The following is an excerpt from an Elite Body interview I did with Isabel De Los Rios, author of The Diet Solution.
Jim Katsoulis: Can you give us a brief summary about how hormones, specifically insulin, act in the body and how it influences weight, I know that’s a big part of your program.
Isabel Delos Rios: Yeah, and this is actually something I teach to every single person, clients and non-clients whether they want to hear it or not. No. Basically, what happens is when you eat something that is a carbohydrate and/or turns into sugar quickly in your body, having high blood sugar is a dangerous state for your body.
It immediately releases insulin, which is the hormone, to start to pick up and clean up that sugar. So, it picks up the sugar and it takes it into your cell. First, it takes it into your liver then it takes it into your muscle, but then it has nowhere else to go.
So, insulin quickly turns that sugar into a fatty acid and starts storing it. And it will decide. It will store it in your legs. It will store it in your abdominal, in your butt, in your arms, wherever it is that your body tends to store.
The longer we have this elevated insulin levels, the more…our body is doing this picking up sugar, turning it into fatty acid, and storing it into different parts of our body, which is exactly what most people do not want. So, the two things that really control blood sugar is number one, to really stay away from the food that turn into sugar very quickly in the body.
Obviously, that’s anything containing regular white sugar, that’s a lot of different carbohydrates like white bread and pastas that turn into sugar quickly, high fructose corn syrup, a lot of these things turn into sugar quickly, insulin elevates and you have this constant state of storing fat.
Now, the other thing that balances out your blood sugar is eating protein because protein has the ability to release glucagon which is the opposing hormone. So, imagine that glucagon can combat insulin and that’s essentially what everyone does want. They want the glucagon, the insulin-fighter, in their bloodstream constantly keeping insulin at bay.
So, the two very important things there are: keep away from those foods that turn into sugar very rapidly, and number two, it’s essential to eat a protein with every single meal. And it doesn’t have to be a big, fat steak at every meal but it has to be a little bit of protein at each meal.
This interview was an excerpt from the MP3 audio interview program, The Diet Solution . To learn how to get the complete interview and many more, click here