Insulin Resistance:
Insulin Resistance: Overview
What is insulin?
- Insulin is a type of hormone your body uses to help turn sugars you eat into fuel.
- After you eat a meal, there are higher levels of sugar, or glucose, circulating through your blood.
- The pancreas releases insulin to dispatch that blood sugar into cells for use as energy.
For possibly as many as one in four Americans, the tissues of the body stop responding to insulin.
When you have insulin resistance syndrome, your body's muscle cells are unable to absorb the sugar properly, so your body will make more insulin to try and force the sugar into your cells.
Insulin resistance is part of another syndrome referred to as Syndrome X.
This term actually refers to a number of multiple health conditions which tend to be present along with insulin resistance.
Both Syndrome X and Insulin Resistance are indicators of people who have much higher risks of developing type two diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.
The combination of symptoms commonly seen with Syndrome X and Insulin Resistance include high blood pressure, high triglycerides, obesity, decreased "good" HDL cholesterol and higher "bad" LDL cholesterol levels.
Most people with insulin resistance tend to carry fat around the middle of their body and often have much higher risks of developing other health problems over time.
Fat cells around the middle of your body are said to release fat into your blood stream much more easily than fat cells located in other areas of your body.
When you carry excess fat cells around your middle, that fat can start releasing into your blood stream within three to four hours of eating a meal, instead of many hours later as happens when the fat is stored elsewhere.
This additional and quicker release of fat cells can cause your triglyceride levels to raise, which in turn lowers your HDL cholesterol.
While it's not fully known which problem causes which complication, it's generally agreed upon that losing weight is one of the first steps to treating insulin resistance.
Some say that insulin is unable to reach the muscle cells as easily because the fat is actually in the way and blocking it.
So your body must release more insulin to force the sugar through the fat to where it's needed. If this is the case, then it's another good reason to start losing some of that extra fat.
Exercise is one of the biggest recommendations for helping insulin resistant people to lose weight, because the muscle mass accumulated from exercise helps to burn excess fat from your system as much as the additional activity does.
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