Scientific study on the effects of insulin on weightloss

If you are insulin resistant (ie diabetic among other health issues), yes...you would want to eat a diet that takes into account GI and GL because someone with insulin resistance have cells in their muscles, fat, and liver that don't respond very well to insulin and thus can't use the glucose in your blood for energy as would happen in an otherwise healthy person. This doesn't invalidate CICO, but it does change the math because your body isn't working right.

An otherwise healthy and active person doesn't really need to worry about this.

jelleigh wrote: »

cwolfman13 wrote: »

If you are insulin resistant (ie diabetic among other health issues), yes...you would want to eat a diet that takes into account GI and GL because someone with insulin resistance have cells in their muscles, fat, and liver that don't respond very well to insulin and thus can't use the glucose in your blood for energy as would happen in an otherwise healthy person. This doesn't invalidate CICO, but it does change the math because your body isn't working right.

An otherwise healthy and active person doesn't really need to worry about this.

That makes sense to me too. I have seen many posts that don't seem to account for underlying health issues or seem to imply that everyone's experience should be the same which doesn't make sense to me.
I do wonder how many people realize they even have some insulin resistance - its not always accompanied by a diagnosis (especially if its not advanced). Weight gain around the middle is especially indicative of it for example.
There are a lot of WOE that people can follow that should create a deficit, but if I knew in advance that my physiology would respond better to one particular WOE instead of another, I'd want to know that and save myself some time.
As it is, I had noticed through trial and error over the years that protein and low carb seem to work best for me, but when the dr told me all this it gave it an actual scientific basis which I found useful because it informs how I will continue to approach my weight loss.

Reading self-reports here is IMO pretty complicated to parse out and draw conclusions, IMO.

I ate moderate to higher carb all through weight loss, and what I'd call high carb now in maintenance . . . but I think most of those carbs may be from different foods than (I think) many are talking about here when they talk about struggling with carb cravings or carbs spiking appetite . . . and I'm not including cases where people call things "carbs" - things that get most of their calories from fats - like pizza or fries and some baked goods. The rice, bread, wheat pasta, potatoes kind of pattern seems to be fairly common, for example.

I don't find those foods to provoke cravings/appetite, for me, but they're also not major sources of carbs in my eating. Most of my routine carbs are fruits, veggies (in high quantities), non-fat dairy, daily oatmeal (old-fashioned, not packets). For me, most of those are filling foods. (I'm not saying they'd be filling for all, though - I have no idea. But I think, say, Winter squash is not what first comes to mind for most people when they say carbs can spike appetite, y'know?)

I did have a good bit of central fat before weight loss, but no signs of IR, though that was never specifically tested. (Blood sugar was routinely in the normal range, even when I was obese - that's the only even remotely relevant result I can think of.) Another individual factor: Even while obese, I was very active, burning a few hundred calories most days in exercise, often the kind of higher-HR exercise that relies on glycogen. I wonder if that might have helped avoid IR? My fat-Ann diet did include more of the potato-wheat-grain-sweets kinds of carbs, but those were things I found easy to cut out, just filler foods I was accustomed to eating, but not important for satiation, happiness, nutrition. I still eat those, but less frequently, generally smaller portions.

I need to read the paper more carefully, but I have to admit that my caution flags went up a bit, seeing the author list. There are some folks in there whose pocketbooks rely on the insulin hypotheses, which is a biasing factor whether or not it can be listed as an official conflict of interest.

My bias, which I admit: Having been adult before the "obesity crisis" got rolling, I feel like the dramatic changes in lifestyles and food culture (like serving size, role of snacking, standard portion sizes, etc.) are more than enough to account for increasing average obesity, without needing to dig much deeper into the evils of carbohydrates. That would be completely invisible to me, if I hadn't been around to observe (and live) it.

Of course a high glycemic diet drives positive energy balance when total calories are not accounted for and because it confounds the message that we need to eat less and move more, and for some reason that there must be something wrong with thermodynamics and we're missing something in the energy balance equation. Maybe look at the rest of the world that consumes a high carb diet that don't have an obesity epidemic. I have a feeling the answers will reveal themselves. Jeeesus. lol