Why Can’t I Lose This Weight? Part 2

In Part 1- Why Can’t I Lose This Weight?, we covered what happens when there is excess insulin in the blood stream; it causes sugar cravings, it causes reactive hypoglycemia and it keeps you from losing weight. Here is Part 2 of Why Can’t I Lose This Weight?

When this person’s body reaches the point of hypoglycemia, he or she has no energy coming from their bloodstream because they have no blood sugar there and they can’t access fat which is the storage unit for fuel for their body. This process can happen in the middle of the night and contribute to waking up and not being able to go back to sleep. So people walk around and they are tired all the time and they don’t know why, but it is because they are in a cycle of reactive hypoglycemia and sleep deprivation.

Their chronic fatigue is often relived when they eat something. But what do they typically eat? Because they have sugar cravings, they typically will eat a bagel or granola bar or crackers, and it will pull their blood sugar back up so they feel better, but their insulin goes back up again too, and starts the cycle all over again.

Because they are in this hypoglycemic process, the body senses danger and calls on a couple of glands called adrenals that sit on top of the kidneys. Adrenal glands have a lot of responsibilities, but one of them is to jump in every time the blood sugar gets low and they release hormones to bring your blood sugar back up. So when people have a history of eating a lot of carbohydrates causing their blood sugar to go up and down, their adrenals are constantly jumping in trying to get the blood sugar to go back up and at some point they get tired and they stop working and that also contributes to people being tired.

Ultimately, the person we are talking about becomes insulin resistant. That’s because those cells that received the glucose, they get fatigued from being bathed in insulin all the time and they start becoming resistant and they don’t want don’t want to pick up the glucose when the insulin molecules are bringing it by and that creates a couple of conditions:

1. The glucose starts to back up in the blood stream. The body manages this for quite some time and it does this by turning that glucose into fat and one of the results is the person now has high triglycerides. This is basically fat being made from the extra glucose that has backed up in the blood stream. In addition, the body is unable to burn fat because the insulin that is constantly present in the blood is sending out a message to the body to hang onto that fat.

2. Insulin resistance also causes something called metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is a lot of different symptoms but the hallmark is that it causes hormonal problems such as,

a. In women it causes high estrogen and high testosterone- so when you see women with the thinning hair on top that is male pattern baldness from the high testosterone.

b. For men, it causes high estrogen and low testosterone – what that looks like in men is that they get man boobs and a beer belly.

So basically, weight gain is happening in this person because they’ve got estrogen in their bloodstream preventing access to their stores of fat, they have glucose backing up in the blood stream and the body converting it to fat, then they have estrogen levels causing them to retain fat and create some more, so this is why our person is unable to lose weight.

In our discussion we have moved from hypoglycemia into insulin resistance because blood sugar dys-regulation is a disease process along a continuum with the end result being type II diabetes. Most of the clients we see have some combination of hypoglycemia and/or insulin resistance and if they do not get it under control, they become diabetic. Eventually the body cannot convert enough of the glucose over into triglycerides to be stored as fat, and the body can’t keep up with all the glucose that is being created and placed into the blood stream, so it starts to back up and people are unable to control their blood sugar. So the body, in trying to deal with all the glucose in the blood, kicks the pancreas in an effort to have it put out more insulin in an effort to manage all the glucose. Ultimately, the pancreas gets tired and quits putting out insulin and then diabetes results. All along it was a continuum of worsening and worsening conditions and the body doing its best to adjust to the situation. The body is never being “bad” or “wrong”; it is just trying to adjust to whatever situation we are putting it in. The whole thing is a progression and the good news is, it is actually reversible. We can help you find the right way to eat and effective interventions to put in place at Healthy Life Solutions.