Size Matters

Size can be the difference between developing insulin resistance, gaining weight, and eventually getting diabetes or not.

Size matters but what size am I talking about when I say the bigger, the better?

I am referring to food particle size. The smaller the particle size of the “food” you eat, the more dramatic the hormonal impact becomes.

If you still use calories as your measuring stick for your dietary consumption, you should know that the same exact amount of food with the same macronutrient ratios will have a significantly different impact on your insulin response depending on the particle size of the food you consume.

This hyper insulin response to the particle size of your food can make the difference between burning the energy from your food and storing it as body fat.

If you, for example, consume a 700-calorie meal with 250 calories from carbs, 150 from protein, and 300 from fat, it has the potential to help you lose weight, maintain it, or gain weight based on how the food is delivered. You could be making a tremendous effort to lose weight with all the numbers to do so exactly right but end up gaining weight due to this very important variable of particle size.

An apple will, for example, have a 150% potential fluctuation in your insulin response depending on if it is consumed whole, as apple sauce, or juice. Even with the same glycemic index (+/- 2), the same calories, and consumed in the same timeframe, the whole apple will have ½ to ⅓ the insulin response that the juice will have, with the apple sauce sitting in the middle.

Grains will also have a much higher insulin response depending on how fine the flour was when the bread or other flour-mashed foods were made because of the smaller size of the particles.

By the way, fiber will not make any difference at all, and if you make a soft or liquid meal and add fiber, it won’t improve the insulin response and can, in fact, make it worse. This is not about fiber.

All you people following the keto diet, counting carbs and staying under 20 or 50 per day will dramatically affect your ketosis, but it depends on how you consume those carbs. If you do so as a liquid or soft serving, a helping of 20 carbs can have a 60-carb insulin result.

Insulin determines if you make and use ketones, and not the carb number or calorie amount. It’s actually better to count your insulin magnifiers than the net carbs.

Keto-approved foods can be very insulin unfriendly and ruin your honest efforts to lose weight or stay in ketosis.

Eating carbs in your meal has a dramatic effect on insulin as well since if you eat your carbs first, it can result in a 300% increase in your insulin response compared to if they were eaten last.

Higher insulin-producing carbs eaten with fat will also cause an increase in the insulin response versus eating them on their own.

Are you getting the picture? I hope it is becoming clearer that following a diet plan based on calories, ketones, or macros can give you a very false sense of security, and it can be the reason why you aren’t seeing the results you think your efforts should produce.

We can do better!

Insulin Friendly Living takes all of this into consideration; you should be doing it too!