The insulin story is very critical.
A moderate amount of insulin is good and a lot can be bad – very bad. So insulin’s role is a storage hormone and when you eat more carbohydrates will result in more insulin production. Insulin delivers nutrients to all cells and this includes to the liver, muscle and fat cells.
Our system was designed that the cell receptors use insulin as a key to unlock pores within the membrane of each cell. With the cell door open, nutrients can then be stored inside the cell. It’s an elegant way for cells to gather the nutrients they need and also to eliminate excess glucose from the bloodstream (note: excess glucose is highly toxic) and store it as fuel for a later date.
You see when you produce too much insulin over a period of time, as happens on a modern diet that’s high in refined carbohydrates and processed foods, so many things can go terribly wrong.
First, muscle and liver cells aren’t able to store a whole lot of glycogen (the stored form of glucose), so it’s easy to exceed storage capacity.
The average person can only store a total of about 400 grams of glycogen in liver and muscle tissue.
When your liver and muscles become filled with glycogen, any glucose remaining in the bloodstream that isn’t used in real time by your brain or muscles (such as during an intense workout) gets stored into triglycerides in the liver and sent to fat cells for storage.
When blood insulin levels are high, those same fat cells store not only the excess glucose but the fat you ate at your last meal.
Moreover, high insulin signals the fat cells to hold on to the fat and not release it for energy. If the pattern of high-insulin-generating meals continue, fat cells swell up and you gain weight.
Eventually, especially among people who don’t exercise much, muscles and liver cells start to become insulin resistant – their receptors become desensitised to insulin’s nutrient storage signals.
Inactive people generally have plenty of muscle and liver glycogen stored at all times; because they are unpractised at burning energy and are inefficient at restocking energy from dietary nutrients, insulin takes ingested carbohydrates and fats on an express train, passing right through the liver to their ultimate destination in fat cells.
This is why it’s so important to reduce the amount of refined carbohydrates, load up on fresh foods without any additives and sugars. Unfortunately we live in a fast world promoting fast foods, delivering us fast health concerns….
To your health
Kerrie
Professional health, fitness and wellbeing coach.
