11 Tips for Insulin and Leptin Resistance

If you could change 11 simple things and completely reverse a diabetes diagnosis, would you implement those changes?

How badly do you want freedom to live the life of your dreams?

In the following report, nutrition and lifestyle modifications are described. These are the foundation of our diabetes prevention and treatment plan.

Swap

Switch all processed foods, including all forms of sugar, particularly fructose, as well as all grains, for whole, fresh food.

A primary reason for the failure of conventional diabetes treatment over the last 50 years has to do with seriously flawed dietary recommendations. Fructose, grains, and other sugar forming starchy carbohydrates are largely responsible for our body’s adverse insulin reactions, and all sugars and grains—even “healthy” grains, like organic grains, need to be drastically reduced.

If you’re insulin/leptin resistant, have diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, or are overweight, you’d be wise to limit your total fructose intake to 15 grams per day until your insulin/leptin resistance has resolved. This includes about 80 percent of Americans. For all others, I recommend limiting your daily fructose consumption to 25 grams or less, to maintain optimal health.

The easiest way to accomplish this is by swapping processed foods for whole, ideally organic foods. This means cooking from scratch with fresh ingredients. Processed foods are the main source of all the primary culprits, including high fructose corn syrup and other sugars, processed grains, artificial sweeteners, trans fat and other synthetic additives that may aggravate metabolic dysfunction.

Besides fructose, trans fat (NOT saturated fat) increases our risk for diabetes by interfering with our insulin receptors. Healthy saturated fats do not do this. Since we are decreasing energy ie. carbs from our diet when we reduce sugars and grains, we need to replace them with something. The ideal replacement is a combination of protein and fats.

Protein

Change a low-to-moderate amount of high-quality protein. Substantial amounts of protein can be found in meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, legumes, and nuts. When selecting animal-based protein, be sure to opt for organically raised, grass-fed or pastured meats, eggs, and dairy, to avoid potential health complications caused by genetically engineered animal feed and pesticides.

[restrict} Most Americans eat far too much protein, so be mindful of the amount! Those that are aggressively exercising or competing as well as pregnant women should have about 25% more protein. Most people rarely need more than 40-70 grams of protein a day.

To determine our lean body mass, find out our percent body fat and subtract from 100. This means that if someone has 20% body fat, they have 80% lean body mass. Multiply that by your current weight to get our lean body mass in pounds or kilos.

To determine whether we are getting too much protein, simply calculate our lean body mass as described above, then record everything we eat for a few days, and calculate the amount of daily protein from all sources.

Aim for one-half gram of protein per pound of lean body mass. Google to find out how many grams of protein are in our food.

High-quality Healthy Fat

Eat as much high-quality healthy fat as you want! Healthy fat is saturated and monounsaturated. For optimal health, most people need upwards of 50-85% of our daily calories to come from healthy fats. Good sources of healthy fat include coconut and coconut oil, avocados, butter, nuts, and animal fats. Remember that fat is high in calories while being small in terms of volume. When you look at dinner plate, the largest portion in size will be vegetables, but the most calories will come from good fat!

Non-starchy Veggies

Eat lots and lots of non-starchy vegetables. Starchy veggies include, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, peas, carrots, yams, etc. Eat green, yellow and red veggies.

Exercise

Exercise regularly and intensely! Research shows that exercise, even without weight loss, increases insulin sensitivity.

PACE (Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion) or HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) are both excellent exercise programs!

Omega-3 to Omega-6 Ratio

We want to improve our omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. Today’s Western diet has far too many processed and damaged omega-6 fats. At the same time we have far too little omega-3 fats,

The main sources of omega-6 fats are corn, soy, canola, safflower, peanut, and sunflower oil. Both corn and soy are almost always genetically engineered and this complicates matters even more!

Optimally our bodies want a 1:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. The current ratio is between 20:1 and 50:1 in favor of omega-6. This has seriously adverse health consequences!

Reduce the consumption of vegetable oils. To do this stop cooking with vegetable oils and avoid processed foods. At the same time, increase the intake of animal-based omega-3, with krill oil, flaxseed oil and walnut oil,

Vitamin D

Maintain optimal vitamin D levels year-round. Recent research shows that vitamin D is highly beneficial not only for Type 1 Diabetes but also in Type 2.

The ideal way to optimize our vitamin D level is by getting regular sun exposure, or by using a safe tanning bed. As a last resort only if the sun is not an option, consider oral supplementation. It is important to monitor Vitamin D levels. Remember taking Vitamin D supplements increases our need for Vitamin K2 as well.

Sleep

Get an adequate high-quality sleep every night. Insufficient sleep appears to raise stress and blood sugar. Increased blood sugar also increases insulin and leptin resistance and weight gain.

Body Weight

Maintain a healthy body weight. Improved insulin and leptin sensitivity will assist in healthy body weight over time. To determine our ideal body weight depends on a variety of factors: 1) frame size 2) age 3) activity level 4) Genetics.

Ideal body weight is far better than BMI (Body Mass Index) for evaluating whether or not you may have a weight problem. BMI fails to factor in both how muscular someone is and visceral fat. Visceral fat is an important indicator of leptin sensitivity.

Intermittent Fasting

Consider incorporating intermittent fasting in our schedule. This is especially helpful if we have followed the diet and exercise guidelines and still aren’t making sufficient progress.

Intermittent fasting mimics the eating habits of our ancestors, who would cycle through periods of feast and famine. Recent research reveals that this cycling produces a number of biochemical benefits, including improved insulin/leptin sensitivity and lowered triglycerides.

Intermittent fasting is by far the most effective way to lose unwanted fat and eliminate sugar cravings. Continue intermittent fasting until the insulin and leptin resistance improves.

Remember to monitor fasting insulin levels as well as fasting blood sugar levels. Our fasting insulin level should be between 2 and 4. The higher our level, the greater our insulin resistance and the more aggressive we will need to be in our treatment plan and diet alteration

Gut Flora

Optimize gut health because it is a living ecosystem, full of good and bad bacteria. Obese people have different intestinal bacteria than lean people. The more good bacteria we have, the stronger our immune system and the better overall functioning of our body. Reseed our body with good bacteria by regularly eating fermented foods.

When we incorporate the diet and lifestyle changes suggested above we will greatly improve our insulin and leptin sensitivity! and a healthy body weight will follow in time

References:

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/07/14/type-2-diabetes-insulin-leptin.aspx

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