Ways to Improve Insulin Sensitivity

We’ve all been there, you take a shot of insulin and when you expect your blood sugar to drop, nothing really happens. You might be more insulin resistant (either temporary or maybe not). Below are some tips and ideas based on personal experience and research that will help you increase your insulin sensitivity and achieve tighter control

Exercise

If I could only give you a single tip – exercise would be it! To clarify, when I say exercise, I am referring to both cardio (things like running, biking, etc.) as well as resistance training (lifting weights). I have personally noticed that after exercise, maintaining my blood sugar levels becomes much easier (less unexplained spikes, flatter numbers, more predictable responses, etc). According to research that I have done, exercise improves insulin sensitivity both in the short term and long term.

In addition to the immediate benefits, of improving insulin sensitivity, and making it easier to manage blood sugar levels, exercise has been shown to drastically improve your mood, suppress appetite (your metabolism improves), and lead to better dietary choices (since once you start exercising and seeing results, you will be motivated to keep going).

If you want to read the science behind this some more, here are some great studies to check out:

Diet and Food Choices

After exercise diet has the biggest impact on proper blood sugar maintenance in my opinion. I find that avoiding simple carbs like white bread, pasta, takeout, highly processed food makes a major difference. when it comes to predictability and stability of blood sugars. When I kept my diet as simple as possible (eating things such as veggies, clean protein like chicken, eggs, fish) it made controlling my blood sugar much easier. A side note – I find when I eat outside of home, even simple things like salads can really throw off my blood sugar levels. I suspect this is likely because of all the sauces and additives they add to make things “taste good” (because restaurants are in the business of selling food, and let’s face it, delicious food sells a bit better 🙂 ). There are tons of recipes on the internet you could find, but I would start with these basics and add more complex meals and see how your body reacts. ultimately, each person is different and what works for one, might not work as well for another, so experimenting is important!

Use a Contiuous Glucose Monitor To See What Works for you

When you start trying different things out, I would highly recommend to use a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) such as the Dexcom G7, or the Abbott Freestyle Libre. Using a CGM makes it much easier to get real time feedback, the full picture instead of a snapshot, and see exactly how your body reacts to the foods that you eat. This way you know what works for you, and if the same food that you eat is having an unusual impact on your blood sugars, you might want to investigate what other changes you made to your lifestyle that might be causing it.

Try Not To Eat After 8pm

One last tip on the topic of food – I highly recommend to try your best to avoid eating after 8pm. This is because a lot of the times, we misjudge how much insulin we should bolus for meals, and find ourselves at 1am either nursing a high, or eating something sweet trying to get your numbers up. This creates a lot of anxiety (who can actually fall asleep with unstable blood sugar), or can lead to something even more dangerous like over bolus-ing to get a stubborn high blood sugar to come down and falling asleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night to dangerously low blood sugar due to an over correction. I do not recommend playing this game at night, after a long day, when you are tired and want to go to sleep. Last thing you want is to fall asleep after bolus-ing insulin to bring the blood sugar down and overdoing it, or spending a whole night with high blood sugar.

Reduce Stress

When we are stressed, the body releases the stress hormone – cortisol. Under stressful conditions, cortisol provides the body with glucose by tapping into protein stores via gluconeogenesis in the liver. This energy can help an individual fight or flee a stressor. However, elevated cortisol over the long term consistently produces glucose, leading to increased blood sugar levels.

Living with chronic stress causes long term damage to all sorts of systems in your body, accelerates the aging process, and can lead to insulin resistance. Do your best to deal with life stressors that cause to be in a chronic stressful state. We all go through stressful situations, but try your best to work reducing the stress once a bad situation has passed.

Here are some ideas that have worked for me to reduce stress:

Walk 15 minutes outdoors everyday (preferably during the day in the sunshine, that way you can get a very important dose of vitamin D too). I find that getting fresh air always gives me perspective, and calms me down
Try to regularly spend time in nature. Either go for a walk in the forest, walk in a park, spend some time by moving water. We often forget that we are part of nature, and we benefit tremendously when we come back to our ancestors’ roots and spend time in nature
Cardio Exercise – There are many studies that link regular exercise to stress reduction and the release of endorphins (the “happy hormone”). In addition to improving your mood, it will also help improve your insulin sensitivity as we covered above
Meditation – There are many studies that spending just 10 minutes a day resting your mind, and trying to declutter your thoughts can lead to a better mood, lower resting heart rate, and overall more relaxed state. So try to give it a shot. You can meditate using guided meditation, or just pleasant background music (I suggest 432 hz music – this is the most harmonious frequency)

These are some great ways to reduce stress, and improve your insulin sensitivity.

Lose Extra Weight

There are a lot of studies linking insulin resistance and obesity. The best thing you can do for your overall health is to lose those extra pounds and get into a healthy weight. Not only will you feel much better, more confident about yourself, you will also get all the benefits of better insulin sensitivity, and ultimately better blood sugar controls.

The good news is that by incorporating the ideas mentioned above, losing weight will be a by-product. It will be the inevitable outcome of leading a healthier lifestyle, making conscious food choices, incorporating exercise, not eating late at night, and cutting down on processed food.

Hope the ideas above were helpful. Do you have any tips that you find help with insulin sensitivity? Please share them in the comments!

Upwards and Onwards! 🙂

Disclaimer: The content is for entertainment purposes only, and is purely informative and educational in nature and should not be construed as medical advice. Please use the content only in consultation with an appropriate certified medical or healthcare professional. The writer is not a licensed medical doctor. If you choose to do anything discussed in this article, you do so at your own risk with the full understanding of any side effects that are incurred.

The Diabetes Source