Weight Management, Obesity and Losing Weight

If you haven't heard, obesity is all but an epidemic in most industrialized countries around the world, with the US leading the statistics. Look around at the malls and on the street or in the mirror, and more than 50% of the people you see will have a weight problem. 

How on Earth did this many people end up with such a problem?

There are lots of things that could be pointed to. We are a country of couch potatoes eating processed foods by the boxful. Those are good reasons but more and more experts are looking at the issues with high glycemic foods.

Glycemic Index and Insulin Resistance

If you are not familiar with high glycemic foods, please read the page here on it. Simply put, carbohydrates are not all the same. Some carbs digest very quickly and enter the blood stream rapidly. These are called high glycemic foods. Other carbs slowly trickle into the bloodstream and are referred to as low glycemic.

Ray Strand MD talks about the process

According to Dr. Ray Strand, "following a high glycemic meal the blood glucose level quickly rises, which initially causes the beta cells of the pancreas to secrete insulin. Insulin drives the glucose into the cell to either be utilized or stored as fat. The blood sugar will then usually drop precipitously and can actually get too low. This is called "functional hypoglycemia." The regulatory responses of the body will then kick into action, leading to the release of glucagon, the fat burning hormone, in an attempt to counteract the actions of the insulin in an attempt to get the blood sugars to rise again.

We have all experienced a time in our life when this has happened to us personally. If we go without eating, we get weak and shaky and can hardly think. Our appetite increases and even after our blood sugars are back into a normal range, we will still feel like we must eat something. In fact, we tend to crave high-glycemic foods and the cycle starts all over again.

On the other hand, when a low glycemic meal is eaten, none of this happens. The blood sugar will rise slowly and there will be a nice balance of insulin and glucagon. The blood sugar stays in a normal range and concentration comes more easily. Because no rebound of low blood sugars takes place, there is no craving of high carbohydrates foods."

Adult-onset Diabetes

Strand says that "over 90% of the individuals developing diabetes today develop type 2 diabetes or what was previously referred to as adult-onset diabetes mellitus. This type of diabetes normally takes decades to develop and is the most preventable form of diabetes. Over time these individuals become less and less sensitive to their own insulin. The body actually begins making more and more insulin to compensate for this insensitivity. As the blood insulin levels rise, the body is able to still control blood sugar levels. However, as you will learn a little later in this newsletter, there are several metabolic changes that occur as soon as these blood insulin levels begin to rise even though your blood sugars still remain normal and you do not show any signs of diabetes. The moment you develop insulin resistance, your arteries begin to age much faster than they should.

As long as you are able to keep producing these abnormally high levels of insulin (hyperinsulinemia), your blood sugars will remain normal. However, over the years, in the overwhelming majority of cases, your body simply can’t keep making all of this insulin. In the majority of individuals with this problem the insulin levels finally begin to drop. As these insulin levels begin to drop, your blood sugars will then begin to rise and you become diabetic."

So what does this have to do with Gaining or Losing Weight?

The metabolic syndrome, or what has also been referred to as the insulin resistance syndrome or syndrome X, is a constellation of problems that develops because of underlying insulin resistance. 

A sedentary lifestyle along with the All-American diet has caused a tremendous number of Strand's patients to develop the metabolic syndrome and eventually type 2 diabetes. The number of people who are starting down this slippery slope of accelerated aging is unbelievable. The Journal of the American Medical Association article stated that nearly 25% of the adult population already has the metabolic syndrome, and many of our children are also developing this silent disease, another 25% are on the way there.

What Comes First—Obesity or Diabetes?

The media and medical community keep telling us the reason we are seeing an epidemic of type 2 diabetes mellitus is that more and more people are getting fatter. Dr. Strand says "what has become very apparent to me after researching the medical literature and observing patients in my own clinical practice is that people are not only becoming overweight because of insulin resistance, but they are also developing type 2 diabetes mellitus because of insulin resistance.

The reason that this becomes so important is because physicians continue to tell their patients that they just need to lose some weight if they want to avoid becoming diabetic. However, one of the hallmark signs of insulin resistance is inability to lose weight, no matter what you try. This leads to a tremendous amount of frustration among patients, because by the time they have seen the doctor and have been told that they are on the verge of becoming diabetic they have tried almost everything to lose weight without success. I have learned that unless these individuals reverse the cause of their underlying insulin resistance, they not only are not able to lose weight, but they are also not able to prevent developing diabetes."

After years and years of abusing your insulin by consuming tremendous amounts of high-glycemic carbohydrates day in and day out, you too are most likely becoming resistant to your insulin. A calorie is no longer a calorie because the tracks of this glucose train have been switched and your body is not functioning properly. If you don’t learn how to switch the tracks back, you simply will not be able to lose weight even with the most aggressive diets. In this state, the body is resistant to almost any weight loss program.

If you are not able to lose weight, it’s not because one day your fat burning ability disappeared. If your doctor has told you that the reason you have begun putting on weight is because your metabolism has declined, he or she is mistaken in the overwhelming majority of cases. The truth is, the tracks of your glucose train have been switched, and glucose is now being delivered to your fat cells rather than to your muscle. The only answer to this dilemma is a program designed to reverse insulin resistance and allow you to successfully "flip the switch back again." You now need to focus on exactly what you can do to prevent or reverse this underlying insulin resistance and allow you to not only prevent becoming diabetic but also allow you to lose weight permanently."

Ray D. Strand, M.D. is quickly becoming one of the world’s leading authorities in Nutritional Medicine. Dr. Strand is an international speaker, and consultant on health and preventive medicine as well as the author of, What Your Doctor Doesn’t Know About Nutritional Medicine May Be Killing You. A graduate of the University of Colorado Medical School, Dr. Strand has been in private family practice for over 30 years.

He has two web pages that are outstanding.