Insulin is a peptide hormone that is secreted by the pancreas. Insulins main role in our bodies metabolism is to uptake glucose from the blood and store it as glycogen in the liver and muscles. With this basic premise in mind there is a way for us to learn how to make insulin work with us, or understand how it can work against us with our dietary habits.
It is very important when undertaking a fat loss diet that insulin be managed very carefully. This is one of the reasons that I’m a huge advocate of low-carbohydrate dieting. The presence of insulin in the blood stream immediately stops fat loss in it’s tracks!!! When insulin is present in the blood your body will no longer use fat as fuel. So now you can see why it is especially important to keep insulin levels to a minimum while dieting for fat loss. The best way to do this is to consume a low-carbohydrate diet. Carbohydrates cause insulin secretion, not protein and fats. There are certan quickly absorbing proteins that can cause insulin secretion to some degree, such as whey protein. But nothing comparable to simple sugars, or even complex carbohydrates. And since we keep our dietary fat intake higher during times of low-carbohydrate dieting, digestion of whey protein is greatly reduced by consuming dietary fats along with our whey protein shake.
So in a time of dieting insulin is definately our enemy. For people trying to put on muscle mass insulin is quite possibly one of our best friends though! Since insulin is a very powerful hormone that shuttles nutrients to muscle cells, insulin is one of the most, if not the most, anabolic hormone in the body. Fat usage as an energy source is not a concern for a person trying to add muscle mass. Therefore we can use insulin to our advantage during times of weight gain. That being said there are key times that we want to raise insulin, but most of the day it’s still important to keep insulin levels to a minimum so we don’t store too much fat during this time period. The only times we want to spike insulin levels during a time of weight gain are before a workout, during a workout, and the most important time is after a workout. There are many reasons for this, and it will get surely get out of the scope of this article, but the main reason is to increase muscle recovery through activation of protein synthasis, quickly restoring lost glycogen stores, and blunting the release of cortisol.
So as you can see depeding on what a persons goals are there are mechanisms that we can use to our advantage in one situation, but we may want to totally avoid during another situation, depending on what we are trying to acheive at that given time. We can’t just clasify insulin as the enemy, because if your a person trying to gain weight it’s actually your ally.
