Transcription
You could have all the hormones in the human body and tens of thousands of calories coming in every day. And if you simply remove one single hormone, it is impossible for that person to get fat. Totally and completely impossible. You simply wipe out a person's insulin, it is completely impossible for them to get fat.
In this video, Dr. Ben Bickman, the world's leading insulin expert, reveals four things about weight loss most people never find out. Why insulin, not calories, is the only real switch for fat loss. The morning effect sabotaging your fat burning before breakfast even begins. The one simple change you can make tomorrow to lose weight faster. And the hidden reason most people do everything right and still can't lose weight.
Most people have no idea their insulin is chronically elevated because their doctor has never tested for it and never will. That means the person next to you, the person you ate lunch with today, probably you. Normal blood sugar, normal blood pressure, people who think they're fine. All of them silently storing fat they can't explain. Insulin resistance has been controlling your weight, your hunger, and your fat storage, possibly for decades. And the reason almost nobody escapes it is because everything we've been told about how to fix it is completely wrong.
Dr. Bickman has spent his entire career studying exactly one thing. Insulin and what it does to the human body. What he's found will change everything you think you know about weight loss. Now, here's something that will stop you midthought. It is physically impossible for a fat cell to grow unless insulin is elevated. Not difficult, impossible. And that's not an opinion. That's what happens in Dr. Bickman's own lab every single day.
Insulin as a hormone is the one metabolic hormone to rule them all. It will determine what the body does with energy at every single cell. This is a principle even many very educated clinicians don't understand. And insulin is so determined to store energy that it will slow the metabolic engine of the body down in order to store more fat cells sitting in a sea of calories and they don't grow. Not until insulin shows up. If insulin is high, your body stores fat. If insulin is low, your body burns it. That's the entire equation.
But Dr. Bickman says the most powerful proof isn't in a lab dish. It's in a human case study so striking most doctors refuse to talk about it. You have people with type 1 diabetes. Imagine the temptation. Let's say you're a young woman who faces more pressure than her than her young men counterparts. She just gets diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and she has become used to eating whatever she wants and being very very skinny. That is one of the cardinal signs of type 1 diabetes. The person is just losing weight. In fact, the early the ancients thought that as they were making so much urine because another feature of type 1 diabetes in in an untreated state is they urinate a lot. That's what the word diabetes means. It means polyura or a lot of urine for formation. They thought that their flesh, their fat, their substance was turning into liquid and excreting from their bodies. And so the person this this imagine this young woman, she's say 13 years old. She is super super skinny which she likes because there's such a pressure to be skinny and she can also at the same time eat whatever she wants and then but of course she feels miserable and indeed it will kill her. So she gets diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and she's put on insulin therapy and two things happen. She starts eating less and getting fat. In fact, they gain people will gain so much weight that if they're in the hospital for a few days, they can't leave the hospital with the same clothes they came in. That's not to say they're leaving and then and they're obese, but they can have easily gained 10 lb, 15 pounds of fat. So, this phenomenon is known and you have people with type 1 diabetes who abuse that fact and will deliberately underdose their insulin. So, they can eat whatever they want. They could go to a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner and indulge in all the sweets and just simply underdose their insulin and be as skinny as they want to be. Now, there's disastrous metabolic consequences, but it's just a testament to the power of insulin.
They can eat as much as they want and they stay thin because insulin is low. That's not a diet tip. That's proof of a biological law. So, the question isn't how do I eat less. The real question is, how do I keep insulin low?
But before we get to the fix, there's something happening to your body right now that most people never find out about. And it's been quietly working against you every single morning. Because when insulin stops working properly, it doesn't just affect one system, it affects every system. And the diseases that follow look completely unrelated until you understand the one thing they all have in common.
Within the US, there's this been this game show over the years called The Greatest Loser. These people, one, lose a fantastic amount of weight, and yet you never see them again because they gain it all back. So, if your weight loss strategy is based on cutting calories without addressing insulin, which is the other of the two variables, then you're going to be hungry. Dr. Dr. David Lewig at Harvard, a friend and colleague and collaborator, he published a report looking at the same kind of dynamic that I outlined a moment ago, two isocaloric or equal calorie meals. And he found that when they ate the meal that spiked insulin, the what he called, I think he called it total energy availability. So they measured every calorie molecule in the blood. So ketones, you know, BHB, they measured uh lactate, they measured fats, they measured glucose, and they found that when with the insulin spiking meal, the total energy availability went down.
What does that mean?
Yeah. So in other words, with the increase in insulin, as I noted a moment ago, insulin is so determined to store energy that it is directing calories to go from the blood to be stored in tissues like fat or in the liver to make you fat.
Yeah, in indeed it would. But the problem is the brain doesn't have that storage capacity. You know, you could have big fat cells with lots of energy. You could have a liver with tons of fat and glycogen, which is a stored form of glucose ready to go, but the brain doesn't have a big storage reservoir. And yet, it has a high metabolic rate. And so, the brain is constantly relying on the energy in the blood that it can use, especially glucose and ketones, the two primary fuels for the brain. And so when you spike insulin, you lower your glucose and you stop your liver from making ketones. So the two main brain fuels have gone down, which is why you get brain fog.
This is not a weight problem. This is a hormonal crisis. And the good news is fixing the hormone fixes everything downstream, which is exactly what the rest of this video is going to show you how to do. Starting with the one morning mistake that's making all of it worse.
Every morning, a few hours before you wake up, your body releases cortisol. This is normal. It's your body preparing for the day, raising blood sugar, bringing your brain online. But here's the problem. Cortisol raises insulin. An elevated insulin in the morning means your body is already primed to store fat before breakfast even begins. Dr. Bickman calls this the dawn effect. And what it means for your first meal is something most nutritionists will never tell you.
You wake up in the morning, anyone who's wearing a continuous glucose monitor will find that their glucose levels naturally rise in the morning and that coincides with a mild state of insulin resistance every morning because of changes in cortisol and other hormones. So my view is don't doubly load to the glucose that's already happening by eating in the morning with starchy, sugary stuff. So be very strict with all of your meals up until dinner. I think that the CGM a CGM is one of the best ways for a person to make their own changes. So if you put a CGM on your body, you're able to look at your phone and see what's happening in your blood.
A CGM being a continuous glucose monitor, a continuous glucose monitor. So you're getting a continuous measurement of your glucose levels. I have seen more people make changes of their own valition when they just are wearing a CGM and they don't need someone to be nagging them. You know, you're you have that internal motivation because you see what's happening in your own body.
For anyone that's never tried it, I highly recommend it. Morning is a time of insulin resistance. Any food you eat in those first couple of hours is far more likely to be stored as fat than burned as energy. Oatmeal, cereal, toast, fruit juice. You're pouring sugar into a system already in fat storage mode. Even coffee makes this worse when paired with carbs. So, what do you do instead? That's where the insulin trick comes in, and it's the simplest change of them all.
Fasting is powerful, but Dr. Bickman knows it isn't for everyone. So, he recommends something simpler. One decision about breakfast that costs nothing and requires no willpower.
So, first of all, zero to little to no carbs for um breakfast and lunch. So any if a person wants to as much protein and fat as they'd like and I would say especially for lunch, let lunch be your biggest meal.
Change breakfast tomorrow. Not your whole diet, just breakfast. Tomorrow your body has been fasting overnight. Insulin has come down. The single worst thing you can do at that moment is spike insulin immediately with sugar and starch. Wait, use your morning energy. Walk. Plan your day. Push your first meal to late morning. Keep it protein focused. Eggs, meat, fish, nothing that spikes insulin.
But here's the thing most people miss. You can do all of this perfectly and still fail. Because there's a hidden force working against you every single night. And it explains why so many people do everything right and still can't lose weight.
When you don't sleep enough, your body interprets it as stress. Cortisol spikes, insulin follows. And cortisol doesn't just raise insulin. It goes directly to your brain and rewires your hunger signals. This is not a lack of willpower. This is chemistry. Dr. Bickman explains exactly what happens inside your brain when cortisol takes over.
Cortisol's metabolic effects do affect the brain and there it influences appetite and food cravings. And wouldn't you know it, it particularly increases cravings for carbohydrates. Cortisol crosses the blood brain barrier and once again binds to glucocorticoid receptors in the hypothalamus and the amydala. These are both regions involved in hunger and reward. So people feeling good about what they're doing. Now in the hypothalamus cortisol upregulates a protein called NPY neuropeptide Y and another one called a goody related protein AGRP and these are increased in response to the uh the gluccoid the gluccocorticoid response elements and when they're activated they stimulate appetite. At the same time, cortisol inhibits leptin signaling, reducing satiety potentially. But separate from that regulation of appetite in the amygdala, cortisol enhances dopamine release, so increasing cravings for very palatable, energy dense foods.
Your brain is chemically wired by cortisol to crave sugar. Not because you're weak, because one bad night of sleep triggers a cascade that kills satiety, spikes appetite, and makes junk food feel like a reward. Sleep isn't rest. Sleep is metabolic maintenance. It's just as important as anything you eat.
So, here's what you now know that most adults don't. Insulin resistance isn't just a weight problem. It's connected to Alzheimer's, infertility, heart disease, and cancer. all from the same root. Fat cells cannot grow without insulin. Calories aren't the gatekeeper. Insulin is. And poor sleep chemically drives you toward the exact foods that keep it elevated all day. The fix isn't another diet. It's understanding the one lever that controls everything and finally working with it.
One change. Tomorrow morning, don't eat the moment you wake up. Let your overnight fast run longer. Skip the starchy breakfast. Give your body the window it needs to finish what it started while you slept.
Struggling to lose weight no matter what you try? Click the video right now to discover Dr. Jason Fung's exact diet method. The one that resets your hormones and unlocks natural fat burning without starving yourself or spending an hour at the gym.