Calorie Restriction
Nightline ran a story on calorie restriction this week, and I thought I should make a comment as to how this relates to preventing insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. As noted in the program, calorie restriction is more about living longer than about losing weight. Of course, consuming very few calories per day will certainly lead you to lose weight.
I don’t recommend calorie restriction as the best way to overcome insulin resistance…at least not until everything else is in order.
First of all, we don’t know if calorie restriction will work as well in humans as it does on laboratory mice and monkeys. Though we’re also mammals, we don’t live in a lab, which means we have to deal with a lot more stress, some “cognition” problems in understanding we’re hungry, and environmental hazards like pollution that are also a factor in how long we live. So, we shouldn’t expect calorie restriction to extend our life by 20-30 years, unless we want to move into a cage. A couple of years is possible, yes, maybe 5-10, but we’re counting on a lot of other things to go right during that time, like not getting hit by a car, for instance.
Second, if we start eating a lot less, our body starts to slow down its metabolism. It thinks a long winter with little food is on the horizon, so burning fewer and fewer calories is called for in order to survive. To boost your metabolism, and to get it into a fat-burning mode, you actually usually need to eat more food and exercise to burn it off.
When starting the HRH Program, I recommend you eat certain foods, but I don’t think you should limit yourself until the symptoms of insulin resistance go away, which leads us to the third point: calorie restriction is not easy.
Hey, if we could have cut our food intake by one-third, wouldn’t we have done so already? Isn’t that why we have insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome problems in the first place? Very few people have the will power to discipline their food intake so much. If you haven’t had that sort of will power in the past, don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ll suddenly have it now.
With pre-diabetes and diabetes, you need to get your body chemistry back in order before you can even consider going on a calorie restriction regimen. Because you’re almost sure to fail if you don’t.
Fortunately, by doing fat-burning exercises like I recommend in the HRH Program, you speed your metabolism, get your blood sugar back in line, lose fat, and feel better. Once you’re to that point, which takes quite a while, you can reassess your priorities and determine whether you want to try a life extension program like calorie restriction.