Episode 191: Hunger Series Part 4: The Insulin Connection

Why does managing hunger and weight suddenly feel so much harder after 40? One piece of the puzzle is how your body responds to insulin as estrogen changes during menopause. In Part 4 of the Hunger Series, we’re unpacking insulin sensitivity and how nutrition, movement, muscle, and even sleep can support more stable blood sugar.

Book your Free Strategy Session here: www.MindStrongFitness.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Becoming MindStrong Episode 191 Hunger Series Part 4: The Insulin Connection


Speaker 1  0:00  
So many of us, consciously or subconsciously, have learned to shame, blame, and guilt insulin. Right? We think the goal of life is to avoid producing insulin. And on this theme of everything happens for a reason, the body doesn't make mistakes. One of my my favorite guest experts we bring in to ignite our signature 12 week program is Dr. Michelle Thatcher. Dr. Michelle Thatcher is a naturopath, and one of the first statements that she and I ever bonded on over was the body doesn't make mistakes. If it's doing something we don't want it to do, our job is to investigate and figure out why. And that concept is true here. If insulin was the enemy, why would our body produce it every time we eat? Right. Talk about the definition of of thinking our bodies out to get us. If insulin was bad, why would it produce it every time we eat? Because insulin is not the enemy. Insulin is not bad. What we need once again is to understand to get an education in its role, so we can flow with it instead of fighting against it. So let's start the conversation with what insulin does, and this is a very overused nutrition world analogy. Maybe you've heard it before. To me, it's it's the most accurate visualization that that I think is out there. So we're going to use the cheesy, overused one. Every time we eat carbohydrates, our body breaks it down into glucose. Glucose enters our bloodstream. Now we don't want high levels of glucose in our bloodstream. What we want is to be using that glucose for energy. That's where insulin comes in. Insulin. Here's the the cheesy, overused analogy, is the key. So it goes up to our cells. Insulin is the key that unlocks those cells, glucose goes into our cells. Our body can use them as energy. That's a good thing because insulin's job is essentially to move fuel where it belongs out of our bloodstream into our cells. If we flip that, here's what would happen if we didn't have insulin, right? If we were stuck in the mindset that insulin is a bad thing. It's something I want to avoid. If we didn't have insulin, number one, we would have glucose floating around in our blood all the time, which means our cells could not get the energy that they need. We'd be walking around with high levels of blood sugar all the time, and our body could not function properly. So, what insulin is doing is it's keeping our blood sugar at a healthy range, which is a capital M must for overall health, for weight loss, for everything that we're here to do. Here's the problem: over time, as we age, our body becomes less responsive to insulin. So if you've hung out here before, we talk about all the time. Over 40, our estrogen starts to naturally drop. As our estrogen drops in this stage of life, our body becomes less resistant to insulin, which means we need more of it to do the same job. This results in three things: our energy becomes less stable, our blood sugar's going for a roller coaster ride, and because of those things, it makes weight loss more challenging, so the issue here is not that insulin is the enemy; it's that menopause changes how our body responds to insulin. And once again, to take us back to the theme we've been harping on, the job is not to fight against that. The job is to understand it so we can flow with it and get our body to respond the way that it's meant to. So before we talk about how to improve what we call insulin sensitivity, how to get our body back to responding to insulin, let's talk about some signs that things might be off, which means that our blood sugar's out of whack. The big one in our world is that afternoon crash. If you're sitting at your desk and somewhere between one to 3p.m. you feel like you could just fall asleep. That is typically a glaring neon sign that your blood sugar is crashing. Cravings and or snacking is another huge one.

Speaker 1  3:52  
If you're noticing cravings that never used to be there before, and or right after a meal you start feeling snacky again, again that could be a glaring neon sign that there's some blood sugar issues going on, and maybe the most obvious one: if you're feeling shaky in between meals, that means your blood sugar has dropped, and we need to get some food in you. So let's do a little check for understanding, and then we're going to talk about what to do about it. Insulin is not the enemy. What's happening over 40 is as our estrogen drops, our body's sensitivity to insulin changes. Meaning, if its job is to be the key, right? It goes to our cells, it unlocks the cells, and that glucose gets out of our bloodstream, goes into our cells, so it can use it for energy. What's happening is, so to speak, the key gets rusty, right? Instead of putting it in the lock and unlocking it, we got to jiggle it around and use both hands before the lock is opening. So, how can we start to improve what we call our body's insulin sensitivity? Meaning, how can we get our body to respond better so that insulin can do the job it's meant to do? I'm going to start with some quick hit one. And I'm going to put "quick hit" in air quotes because if you've hung out here, you know we do not make major life overhauls. It's about baby steps and momentum. But I'm saying quick hits because I want to have a deeper conversation about the biggest one of these. So quick hits would include increasing protein intake, right? And again, the reason that we talk about baby steps and momentum is 97, 98% of women who come to us are not eating anywhere near enough protein. What we are not going to do is say, "Suck it up, Buttercup. Go quadruple your protein intake. You will be chugging protein shakes till you're nauseous. It's not going to work. So yes, baby steps and momentum to slowly increase that protein. I'm calling it a quick hit because there's not much more to that conversation except we want to increase our protein intake in the name of making our body more sensitive to insulin. Number two, similar conversation: fiber. Most women average around seven to nine grams of fiber. Where we really want to be is about 25 to 30 grams of fiber. That is a massive leap. Do not try to make that leap overnight. It will mess up your bathroom habits. As with everything, meet your body where it is and baby step. But getting more protein in, getting more fiber in, are both going to be powerhouses when it comes to increasing this insulin sensitivity. Couple other quote unquote quick hits. Number one, we have to stop fearing carbs. Ironically, the first thing most people do when they think that insulin is is the demon here is we cut out carbs, and it's taking a six inch hole and it's making the problem worse. If we are to agree, which I hope we are because it's science, that our body needs fiber. Guess what fiber is? It is a carb. Yes, we can focus on the types of carbs we're eating, right? With carbs, there's two types. There's simple carbs. The theme is sugar, and there's complex carbs. Guess what the theme is? Fiber. So we want to focus on those more complex carbs the majority of the time, while still allowing for the more fun simple carbs now and then. So we get away from diet culture. We don't cave binge go down the rabbit hole. And if you want to balance your blood sugar, if we want to become more insulin sensitive, which we do, we need our complex carbs. One of my favorite quick hits is go for a walk after meals. It is so simple. You don't have to put your gym shoes on. You don't have to go break a sweat when you eat a meal. Go for a 10 minute walk because that is a powerhouse for balancing blood sugar. What happens is your muscles start to work like sponges, pulling that glucose out of your bloodstream into your muscles. Great, super easy, quick hit to balance blood sugar. 10 minute walk after meals, and last little quick hit.

Speaker 1  7:35  
Again, this one's definitely in air quotes because this is so much easier said than done. I have past episodes on this. There's more coming up, improving our sleep. If you are not sleeping enough, your blood sugar is going for a ride throughout the day. Your hunger hormones are going for a ride, as we spoke about in this series. We need to be focusing on improving sleep quality and quantity if we want to also help with insulin sensitivity. Now, I want to go back for a quick second to what we just spoke about with carbs and protein and muscle, so you heard me say, ironically, one of the first things most people do is they start cutting out carbs, which is actually making the problem worse. One of the best solutions to improving insulin sensitivity is not about cutting out food groups; it's about building muscle. Muscle is one of the biggest stores for glucose. So, the stronger and the healthier that our muscles are, the more stable our body can keep blood sugar. We talk a lot here about the more lean muscle mass in our body, the faster our metabolism runs. Elaborating on that is also true: that the more muscle we have in our body, the more stable our body can keep our blood sugar, the more insulin sensitive we become, which is what we want. The other piece I'll add to this mix, and I'm going to avoid going down a huge rabbit hole here, but it's important, is that every time our blood sugar crashes, our body thinks that we're dying, and in response, it produces a huge surge of cortisol. If you've listened to this podcast, we talk a lot about cortisol here because you will not lose weight in a body with spiked cortisol. So let me let me put this thread this this thought thread all together. The more muscle we have, the more stable our blood sugar becomes. The less drops in blood sugar occur, the less cortisol our body produces as a result. The easier it is to lose weight. So yes, nutrition is always number one. It is 90% of this game. But I hope you're seeing why that added element of weight training, resistance training, we call progressive overload, pushing our muscles to do what they can't yet do is such a game changer in a body over 40. So let's wrap this up with a couple big picture thoughts. First and foremost, most important, insulin is not the enemy. The goal here is not to stop your body from producing insulin. The goal is to make our body more insulin sensitive, meaning we want. Wipe the rust off those keys. We want our insulin to be able to unlock our cells easier, more efficiently, so that glucose from our bloodstream can get into our cells, and our cells can do their job of using it as energy. The best ways to do that, as always, nutrition, nutrition, nutrition, and weight training, resistance training, pushing our muscles to do what they can't yet do, is a fantastic next step because of all the reasons we've talked about here. It's going to increase that insulin sensitivity. It's going to keep blood sugar steady. It's going to avoid those cortisol spikes, and those are all capital M musts at this stage of life. In the next part, part 505 of the series, we are going to wrap this series up with a bit of a more nuanced conversation. So so far in this series, we've been talking about hunger hormones 101. We spoke about what the big four are. We dove into leptin and ghrelin. We dove into GLP ones, and here we're talking about insulin. To summarize, to wrap up, to bring together this five-part series, we're going to dive deep into the difference between hunger cues and cravings because we can teach you everything we know about biology, about what's going on with these hunger hormones. But what does this actually mean in practice in our day-to-day life? That's what we're going to do in part five, where we talk about hunger cues versus cravings. I'll see you there. For more information on Mind Strong Fitness or to apply for a free one-to-one strategy session with my incredible all-female team, visit www.mindstrongfitness.com.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai