Insulin Resistance and Exercise Article

Contents

4. Feature Article: Insulin Resistance and Exercise.

Your HRH Program E-book and Bonuses

If you haven’t yet purchased the HRH Program e-book, there’s no time like the present! Go to www.heartratehealth.com to get a copy, plus nearly $100 in bonus material. And remember, if it doesn’t work for you for any reason, you have a full year to return it for a full refund.

Link of the Week

One of the hottest selling new snack bars in this country is called a LaraBar, which is made by a bright and energetic woman named, ironically, Lara. I introduced myself to her in my favorite bookstore a while back, and she immediately struck me as someone whose health you would want to emulate.

Her bars consist of raw fruits and nuts, with no added sugar. She started selling them in stores a little over two years ago, and she’s already in hundreds of locations nationwide.

The thing I really appreciate about Lara’s products is that she uses only the natural sugars that are found in the dried fruits she uses, like dates, apples, and bananas, and there are no artificial or highly processed ingredients of any kind to be found in them. Most health bars on the market contain a lot of added sugar, and this just isn’t good for you.

You can buy LaraBar’s directly from their web site, www.larabar.com, or you might be able to buy them in a store near you (for a one-at-a-time purchase). I would recommend getting a box of the Cherry Pie bars to help you in-between meals. The ingredients of this bar are pretty simple: dates, almonds, unsweetened cherries. That’s it!

More New HRH Pages

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been hard at work on getting some new pages up on the web sites. You should check out some of the different pages at

www.heartratehealth.com/resources/ and www.heartratehealth.com/diabetes/.

In case you didn’t know, the HRH Program is also good for managing depression. You should check out the info at www.hrh-for-depression.com if that’s something that you need to know more about. I’ve also added a page at www.hrh-for-depression.com/depression/, which is some general information about depression and the treatment options that are available for it.

While you’re at any of these pages, have a click on one of the ads at the top and bottom of the pages. Clicks on these links help support the site and could lead you to some new information that could help you out!

Book Review: The South Beach Diet

Please click here to go the Book Review section of the site.

Feature Article: Insulin Resistance and Exercise

For Halloween, I sent you a note detailing the spooky return of the “Phantom Sweet Tooth,” which foretold the story of how my mind still wants sweets even though my body is essentially opposed to them now. Then, I promised I would send you another installment about putting that phantom to rest.

But then, another spooky thing happened. I just couldn’t bring myself to write it! What happened? Was my mind opposing me even talking about how to shut it up? Possibly, but I thought of another reason.

It occurred to me that I was getting ahead of myself. In that piece, I had talked about how the HRH Program reverses the symptoms of insulin resistance—especially the cravings for high-glycemic snacks and treats—but I hadn’t actually talked about how that works. And unless you’re well into the program, you may very well not know what the heck I was talking about. So let’s dive in now to discover how exercise can improve insulin resistance and drastically lower your cravings for sweets!

Insulin Resistance and Exercise

Have you ever had the experience of wanting less food on days that you exercise? If so, then you may be experiencing one of the many known effects of insulin resistance syndrome, which left untreated will eventually lead to diabetes.

At first glance, it makes no sense. Shouldn’t you want more food after burning up extra calories? But once you understand how exercise influences your body’s use of its blood sugar, then this experience is perfectly reasonable. Moreover, repeating it regularly can make for quick and easy weight loss.

Let’s cover the basics of insulin resistance first. Insulin is the hormone responsible for opening up our cells to take in energy for use during the day. Sugar and fat are the energy sources our cells use.

After we eat a meal, foods are broken down into sugars and fats and absorbed into the bloodstream. This raises our blood sugar and circulating free fatty acids, which we won’t cover in this article. When the pancreas senses increased blood sugar, it releases insulin into the bloodstream.

Ideally, the insulin quickly unlocks the cells, the sugars enter the bloodstream, and the whole process is over and done with within an hour or two. However, the cells become less able to take up insulin due to a number of circumstances, including aging, lack of physical activity, becoming overweight, and eating too many high sugar foods.

When this happens, it is necessary for the pancreas to secrete more insulin, as having high blood sugar in the bloodstream is highly damaging to the body over the long-term. (Diabetes is the condition of having high blood sugar, and it can be thought of as a disease which causes the aging rate to double in sufferers, dramatically shortening lifespan due to complications like heart attacks.)

As this process continues over the years, the insulin resistance syndrome worsens, and the day-to-day effect of this becomes evident to the sufferer as wild swings in blood sugar lead to a roller coaster effect on energy and hunger, as well.

It has been proven that low-blood sugar causes cravings for high-sugar snacks, because the body senses a need for quick energy. High sugar treats, such as candy bars, break down in to energy faster than other foods, and this gives you the sensation of feeling better, even if the effect lasts just a short-time.

Regular exercise has been shown to interrupt this process of blood sugar swings by helping us to regulate our blood sugar better. How does this happen? Researchers are unsure about the exact way that exercise has this effect, even though they know for sure that it does. Using what we now know about it, though, we can make an educated guess that makes perfect sense.

When we exercise, our body senses an immediate need for energy. The body is great at distributing resources to the places where they are needed. So when we exercise, all of the sudden the insulin starts to work better at getting the energy into our cells.

This means that less insulin is needed, and when less insulin is needed, there swings in our blood sugar are less severe throughout the day. And when the blood sugar swings are lessened, so is our appetite. Thus, for someone with insulin resistance, exercise can actually cause him or her to want to eat less.

Researchers have found that as little as one workout can have this effect on our blood sugar. But the effect is enhanced when the exercise is done regularly, both many times per week and at the same time of the day. It becomes part of our daily rhythm. And when the body expects to need the energy even before it actually needs it, it will react by pre-positioning the energy in the cells that are going to be using it when the workout commences. Thus, insulin sensitivity is increased, and the march towards diabetes is reversed.

One warning is necessary, however. The exercise must be done a certain way so as to avoid burning up too many sugar calories. Given what we know about blood sugar, it is easy to understand why. If too much sugar is removed from the bloodstream through highly intense exercises, then the swings in blood sugar and energy will continue instead of decline.

Researchers have found that exercising in the fat-burning zone, like that recommended in the HRH Program, is the best for decreasing insulin resistance and preventing diabetes.