The reason you have too much belly fat is that you produce too much insulin. The reason you produce too much insulin is twofold: you consume too many rapidly digestible carbohydrates and your muscles don’t respond to insulin—a condition called “insulin resistance.” Here’s what happens.
Your muscles burn glucose and fat for the energy they need to do their work. They keep some fuel in storage so it will be there when they need it. If your muscles are only working for brief periods, they have all the fuel they need in their stores. However, if they work long enough–about twenty minutes of steady walking, for example– they burn through those stores. To replenish them, they unlock gates in their membranes that respond to insulin. They become “insulin responsive.” Insulin can then open the gates, let glucose in and replenish those stores.
If your muscles are not responsive to insulin–if you have insulin resistance–and you eat a carbohydrate, glucose has nowhere to go so the glucose level in your blood rises. This triggers your beta cells to secrete more insulin, a lot more. When your muscles are resistant to insulin, your beta cells have to secrete from two to six times the normal amount of insulin to remove glucose from your blood.
So what happens to the glucose in your blood when your muscles stop responding to insulin? There’s one kind of cell in your body that keeps responding to insulin after your muscles have stopped, and that is your fat cells. High insulin levels push glucose into your fat cells, which change it to fat. Why belly fat? The fat cells in your abdomen are more sensitive to insulin than those in other parts of your body, which is why insulin resistance promotes fat buildup in the abdomen–the “muscle-belly connection.”
Insulin resistance is the main reason so many of us these days are hyperinsulinemic. Approximately a third of Americans have signs of chronic insulin resistance by the time they turn 40.
How do you get rid of insulin resistance? You guessed it. You activate your muscles, but here’s the good news. The kind of activities you need to do to restore your muscles’ responsiveness to insulin is different from what you think. You don’t need to huff and puff on the jogging trail or grunt and groan at the gym. The object is not to increase endurance or build big muscles. You just need to tap into the fuel that’s stored up in your muscles. Click here and find out how: Activate Your Slow-Twitch Muscles
