In the last newsletter, I broke down a concept I call the Health Bank. If you are new to the newsletter or missed it, check it out here. The Health Bank concept leads perfectly into another concept that I think is important which is carbohydrate tolerance.
Carbohydrate tolerance is how well your body metabolizes carbohydrates. If consuming carbohydrates is stalling your weight loss, causing energy and mood swings, leaving you feeling bloated, and keeping your blood sugar elevated for hours after eating, then you are not very carb tolerant.
Having low carb tolerance is also known as insulin resistance (IR). Insulin is a hormone responsible for helping us metabolize carbohydrates. Insulin is released following carbohydrate ingestion and works to get glucose from carbs into our cells where they can be used for energy. While this is a beneficial process, if we are stimulating it too frequently and to a great degree, we can lose our carb tolerance and develop IR.
If you have read any of my work, you have probably heard me say many times that IR is one of the biggest contributors to our most chronic diseases. Being insulin resistant means no longer having the ability to effectively metabolize carbs which is a slippery slope towards more chronic health conditions like diabetes, heart disease, neurological dysfunction, and obesity.
For these reasons, it is important to our health for us to maintain carb tolerance or insulin sensitivity. To understand how to do so, think about your insulin sensitivity like a pressure gauge. There are certain diet and lifestyle choices that will contribute to insulin resistance. These increase the pressure in your pressure gauge. There are also strategies that improve insulin sensitivity. These will help release some of the pressure in your pressure gauge. Check out the infographic below for visual representation as well as which factors can increase and decrease pressure in your pressure gauge.
The pressure gauge theory is similar to the Health Bank theory. If we want to maintain insulin sensitivity, which we all do for the sake of our health, we need to pay attention to the signs of insulin resistance (listed earlier) and be honest with ourselves if we are overdoing things that increase the pressure in our gauge. If we are chronically overeating processed carbs and living a sedentary lifestyle, it is time to try some strategies to relieve that pressure that is building up every day. Know that acute increases in pressure are okay, but we need to keep that pressure needle in a healthy zone if we want to maintain a healthy and high functioning human body.
Thanks for reading,
Chris
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