What is Insulin and How does it Affect Blood Sugar and Fat Loss?

Importance of Hormones in personal training

It seems everyone concentrates on the role diet and exercise play in our health and wellbeing, but forget the importance of hormones in the team effort.  In this article I’m going to be discussing the hormone insulin, what it is, how it relates to diabetes, and how it can be manipulated to help us lose fat and live longer.

What is Insulin?

Insulin is a hormone that helps us absorb nutrients from our food.  Whenever we eat carbs (and a little bit when we eat protein) the amount of sugar in our blood increases, and the pancreas releases insulin to help take the sugar out of the bloodstream and into our organs (mostly the liver and muscle cells) where it can be used for energy.  

What is Insulin Sensitivity?

Doing a lot of something can make you less sensitive to its effects, right?  Drinking coffee all the time can dull the caffeine, regular drinkers need more alcohol to get a buz. Eating carbs too often (especially simple ones, like sugars), can make us less sensitive to insulin (or more “insulin resistant”) When that happens, we need to produce more insulin than we should need to in order to keep blood sugar stable. BAD!  If insulin sensitivity becomes poor, we have trouble digesting carbs and absorbing nutrients. The result, weight gain. The pancreas needs to create more and more insulin because of the increased sensitivity.  Eventually, it’s unable to release the hormone properly, which leads to type 2 diabetes

Stay tuned for  next week: 6 tips for improving insulin sensitivity and increasing fat loss

Written By: Shannon ACSM-cpt

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