Restoring Insulin Sensitivity

so this is going to be another short video on how to restore your insulin sensitivity using fasting as a technique so fasting has of course become very popular lately but i think that it is very useful in patients who have insulin resistance and as i previously alluded to insulin resistance is caused by a diet that's rich in processed carbohydrates fructose sugar but another huge problem is how frequently we eat when we eat very frequently every few hours our insulin levels are constantly high and it is this constantly high insulin level that the body detects and then your body becomes insensitive to that constantly elevated insulin level so then when you do it you need more and more insulin so every time you eat another meal and your insulin levels stay high because you're eating frequently and you're eating processed foods that contain a lot of carbohydrates then your body is going to become more and more insensitive to the insulin and will produce more insulin the next time you eat so gradually for the same amount of carbohydrates or calories you take in you produce much more insulin this can be detected on a simple test that we do in our office it's known as the craft test where you drink some sugar water and we measure the blood insulin level every hour for the next five hours and there are specific patterns for patients who have very high insulin levels so how do you then desensitize the body to insulin and we already talked about the foods that cause insulin resistance now i'm going to tell you about dieting through fasting when you fast you're not taking in any calories or carbohydrates so automatically your pancreas stops producing so much insulin there's always a basal amount so now you're going to have a very low insulin level then the body detects this low insulin level and then the next time you do it it is going to be more sensitive to the insulin and you're going to produce less insulin so the more often you do the fasting and the longer the periods of time between the meals you can actually start producing less and less insulin because your sensitivity is being restored so there's many kinds of fasting the one that i advocate to all my patients is this first and foremost you must cut out carbohydrates especially the processed carbohydrates and do that for the first couple of weeks because there's a true phenomenon of carbohydrate withdrawal that most of my patients go through that phase usually lasts about 10 days and then after that i tell them that look you need to randomly skip a few meals so maybe you wake up in the morning and you should just skip breakfast tomorrow you skip lunch day after tomorrow you may skip dinner but you randomly skip a few meals and your body gets to know what it feels like not to have a meal and you realize that you may miss the social time for example of the meal but basically you can get through this episode quite easily consuming more liquids mostly water once you get the handle on just missing a few meals here and there then i tell patients okay now choose a day or two days in this week when you only gonna have one meal you choose that meal and the rest of the day you drink lots of water when you're hungry you'll notice that hunger will come but doesn't continue and progress throughout the day hunger doesn't get worse hunger comes in one hour half an hour spells and then goes away and it is produced by this hormone called called ghrelin so ghrelin levels don't continue to come up they are pulsatile you'll feel hungry for a while and then it goes away once you get used to skipping meals and then perhaps once a week you'll have only one meal then you can do that for two weeks and then go to eating one meal a day three days a week then take it to four days a week five days a week but you gradually do this your body gets used to the feeling of not having eaten because you go through the carbohydrate withdrawal you go through a social withdrawal you miss the time of the day but you'll get used to it and you'll actually feel more productive more energetic and the best part of it is because your insulin levels are low when you do eat thereafter you will produce less insulin and your body will become insulin sensitive so what benefit would you get from that well first and foremost you will stop being in the storage mode because your insulin levels are low so when you're not storing your calories that you consume you'll notice that you'll start losing weight very quickly it is the insulin that partitions the calories in your body and points those calories towards storage versus consumption so when your insulin levels are low you're going to consume those calories calorie is not a calorie a calorie will do what it will do based on your insulin level if your insulin level is high most of those calories will go into storage if your insulin levels are low most of those calories will be metabolized in the body so a calorie is not a calorie you must aim for low insulin levels and the best way to do it is to follow the diet plan that i've given and i've also strongly endorsed fasting some people fast for 18 hours a day and eat in a six hour window period that's also acceptable some people eat only once a day that's also acceptable some people fast for 36 hours once a week and the rest of the times they do a 18-6 pass that's also okay there's many permutations but at least we must get out of this eating five times a day with two snacks that absolutely has to go it's gotten us into all this trouble eating frequently and eating processed foods has gotten us into one of the largest health threats that we are facing currently so i wish you good luck with this plan and stay tuned because i'll have some more videos for you you

Channel: The Galen Foundation

Views: 363,569

Keywords: Pradip Jamnadas, Dr Jamnadas, Insulin Resistance, restoring Insulin Sensitivity

Id: FC0Hd_ptslU

Length: 7min 53sec (473 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019