Most Replayed Moment: The First Warning Signs Of Insulin Resistance! Check Your Skin For This

0:00Running a small business can feel a lot like being alone at sea and too often you're not steering the ship yourself. You're getting dragged into the pool of the admin, things like offer letters, onboarding, wages, payroll, filing taxes and health insurance. And that's where our sponsor, Gusto, helped. They helped you break free of all of this clutter and all of this admin work and all of this headache. Gusto is an online payroll and benefits software but for small businesses just like some of you. It's an all-in-one, remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use platform so that you can pay higher on board and support your team from anywhere in the world. That way you can channel all of your energy into growing your business rather than just keeping your head above water, which is a feeling I know very, very well. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash diary and get three months free when you run your first payroll through Gusto. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash diary. That's gusto.com slash diary.

1:01So when I'm your 54 years old, when I'm 54 years old I want to be as young and energetic and articulate and cognitively astute as you are. So what should I be doing now to make sure that I don't decline decay in all those areas I've described? What'd you have for breakfast? Today. Yeah. I have not eaten breakfast yet. It's okay. That's not a bad thing but when you're 54 you should probably put the calories in the morning, not at night. We know that as you age the cost of a calorie turns into timing. If you eat that one bite of food after six o'clock is worth 10 bites of food before noon. So if you're trying to say how do I get the best out of the nourishment but also eating is fun. If you only get one bite after six o'clock and 10 before move that food towards morning when you're your age, what's the last meal you ate? Yesterday.

2:01Yeah. For dinner I had this cod and I had salad. I also had pasta. Okay. But they're pretty late, which is a good thing. Yeah. Where did you have the rest of the day before that? Was that your birthday? Just a salad. Okay. And more towards lunch or noon or probably about four o'clock. So waited all the way to four o'clock to eat. Very common. This is a really common pattern of people doing what we would say intermittent or time restricted eating. They put that eating window in this but it's got that balloon at the end of the day. And it really does. I mean what you're stimulating is an excessive production of insulin and you're going to wake up the next morning. What time do you wake up this morning? Today. I went to bed fairly, relatively early for me. I woke up at about 7.30 a.m. Oh. Especially it's later. And did you have a solid seven, eight hours of sleep or how? Yeah. So during that time, you finished eating around 10 o'clock then it sounds like. Yeah. Okay. So then it's seven o'clock. Okay. So 11 o'clock and you've got seven, thirty the mornings when you woke up so that's about

3:04eight hours since you've eaten. Your insulin is still churning, especially if the meal was large and there was carbs in it. You've got these processed foods late at night and you're at the beginning of the disease, right? You're at the beginning of the chronic inflammatory churn of how do you age faster and faster? You don't do that. You don't have high insulin throughout the night. So can you explain to me like on a 12 year old what insulin is and the role it's playing? Because you know, I guess we're focused here on how to, I guess longevity aging for a second. How does insulin play role in all of this and what is insulin? So insulin insulates. Okay. So think of it as it makes you fluffy. It makes it puts the fat on. It's got some other roles too, but we're going to talk about chronic diseases here where it's not a scarcity problem. You make plenty of it. And when it's in excess, it will store energy for when you go through a famine. It will also cause you to grow. Now, grow means get a little fatter, but it also means things like their skin gets

4:07a little thicker. They have skin tags. And what I always think about is what's going on in their brain. And when that insulin is high for years and years and years, just like yours, because if you didn't eat the rest of today, and then you got up tomorrow morning, it would be about that long after a late meal last night. That's how long it would take you to say, okay, we're back down to where we started from or where we should be in the morning. For someone that's never had the wedding seal in before, there's some context to give them in terms of what it's doing. So it's coming out like a transporter and helping put away the sugar. We'll deal with the excess sugar. Right. So it is what lifts, yeah, it lifts glucose or sugar from the circulation into a cell. That's its first primary job. But if all the cells are full, their storage is full. It's going to start to pack it into the liver. I mean, let's say all those stores are full too. This job of insulin, this hormone, oozes into every part of your body to say, make sure it's got fuel, make sure it's got that sugar.

5:09But most people are like what I would guess you are. Most of the time you aren't a shortage of sugar. And so it tops things off and then it will turn things into fat. It's too much sugar. They can't store it. All the storage is full. So you can send the signal out. Make me some more cells. I need some more storage units. This guy's eating more than he thinks he is. And we're going to be prepared to live through the famine. But in the meantime, turn it into fat. Make him a little fluffier. Is that the only consequence of high insulin is that I'm going to, I might be a bit more fat? No, that's just the one people hear about the most. When you look at chronic disease management, it is the growth of the diseases, of the inflammation. It's the making of the trash. So I keep saying, you need to take the trash out routinely, which means that insulin, which has been smoldering higher than you think it is because you live in today's role because you eat processed food because you eat superlated night. You don't go two to three days without eating. You've got storage filled in your body.

6:10The high insulin levels in a healthy person hides that the debris is being made and you don't know it. Yeah, hides it. Yeah, it's going to put it in between two cells in your brain. It's going to put it in between the skin cells. The trash doesn't get taken out until the insulin gets lower. And unfortunately, most people have been making buckets of insulin without knowing it. Why? What are they doing to create buckets of insulin? All the things you said about carbs, foods that comes from boxes and barcodes and bags instead of whole foods instead of a fat forward diet, which would then push that body into making ketones. So you cannot make a ketone if you're insulin-side. Are there any signs that I might have high levels of insulin or insulin resistance? Abdominal growth is the first thing that is the first place that the fat goes. So you do this really great part where you don't eat until later in the day.

7:12How does that feel during the day? During the day, I feel really focused. I actually don't even know that I'm eating. So that's really good. What I would love to know is show me what your blood sugars are doing during the day and show me if you make ketones. That will be the answer is when you have excess insulin, which is this chronic disease maker, it is what makes cancer, it is what makes high blood pressure, it is what makes debris in the brain where call it depression or brain fog or Parkinson's. It's the aging of the brain. It's linked to all of those things. All of those things. And that excess insulin nobody tells you about. But the symptoms are, dang, I feel like I got to eat every two to three hours. I feel like I'm going to get a degree or there are fuel keeps running out. When you say, I can eat once at the end of the day and I'm pretty good, my focus stays really good. What I want you to prove is, what are your ketones during the day? So when you've got a patient who has done that, their ketones will be 0.7, 1.0.

8:13And they're taking off the trash all day long. So there's these two energy sources, one of them is the glucose, one of them is from like eating pasta, which I last night. So that probably put a lot of glucose in my bed. I probably had a high glucose spike and then insulin came out to deal with that. And then there's ketones which start to appear when I'm fasting or when I haven't been eating carbs for a while and my body is looking for an energy source. Right. Yeah. So think of it as your short term, easy to access sugar has to decrease. And that means your insulin has decreased that hormone for insulate. You're both run in tangents. You decrease your empty and glycogen, your insulin's going down. So how do I know if I have insulin resistance? What are the key signs? You mentioned skin tags. I've never had that term before. Yeah, skin tags are not moles. So moles, you can feel this bump on your skin, right? But a skin tag has a neck and like a little mushroom. And it's the most annoying thing when patients come and say, well, I just tried to cut them

9:13all off, but they kept bleeding. I'm like, do not cut them off. They'll fall off when your insulin's lower. So that's the first place. It'll be found in their armpits or places where their skin rubbed. So armpits and they're growing. And once insulin starts to grow them, it's like a crop, a crop, a little baby call flower, hanging out in their armpits. You talked about velvety skin as well as being an indicator. Velvety skin is this Latin word, it can, those as nigricans, which is a fancy word that means the skin is darker and thicker. The places that usually happens is the back of the neck. And you'll hear stories of, I tried to wash my neck. It's dirty all the time. It's not dirt. It is the way the skin is under the curse of high insulin. And you see it in teenagers all the time now. They put on weight and their growth hormones are already doing that teenage thing. Now you put a high insulin in there and they have this dirty neck syndrome. Or on the creases of their elbow, it's just darker here.

10:14That is pathology. That's not normal from high insulin. You talked about weight changes as well. What's this thing about hairy toes that I was reading about? Right. So as my patients age, so most of my 55 year olds that have had high insulin, I will tell them, look at your toes. They're supposed to have hair on them. And when your body has had that high insulin state for a couple of decades now, it will start to say, we don't send resources to a couple parts of the body anymore. And the follicles in their toe are one of them. Like you just stop growing hair on your toes. And there's an ascending problem with this where the toe starts, then it's the ankles, then it's up to the knees, and they don't have hair anywhere on their lower extremities. It is a process that started from high insulin. So you have this idea of this keto continuum. What is the ketone continuum? I read about it. I mean, it's a book here by Half-WitchyPublished in 2020 called the ketone continuum consistently keto for life. Right.

11:14So the ketone continuum is this 12-step process to get into a consistent keto. Consistently keto. Yeah, you're constantly taking out the trash. The first part is the beginner. Okay, so the first part, the beginner section has four stages to it. What are those four stages? Well, I like to tell patients that you never fall all the way off of the continuum. So the first step is really not keto, but it is that they're eating every two to three hours. And if they fall off the wagon, that's usually where they land. So that's what most people start at. They're eating every two to three hours. They are not keeping their carbs less than 20. Step two is, cut your carbs to 20. That's the only thing I need you to measure. And you're going to be able to use a ketone strip, you know, measure ketones in your urine. And that will ride, you'll ride away. And that ketone production is happening. The fat-based hormones in your body are starting to resurrect. They're starting to do the things that they need to do. And there'll be this magical moment in the not-too-near future where you skip a meal.

12:17And this, that beginning stage, how long does that last? I'll put this on the screen so everybody can see the continuum. How long does that initial beginner stage last for people? If they've been severely insulin resistant, this is the ones where I've said they took their carbs to 20 for two weeks before they pita ketone. So I use some other steps if that's how severe that is. Let's just take the average person. That's like, not 100 pounds overweight. They're hitting menopause and they've put on 25 pounds. When they drop their carbs to 20, they're pita ketone by the end of the week. And they are missing their first meal by day 10. Okay, so day 10. And then it says, when we get to stage 5 in the keto continuum, it says 16-18, 16-8. Is that? Yeah. So let me start to use timer-stricted eating, where I want, when we're going to, your body will adapt. You'll say you can't stay on the keto diet because they go to step 4 and then they think that that's all they needed to do. There are several steps to reversing this problem.

13:17And you'll know you have the right step if the ketones are still present in your blood. Your body will adapt though. So we start to say, all right, we're going to learn some new behaviors. We're going to learn what the nothing burger looks like, at least for 16 hours out of the day. What does that mean? You do not eat a thing in those 16 hours. Now, I give them a little hedge because most people come in like you. They don't start eating until 2 o'clock in the afternoon and then they eat until 10 o'clock. And I want them fat forward. I want lots of fat going in because insulin resistance, that high insulin state means they've locked or they've insulated their fat on their body. And then we get stage 7 where it says 23-1. Is that fasting for 23 hours a day? Yeah. And eating for one hour a day. There's a little bit of line between 16-8 and 23-1, but there's a whole bunch of life there. Meaning we don't actually have patients go from 16 hours of fasting to 23. We have them slide it down by an hour, slide it down by an hour.

14:19And then we do that harder thing which is move it towards sunrise, quit insulated night. And then the last stage here, so that 9, 10, 11 and 12 is prolonged fasting between 36 and 72 hours fasting. Right. So those folks that have high insulin for 15, 20 years, they're going to have to do a nothing burger for 36 hours in most of them to really give a good reset of their metabolism. And although you look at other folks saying, oh, you should never do that if you're a woman. You should never do that over the age of 50. I'm saying you have too much insulin in your body. You have to do that to get the pancreas to make less insulin over time. On that point, between men and women, I want them metabolic differences that need to be mentioned here because sometimes when I do ketogenic fasting, my girlfriend, she takes much longer than me to get into a ketogenic state. And I'm wondering if her body is in some way trying to defend the switch. Have you ever seen the reality show alone? Oh, no, I'm not. What they do show guys.

15:19Oh, I'm not either, but they drop these people off in the middle of nowhere and they starve them to death. And you watch the fat come off of them and the men, the fat just melts off of them. And the women, they do what your girlfriend does. It just holds on to them. That we are designed to have that fat on them. So asking them to do a ketogenic state, you'll hear people say, oh, it's going to ruin your hormones. Oh, it's going to, you can't do that. And I would say you can have all those conversations once their insulin is normal. But I have lots of women in child-bearing years that are excessive producers of insulin. And their vitamin D is low. Their estrogen is low. They have hair loss on the top of their head. They have skin tags throughout their body. Or maybe the first sign was they had PCOS. All of these are a sign that insulin came in and it's too high in their body. So lowering it has rules. And if you want to have a baby, carry a baby, have the weight come off after you've just dated a baby, have weight not be your enemy during menopause.

16:22You have to be making ketones at a routine and regular interval. Start with the food. Start with the menus in the kitchen. Don't run to the gym first. I've noticed in women in my life that they've told me that their menstrual cycles become more synced up when they are in a lower carbohydrate diet. Right. Their hormones can hear each other. I mean, when insulin is high, insulin dictates what that sugar does, but it also is the dictator for every morsel of fat. And estrogen, testosterone, vitamin D, they're all a derivative of fat, of cholesterol. And they are, they're put into the fat cells. If you biopsy an obese woman and say, can I see, is there any vitamin D hidden in there? Is there any estrogen? Is there any, yes, they're all in those fat cells. You start to lower their insulin and the fat mobilizes. So the hormones that are naturally communicated between women, they can actually hear them again. I mean, that tribal thing. If a woman were to stay in a ketogenic state permanently, would there be any disruption

17:26to her metabolic health? You mean like me? Yeah. Like, you know, a menstrual cycle's her, anything. No, I think it's, you're going to find people that it shouldn't be extreme, meaning I've been on this for 15 years. The ketogenic phase is at least 20 out of 30 days in a month, the first few years I was on it. Now at 55, menopause in the last year, I'm like, without a ketone, my brain doesn't work right now, that a ketone. My energy goes to pot. And I've been walking women through menopause for 25 years. It is not a fun story when they're insulin resistant. So prepare, have the flexibility of that mitochondria to use both ketones and glucose. And that's what a ketogenic state is. I want to speak to the business owners, listening and watching right now. I know what it's like to be personally responsible for every decision. I founded my first company at 21 years old, and honestly, the pressure can be immense.

18:28It's the kind of mental load that takes its toll below the surface. I recently did some tests through fast-sponsor function, which got me thinking about that invisible impact. I found that I had low levels of omega-3s. I had deficient levels of vitamin D, probably because I sit inside this dark room all day. And that has totally changed how I can strap my day going forward. I'll get up in the morning and the first thing I now do is I go for a walk outside in the sunshine. In part to help my vitamin D levels increase, but also because it helps to reset my circadian rhythm. With function, you can check your brain health, your aging, your stress, and so much more. They provide over 160 lab tests, Ford is equal to a dollar a day, and member pricing on advanced imaging. And you can use functionhealth.com slash D-O-A-C to join and use code D-O-A-C25 for a $25 credit. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.

19:33Running a small business can feel a lot like being alone at sea. But too often you're not steering the ship yourself. You're getting dragged into the fall of the admin, things like offer letters, onboarding, wages, payroll, filing taxes, and health insurance. And that's where our sponsor, Gusto, helped. They help you break free of all of this clutter and all of this admin work and all of this headache. Gusto is an online payroll and benefits software, but for small businesses just like some of you. It's an all in one remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use platform so that you can pay higher on board and support your team from anywhere in the world. That way you can channel all of your energy into growing your business rather than just keeping your head above water, which is a feeling I know very, very well. Try Gusto today at Gusto.com slash diary and get three months free when you run out your first payroll through Gusto. That's three months of free payroll at Gusto.com slash diary. That's Gusto.com slash diary.