Insulin and Glucagon The Tag Team Wrestlers of the Hormone World!
I have a lot of people, some very close to me, who are constantly asking me about weight loss. It's really tough. I want so badly to help them, but most just aren't ready to make the changes necessary to lose the weight they desire.
However, that doesn't stop me from trying to learn as much as I can about ways to unlock healthy habits and well-being. Further, I’m always looking for ways to help those who ask for it.
If you happen to be one of those people who want to lose weight, but you've pretty much narrowed it down to calorie restriction or exercise to make it happen, this is for you.
You have to know something about your body. It was not made for the habitat we live in. Let that sink in for a moment. Your-body-was-not-made-for-the-habitat-you currently live in. So what do I mean by this?
I've been researching this buzz phrase of 'ancestral living.' It's being made popular by all sorts of people, most notably Mark Sisson, founder of Primal Health as well as Ben Greenfield and many others.. Intermittent fasting is said to be effective because it mimics how our ancient ancestors ate.
Well, that's all well and good, but why did they eat this way? That seems to be the more important question. Further, why does our body react the way it does to this sort of eating? Why does our body seem to work best when we temporarily starve it?
When you start to answer these questions, you can then unlock the answers to how you should manage your food intake as well as exercise. The most important being the food side. Oh, and another thing. Stop thinking in terms of when you can’t eat. Don’t think about things you can’t eat. Instead reframe your thoughts around food. Think about the times you can eat. Then consider what you will eat and why. Make your food have a targeted purpose. Are you eating to store energy? Are you eating to offset something you will have later such as carbs and you want to minimize the glucose spike they can cause? Have a purpose for your eating beyond hunger and pleasure.
Let’s take a look at our body from an evolutionary perspective. What was our body created to do? Anyone...anyone??? Survive. That's it. Our bodies were made to survive. Our brains, our organs, all of it. The primary function of the body you enjoy is to survive.
How does it do this? Well, there are parts of the brain, hormones, neurosensors, nerve endings, your eyes, your feet all of which play a role in job numero uno of the human species-survival.
I want to focus specifically on the things at play when we eat. So let's travel back to around 2000 B.C. If we were to meet our prehistoric self we’d find we are much different eaters. We were hunter gatherers. We went out, hunted for game. If we were lucky we'd score some chow, bring it back to the cave and feast.
Here's what happened during that process. First, we burned a significant amount of calories just getting to the food. Then we burned more, killing the food. Not done yet, we had to drag the food back to the cave. Now we must cut up and prepare the food. By the time we eat we are hungry as a hostage. Oh, and along the way there and back we were probably sprinting away from a predator animal.
Once we are back in the cave safely, we gorge. We chow down like there's no tomorrow. Why? Because the chances of there being no tomorrow was so much greater back then. So we just eat and eat. Our body lets us do this for good reason. Our body knows we only eat when we’re really hungry as was often the case at this time. Anything extra is stored in fat cells. See we aren’t like a vacuum or any other household appliance. Fortunately, we can store energy in the form of fat. This means we don’t have to have a food tube hooked to us continuously. That would suck.
Here’s where I want you to pay attention because here’s where things really shifted from 2000 B.C. to 2021 A.D. Our bodies have two ways of storing fat. One way is via insulin storing glucose by turning it into fat. When insulin steps up to manage our blood sugar it also takes the glucose not used and recruits the help of cholesterol to store fat. You read that right. Eating extra carbohydrates that your body doesn’t need leads to fat and higher cholesterol. Cholesterol provides the infrastructure for the fat. Without any cholesterol we’d all just go into a pile of goo (think of the wicked witch after getting doused with water.)
This wasn’t much of an issue back in prehistoric times. The “Paleo” diet mimics our prehistoric meal plan. The diet of your run of the mill cave dweller was meat, berries and nuts. He never crushed a bleached out, toxic riddled bun, smothered and grilled to perfection hugging a GMO infused patty with plastic cheese melted all over it.
I am of the opinion the single most important thing to manage related to our diet is our blood sugar levels. This more than anything determines whether we will be lean and healthy or fat and ailment ridden. There’s a reason perfectly healthy people like Dr. Peter Attia and Ben Greenfield are now sporting continuous glucose monitors (CGM’s) like those worn by the likes of my youngest daughter Abby. She has Type 1 diabetes, and managing her blood sugar is a matter of life and death. So how do we control our blood sugar? Well, we manage the production of two hormones.
Let’s look at Insulin and Glucagon as tag team wrestlers. Back when Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble roamed the earth, glucagon was the Rick Flair of hormones being secreted from the pancreas. Without all the extra carbohydrates, there wasn't much need for insulin to jump in and bring down blood sugar levels. So Insulin was constantly tagging Rick Glucagon Flair in to go take fat and turn it into glucose, keeping blood levels high enough.
Here’s the tag team’s favorite moves. Insulin brings the blood sugar down, while glucagon brings it up. What else would you expect of a hormone I’ve compared to Rick Flair? Working together they keep their opponent, high or low blood sugar in check. If the blood sugar gets too high or too low blood sugar wins the match and we lose ultimately.
Eating for pleasure during this time wasn’t a thing. Which makes me wonder why Fred Flintstone was so rotund. But I digress. Our eating habits matched the way our body was made. Eating was for survival. Gorging was actually good. Studies have shown there is a 400% increase in pleasure from eating after the body has experienced some form of starvation. What does this have to do with survival? Your body is telling you, “Eat! Eat!” This is why even though you’ve unbuttoned your pants,released a few satisfactory belches and your forehead is sweating you can still shove some more dessert in your pie hole especially if you were really hungry beforehand. Your body wants you to eat up while the getting is good because it doesn’t know when the getting will be good again.
The pleasure of eating that continues to keep going even if it physically hurts your stomach isn’t by accident. It’s for a purpose. It’s like lifting weights through the pain. Your body is working internally to help you survive. It is telling you to eat because it thinks this could be the last meal you have for a week.
Fun fact: We can actually store enough energy to walk from New York to Florida without eating. It would be miserable, but most of us could do it. Our bodies are amazing.
So why would our body tell us to keep eating? Well, for all the wonder that is the human body our organs and hormones are pretty stupid. They have no idea what year it is. They just function for survival. The arcuate nucleus of your brain has no clue that you live in 2021 where after you stuff that deep dish pizza to break your fast, there is a buffet just mere feet away containing the equivalent of a hog trough ready for you to pile more of its carb and fat loaded goodness up. All your body knows is it was designed to survive, and it’s going to signal all the triggers for you to eat.
So if we know this we can use it to our advantage. We have to really start to understand what our body is saying to us so we can talk back or even silence it. When your body is telling you to gorge because you were so hungry before you ate, you must do something to keep the body quiet. It’s like giving a baby Benadryl before a road trip. Oh yea, like you never did that. Ok, so what did you do? Did you rub their little gums with Wild Turkey?
The key is working with our prehistoric designed body. If you just do calorie restriction and exercise you will fail or at best always be fighting your body. Again, our organs don’t have brains. They don’t know the difference between fasting and starving. Both signal starvation for the body. Further, you can damage your fat cells and make them even harder to shrink in the future if not managed properly. So what’s the answer? You will always be in a battle with your survival designed body. What we call dieting, our body calls starving. Again, it has no idea we live in a first world post industrial era with a cornucopia of calories around every corner. For all your pancreas knows you are living in the wilds of the jungle. Therefore, every time you try to restrict calories for weight loss your body is going to get pissed and look for calories. When it finds them it’s going to store them. So what do we do to get in sync with caveman/cavegirl you?
Let Rick Flair be the star he is. Eat the right things. It cannot be overstated that eating foods that are either green and growing or once had a pulse is crucial. Eat whole foods to control your blood sugar levels. Feed on non-processed foods low in carbohydrates ( I didn’t say no carbohydrates) and leave insulin to simply balance out blood sugar levels. The key is to make your body so responsive to insulin the pancreas doesn’t have to overproduce it. Then, when reserve energy is needed, let glucagon shine and go get some fat to be turned into glucose and be used for fuel.
Be aware of your habitat. You and I were made to roam the wild hunting and catching our food. We exert no effort or energy to get our food these days. This is not good. This means we don’t burn calories before, but this doesn’t mean we aren’t hungry. As a result we sit down to eat a bunch of garbage, burn no energy and then let it sit and get stored as fat.
Perform a simulated hunt. Our ancestors had to go out and hunt and gather. We do not. To simulate the effort, do 40 air squats before and after you eat. Remember, your organs are stupid. They have no idea you didn’t just hunt down that cow you crushed in the form of a Wagyu ribeye. Burn some of that glucose up so it doesn’t get stored as fat. This will be really important before you eat a carb heavy meal.
Finally: Offset your eating. If you will consume some clean protein about thirty minutes before a meal, you will dramatically reduce your blood sugar levels. Remember why this is important. How does this happen? It’s because you will be more sensitive to the insulin your body produces. Less insulin means less glucose stored as fat. Think of it as calming your system.
Final takeaway: We were not made to eat all the food we eat. There’s nothing wrong with all the calories we have available at such a low cost (financially speaking). The 10 cent calorie is a modern marvel. However, there is a big problem with how our bodies were designed in relation to this newfound abundance. To best optimize our body we must first understand its innerworkings. Once we do that we can start to use this habitat to our advantage. If we don’t, we’ll just keep getting fat and suffer all that comes with it such as heart disease, insulin resistance and the rest.
Whooooo!!!!!