How Long Does It Take To Reverse Insulin Resistance?

how long does it take to reverse insulin resistance in order to answer that question there are several things that we need to understand like what are some of the mechanisms of insulin resistance and how can we measure and keep track of them so we know if we're making progress what if we'd like to make it happen faster then what are some things that we can do to speed it up is there even such a thing as a complete reversal what do we have to look forward to and after we have reversed it what can a lifestyle do we have to adopt to stay insulin sensitive today we're going to talk about all those things that you have a really clear picture coming right up I'm doctor Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything this is one of the most common questions I've received so I decided to make a video to try to answer as many aspects as possible and when people ask they want to know why is my glucose still high how long is it going to take for my glucose my fasting glucose readings to change how long is it going to take for my a 1 C to come down my doctor says my glucose my a1c is is too high they want to keep giving me meds how long do I have to take those meds and then they ask once they've understand a little bit more maybe they start asking about well what about insulin and and home iír how long is going to take for that to change and then they want to know about setpoint that's the body have a tendency to go back to a certain weight does it change its metabolism to get back to its set point it's like there's a cell memory and then finally there is the issue of genetics so all of these things are criteria that influence the mechanism or the measurement of insulin resistance so we'll deal with those in some more detail but just a real quick review to understand the mechanism that this is a long term process that there's a lot of people whether it's diabetes or whether it's neck pain or some other ailment and people say oh well it just happened I was died just diagnosed last week this is a new thing and when it comes to health unless there was a trauma unless you fell down the stairs or you were in a car accident there is no such thing as a new thing it has developed over time it is an adaptation blood sugar insulin insulin resistance it's an adaptation we exposed into something it does it it's best to balance things out despite the things for doing to it but in the end it can't keep up with the with the adaptations we want to think of the body and insulin as having a carbohydrate tolerance machine you have a machine that can process carbohydrate it has a certain threshold a certain endurance of how long and how much it can do that and if you just push it too far too long then you basically broke it and if you broke it then you have to take some more forceful steps some more dramatic steps in order to reverse it then you would have to do just to maintain it you eat something and your glucose goes up your blood glucose increases then the body produces insulin in an appropriate amount in a sufficient amount to get the glucose out of the bloodstream and into the cell and maintain a normal glucose level ultimately the goal of even having blood glucose is to deliver it to the cells so the goal itself is not a certain level of glucose it's to maintain a certain level to maintain a steady fuel delivery to the cells of the body but insulin is necessary to get the glucose from the bloodstream and into the cells initially there is a balance there's only a little bit of insulin required for a little bit of glucose and we are what we call insulin sensitive but as the years go by the more sugar we eat the more carbs we eat the more frequently we eat the more blood sugar there is the harder it is for the insulin to get the sugar into the cells because there's more sugar and eventually the cells don't want it so the insulin goes up and up and up so after five or ten years then the glucose might still be normal because the body is producing enough it's succeeding at keeping the glucose at a certain level and the diabetes it doesn't happen until we've come so far that the insulin isn't sufficient there is no amount of insulin almost that will get the sugar into the cell because the cells are become so resistant and that's where we get severe insulin resistance with pre-diabetes and diabetes but the thing to understand is that this did not happen overnight we're talking decades for the most part some people that are a little bit genetically predisposed they have less tolerance they might break the Machine in five years but other people it probably takes 20 years for the most part to break the Machine if you will so now let's come back and talk about some of these criteria so we know that the problem is too much sugar too much carb driving insulin the cells resisted so the glucose stays in the bloodstream and we get high blood glucose so people want to ask when is that coming down it's gonna vary a lot for some people as soon as they stop eating sugar if they just don't put sugar in their mouth for a week or a couple of weeks then their blood sugar goes down other people have to be more dramatic they might cut out all sugar they might go into ketosis they might do fasting and that will bring it down but some people do that and it still stays high for weeks or even months even if the glucose stays relatively high even if it's reading a hundred and fifty hundred and sixty even 170 but you have stopped eating carbohydrate your body is reversing the process even if it takes months to get there because once you stop putting carbohydrates and sugar into your system then the body doesn't have to fight so hard to get it out so it's not gonna make more insulin until you eat something else so we've talked about this in some other videos on dawn Naumann on but the point is that is still the thing that comes down the fastest whether it happens in days or weeks or months it's still the thing that changes the fastest the second fastest thing is your a1c which is a three to four month average of blood glucose glucose changes by the hour a 1c changes by the month so even if your blood glucose goes from a hundred and sixty to ninety almost in a few days almost overnight it's still gonna take there's no point in measuring a1c a week later because it'll have changed maybe zero point something but in four to six weeks you'll see a significant change and in several months is when you start seeing dramatic differences where you can get into a normal range that people ask well how long do I have to take medication and I'm not a medical doctor so I can't give you advice on medication but just understand that they gave you the medication because your blood sugar was too high but once your blood sugar comes down or once you stop putting sugar into your system you basically don't need the meds or don't need as much but that's a discussion that you have to take up with your medical doctor but the need for meds essentially follows the glucose and the a1c because that's what the meds are there for to lower glucose and that's why they were prescribed because you had a high glucose or in high a 1c but now we're getting to insulin and the Homa I are the measurement the blood test to measure how much insulin how hard does the body have to work how much insulin does it have to produce to keep the blood level blood glucose level where it is right now and this is something that takes years decades remember the glucose only came up at the end once pre-diabetes turned into diabetes lucasz really shot up that's at the end of a 20 year process but now you've had 20 years of becoming insulin resistant so therefore this is going to change very very slowly we're talking months for some people who are not so insulin resistant but four people are very insulin resistant even if you do all the things right you can probably expect it to take years to truly get that insulin resistance down some people might have to do fasting for extended fasts three four five days a week maybe two weeks and every time they do that the insulin levels will drop a little bit but you might have to do that many many times to get it down into a normal range there number five cell memory and setpoint so this is more of a conceptual thing that it's not something we can measure specifically like where is your set point but we know that there is such a thing because people's metabolism change that if you are burning a certain amount of calories and then you eat fewer calories but you maintain insulin levels then your body will lower its metabolic rate it will adjust to try to get back to that setpoint and you will have a ravenous hunger the body will do everything it can to get back to the point where it thinks you need to be and we want to think of this as a habit your cells have habits they develop there's a certain momentum after you've done something for 20 years there's a lot of momentum there's a lot of memory there's a lot of habit in the body and these things are good and they're bad for someone who has been in really good shape physically for someone who has had a lot of muscle and then they get out of shape it's gonna be pretty easy for them to get back in shape because the body remembers it knows that hey I used to do that I used to be that but unfortunately the same thing holds true for being overweight and insulin resistance the body remembers and here we have to understand that this is going to be years to change this and the longer it's been there and the more severe it's been there the more dramatic and the longer the more patient we have to be to reverse it there is a very strong genetic component to insulin resistance that some people are just born into having an easy time to gain weight for one example the Pima Indians lived in North America and they had no diabetes but as soon as they were exposed to processed foods they developed over 50 percent type-2 diabetes so they had a very strong component so that's unfortunate if you have the genetics for it but the good news is that you can still reverse the insulin resistance you can still develop a lifestyle where you don't have to have diabetes the unfortunate thing though is that whatever genes you have they're yours you were given them at conception you've had them all your life there's really nothing that you can do about that you can't change genetics but you can change epigenetics you can change how you express those and if you don't give you about a sugar then it's not going to become diabetes so the main theme to understand there is that there is a huge variation between people but that there's still sort of an order between these different criteria so if we look at insulin resistance on the vertical scale here so if we start off with a lot of insulin resistance and then we start creating a lifestyle to reverse it then the first thing that's going to go is glucose and that's going to happen relatively fast that can happen like we said in days or weeks sometimes it'll take a little bit longer insulin is going to take longer it'll be months and years but then finally if you want to sort of totally reverse insulin resistance I don't know that it is 100% reversible I think based on the setpoint and the cell memory we probably always retain a little bit of what has been but the longer that we go the more the body sort of forgets that longer we go without doing something and we have another lifestyle the more the body replaces the old memory with with the new so there's no definite time here but we're definitely certainly talking gears what if we want to speed it up if we want this to happen as fast as possible then wherever we are whatever our personal circumstances are we can still make it happen faster for us by understanding the order of the powerful tools that we have so the first tool we have is exercise just putting your body into motion increasing circulation increasing energy expenditure changing hormones we've done lots of videos on that so understand how to exercise the right way to maximize the good hormones and to minimize the bad hormones we also talked a lot about cortisol and stress and we've got videos on that but you want to reduce stress if you have a lifestyle that has a lot of stress you could make cortisol that drive insulin and blood sugar so if that's a big factor for you then work on reducing stress and again learn how to exercise so you minimize stress and maximize the benefits and these are in order of the power so the further down the list here we go the the more powerful they become so in this order exercise is the least powerful your stress reduction is next now we're getting into the really powerful ones and that's a low-carb high-fat diet to teach your body to go from carbohydrate metabolism to fat-burning metabolism and that's done by reducing the carbs in that the primary fuel available is fat and eventually the body starts using the fat Kido is just a very strict version of low carb high fat Kido is low carb high fat but low carb high fat isn't necessarily Kido Kido is when you put your carbs so low that your body burns fat and a byproduct of that is something called ketones ketones become brain fuel they become an alternate fuel for the body and if we can measure ketones then that's proof that the body has switched from carbs to fat very significantly that the vast majority of energy that we're burning is ketones is fat and ketones as a by-product and the most powerful tool we have is fasting so we can start with intermittent fasting or we can do longer fasts I recommend people do it gradually and look up some of the other videos on fasting in order of importance you want to exercise you want to reduce stress and cortisol you want to reduce your carbs get into ketosis and do some fasting that's how you make it happen faster but is it even possible to reverse it completely we have to understand what does it mean to reverse it and that comes back to the criteria so your medical doctor he's going to be happy he's going to consider it reversed as soon as your glucose and your a1c is normal but does that mean that you can go back to eating normal that's a very common question so I'm doing this now when can I go back to eating normally again so this depends on what we think normal food is what does that mean the majority of people in the Western world think that normal is the way that we've eaten for the last two three generations but that is very very different from how we ate the previous several thousand generations so the way we've been eating normal the standard American diet is not something that you're ever going to go back to because that's the diet that's the diet full of chemicals and sugar and processed foods that forced your body into this adaptation in the first place so if you do something to reverse it to undo the adaptation you can't go back and doing the thing that caused the problem in the first place so in that sense if you think that's what the goal is then it is not reversible you will not be able to go back to eat normal what you will be able to do is to eat real food and maintain a healthy lifestyle so standard American diet is terrible it has tons of sugar tons of chemical tons of processed foods the USDA recommendation suggests that you eat whole food that you eat at least 50% of grains from whole grains and so forth but they still tell you to eat about 300 grams of carbohydrate and based on their recommendations of added sugar no more than 10% of calories 3 cups of dairy 6 ounces of grain and so on so much fruit more than half of this 300 grams is actually sugar so even though the USDA is an improvement on the standard American diet it is not enough it's not enough of a change to keep you insulin sensitive after you have reversed this the USDA diet may work for a very small percentage who are physically active and who have never developed insulin resistance and for people who lead an active lifestyle and don't eat too many meals but it is not recommended I don't recommend that and if you have insulin resistance then this will push you toward more insulin resistance so while it is slightly better than the sad because it tells people to some of the the soda and the processed foods it is only slightly better there's only a nuance difference really between the standard American diet and the USDA so we have to understand that the food we have been eating is not going to work you will not go back to that normal lifestyle because it isn't normal that's not food it is fake food it is chemicals it's processed foods it's imposter food it's frankenfoods we need to start understanding what what real food is so meat and vegetables some for some people some beans and tubers roots thinks that that grow on the planet I think a lot of people will be able to go back to what's called a low carb diet that might be about a hundred grams of carbohydrate but you still want to eat mostly whole food I put a question mark there because that's not going to be everybody if you have a stubborn set point and if you have a genetic predisposition then that's probably not going to be strict enough I think most people are going to be able to maintain their insulin sensitivity if you do these things for a few years and you get your blood values too and your insulin to where you want it to be I believe you'll be able to maintain it on a low carb diet which I think starts around 75 grams of net carbs per day and for some people again they might start gaining weight they might start increasing their insulin resistance their home I are even on 75 grams and then you want to learn how to find the balance in your situation with low carb high fat keto and how much intermittent fasting do you have to do some people might be able to do an 18-6 that they eat for six hours a day two or three meals maybe or to meals and and then it would be Oh mad one meal a day but whatever it is you have to find out what the balance is for you and on my previous video somebody commented and said that oh you throw so many options up there it's like you're just throwing enough up there to see if if something is gonna stick you don't seem very sure of yourself well I'm not I'm sure of the principles but no one can say what's going to work for you what we're we fall into the trap where we want someone to do a study and we want someone to determine the one thing that's going to work and biology doesn't work like that if they do a study and they put people through a low-carb program and they said that the average weight loss the average reduction in insulin was 20% that doesn't mean that everyone had a 20% reduction that means some people got a 50% reduction and some people got a 20% increase and you don't know which one you're going to be that's why there is no one recommendation that's why they can never do research and find one thing that's going to work for everybody because there's always a range that's why we have to understand several different factors and we have to be patient and we have to understand it's important that it's worth it to learn and develop this lifestyle with trial and errors that we find the balance that works for us and if you enjoyed this video I think they're going to love that one too thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Dr. Sten Ekberg

Views: 755,506

Rating: 4.93854 out of 5

Keywords: How Long Does It Take To Reverse Insulin Resistance, reverse insulin resistance, insulin resistance, how to reverse insulin resistance, insulin resistance diet, type 2 diabetes, insulin, can you reverse insulin resistance, diabetes, insulin resistance cure, insulin resistance explained, high insulin levels, how to reverse insulin resistance naturally, how long to reverse insulin resistance, dr ekberg, wellness for life, a1c, lower insulin, glucose, blood sugar

Id: TOTZDjAyar0

Length: 24min 51sec (1491 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2019