Dr. Jason Fung: To Lose Weight, You MUST control Insulin

00:00:01
So what happens when you eat is that insulin goes up.
00:00:04
And insulin basically is the hormone that tells your body to store fat.
00:00:08
So it stops your body from burning fat, you start to store some of the sugar and store some of the fat.
00:00:15
Carbohydrates get turned into glycogen which are chains of glucose in the liver, is basically a storage form of sugar.
00:00:23
And when you have too much of that, then your liver produces lipids and it basically stores fat.
00:00:29
So when you don’t eat, your insulin levels fall. And that’s a signal to start pulling some of that energy out.
00:00:36
So you’re gonna start by pulling some energy out from the glycogen and you’re gonna pull some energy out of the stored fat.
00:00:43
So, you can think of it – the glycogen, like a refrigerator, so you can put food in easily, you can take food out easily.
00:00:52
Right, it’s just food energy.
00:00:53
And the fat is more like your freezer, you can store more of it, but it’s in your basement, it’s hard to get to.
00:01:00
And it’s the same idea, you have two storage forms of energy – the refrigerator though has a limited capacity, so if you put, if you have too much stuff, you have no choice but to put it in your freezer.
00:01:12
The body doesn’t have some giant vat of calories, right? You can store sugar, you can store fat.
00:01:20
There are two places in the body where you can store food.
00:01:23
Your calories goes in, into your fridge and your calories goes out from the fridge, but there’s a third thing that you have to consider.
00:01:31
And that is how much food goes back and forth between the freezer and the fridge. And the question is what’s controlling this? And it turns out that the main player is insulin.
00:01:43
Insulin inhibits lipolysis, what that means is that it stops you from getting the fat coming out.
00:01:50
So if you have a lot of insulin, then you can’t get the food back out this way. So normally, if you eat a huge meal, your insulin is high, it’s gonna tell the body to move all the storage in this way. And that’s the problem.
00:02:03
So if you have a lot of insulin resistance which keeps your insulin levels very high, it’s like that freezer is kinda locked away in the basement behind a locked steel bar – you can’t get at it.
00:02:15
So what happens now when you start reducing your calories? If you start reducing your calories in, what your body is simply gonna do is reduce the calories out.
00:02:26
That’s what it does, because it’s not gonna keep losing weight until you die. That’s just ridiculous.
00:02:33
If you’re affecting the insulin, you can’t get at that fat. You’re just gonna reduce your calories out.