To Eat or not to eat?
If you’re trying to build your best body, insulin is one of the most important hormones you need to understand. It is the body’s top anabolic hormone; the key to unlocking the door of the cells to allow the nutrients do their nourishing job. While insulin is famous for its fat storing effects, the hormone itself is responsible for nutrient delivery paramount in recovery and growth.
From all major classes of macronutrients, only carbohydrates stimulate insulin release. However, the hormone delivers all nutrients that tag along. This means that insulin drives all proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals throughout the body and drops them off gradually at the needed places. Without this hormone, our bodies would not be able to process nutrients and therefore would have no energy for movement, growth, repair or other functions. The more insulin present, the more nutrients are likely to reach and nourish the cells. This is why stimulating insulin and eating carbohydrates has such a potent anabolic effect.
The confusing part about insulin is its balancing act in the body. In reality, it is essentially a storage hormone with one purpose in mind — take the goods and park them in the body. If your body has too little insulin, then you can’t get any energising nutrients into your cells. On the other hand, too much insulin will not only prevent you from getting rid of that spare tyre covering your midsection, but will make sure that every calorie you eat goes into the fat depot. In this case you are setting the stage for insulin resistance, formerly known as Syndrome X.
What is insulin resistance?
Not all experts agree on the definition of insulin resistance or whether it even exists as a distinct medical condition. Doctors have talked about a constellation of several pre-diabetes risk factors for years and have called it many names, including Syndrome X and Metabolic Syndrome. Whatever it’s called, this collection of risk factors is apparently becoming more prevalent.
‘Syndrome X’ was coined in 1988 by Stanford University Professor of Medicine Gerald Reave. He was the first to actually make the connection between cardiovascular effects and poor insulin function, as happens in many diabetics. Syndrome X traits include high blood pressure, abnormalities in the amount and properties of certain blood fats and in blood clotting factors. Together, these are believed to contribute significantly to the unusually high rate of death from heart disease (roughly 75 per cent) among diabetics.
These metabolic imbalances have seemed to work simultaneously not just in diabetics, but also in people without blood-sugar problems. Very soon it was agreed that Syndrome X is a gigantic metabolic chaos, which makes getting and using energy a challenging and unpleasant experience.
It wasn’t until three years later when a report by the National Cholesterol Education Program at the National Institutes of Health recognised this cluster of risks and put the emphasis on obesity as a central component.
The Syndrome X probably didn’t sound right, as it is a some kind of alien agent, so it was renamed as the Metabolic Syndrome. Many endocrinologists prefer a different name for the condition: Insulin Resistance Syndrome.
What are the symptoms of insulin resistance?
There are no outward physical signs of insulin resistance. Generally, people with this condition have a tendency towards lower metabolic rates and carry less metabolically active tissues, such as lean muscles. Currently, the Metabolic Syndrome may be diagnosed in people who have three to five of the following risk factors:
- Elevated waist circumference: 100 cm or more for men; 90 cm or more for women
- Elevated triglycerides: 150 mg/dL or higher
- Reduced HDL (‘good’) cholesterol: less than 40 mg/dL in men; less than 50 mg/dL in women
- Elevated blood pressure: 130/85 mm Hg or higher
- Elevated fasting glucose: 100 mg/dL or higher
Some experts believe doctors should also look carefully for high levels of C-reactive protein which marks the inflammation. Fibrinogen, a protein that signals the body to form or break down blood clots, may be another possible risk factor of the syndrome to add to the mix.
When you see the guys who work out for years and never look ripped, that’s likely insulin resistance. One puzzling factor about insulin resistance is that being overweight does not mean you have pre-diabetes or don’t respond to carbohydrates very well. Many diabetics are very skinny. This brings out more questions to be answered. How come healthy active way of living wracks havoc on metabolism?
How insulin resistance develops is terribly interesting. There are two concepts behind it — when you eat too much and when you eat too little. To explain the concept of insulin resistance, I will spark your imagination.
Sugar highs and insulin resistance
Think of your pancreas as a bus. Insulin is the bus driver, your nutrients as passengers and your body cells are bus stops. When the bus is full, your blood sugar levels are high. By dropping off passengers at every stop, the bus driver, insulin, does a great job at lowering your glucose levels. That’s all good, because glucose hanging about in the blood is dangerous stuff. It can stick to proteins and destroy them. The more carbs you eat, the faster they are digested and the greater blood sugar elevation — the more insulin is needed.
If you eat faster and more than needed, the calories you just eat are not immediately used by the body: they will be converted to sugars and stored in the form of glycogen. The body has two storage sites for glycogen: the liver and the muscles. The liver, which weighs approximately two kilograms, can hold only 100 grams of glycogen, an equivalent of 300 to 400 calories. When the liver stores are filled and there is still excess insulin-carried glucose present in the blood, the next stop for carbohydrates would be your muscles. These can hold a bit more and the amount varies depending on how much lean mass you’ve got and how hungry it is. Yes, muscles get hungry for sugars, especially if there is recovery taking place after exercise!
Glycogen forms the principal reserve of carbohydrate storage energy, which powers your massive needs for workouts or for brain function. It is the prime fuel for energy in anaerobic bodybuilding exercises like weightlifting and strength training. When the energy is needed for such things as physical activity, or for rebuilding muscle cells, you will dip into these reservoirs of sugars and get them working for you. If as a bodybuilder you would like to keep your muscles pumped up all the time with loads of energy during workouts, then you must strive to stockpile your glycogen reserves.
All the sugars you eat to this point are doing your body good. But if there is still more insulin-carried blood glucose after the liver and muscle tissue have taken in all they can handle, the excess will be rapidly stored in extra-muscular fat cells.
Eating too much and too often puts the pancreas under a lot of pressure as the system can’t keep up with food processing at such a fast pace. The pancreas is not designed for insulin mass production, but there is no way around it: the pancreas just puts out more insulin. This combination of surplus energy and high insulin is nasty and gives this incredible anabolic hormone a bad reputation. Excess insulin is a powerful growth factor and causes DNA to turn over more frequently and disturbs other hormonal systems.
After a while, your cells become so overwhelmed with too much sugars and insulin that they shut their receptors and refuse to take in anything. The pancreas figures out that if the amount of insulin is not enough to drive all the excess energy into the cells, it just puts out some more storage hormone. Soon you lose the natural sensitivity to insulin and stop responding to incoming calories the way you should. Cells become insulin-resistant because they are trying to protect themselves from the toxic effects of sugars and high insulin. They down-regulate their receptor activity and de-activate the number of receptors so that they don’t have to be subjected to all that stimuli all the time.
With over-eating you literally train your system to manufacture insulin amounts so large that it would probably be enough to save a small village of diabetics. This is nasty because chronic elevation of insulin can increase the rate of transport of all calories from fats, especially fats, but also protein and carbs into fat cells.
So, the first road to insulin resistance begins with overeating and overproduction of insulin. After a period of time, when insulin-receptive cells decrease their sensitivity to the hormone, your metabolism gets screwed big time. Regardless of how little you eat the body becomes one big fat sponge! In fact, that is the big problem with most people in the world of plenty today — most of us spend every day with insulin levels that are far too high. This is a typical result of high-calorie weight gain diets. And the long-term effects are ugly.
The worst case scenario for someone trying to pack on muscle while minimising fat gain is to have high blood levels of carbs, fat, and insulin at the same time. For these guys, frequent high-energy snacks are the under-cover agents from the enemy camp because they force the body to constantly produce more insulin than the cells can recognise.
This doesn’t make too much sense at first if you recall: “Eat more often to avoid insulin resistance!” or “No less that five meals a day, plus snacks, is the only way to strip fat, get ripped, build strength, blah, blah, blah...” That is correct — eat more often, but don’t eat more food than you need more often! Remember, your system is capable of processing only limited amounts of nutrients at once. This depends on the rate of hormonal and enzymatic secretions, how other hormones function, whether you’ve been exercising or resting, your age, gender, and whether your specific body needs. Exposing the liver to insulin for long periods without a decent break means insulin is up, way up around the clock, and so are the fats in the blood.
Sugar lows and insulin resistance
The second road to insulin resistance is really surprising. It comes from dieting and exercising. You read it right — the two most important indicators of healthy lifestyle predispose you to insulin resistance. Dieting is very catabolic; and so is exercise.
In order to keep your muscles from wasting as well as for muscle growth to occur, insulin must be constantly present in the body so that amino acids and glucose can move into the muscle tissue. This means two things — if you want to build lean tissues, your need for nutrients goes up. And after the workout these needs are elevated even more.
Let’s see what happens when you train. During your workout, your body extracts glycogen as stored carbohydrates from your muscle cells as one of its primary fuel sources for hoisting that bar into the air. The muscles of the typical bodybuilder have around 150 grams of sugars per kilogram of lean mass stored as glycogen. After a strenuous high-intensity workout you lose about 40 per cent of this valuable fuel.
This is the best time to put simple fast-absorbing sugars to work and capitalise on insulin sensitivity. The key message for you to remember is that your muscles are the most sensitive to insulin and all nutrient uptake in the first 45 minutes after exercise. All the glucose and proteins which come in at this time will be synthesised for muscle proteins and muscle glycogen with the help of insulin. Even excess calories will find an outstanding use for repairing ligaments, tendons, supporting immune cells and providing foundation for other anabolic and anti-catabolic hormones.
If you eat sufficient amount of carbohydrates immediately after a workout, you may be able to restore as much as 75 per cent of the muscle glycogen lost. And you don’t even need any additional supplements for this — just a good insulin spike from the simple nutrients. From then on, you should be able to maintain your anabolic environment with frequent meals of lean proteins, good fats and complex starches.
Researchers found that the ability of the muscle cell to replenish glycogen stores is 50 per cent less two hours after exercise than immediately after. In fact, when bodybuilders drank a shake of protein and carbohydrates within the first 30 minutes after the usual ‘adios’ from the gym, muscle protein synthesis was elevated 300 per cent, but when the supplement was delayed by three hours, the elevation in synthesis was only 12 per cent. From this you can tell that muscle is much more sensitive to insulin early in the recovery period. If you pass this first golden hour of nourishing opportunity, you lose your chance to make the most out of the potential gains. If you don’t replace muscle glycogen following your workout, your muscle cells won’t be able to repair themselves at optimum levels and you may actually experience muscle loss, or at least less than desired results.
What happens if you don’t supply the deprived cells of their nourishment over and over again? They starve and eventually decide that since no food is coming, there is no point to prepare the ‘nutrient-welcoming’ door, thus will not become receptive to the nutrient uptake. And then when you eat again, the cells get confused. “What the heck?” say the muscles, “We are working hard enough to keep the essentials and have managed so well without you giving us energy. And now you are feeding us? Is it a treat or a threat?” Unsure what’s happening, the pancreas doesn’t get the full story either and just starts pumping out more Insulin. In other words, Insulin sensitivity gets lost somewhere in the dieting loop.
Same thing happens if you do not eat often enough — that is, if your meals are more than about four hours apart. Cell replenishment extends beyond the window immediately after training. You need to continue replenishing glycogen stores in the liver and muscles. Because digestion and metabolism of food is not eternal, your insulin, amino acid, and blood sugar levels will gradually drop off. Without enough insulin present, growth ceases until such a time as you take in adequate carbohydrates and complete protein. This will again cause an appropriate amount of insulin release to open muscle receptor sites.
Running on subliminal energy levels and forcing your body to burn fat and lean tissue just to keep going reduces insulin sensitivity. In other words, eating too little is just as bad as eating too much when it comes to developing insulin resistance.
Just like over-feeding, long-term weight-loss diets create fertile foundation for insulin resistance. Regardless, if you become insulin-resistant, your cells — especially the muscle cells — don’t respond to the anabolic effects of normal levels of insulin. If this is the case, the body is forced to release massive amounts of the hormone, a lot more than it normally would, to promote nutrient storage in the resistant cells. Remember, though, that chronic high levels of insulin in the blood are very bad and can cause Type-2 diabetes.
Once insulin receptors get lazy, they will stop the sugar-load in the form of valuable glycogen and make it easier on your system — store these as fat. When your hormones are out of whack, you may be plagued by recurrent hunger and cravings, mood swings, lethargy, obesity, poor athletic performance, training failures, loss of endurance and power, shortened life span, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, a suppressed immune system and many other chronic diseases.
Maintaining correct insulin levels is a tightrope walk that needs to be negotiated with a keen eye on both diet and exercise. IM
