FIVE Tactics to Improve Insulin Resistance

First of all, what is insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is when our cells’ insulin receptors are not sensitive to insulin that is released from the pancreas in response to glucose or sugar, then they cannot allow glucose into the cells to make ATP or cellular energy.

How do we shift the body from being insulin resistant to insulin sensitive?

Here are FIVE tactics to treat insulin resistance:

Enough quality sleep

Sleep is so important to our metabolic health. There’s a lot of research that shows that there is a huge connection between these two. If you have 24-hr sleep deprivation decreases the insulin sensitivity. And even if you have partial sleep deprivation will also lead insulin resistance. So we want to focus on getting good quality sleep. I have other videos that goes into getting quality sleep: https://advancednaturopathic.com/five-ways-to-improve-sleep-quality/

We need to prioritize sleep.

Exercise

Studies have shown that doing moderate-intensity exercise increases insulin sensitivity of cells throughout our body and this will last for 12-48 hours post-exercise. Therefore if we exercise, we increase the sensitivity of our cells to insulin. Exercise is another important tactic to shift our body from being insulin resistant to insulin sensitive.

Decrease stress

The third tactic is decrease stress. Most people equate stress to only mental-emotional stress and we definitely want to work on decreasing mental-emotional stress, but there are other stressors on the body including eating the wrong foods, to environmental toxins, heavy metals, immune challenges including fungal infections, bacterial infections, viral infections or parasite infections – these can all be stressors on the body. These stressors activates the HPA axis, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. When the HPA axis gets activated from these stressors, the adrenals produce a stress hormone called cortisol. High cortisol leads to high insulin, which can set us up for an insulin resistance picture. Therefore if we can decrease the stressors, then we can decrease cortisol levels and decrease the amount of insulin that is being produced, which would improve our insulin resistance.

Avoid grains and sugars

The fourth tactic is to make dietary changes. We need to avoid sugars and grains that turn to sugars once we eat them. High amounts of sugars in the diet contributes to an insulin resistant picture. This can also happen with a grain-focused diet such as cereal for breakfast, even oatmeal is a grain, a sandwich for lunch and pasta or bread and chocolate cake for dinner. So we need to get off of the sugar and grains to shift our body from being insulin resistant to insulin sensitive.

Take berberine

Take a supplement called berberine. Berberine helps to increase the sensitivity of the insulin receptors on our cells. A great supplement to help shift your body from being insulin resistant to insulin sensitive.

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