemic index. And it doesn’t have that much sugar fruit, so it also has sort of a moderate glycemic load. So a good way to get carbohydrates if you’re trying not to spike your insulin is from fruit and vegetables non-starchy vegetables so animal protein again a moderate impact on insulin about 20% that of starches fermented dairy so she recommends this in limited quantities it’s about a cup of greek yogurt or an ounce of cheese nuts and seeds don’t impact insulin so you know which is you can have tons of almonds whatever and fats have no impact on insulin so it’s ultimately this kind of paleo diet where you’re not including legumes and you’re not including potatoes. And so there’s a lot of research she’s done on this.
[51:36] I’m sorry, my face is covering some of it. But so there’s three studies that she conducted and a randomized control trial. And it was on women with PCOS. So I would love to see this study extended to, I would love to see it extended to mental health because there’s some research on ketogenic diets for mental health. And my story that I’ve shared on my blog is that, you know, before Christmas of 2024, I kind of just was going through a funk and I just said, you know what, screw it. Like I’ve been avoiding gluten for forever. And I just don’t want to anymore. So I just went back to eating bread and it was glorious. I had a great time. I had brie. I had baguettes. Like I had sandwiches. It was amazing.
[52:27] But my body was not happy, and I had horrific brain fog. That was the first thing I noticed, and all this water retention, inflammation, I just felt horrible. So after Christmas, I said, you know what? I need a bit of a reset. My gut is not happy. My brain is not happy. And I did a ketogenic diet, more specifically the carnivore diet. I wanted to try it. I just wanted to simplify things.
[52:49] And I just wanted to give my gut a reset. And there’s actually a benefit. This is very counterintuitive and an aside, but there is a benefit. There’s documented evidence that just restricting fiber can actually help digestion. For me, it was a good reset. I don’t think we should avoid fiber forever. Maybe some people with particular health concerns need to, but for me, it was a good reset. So I did the carnivore diet for about three months and I felt my mental health was fantastic. I felt my brain fog clear in like 24 hours and it felt magical but one of the things with carnivore diet is it’s very hard because you’re you don’t have any carbohydrates in your diet at all you don’t have what we what’s called muscle glycogen which is this stored starch-like molecule in the muscles that allows us to burn energy quickly and also retain some water in the muscles so one of the very common symptoms that people experience on a ketogenic diet, especially a carnivore diet, is like a lot of thirst and issue with water balance and muscle fatigue. So I felt that. I felt like I didn’t have strong endurance.
[53:57] I felt, you know, and then at a certain point, I just felt like food was just very brown and I was not so much craving, but I liked the idea of colorful fruits and vegetables and juicy like apples and stuff so my friend um started doing the low insulin lifestyle because i was i was discovering it around the time that i was doing carnivore i was writing my course.
[54:23] On insulin resistance and um.
[54:27] And, uh, and she was trying to do the carnivore too, but it was breastfeeding. And so it wasn’t working out. She, it was affecting her, her milk supply. So she decided to try this and she was, she was like, you know, I feel great. I don’t have any cravings. You know, by day three, like I’m really, really full and satisfied. And again, it’s because you’re able to tap into your energy because your insulin levels are low. So you’re using your body’s energy stores. Um, And, you know, I was also kind of stagnant on carnivore. And so the big aha moment I had was that I was mixing whey protein into yogurt almost every day to get this kind of hydration.
[55:07] And also the whey protein was kind of sweet. And it was a fast way to, you know, instead of having to like cook meat and chicken and eggs, it was something quick that I could have as a snack when I wanted food. So I was having whey protein almost every day. And so I wasn’t experiencing any weight loss. And I was, you know, it kind of, I wouldn’t exactly crave things, but I don’t know. Something just didn’t feel right. So I switched to this, I started adding back in fruits and vegetables. And it felt really, really good. And it felt very sustainable. And I started reflecting on things I’ve tried in the past, things that were successful for me, ways of eating, paleo, particularly comes to mind as something that felt very wholesome and holistic and satisfied my nutrient needs. And I was like, you know, what works about paleo was probably this. Fruits and vegetables, animal protein and fat, nuts and seeds.
[55:58] And, you know, I looked back at my life and, you know, my particular response to carbohydrates and likely having something called reactive hypoglycemia, where you get a big insulin response. Your insulin is, you get a big insulin response essentially after eating. So, you’re not carbohydrate sensitive. In other words, you’re carbohydrate intolerant, right? The glucose tolerance test, you get this big spike of insulin after you consume carbohydrates.
[56:27] I don’t think that I’ve ever really been glucose tolerant and I don’t know if that’s my Mediterranean genetics I don’t know what’s going on with that but then you know putting the pieces together so I think a lot of people really resonated with this idea because when I sent an email out and shared the Dr. Ali Chappell interview a lot of people were like responding and I mean I think that a lot of people were seeing this as like the next new diet right because the the tagline is in two months women lost with PCOS lost 19 pounds and they didn’t restrict what they were eating they ate all that they wanted from a number of foods fruits non-starchy vegetables and fruits animal proteins also some plant-based proteins tofu edamame hemp nuts and seeds and fats and so they ate everything they wanted they didn’t restrict at all. They were told not to exercise just to standardize, but exercise would actually probably have enhanced their results.
[57:31] And yeah, they had great weight loss. Weight loss that is not typical in a lot of studies. You know, you can expect maybe 11 pounds in four months on a calorie-restricted diet. You can expect maybe something like 11 pounds in six months on a ketogenic diet or intermittent fasting, things like that. So 19 pounds in two months, unrestricted, is pretty incredible. Eating all the fruit you want, because people are always kind of wary about fruit, and we like fruit and nuts and seeds, and these are kind of foods that are appealing.
[58:08] So yeah, it was this great tagline. A lot of people were writing to me, how should I do this? What should I do? I think for me, the biggest thing, it’s not so much weight loss. It’s the digestion feels great. Brain feels good. Energy feels good. I’m not constantly hungry like I always have been. I was like pounding back protein to prevent myself from eating constantly. It’s like always with kind of this food noise in the background. I don’t have that on this. And I feel very satisfied. And you get all of the nutrients that you need. It’s not that grains and legumes are bad for you.
[58:43] It’s just that they contain starch and you can have all of the you can easily get the nutrients that you need from fruits vegetables animal animal proteins and animal foods and so it’s this kind of comprehensive feels very holistic diet you know um.
[58:58] So there’s lots of different studies that were done. Her classic kind of PhD study, she just did the diet for a test drive. Another study, they looked at how much fat people were burning after they consumed a high-fat, high-calorie shake. So before they were on the low-insulin lifestyle, the insulin in their body prevented them from tapping into fat. So they were just essentially burning sugar and then hungry, burning sugar and then hungry, and storing fat. But after the two months of the low insulin lifestyle, they were able to burn fat. And so this is also supporting consistent energy levels, you know, in the brain and in the body and reduced hunger and cravings. Because you’re able to tap into your energy stores. You’re able to tap into fat. You’re able to be what we call metabolically flexible, where you burn sugar. When you’re done burning the sugar, you burn fat.
[59:52] And so you’re no longer, you’re off now the blood sugar rollercoaster where you just burn sugar. Than cray sugar burn sugar cray sugar burn sugar cray sugar um another study looked at time to conception because it’s pcos so the goal for many people was fertility and it was about 85 days was the average time to conception and another study looked at standard treatment so it was like a mediterranean diet exercise metformin calorie restriction all in one group and the other group did the low insulin lifestyle and the Mediterranean diet people gained a third of a pound in two months and the low insulin lifestyle people, they lost their 17 to 19 pounds. They had people do diet diaries a couple times. So again, no restriction. My thing that I always think about with the diet diary is if I was a participant and you asked me to fill out a diet diary, I probably would, it would influence how I eat that day for sure. I wouldn’t eat like the pound of bacon or binge on a bunch of nuts and seeds if I knew I had to record it. So I think you can maybe assume.
[1:01:00] And I haven’t, you know, Dr. Ali kind of agreed with this, but I don’t know if, you know, she fully did. You can maybe assume that it was sort of their best day. And that would be, you know, like an average really lower calorie day. But the diet diaries showed that they were consuming about 1400 calories again they’re not counting they’re not tracking they’re just eating what they want from the amount of foods that they’re allowed again you could eat like all bananas technically you could eat all bacon like, but they were they were sort of and this is also the thing when we’re eating whole foods because ultimately fruits vegetables and animal protein these are our whole foods that we find in nature You, you know, get some lettuce that’s growing from the ground, you pull an apple off a tree, you kill a chicken or eat its eggs, right? These are like whole foods, they come from the foods in nature, whereas like, you know, rice, yeah, it’s still a whole food, it’s not that processed, but it still requires this kind of refining and processing to get it to something that you can eat.
[1:02:10] And so when it turns out that when we’re eating these whole foods it it has a very satiating effect in part because of its impact on our insulin levels and our ability to kind of be metabolically flexible but we also are like kind of able to to tap into our body and what it needs, And there’s been studies on this in babies, actually. And they found that, like, yeah, your body can kind of ask for the nutrients it wants. So it’s like, do you want an apple? So that’s kind of more of a sugary thing. Or do you want something savory, which would be like chicken? And they actually ended up eating quite a bit more protein than the typical, you know, woman that I see in my practice.
[1:02:57] They’re eating about 95, 90, 94 grams of protein a day without trying to track and emphasize protein. And I think the reason for this is because, yeah, you’re either eating kind of like a sweet food, or if you want a savory food, you’re going to go for protein. It just, because you just have these whole foods to draw from, you’re probably going to do about at least a quarter of your foods are going to be these animal proteins. And so then you end up eating about 25% of your calories from protein, about 30% came from carbs, about 90 grams of carbs. So that is a low carb diet that they were naturally eating. Again it’s very very hard to get a lot of carbs when you’re just eating fruit and vegetables because there’s only so many apples you can eat there’s only so many grams of carbs in broccoli or something like that whereas yeah if you eat a cup of rice you’re getting a huge dose of starch and they were actually eating quite high fat so about 45 percent of their calories were coming from fat so it’s a higher fat diet a moderate protein diet and a low carb diet and that’s just naturally what people gravitated to when they were given those foods to eat. So really cool. I think I probably eat more than 1,400 a day. Definitely, actually. But this was ultimately what resulted in their weight loss. But they were also able to tap into the fat because their insulin levels were low. And they had a 50% reduction in their insulin levels after two months.
Speaker0:
[1:04:25] So, really impactful research-based lifestyle, you know, and I would love to see, I think there’s going to be more in the works of this lifestyle, but I would love to see some research on it for mental health. I know that the PCOS patients, they filled up quality of life questionnaires, and they did have a positive impact on their mental health. Um but you know i don’t know if they were doing they weren’t doing like um you know gad sevens and stuff like that measuring their anxiety their depression like phq9s like measuring their mental health specifically they were measuring like quality like you know their tendency to binge eat went down their irritability and impulsivity went down so kind of their food behaviors and how that relates to mental health all improved but there wasn’t i don’t as far as or any specific like mental health symptoms. Although subjectively, if you talk to them, I’m sure that they would probably have good things to say about how they felt mentally and emotionally. Yeah. So, the thing, the protein question, so there was a lot of controversy. I don’t want to, like, draw more attention to it, but Dr. Allie Chappell was involved in this debate around whey protein.
Speaker0:
[1:05:41] And the main argument was, so in my podcast, she was talking about how whey protein is a waste product, and whey stimulates IGF-1, so it stimulates insulin, and that’s not good for us. And so on the low insulin lifestyle, they’re told no whey protein, they’re told limited amounts of fermented dairy or so that they don’t overly impact their insulin levels. And, you know, and then we get all these great results. So, okay. So yeah, whey protein highly stimulates insulin. And so she recommends against it. And then she also says, you know, I think we emphasize protein too much. And I will tend to, so this is what we see, right? So I have been harping, just like the blood sugar thing, I’ve been harping protein, protein, protein, you need to eat more protein. Look at someone’s dietary, you’re not eating enough protein. You’re, you know, a perimenopausal woman with insulin resistance, you need to eat more protein. I will actually, when working with diet with people, I will tell them to eat protein first. And I see memes all over the place now.
Speaker0:
[1:06:48] Where it’s like, you know, eating protein is a full-time job. It’s so hard to eat protein. And then you have protein cereal and protein bread and protein pancakes. And it’s usually whey protein that they add to that to get the protein.
Speaker0:
[1:07:01] So Dr. Allie is like, whey is a waste product and it’s, you know, impacting your insulin levels. So avoid it.
Speaker0:
[1:07:10] And then she had a debate with somebody who said, okay, you’re looking at the mechanism. You don’t like that whey has an impact on insulin, but what’s the impact on metabolic health when people consume whey protein? And so there are studies that show either no effect or maybe it’s beneficial. And the reason it would probably be beneficial, me without having looked in depth at the studies, I would assume that adding whey protein would be beneficial because whey protein stimulates muscle synthesis, right just like insulin does but the protein in way and the impact on insulin is a potent stimulator of protein muscle synthesis okay so when you have more muscle that’s going to positively impact your metabolic health especially if you’re strength training, further adding more protein in people who are largely protein deficient because most people are not getting enough protein i mean now maybe they are because protein has become a marketing thing. People are tending not to get enough protein because the guidelines were always to get 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, which we now know is like the minimum to prevent muscle wasting. And it’s not enough to be well muscled. And so we have this epidemic of low muscle and insulin resistance.
Speaker0:
[1:08:34] So yeah, when you start adding protein to people who are protein deficient, doesn’t really even matter where the protein comes from, that’s going to have a positive effect on them, even if it’s stimulating their insulin, because they’re probably stimulating their insulin anyways, if they’re eating like a high starch diet, and then maybe they’re not eating as much starch, because they’re full now, they’re eating protein, so a whole bunch of things. The thing with nutritional science is it is not reductionistic by definition. It’s very, very hard to just change something and get an effect. Like when you have a drug trial, you know nobody starting off a drug trial has taken or ever seen this drug before and then you take half of the participants and you give them the drug and the other half you give a blind placebo right so if there’s an effect you know it’s probably because of the drug especially if it happens to the group that got the drug and not the group that didn’t but when you give even if you’re doing a randomized control trial when you give one group whey protein and the other group let’s say i don’t know just like, I don’t know, a placebo powder, like if they’re deficient in protein, that’s going to have an effect and it’s going to change a whole bunch of stuff. And then adding more protein, which is something that our body requires, it’s not a drug that’s like a novel thing added to your body. It’s like, you know, you’re getting something that has a physiological effect on a lot of different body systems, impacts your behaviors in the way that you eat, and impacts the macronutrient.
Speaker0:
[1:10:00] Makeup of your food because you’re getting protein, right? So, you’re getting extra protein. So, a whole bunch of things happen when you add whey protein. So, I don’t know if it’s fair to say, like, I appreciate knowing that whey protein stimulates insulin because I would rather consume hemp protein or pea protein or a type of protein powder that doesn’t impact my insulin levels because I don’t want to spike my insulin. You know, but after a hard workout, if I really want to like, get jacked, I might do whey protein with like, you know, glucose, to be honest, and get a huge insulin spike, but put that insulin to work building muscle. So there’s a time and a place for it. But what we do know is that so Dr. Ali Chavez kind of like, you know, you don’t need that much protein. But there is quite a bit of research around the importance of protein. So, you know, 30 to 50 grams of protein per meal. And again, you don’t need 50 grams at a meal, but 30 is great. Stimulates muscle protein synthesis, and that supports our metabolic health. It regulates our blood sugar, partly yes, because it does impact our insulin. But if you’re having just animal protein, it’s not having a huge impact on insulin levels.
Speaker0:
[1:11:15] And, you know, the more muscle we have on our body, the more longevity we have, you know, the less our risk of dying from anything. Muscle is a glucose sink, so it soaks up glucose at rest, but really goes into overdrive at soaking up glucose when you’ve just worked out. And in fact, you don’t need insulin to bring your glucose down when your muscles are working. So this is the advice where you take a walk after dinner, you start working your muscles and you don’t eat even insulin to get the glucose into the muscles and store it as muscle glycogen. Further, we store about 400 grams of carbohydrate as muscle glycogen. It’s a huge like reservoir of glucose that doesn’t have to go into fat cells, doesn’t have to overstuff them. So the more muscle you have, the better glucose sink you have. And then you have this quick burning energy.
Speaker0:
[1:12:08] So the more muscle you have the better and you need protein to you need two things to stimulate it when you’re at an adult you need um protein so lysine specifically branching amino acid and you need resistance training so you need to like have a stimulus on your muscle to to create muscle um and we know there’s lots and lots of studies on protein forward diets so diets that deliver about 0.8 to one gram per pound, not kilogram of ideal body weight per day. So it’s almost double the previous recommendations of 0.8 grams per kilogram. So we’re saying 0.8 to one gram per pound. I just aim for one gram per pound of body weight. And so if you distribute that over the course of a day, a course of across three meals, then maybe, yeah, if my ideal weight is 150 pounds, and I’m trying to stimulate muscle and decrease body fat, then yeah, I’m probably aiming for about 50 grams per meal.
Speaker0:
[1:13:11] You know, there’s studies shown by Dr. Cabot-Leon that are like not new studies from the early 2000s, where when, you know, people had like a bigger protein breakfast, a decent protein lunch, a decent protein dinner, versus a group that had like a really crappy low-protein breakfast, and their biggest meal was dinner, they lost more body fat, lost less lean mass when they were engaging calorie restriction. And there, you know, there’s another study that shows, you know, low-protein diet, low-protein plus exercise, high-protein diet, high-protein plus exercise. And the best group, of course, was high-protein and exercise, but the second best was high-protein.
Speaker0:
[1:13:54] In terms of body fat lost and lean mass preserved. So a lot of benefits to having protein. Does that mean go eat like protein cereal? Honestly, like my answer to the memes where it’s like, I’m working overtime trying to get enough protein. My answer to that is like, just eat meat. Just eat meat. We’re so scared of meat. If you eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, you’ll get enough protein if you eat like a decent serving you know a five ounce serving at every meal or if you’re tofu and edamame those are great too and you can also do hemp protein powder or collagen powder um it’s collagen is not a complete protein but who cares when you’re mixing it up with other you don’t need to worry about complete protein when you’re getting complete protein across your day in my opinion um so yeah when you’re doing a low insulin lifestyle because really all you have is like animal foods and fruit and vegetable you’re naturally probably going to eat more protein because what are you going to put in your burrito bowl um you can’t put rice in there can’t put tortilla so you’re going to probably put a lot of ground beef uh maybe you’re going to put um a bunch of different salad ingredients avocado and yeah so the savory the salty is going to come from the ground beef and so then you’re getting enough protein.
Speaker0:
[1:15:13] And you know people always ask about people are scared of animal protein and i think it’s because of this, again, all the brainwashing and gaslighting that we’ve had from the 1970s on about having a high-carb diet and not eating animal. And the fact is, our diet is largely plant-based in North America. And it’s, that’s not, turns out, plant-based isn’t the right heuristic for a healthy diet. A plant-based diet that’s like made of whole foods, sure, that could be good for you. Um but it’s probably going to be heavier on starch and if it’s not then you have a very limited amount of protein foods to draw from so yeah it is possible to do a low insulin lifestyle on a vegetarian or vegan diet it’s just your your protein sources are going to be very very limited and then maybe yeah you should definitely be doing hemp protein powders and things like that if you want to try it um but fun fact is somebody who i was really like watching.
Speaker0:
[1:16:10] What’s her name it’s a health influencer that is like a fruititarian so all she consumes is or like raw raw fully raw christina so she has these beautiful like platters of fruit she gets to eat all this food because all she so she is doing a low insulin lifestyle vegans vegan version lots of nuts and seeds and fruits and vegetables so uh she’s just not eating any animal product and she’s surviving but I think she started adding protein powder in recently um so yeah so very interesting um.
Speaker0:
[1:16:44] You know, kind of debate that happened. But I think that, you know, we definitely want to eat enough protein. And I, you know, in my course, I suggest, you know, starting with protein first, because the thing with that is, you know, it’s less about restriction, which can be really helpful, especially if you, so if you struggle with insulin resistance, chances are you’ve done a diet before, you know, because if you have difficulty losing weight, you’ve probably tried something to try and lose weight, whether it was fasting, whether it was Weight Watchers, whether it was something. So you’ve done restriction before, you’ve counted calories, you’ve tracked your macros, you’ve done something like that. So telling you to eat less of something, I mean, yeah, that’s helpful, especially if it’s like don’t eat any starch, particularly if you have really strong insulin resistance.
Speaker0:
[1:17:36] But, you know, I like to suggest protein forward first, because it feels less restrictive, you’re focused on eating something, you can always eat it at the end of the day if you you know weren’t focused like you can always have like a protein smoothie or something at the end of the day or a steak if you’re like i didn’t i didn’t you know follow it today or had a busy day versus like having to reverse, overeating or eating something that you weren’t allowed to so it has this, positive frame. And it will displace other macronutrients in other foods. You feel more satiate, your blood sugar is more stable, your brain has, you know, more continuous glucose control. It increases tyrosine, which increases dopamine, which supports motivation, reduces cravings, supports executive functioning. There’s all these positive benefits to adding protein. and so it’s not the only thing it’s not just protein and nothing else it’s just my first step often when patients come in and we need to start working on lifestyle foundations, lifestyle foundations are it’s hard to get someone to do big changes right away.
Speaker0:
[1:18:47] Um in my course too we talk about like what happens when you have to eat out what happens when you go to someone’s house what happens how do you say no to people who offer you their pecan pie you know so there’s a lot but if your if your goal their first goal is just to increase protein it’s like you can hand you can navigate all of that stuff you know you just focus on protein and just see what changes and that’s like a good way to start thinking about food and tracking food and not thinking about restriction and then you’re not hungry so you don’t have that same association of like i’m gonna do a thing to be healthy and it’s gonna result in me being, frigging hungry, which was my association my entire life. So on the low insulin list, I don’t find that I’m hungry, actually, I’m very satiated. But, you know, it can be something to wrap your head around to be like, I can’t have starch. So what’s starch in? And what can I eat? And what’s the list? And what’s the grocery? So what am I going to, how am I going to have tortillas? How am I going to do this? So Dr. Ali Chavali uses a lot of almond flour. But yeah, so I think protein has a very important place in supporting metabolic health.
Speaker0:
[1:19:49] Now putting it all together um you know so i think when a patient comes in the first thing is we do an assessment we may do some testing and we come up with an individualized plan right so, yeah you can take this and run with it you can just google the foods but again it’s like no starch no sugar no unfermented dairy and then you can have you know all the fruits and vegetables all the animal protein. I will say that a patient that I saw recently, you know, she was like, she’s like, I’m going through perimenopause. I have brain fog. I have no energy. I’ve got all of these symptoms. I’m gaining weight and I can’t lose it. I just, I feel like garbage. My mental health is terrible. And I just, I want to, you know, rehaul my health. And so we talked with the low insulin lifestyle because she had other signs of insulin resistance.
Speaker0:
[1:20:46] We didn’t measure insulin, but we definitely have a plan to do that. Cost is a factor in terms of blood testing. And we want to just test everything together. So she already had a lot of signs of insulin resistance. She had high triglycerides, low HDL or good cholesterol, some inflammatory markers, and actually was starting to get elevated hemoglobin A1C or blood sugar was starting to go up. So it was kind of in the at-risk range. So, okay, we, you know, we don’t have a baseline insulin test, but let’s go ahead with, you know, treating insulin resistance. So, I recommended low insulin lifestyle. She was already doing lots of strength training, had a good exercise routine. And she came back and she’s like, I feel amazing. Within three days, everything transformed. My symptoms are all better. What are you eating? And she’s like, well, I’m eating quinoa every day and I’m eating lentils every day.
Speaker0:
[1:21:38] So, and I’m eating chickpeas. so you don’t have to be perfect in other words is that um you know so there’s an individualized approach i didn’t have the heart to tell her that those foods were not didn’t belong on the plan but if it’s working why be more restrictive right if you can have there’s lots of benefits to having lentils lentils have iron they have fiber they have there’s another protein source quinoa it creates variety you’re allowed you feel better because you can eat these different foods you can replace rice with it.
Speaker0:
[1:22:08] You know, I like this lentil flatbread that I make. So if you don’t need to be that restrictive, if you don’t need to do zero starch, then great. So we’re looking kind of at an individualized plan. Like, what are you already eating? How can we tweak things? Maybe we start with more protein. Maybe we start removing some starches. Maybe it’s just sugar that we deal with. Maybe we say, you know what, don’t worry about fruit. Eat all the fruit you want. In fact, when you eat fruit, it’s helping address a sugar craving and then you’re craving candy less and you’re having less binges. We’re looking at the individual and we’re bringing all the features together. So yes, you can just try a diet on your own. That’s great. But I am always concerned that it just becomes another diet that we try. And then we meet the same internal or external obstacles and we feel bad about ourselves and that triggers that shame and that triggers that that feeling of defeat and you cheat on it and you don’t have someone to help you reframe that that it’s not a cheat it’s just like okay like whatever you know so you know how do we approach this individually is is always so important um i think my face is covering it but essentially the low insulin lifestyle is no starch and sugar you know increasing protein fat and fiber and strength training two to three times a week so adding in strength training supporting muscle building.
Speaker0:
[1:23:34] That’s very important, right, is building that muscle. There’s a whole section on muscle and exercise in my insulin resistance course. Diet, yes, is really important, but it only has one, it’s only one core, like one part of the course. And then a huge part of my course is on stress management and like regular movement, lifestyle, like, you know, stuff that supports your mental health. Again, it’s like, yeah, insulin resistance is good for your mental, healthy insulin levels supports your mental health but supporting your mental health like with these self-care practices like for me it’s getting out in nature practicing hobbies socializing reducing your stress getting to sleep on time sleep support um all of that is also good for your stress levels which is good for your insulin levels so you can like reverse these vicious cycles you lower your inflammation, maybe there’s certain supplements that can help right if you’re not sleeping supplements for sleep, if you have sugar cravings, there are supplements that can support that. Supplements for muscle health.
Speaker0:
[1:24:37] Again, I say this in my course too. I mean, interestingly, I’m a huge advocate for lifestyle. I think it’s lifestyle really that is going to have the biggest impact on our health. And a lot of it requires a little bit of an entire reframe, right? Especially if we’re living in a chronic disease state, like insulin resistance, and especially if it’s been longstanding, then yeah there’s a lot of connections and associations and identity patterns even that need to change and that’s scary and that’s huge and because we’re social creatures and we’re we’re not just biological creatures we’re social and we don’t like eat in isolation and we are a product of you know the people around us and how they and how healthy they are and how they behave that just going on of, you know, changing your lifestyle, not that easy. It’s an entire identity shift oftentimes. It’s huge habit change, you know. So supplements often are a way to get people’s nutrient levels up where they feel better, where their body works better. And that can be positive motivation for and physical energy, you know.
Speaker0:
[1:25:51] Positive mental and emotional and physical energy and motivation to make some changes, you know, whether it’s going for walks, because now you’re not so exhausted, because you slept better, or you just, your adrenals are functioning better, your brain is functioning better. So now you can make decisions like going for a walk after dinner, and now you can eat more protein, that makes you feel better. And then you think, well, okay, nothing, you know, I still would like to, I still have visceral fat, I’m still experiencing X, Y, and Z symptoms, So maybe I’ll consider now reducing my starch or taking out starches, right? So there’s so many approaches and ways in, you know?
Speaker0:
[1:26:29] And I think in a huge part of my course was around self-compassion and shame and addressing obstacles, you know, so individually, what is helpful to you? Where do you start on the journey? Like, what’s important for you? What is your blood work say? What is, you know, waist circumference, all these different things? Like, what’s your starting point? What do you already do that’s working for you? What are you doing that might not be working for you? And a lot of it, you don’t know, right? Like, a lot of it is we don’t know. And there’s so much confusion in the nutritional space and you know protein no protein starch no starch bananas no bananas can I eat fruit can I not what about nuts what about seeds what’s this portion oh it’s just about your macros actually it doesn’t matter just calories in calories out.
Speaker0:
[1:27:13] There’s so much and so all of that could be true for a specific person right maybe for one person it is calories that’s the thing now you know you’ve done you know all of these different things and that’s where you’re stuck. It really actually may be we need to just track calories, you know? It’s probably not the majority of people, but I, you know, it could be that person. But maybe that person’s not interested in tracking calories, that that’s highly triggering, unpleasant.
Speaker0:
[1:27:40] Like if you’re like me, you don’t want anything to do with that anymore. So what else could we try? You know, do you do better by just saying, okay, like, again, I’m talking about myself, no starch, no sugar, you know, no way. Okay, perfect. Just tell me what I can’t eat and I won’t eat it and that’s fine. Um, so, you know, what works for the person? Um, or is it like, you know, your nutrition is dialed in, but you don’t move and that’s what we need to work on.
Speaker0:
[1:28:07] Or is it a case of, you know, again, nutrient deficiencies are big. Um, I see them a lot in my practice and they will be an obstacle to feeling better, you know, um, zinc deficiencies or B6 deficiencies or, you know. So, yeah, so there’s an entirely holistic approach, essentially, in which we’re addressing things.
Speaker0:
[1:28:35] And yeah, so that’s it, everyone. So if you have questions, reach out, connect at tallyandeed.com. If you’re following on YouTube, like and subscribe, please. I have lots of ideas. I have lots of plans. And I think, you know, subscribers, questions, engagement would really help me with the execution. I’m happy that I released this. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. April has been quite the month. It’s been terrible, quite frankly. But the foundation of low-insulin lifestyle and movement have actually been very helpful for me, keeping me afloat.
Speaker0:
[1:29:16] So I think that’s, you know, I can say that when put into practice, it works. It’s possible to, at your lowest point, follow this lifestyle, and it helps, you know. And again, these are all things that I like to work with people on. You know, if you’re at your lowest point, like what’s the minimum that you can do? Like how do we get you out of it? How do we help you out of rock bottom? You know? And then, and this is a huge thing in psychotherapy is like people often come in with a rock bottom kind of chronic problem that distracts them from the deeper work that they want to actually do. Like, you know, examining childhood patterns and, you know, our schemas, things that we, you know, we have like our kind of chronic surface problem so that we don’t go into the deeper traumas that, you know, influence us and keep us stuck. So a lot of cool stuff. I know the economy is scary, but if you have benefits in Ontario, in Quebec.
Speaker0:
[1:30:23] And I believe Nova Scotia for psychotherapy. Yeah, reach out. I am offering naturopathic medicine and psychotherapy in Ontario and other provinces that my psychotherapy license is good in. And yeah, I would love to work with you. If you have benefits, use them because this is how we get out of tough times is with support and help. And, yeah, I know that, yeah, it’s scary to spend money, but if you have it covered, I would suggest going for it. I’d love to help. Yeah. Like I said, I’m going to look into offering membership and a course, like a very holistic course. I released one back in 2020, I think, called Good Mood Foundations. And so I’m looking at making Good Mood Foundations 2.0. And this Good Mood Foundations is going to have sections on nervous system regulation, self-compassion, attentiveness and observation when it comes to our body, as well as nutrition, lifestyle. We’re going to talk about the microbiome. We’re going to talk about hormones and menopause. Like, it’s going to be truly holistic.
Speaker0:
[1:31:42] And, you know, it’s my way of allowing you to access this information and walking you kind of through my brain for a very low price if you don’t have coverage. Or just if you need support. You need, like, more information. You like to digest more information. you know it’s hard to get it all from just one-to-one sessions because we have limited time together so you get that individual support where we’re like really getting into the nitty gritty but maybe you want kind of the overview that you can consume on your own and maybe you want a community so you know give me suggestions i run my courses right now from thrive cart um i would love to get like a community membership thing going so we’ll talk more about that soon, and I’m going to be writing a lot more. So yeah, make sure that you’re in my email list because that’s where I’m going to reach out to you about new things that are coming up and writings and things like that. So thank you for listening. Let me know your questions and comments, you know, leave a comment below or reach out at connect at taliand.com. If you live in Ontario, I’d love to work with you. Take care, everybody.
