Do Your Thoughts Influence Blood Sugar and Insulin Levels?
What you think about comes about. Right?
But does your mind actually influence blood sugar and insulin? Let’s investigate with a fairly common example.
If you have an emotional rise or engage in a heated reaction to a perceived crisis at work you unknowingly initiate your fight or flight response.
Even though the ‘crisis’ isn’t life threatening, your body responds as if you’re going to fight it or take flight/ run from it.
Your body immediately demands instant energy.
So what does your body do for you? Even though you’re sitting at your desk and you don’t need to fight. Nor do you need to flee, your body is still reacting to your emotional response to the situation.
Your brain, via cortisol and other stress-response hormones signals your liver to release sugar.
Your liver keeps a reservoir of glycogen, stored glucose, for at-the-ready fuel emergencies like this.
The liver’s sugar is immediately dumped into your blood stream to serve your fighting or fleeing. So, now you have a blood sugar rise and you haven’t even eaten anything.
This is when I really feel for our friends with diabetes, type 2 and type 1. You have a blood sugar rise just because you ‘got emotional’.
And you’re also going to have an insulin release or need to inject insulin. More fat storage hormone circulating.
Can you see why chronic stress, long-standing anger, grievances, and being emotionally volatile or ‘high strung’ works to make us fatter and sicker?
Just by the thoughts you think you can have a rise of insulin, which means body fat burning is turned off. It also means you accelerate aging.
You know, blood sugar ends up as belly fat that we carry around. And, unlike fat deposits in other areas of your body, belly fat isn’t benign fat. It releases inflammatory compounds, tumor signals, and hormones such as estrogen.
Here is the connection between man boobs and belly fat, and breast cancer and belly fat. And besides ending up as fat, blood sugar is broken down by your body and ends up sticking to proteins all over the inside of us.
Our body tissues degrade, kind of like rusting. Proteins become sticky and gummy. Amyloid plaque of Alzheimer’s, atherosclerosis of heart disease, neuropathy of diabetes or hyperinsulinemia.
People dying because they can’t feel the bottom of their feet and don’t realize they have an open wound that becomes infected and sepsis takes their life. True story. Truly devastating. It happens. Every day. To good people who didn’t know how to reverse insulin resistance or just didn’t know that they could.
Think of the suffocating emotions of loved ones watching their seemingly robust father die of sepsis.
Sure. He had diabetes. But he was taking care of it.
Dr. Perlmutter writes about watching his father wither away with Alzheimer’s. It’s the same. “There is frustration fused with helplessness, and anguish mingled with regret.”
Regret.
The haunting energy of denial, turning a blind eye, and brushing off.
If you seek to avoid regret, to understand the science, if you’re confused about all the food directives out there, SHIFT is a safe haven. It is certainty. Sanity. And it is solution.
You don’t have to suffer from cravings. You don’t have to carry a spare tire around your waist. You don’t have to endure restless leg.
You no longer need fear Alzheimer’s or heart disease. You don’t have to play victim to cancer.
You can soften the edges of life with chronic degenerative diseases. You have the right to feel younger than you have in years.
Your children and grandchildren deserve vibrant, unencumbered lives. You know how to reverse insulin resistance and you know how to restore your health, vitality and zest for living once and for all.
