Increase Insulin Sensitivity

Insulin is one of your body’s best friends.  It’s the single hormone most responsible for building healthy tissue, gaining muscle, tapping the energy of the glucose in your blood, and blocking the protein in your body from being broken down for use as a back-up fuel source.

But the distortions of today’s lifestyle conspire to make insulin’s job harder.

Poor diet, stress, toxic exposure, sedentary lifestyle and weight gain all lead to reduced sensitivity of your body cells to the effects of insulin – insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance is one of the core imbalances contributing to today’s epidemic of degenerative diseases – cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, dementia, chronic pain, and the like.

Insulin resistance, if it progresses far enough, has another name – Type 2 Diabetes.

Five steps to reverse the damage done by the modern lifestyle

1. Build muscle. You need to lift weights, use resistance bands, or perform body-weight exercises on a consistent basis. Focus on the body’s largest muscle groups.
2. Cut out sugar, corn syrup, and other sweeteners.  You don’t need them.And don’t substitute artificial sweeteners for sugar, either.  They’re even worse for you. Honey, maple syrup, agave, and other alternatives are only slightly better.
3. Get rid of “trans” fats. That means no hydrogenated vegetable oils.
4. Improve the balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. Boosting your intake of healthy omega-3 fats by eating fresh, oily fish and taking a fish oil supplement can help, but usually it’s not enough. You also have to severely cut down your intake of corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, and the like.  And fried foods?  Unless you’ve made them yourself, you can be nearly certain they’ve been prepared with evil fats.
5. Use the proven power of specific herbs that boost insulin sensitivity.  Two of them you can start with:  green tea and cinnamon. A cup of brewed green tea is a healthy drink, and there are supplements that can give you a daily tea dose, too.  Freshly-ground powdered cinnamon can be added to a lot of foods, but herbal supplements with cinnamon extract can also be a handy way to get what you need.