I have been reading about insulin resistance, and some of the effects that it has on our bodies, and apparently one of the side-effects of insulin resistance can be muscle loss, because it is connected with low levels of human growth hormone.
The two hormones work in sync, and when that sync is messed up, then the body suffers the results.
When we eat carbs, we produce insulin to send the glucose to our muscles for energy, and to our liver for glycogen stores. However, when a person over eats on carbs, or lives on processed carbs and not natural Whole Foods, then we can become insulin resistant, and when that happens, the cells refuse to let the insulin come in with the glucose. Since the blood sugar can’t be allowed to get too high, the insulin ends up sending the glucose to the fat cells and stores it as fat instead of burning it as energy.
Even worse, is that a fat person makes five times as much insulin as a slim person, when they eat the identical food.
So....hypothetical scenario......two people eat a piece of apple pie, One person is overweight, one is slim. The fat person produces 5 times as much insulin as the slim person; but because of insulin resistance, he doesn’t get the benefit of using the nutrients from the food as energy like the slim person did.
The slim person enjoys his pie, burns the carbs as energy, and happily goes on about his day. The overweight person, has no energy, because all of the sugar in his blood went into fat cells, so now his blood sugar is too low again, and he is hungry.
He eats the rest of the apple pie.
Of course, it doesn’t do him any good either, all due to insulin resistance, and even worse, he now has more body fat, and is still craving food.
Once the body has digested food, and after we go to sleep at night, then our body goes into restorative mode, burns fat, and produces human growth hormone. This is when our muscles are rebuilt, and bad cells are burned up as food, and the body regenerates itself.
It takes about 4-6 hours after our last meal before we finish digestion, and burning up the glucose, and start using fat ketones as fuel.
Now, when we are doing intermittent fasting, OMAD (one meal a day), then during the fasting period, several amazing things happen !
The first thing is that fasting lowers our insulin resistance better than anything else can do. A 3 day fast will lower a person’s insulin resistance by about 70%. The good news is that about 2/3 of that happens during the first 24 hours, so simply eating one meal a day, and fasting for 16-23 hours will lower your IR almost as much as a 3 day fast, and the more you do IF, the more it lowers your insulin resistance.
The other thing that IF does is increase your HGH levels. In men, it can increase up to 2000%, and about 1300 % for women.
When HGH increases, you can build/retain your body muscle mass better, and it also helps with anti-aging.
I am not done yet !
This is only from testing with mice, but they found that when they restricted their feeding time, even though they were given the same amount of food to eat, the mice did not get old-age related dementia like the mice that were allowed to eat whenever they wanted to eat.
Most mice started to develop dementia at about 9 months of age, but the mice who fasted didn’t start to develop this until 24 months, almost their whole life span !
This correlates to about 20 years for a human, so this lowers the chances of Alzheimer’s , especially if a person continues in the OMAD food plan.
