How to Fix Your Set Point and Raise Your Metabolism

Your body has a weight it wants to be, aka it's set point.  Occasional over eating or under eating does not change the set point but consistently doing either will impact it.  It is this abusive eating pattern that will do lasting damage to your metabolism and for most of us, achieving lasting and significant weight loss means fixing a broken metabolism.

Here are things that can affect our metabolism, hunger, and weight loss

1. Dieting the wrong way. Too low calories, destroys our metabolism
2. Dieting also causes hunger/cravings which can destroy weight loss.
3. Age slows the metabolism.
4. Exercise can make you hungrier and crave food more so yes, it is good, but we want to make sure and fix insulin resistance to resist cravings.
5. Losing weight is not natural and the body fights losing anything by slowing down our body's metabolism.  It’s a survival technique.  Think about it, only in the last 50 years has food been so readily available for so many.  Our body's have not had time to adapt to these changes.

We want to fix and lower our set point, and to do that we need to fix insulin resistance.

First, you have to understand what destroys set points.

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The pancreas: the pancreas is located beneath your left ribcage and it has millions of islands of cells in it called the Isles of Langerhans. These cells are called Alpha Beta Delta Cells and the Beta cells (60% of all these cells) are responsible for making insulin when you eat sugar and 
carbohydrate.

But insulin has other functions, too:

1. affects fat metabolism
2. controls protein metabolism
3. increases tensions in the arteries which raise blood pressure
4. converts sugar into cholesterol
5. converts sugar into triglycerides (blood fats)

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The Reason We Are All Getting Fatter

You cannot burn fat in the presence of insulin as Guyton’s Physiology tells us. And we have been told to eat all these small non-fat meals all day which keeps our insulin spiked all day with no recovery.

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More on Insulin We Have Not Discussed Yet

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Insulin is triggered by a high carbohydrate meal. The body converts carbs into sugar and stores them in a form called glycogen. Glycogen is a series of glucose molecules strung together. And glycogen needs potassium to be stored.

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So we have got all kinds of excess insulin stored in our fat. This is what gives people a non- alcoholic fatty liver. Insulin directly causes fatty liver 

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Then insulin begins destroying proteins in the body from protein in your muscle to protein in your cells. We have all kind of intracellular proteins. So this is a big problem.

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After it destroys proteins, it converts them into a waste in the form or carbon skeletons.

 

This is what destroys diabetics and leads to

▪    Strokes and brain events like these
▪    Kidney failure
▪    Protein destruction
▪    Then everything spins off into diseases of all kinds from multiple myeloma to other cancers and heart disease.

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75-100 is normal blood sugar before you eat. Once you eat, 120 to 140  is normal but getting near that 140 zone is dangerous. With diabetics, insulin is not there to keep blood sugar in check.

 

It takes 3-4 hours for your blood sugar to come back down after you eat.  Diabetics take a longer time to reset and that’s what gives brain fog.

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This is why we get insulin resistance, the liver eventually quits listening to insulin and will not absorb it. It stays in the blood instead. At this point, you’ll see symptoms of combined Hyper and Hypo glycemia.

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Many of us have a fatty liver and don’t know it. Here’s the symptom list:

1.   Insulin resistance
2.   Brain fog
3.   high fasting insulin
4.   Belly fat
5.   Bloat and digestive issues
6.   Sleepy after a meal
7.   High blood pressure
8.   Cravings and constant hunger
9.   Dark pigment under the folds of your body
10. Hunger between meals

That is all insulin resistance and that is what destroys your weight set point, since when insulin is up, fat burning is down.

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So, what causes Insulin resistance?

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1. Sugar
2. Protein in large amounts (the leaner the protein, the more insulin is released. So try eating higher fat meats.  The insulin index tells you about all kinds of food that trigger insulin only not glucose, which is the Glycemic Index). 

 

This explains how you can try going no sugar and still not lose weight.

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3. GI Hormones (raise insulin every time you eat)
4. Estrogen (heightened estrogen in the body also raises insulin)
5. MSG

Here’s an excerpt from the insulin index (II) showing how much proteins and other foods spike insulin.

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Butter 2%

Olive Oil 3%

Coconut Oil 3%

Heavy Cream 4%

Pecans 5%

Avocado 6%

Cream cheese 5-8%

Bacon 9%

Walnut 9%

Peanut Butter 11%

Egg yolk 15%

Cheese 15%

Whole egg 21%

Berries 47%

Beef 51%

Egg whites 555

apple 75%

Low fat yogurt 76%

Banana 84%

Whole wheat bread 96%

Baked beans 100%

Potatoes 121%

 

So the lower on the insulin index the less they trigger insulin. That’s why we can get away with eating more fat. So, yes, there are foods that can exacerbate insulin that aren’t sugar or carbohydrate.  So, don’t be afraid of higher fat proteins!

So here’s my most important point.

We want to eat strategically.

We want to try to stay in fat burning mode longer and be aware of food on the insulin index that will sabotage your efforts.

If you will note below, we dip into fat burning mode when insulin spikes lower and we go into fat burning mode, like between breakfast, lunch, and dinner if we do not snack.

Take it down to two meals and you are in fat burning mode longer.

How to Lower Insulin and Heal Insulin Resistance

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1. Apple cider vinegar lowers insulin (1 tsp per glass of water) or use on salads
2. Fermented foods from pickles to Kim chi, any fermented vegetables help lower insulin and improve gut health.
3. Getting enough potassium with lots of veggies
4. Getting enough B1 in the diet (nutritional yeast)
5. More fiber helps with insulin resistance, and celery is good for this.
6. Fat, no insulin release means this gives you time to heal insulin receptors
7. Lower cortisol and estrogen via acupressure
8. More vegetables to increase potassium and magnesium
9. Vitamin D (cod liver oil, sun)
10. Chromium can also help.

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Recommendations

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You don’t have to eat breakfast if you are not hungry . . . two meals a day and no snacking will help you heal from insulin resistance. It is called intermittent fasting and it works.

 

Also, do not eat three hours before bed. This aids in getting you into fat burning mode while you sleep.

When you go off insulin, lots of fat will be dumped through your liver so you need those vegetables to prevent acquiring a fatty liver from that too.

 

• Vitamin B1 also helps with this, but you want the natural kind, not synthetic, so look to nutritional yeast. B1 helps calm insulin release and can help you heal from insulin resistance.

 

• You can do dark green veggie blended smoothies such as kale shakes but not juices because you need fiber, not sugar. 

 

• Also, to lower cortisol and estrogen in the body, acupressure can help. Sleeping more and exercising also help heal Insulin resistance and help you more fully recover from insulin spikes.