Do you know what your fasting blood sugar is?

If you are often hungry, are overweight (have a roll around your middle not looking like a six pack), have high triglycerides, low HDL and high blood pressure, there is a good chance that your body is insulin resistant. When your body is insulin resistant, more insulin is released than normal to try to get glucose (sugar) into your cells for energy. The extra insulin causes excess fat storage in both the blood (in the form of cholesterol and triglycerides) and in the body in the form of a fat roll around the stomach area.

Health care providers use blood tests to determine whether a person has pre-diabetes but do not usually test for insulin resistance. If tests indicate pre-diabetes, insulin resistance most likely is present. One way to test for this is to have your blood sugar tested when you haven't eaten anything for 8 hours -preferably in the morning. A normal fasting blood sugar is less than 100, pre-diabetes blood sugar is between 100 and 126 and Diabetes is diagnosed at a fasting blood sugar over 126.

People who have pre-diabetes often benefit from a low carbohydrate diet. Eating less carbohydrates helps them keep their blood sugars down and causes them to release less insulin.

If you have pre-diabetes, I think you could benefit from reading The Metabolism Miracle by Diane Kress who is a Registered Dietitian and a Certified Diabetes Educator. She struggled to eat properly and control her weight using the knowledge that she had learned in school. Even though she was doing what she thought were the right things, she continued to gain weight. She discovered that she was pre-diabetic and insulin resistant and figured out that she had to try to change her diet in a different way.

The program that she designed has helped her lose weight and become less insulin resistant. The program has three steps. In the first step you retrain your body to become insulin sensitive again. The first step is an 8 week low carbohydrate diet that lets your pancreas rest and puts your body in fat burning mode rather than carbohydrate burning mode since you are only eating 5gm of carbohydrate per meal and snack. For the second 8 weeks you can increase carbohydrates to 11-20 Gm per meal - no more than 5 hours apart. Her third and final step is a diet in which 30 to 35% of daily calories come from carbohydrates. If you exceed your carbohydrate intake for more than 3 days in a week in step 3, she tells you to go back and repeat step 1 for ten days and then step 2 for ten days.

The Metabolism Miracle gives meal plans and recipes for each step of the way. She also answers questions which her patients had as they progressed through the steps.

I had always wondered why people who successfully lost weight felt it was important to eat breakfast every day. The book explains that glycogen is sugar that is stored in your liver and muscles for energy. If your pancreas detects that your blood sugar is getting too low, it releases a hormone called glucagon which tells your liver to release glycogen. The Glycogen releases its sugar and makes your blood sugars go up even if you haven't eaten anything! This is one reason why you should eat breakfast within 30 minutes of getting up in the morning and why you should have a small amount of carbohydrates at every meal and snack (no more than 5 hours apart)- if you don't, your body will release glycogen which will make your blood sugars spike. You will spend the day having your insulin chase your blood sugars up and down.

Links: The Metabolism Miracle
Insulin Resistance and Pre-diabetes National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse (NDIC)