In my last post, I touched on some factors other than diet and exercise that can impact your weight loss efforts.
Today I want to discuss three random studies. None of them have anything to do (at least not directly) with each other, and none of them represent “the” solution to weight loss. I highlight them rather to reinforce the point that, if you are paying attention to the ever expanding (no pun intended) science of obesity and weight loss, you should understand that eating more and moving less are only one part of the story.
One of my biggest interests – and one of the most common goals patients have – is weight loss. It’s also a common area of frustration. After all, it SHOULD be a simple thing. Change your diet and move more, right? What could be easier than that? And yet, millions of Americans try this approach every year, and most of the time it fails them. Why?
I bill myself as a “holistically minded” doctor. What I mean by this is not that I have any formal training in “holistic” care – I haven’t, for example, done a course in functional medicine, or in acupuncture. Rather, I have always had the bias that the human body is a wondrous and complex machine about which even we 21st century doctors know very little, and that many health problems can be either averted or healed if the body is simply given the optimal environment and left to do its own thing.
My last post was about the basic biology of insulin resistance and about how it is the underlying root cause of type 2 diabetes, as well as a risk factor in its own right for many diseases.
Today I’m going to answer the question of how to tell if you have insulin resistance.
Tens of millions of Americans suffer from insulin resistance, and most of them don’t even know it. Left unchecked, insulin resistance can lead to heart disease, cancer, dementia, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and lots of other bad health outcomes. But before I can get into explaining how you can know if you have this condition, and what you can do about it if you do, I first need to explain what insulin resistance is.
