It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways

become insulin resistant. Once this occurs, the cells lose their sensitivity to insulin’s message to store nu ...

INFLAMMATION These cells, overfilled and running mostly on sugar, produce “reactive oxygen species” (which you pr ...

resisting insulin’s message to store. This creates ongoing hyperglycemia—chronically elevated levels of blood sugar ...

health long before you get to diabetes. Hyperglycemia (chronically high levels of blood sugar) is damaging, ...

bloodstream. Since your blood sugar regulation mechanism no longer works properly, all that insulin can ...

vicious cycle—and it could be worse. If you don’t change your eating habits pronto, insulin resistance ...

Nobody wants diabetes. In fact, nobody wants any of this—the primary reliance on sugar for energy, the ongoin ...

Glucagon unlocks the one-way door out of storage cells (like liver and fat cells), and allows you to access the e ...

glycogen in the liver back into glucose and releases it into the bloodstream for use as ener ...

Just as insulin is the “air conditioner” for safe blood glucose levels, glucagon functions as the “heater,” ...

When you are insulin resistant and eat a high-carb meal, insulin levels stay high and “echo” throughout the bo ...

CORTISOL Summary: The “stress hormone” secreted from the adrenal glands to help the body recover from an acute ...

system so that you (mentally) feel more like Einstein than like Homer Simpson. Cortisol levels then ...

secretion) when you’re sleeping, so you don’t get adequate deep, restorative sleep. That sleep, and no ...

bloodstream as a response to your volatile blood sugar levels. The trouble comes when your actions (dietar ...

calories (which we’re pretty sure you’ve done before) is also profoundly stressful and also elevates cortis ...

Chronically elevated cortisol levels increase blood sugar levels, which may contribute to insulin resistance. Elev ...

disease, stroke, atherosclerosis, and kidney disease. Finally, as a weight-gain triple-whammy, elevated cortisol ...

stressful situations, and other more subtle influences. There are not enough pages in this book to examine all ...

nutrient-poor foods and your hormones are all in a good, healthy balance. For you, nearly every day is a ...