Insulin is the hormone that keeps your blood sugar from going too high.
When you think about blood sugar you may think blood tests, doctor’s visits, pregnancy or perhaps that blood sugar is not really a problem for you.
However there are 1 million Australians currently battling type 2 diabetes and perhaps even scarier, a study from 2000 found that 19% of Australians 25 years or over met the criteria for metabolic syndrome – a key driver of which is insulin resistance.
To understand how this might be relevant to you, let’s break a few things down.
What is blood sugar and insulin?
Blood sugar is the measure of the amount of glucose in your blood which can be easily tested at your doctor‘s office or at home with a finger prick kit (glucometer).
You need the right balance of sugar in your blood to maintain homeostasis or a natural harmony between the body’s systems. Because of this our blood sugar level is tightly controlled by the hormone insulin.
Insulin’s job is to drive glucose (blood sugar) out of the blood stream and into cells where it can be used or stored for later.
Because of this insulin is a growth hormone. Whenever insulin is present it is encouraging the uptake of sugar and storage of energy by the body.
When you eat food with sugars or starches (“carbs”), your digestive system breaks down those carbs into simple sugar molecules to be absorbed into your bloodstream.
So how does this go wrong?
Your body wants your blood sugar to be at an optimal level at all times meaning that within in hour of eating carbs your body is working to rebalance your blood sugar.
Blood sugar should be high enough that you’re not light-headed, fatigued, and irritable. It should be low enough that your body isn’t scrambling to remove the excess from your blood.
When blood sugar is too high, it is referred to as hyperglycemia. Prolonged periods of elevated blood sugar levels (chronic hyperglycemia) can lead to “insulin resistance.”
What is insulin resistance?
Insulin resistance is when your cells are literally fed up with the constant influx of sugar to deal with and they basically start ignoring insulin.
I think of it like that story ‘the boy who cried wolf’. He just kept on crying wolf and eventually no one listened, even when the situation got serious. Insulin resistance is much the same!
So where type 1 diabetes is a lack of insulin due to autoimmune destruction of the pancreas that makes it, insulin resistance is a condition where there is actually plenty of insulin in the blood but our cells just aren’t responding to it like they used to and so blood sugar creeps up.
Type 2 diabetes is when this condition gets so bad that blood sugar levels are now much too high and we are at risk of a multitude of other serious health complications like blindness, nerve damage, chronic skin infections and kidney damage to name a few.
So in short insulin resistance can eventually lead to diabetes and given the previous statistics it’s evident that it does exactly that in a good percentage of the population.
So let’s look at how you can optimise your diet and lifestyle to keep your blood sugar stable.
Nutrition
The simplest thing to do to balance your blood sugar is to reduce the number of refined sugars and starches you eat. To do this, start by dumping sweet drinks and desserts. This includes ‘healthy ones’ – unfortunately they aren’t healthy at all if they’re pumping sugar into your blood stream.
Increasing the amount of protein in your diet helps you to feel fuller for longer and is also slowly digested and metabolised by the body.
Lastly eating more fibre is helpful too. Fibre helps to slow down the sugar absorbed from your meal; it reduces the “spike” in your blood sugar level.
Fibre is found in plant foods as long as they are eaten in their natural state as processing foods removes their fibre. Eating nuts, seeds, veggies and low sugar fruits (not juiced) is a great way to increase your fibre intake.
INTERESTING FACT: Cinnamon has been shown to help increase insulin sensitivity.
Lifestyle for stable blood sugar
You already know that exercise is good for you, right?
Well exercise is really useful for improving insulin sensitivity – this means that your cells respond more effectively to the incoming sugar and are able to take it in from the blood stream.
Remember that insulin is essentially a growth hormone so if you’re still eating sugars and processed carbs, exercise is not going to prevent weight gain.
If you’ve adjusted your diet appropriately then think of exercise as a tool to help you deal with the remaining sugars in the diet (as all carbs are broken down into sugars in the body) and as a way to retune your metabolism and move you away from a state of insulin resistance.
Is there anything else that helps stabilise blood sugar?
Would you believe that stress affects your blood sugar levels? Yep!
Stress hormones increase your blood sugar levels.
If you think about the “fight or flight” stress response, sugar is merely fuel to help your brain and muscles “fight” or “flee” in times of stress. It makes sense to keep sugar in the blood stream where it’s readily available to use rather than in let it go into storage.
When you are stressed signals are also sent to release stored sugar back into your bloodstream, further increasing blood sugar levels.
So managing stress is actually much more important than you previously might have thought.
Try to reduce the amount of overall stress you’re under and take positive action to learn to manage stress more effectively. Simple tips are yoga, meditation, deep breathing, gardening and walking in nature.
Sleep also goes hand-in-hand with stress. When you don’t get enough quality sleep, you release stress hormones, have a higher appetite, and tend to get those hard-to-resist sugar cravings.
Sleep is crucial and like stress it is often overlooked when it comes to keeping your blood sugar stable. Make sleep more of a priority – it will do your blood sugar (and the rest of your physical and mental health) good.
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Kelly Moriarty is an online health & nutrition coach and founder of The Green Body Plan.
After 5 years as a veterinarian Kelly was unhealthy, stressed out and generally dissatisfied.
She now helps professional women make the same changes she did to beat burn out, lose weight, recover their energy and take back control of their health naturally.
References:
1. Zimmet PZ, Alberti KGMM, Shaw JE, Mainstreaming the metabolic syndrome: a definitive definition. Med J Aust 2005;183:175–76. Search PubMed
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