The first step in insulin resistance is fatty deposits in the liver. At this stage, it's not too big of a problem, as there aren't that many symptoms. Maybe you're carrying around a few extra pounds, but there's nothing major going wrong, so you keep on eating the way you always have.
Next comes insulin resistance in the muscles.
At this point, you begin to seriously put on weight. You begin experiencing:
- glycogen storage issues and symptoms
- blood glucose problems
- excess blood fats
- and tiredness
Sometimes your ill health is enough to cause you to change your lifestyle. To go on a diet. To get up off of the sofa and exercise.
But sometimes, it's not.
Sometimes, you rationalize all of your health problems away in an attempt to justify your current, unhealthy lifestyle.
You blame the excess weight on age.
You blame your inability to stay on a diet on your food addictions and social behavior.
You say that you don't care that you've put on a few extra pounds, and that being overweight is normal in our current society.
Who wants to look like Twiggy, anyway?
If you keep on eating the way you always have, if you keep on embracing your sedentary ways, all of those excess calories have got to go somewhere.
And while you may, or may not be overeating in food volume, the liver and muscle glycogen dysfunction is serious enough to either make you go from overweight to obese, with all of those extra health issues, or turn you into what's known as metabolic syndrome.
How Metabolic Syndrome is Born
Now we come to the end of the road of insulin resistance, where even the fat cells begin to rebel because their job isn't to continuously fill themselves up with fats.
Fat cell function is to switch between fatty acid uptake, and release.
Their function is to buffer the flux of fatty acids in the circulation in the face of dietary input of fatty acids. The role of the fat cells is to absorb fatty acids when there are too many around, then release them when they are scarce.
But if they're never scarce, if the buffering capacity gets overwhelmed by consistent intake of dietary fats over and above the rate of oxidation, all of those fats have got to go somewhere.
And that somewhere is the liver, muscles, pancreas, and adipose tissues; thus overeating eventually causes full body insulin resistance.
As fat cells fill up with triglyceride, they become resistant to insulin, causing even more triglyceride to build up in the bloodstream and body organs.
Hence, the birth of metabolic syndrome.
Not a good thing as far as heart disease, stroke, and other fat-related diseases are concerned.
Low-Carb Works Great for Insulin Resistant Fat Cells
This is the point where quite a few folks decide that they want to enter into the low-carb lifestyle.
And as far as low carbing goes, total body insulin resistance is a good position to be in, especially if you have only a moderate amount of weight to lose because at this point in the progression, the body is no longer in fat storage mode.
Since the fat cells can't see the insulin in your bloodstream, there's nothing to hinder weight loss.
So when you eliminate most of the carbs from your diet, regardless of the level of basal insulin you have, the fat just falls off of you.
Atkins' Magic.
Metabolic Advantage.
Whatever you want to call it, the results of being resistant to insulin at the level of the fat cells seems to defy the laws of Thermodynamics.
You lose weight very, very easily -- and quickly.
And if it's your first time of attempting a low-carb diet, you can get very good results with any of the low-carb programs, provided you stick with it, change your lifestyle, and make it all the way to goal weight before stopping.
At which point, you then move into the maintenance program for life.
Easy peasy.
But, not everyone chooses to do that.
Some of you didn't understand the consequences for not turning low-carb into a lifestyle the first time that you tried it.
That was me.
Some of you left the movement for various reasons, good or bad, only to find that upon your return, your body didn't work quite the same way as it did before.
That was me, too.
Some still found magic, just a little bit slower. And some found absolutely no metabolic advantage at all.
An Apology
I want to apologize here for being so cynical regarding low carbing lately.
I just really want to figure all of this out, what is actually happening to me, so that I can make the adjustments I need to make to finally reach a healthy weight.
All of the research I've done on insulin resistance lately points to the fact that the problem I'm having with a low-carb, high-fat diet not working for me, might not be because low-carb itself doesn't work.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that low-carb the first or second time around healed the adipose tissue insulin resistance, which then made it harder to lose the weight from thereon in.
Maybe the reason why I've had to lower my fat and calorie intake almost from the very start of my journey this time around is because I'm battling liver and muscle insulin resistance, rather than total body insulin resistance.
And as a result, dietary fat and overall calories matter more than they otherwise would.
I don't know. What do YOU think?
*NOTE: When this post was written in 2010, I didn't know that I had celiac disease and Graves' disease. Both conditions bring about a starvation response to dieting and malnutrition.
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