It’s an Insulin Thing

I’ve been feeling poorly lately. Crappy. Grumpy. Short-tempered. Can’t sleep, can’t think and overwhelmed.

The only thing I know a reason for is the overwhelm. All these programming and data analytics classes I’m taking! Boy! My inbox hasn’t seen a clear day in a month for all the reminders and class notes.

But the rest has been playing on my mind, too. It got difficult to relate to people outside the programming community, and I became short-tempered easily. Very irritable, really. I ended up not being able to concentrate, too.

I looked at my lifestyle. The basis for how we feel is often rooted in our lifestyles, and there it was. I was out of Ketosis and into sugar-burning. I’m having sugar-highs and lows. I’m falling asleep after meals and generally tired and irritable all the time.

So, there it is. Diet.

When I eat right, I feel right.

I’m having trouble getting back to the Keto I was doing. I’ve been struggling for a while, but this made it so clear to me that I need to eat a low-carb diet.

Of course, there’s even more research in the last six months to back this up!

Dr. Bickman’s “Insulin IQ” site is a good one to check out. The more I read and study this stuff, the more I understand my poor body’s response to carbs.

Insulin Resistance SUCKS!

I ran across a TED talk over a year ago about obesity being a side-effect of insulin resistance. Everyone blames the fat girl for being fat, but they don’t realize that putting on weight, fat, is a physiological response to too much insulin in the body.

I can eat 800 calories a day, turn around and smell a cupcake and gain 5 pounds. Insulin packs on the pounds.

When the body gets too much insulin — like what too many Type-2 diabetics get, the body packs on the weight. The problem isn’t that there isn’t any insulin – it’s that the body isn’t using the insulin it has. Don’t add more insulin, increase insulin receptivity. That’s what a ketogenic diet does – increase insulin receptivity.

The effects aren’t permanent, but they are long-lasting. The longer I stay in ketosis, the better I’ll feel. And the weight will start to drop again, too. Nice side-effect, right?

It’s an insulin problem, not a sugar problem. 

Testing blood sugar is cheap and easy. Testing insulin is expensive.

If sugar goes up, add more insulin to bring it down, right? WRONG! 

So, all those potato salads and sugary desserts are off the table for me. Good thing I don’t have much of a sweet-tooth. I prefer salty snacks. But potatoes, corn, carrots, bread – all off the menu. Strange thing, I haven’t had bread much or missed it except as something to carry sandwich stuff with.

I’ve been off the sweet drinks: sweet tea, soda pop, lemonade, and so on, for a long time. And baked goods – those sticky buns we all love, well—  I had to stop eating those a while back too. They gave me gastric upset.

But I just learned that peanut butter may be impairing the uptake of iodine in my thyroid, so I can’t eat that anymore, either. Gotta take care of that since I got the goiter.