There’s good news and bad news about belly fat. The bad news is that according to a recent government estimate, as many as 88 percent of the population have signs of insulin resistance, which often shows up as belly fat on the body. The good news is you can do something about it, according to a doctor who treats people with metabolic diseases like obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance.
By changing your diet and adopting a low-carb, high-fiber approach, you can reverse metabolic syndrome, which is a condition that involves insulin resistance, the doctor says research has found.
Before what you despair of can’Don’t eat, there are 22 foods that help fight belly fat and can even reverse insulin resistance if you eat them daily and avoid simple carbs (like sugar, crackers, chips, candy, and other processed foods) that break the blood into soar sugar. You can shed belly fat as well as lower your insulin resistance and achieve overall health simply by adding these 30 foods to your diet and avoiding the types of simple carbs that cause insulin spikes.
What is insulin resistance and how to reverse it?
Insulin resistance is a term that describes what happens when your body stops listening to insulin, so you produce more and more of it, and the ugly cycle continues, explains Dr. Cucuzzella, MD, author of the book Low carb for every budget. Insulin resistance — and excess belly fat — starts because, for every five liters of it, your blood can only handle a limited amount of sugar in it, specifically the equivalent of a teaspoon, or 110 milligrams per deciliter, says Dr. Cucuzzella, who is a family, is a professor of medicine at West Virginia University School of Medicine.
When you eat more sugar or simple carbohydrates (such as those found in junk food, bread, pasta, or other highly processed foods) than your body can use, your insulin response spikes to signal the body to store the extra as fat. “Insulin knocks on the door” to tell your body that blood sugar needs to be delivered to cells, first to the liver, muscles and other cells to be used for fuel, but then to your fat cells where it can be keep it for later.”
Things go wrong when you eat more sugar than you can use, he explains. The average American meal contains about 60 to 75 grams of carbohydrates. On average, Americans eat about 250 to 300 grams of it carbohydrates per day, that’s about 10 times what your body can use—unless you’re training like an Olympic athlete. (Side note: Dr. Cucuzzella says he ate 20 to 30 grams of carbs a day for 10 years, and as someone with diabetes “that level keeps me healthy and going.”)
The more carbohydrates you eat, the more insulin is released, leading to insulin resistance
When you throw the typical meal in with those 60 to 75 grams of carbs, your insulin will do whatever it needs to do to store the extra. Instead of knocking on the door, it’s now banging on the door to alert the body that there is too much blood sugar, and it needs to do something to get the body’s attention for it to start going up and down rise and rise. When the fat cells are full, the body says: enough! But insulin has to knock on the door even louder for the body to listen and remove that sugar from our bloodstream.”
This back and forth signaling (insulin is getting louder, body bullies into storing extra glucose as fat, body resists this message as it has had enough) sends insulin higher and higher and the body becomes more and more resistant to it News . The body just doesn’t want to hear about insulin over and over again like a spam caller. It stops fetching.
A better way to put it is carb intolerance, which means your body doesn’t hear or see the insulin. Your body ends up acting like someone who is gluten intolerant when they eat wheat: you become inflamed, your immune system is overwhelmed, and your gut reacts like all those carbs are making it sick, which they actually are.
Whether you’re on a plant-based diet or not, you need to watch out for added sugars and simple carbohydrates. If you were peanut allergic you can’t eat them, but someone who has central obesity or insulin resistance is essentially carb allergic.
OOnly 12 percent of the population is “metabolically healthy,” says Dr. Cucuzzella, and for the other 88 percent with metabolic issues, eating foods that help lower blood sugar is key to shedding unwanted belly fat and lowering insulin volume. and get healthier.
What causes belly fat and how to lose it
“The main reason for belly fat and insulin resistance is excess sugar in the bloodstream, which comes from the food we eat,” such as excess carbohydrates, which cause insulin resistance and trigger a “metabolic storm” in our bodies,” explains Dr. cucuzzella .
When metabolism collapses, people develop a condition called metabolic syndrome, a collection of conditions that combine to increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes.
Given the effects associated with these conditions (elevated blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, and a high cholesterol profile), Dr. Cucuzzella wrote an article, “Is it time for a sugar lockdown?,‘ published in the current issue of Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine.
Why is belly fat so bad for your health?
Belly fat is more than just a cosmetic issue, he adds: “Belly fat or abdominal fat is the dangerous fat,” says Dr. Cucuzzella. “It’s called visceral fat, not brown body fat. We need brown fat as protection for vital storage. Women store differently than men and store more for endocrine function and for reproduction. But if you store it in your stomach, it increases your risk of heart disease and stroke. The main reason for this apple shape is metabolic syndrome.
“Of the patients I see, 90 percent have them and they don’t know it. Essentially, the body doesn’t metabolize carbohydrates the way it should. If you look at glucose per deciliter concentration, they may not even be consuming more carbs than other people when they come to me, but their bodies can no longer tolerate the carbs they eat.”
The problem is that when the liver is already full and your muscles are already full (with the energy they need) and you add more carbs and fat to the blood and over time you have liver fat. . So not just sugar, but the fat that goes with it, so now you have fat trapping. Insulin is a switch that says memory. So if you need to use that fat for fuel, you need to cut down on carbs, and you can do that with a plant-based diet, and you can do that with avocado and nuts, and you can add eggs and fish for protein.
Carbohydrates are the primary driver of insulin. To do that, you need to lower insulin, and when you do that, you need to lower carbs. It won’t go away with a 30-day diet, he explains. Instead, the answer is to change your eating habits and embrace them as a lifestyle. You have to make this switch.
How to Reverse Metabolic Syndrome, Insulin Resistance and Lose Belly Fat
The most important thing that Dr. Cucuzzella recommends for his patients is to stick to a diet of low-carb, high-fiber foods and stick to real or whole foods. “It’s really nothing extreme. It’s what your grandmother would eat: nothing in a box or bag with a label. Lots of real food with carbs but also high in fiber, so while a banana would qualify, it will behave differently in the body than leafy greens.”
Eating a high-fiber, low-carb diet is the best way to fight and reverse insulin resistance, says Dr. Cucuzzella. Choose carbohydrates that contain fiber, like green leafy vegetables, and focus on getting as many of these high-fiber foods as possible while cutting out simple sugars and starchy foods.
“Fiber is magic. What fiber does is feed the gut. Take zucchini, for example. It might have six grams of carbs, but 2 grams of that is fiber. That means the carbs in zucchini don’t break down like glucose in the body behave. The fiber becomes food for the healthy bacteria in our gut. Likewise, if I eat an apple, the carbs behave differently than apple juice without fiber. Fiber feeds the healthy trillions of bacteria in the gut, helping to prevent obesity and the heart fight disease and it fills you up.
“We don’t understand all of the ways the microbiome helps us stay healthy,” says Dr. Cucuzella, “but we do know that feeding vegetables and high-fiber foods like veggies can help reverse disease and lower insulin.” Lower your insulin response to the food you eat.
Why it’s so important to cut down on simple carbohydrates in the face of COVID-19
Carbohydrates cause inflammation, explains Dr. Cucuzzella, which is dangerous if you contract COVID-19. “I work in a hospital, so people in the hospital often have these conditions associated with insulin resistance, so obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes. If you want to protect yourself from the next wave of COVID-19, get well now. We look inside. When someone gets infected with COVID, the cytokine storm causes their blood sugar to spike because it’s a sympathetic nervous system response. But you can get healthy by maintaining a low-carb diet. That really has power against the virus.
“If you’re ever in the hospital, the host or body has to be healthy to fight the infection. The cytokine storm causes hyperglycemia. And when we have hyperglycemia, our entire immune system is deactivated and a cascade of negative effects begins. We don’t have a good treatment for the cytokine storm yet. You have to endure it. The people who have it the worst are people with some spectrum of high blood sugar or metabolic syndrome.
The 22 foods you should eat to lower insulin resistance
Here is my list of non-starchy plant foods that I give my patients from my book, Low carb for every budget. It shouldn’t be expensive to eat healthy. We call it the green food list. Eat these to lower insulin resistance and lose belly fat.
- avocado
- asparagus
- paprika
- Cauliflower
- cabbage
- cauliflower
- cucumber
- Green Onions
- jalapeno
- Mushrooms
- olives
- Onion
- pickles
- romaine lettuce
- spinach
- sauerkraut
- tomatoes
- zucchini
- macadamia nuts
- almonds
- walnuts
- pecans
You can find more ways to integrate a healthy, plant-based diet into your life here The turnips Articles on health and nutrition.
