Insulin Resistance and Metabolic Dysfunction

And what people don't seem to understand, if you look at one gram of a nutrient, that's a lot. So when you start taking 45,000 milligrams of something, when you say it like that, then you're like, shit, that's a lot. And people don't think about that. If you're eating 300 grams of whole protein, it's nice and balanced. The minute you start throwing in a lot of single nutrients or two or three different nutrients, then it throws everything off. So taking five or ten grams of branched chains is not that big of a deal around your workout. But then when you're doing that all day, not to mention if you're stimulating mTOR all day, everything's anabolic. So if you want to get insulin resistant and inflamed, and if you want, fat gets anabolic. So you start ramping up mTOR, guess what? And you have girls that want to lose body fat, but they're drinking BSAs all day, and they can't figure out why they're dieting, but they can't lose fat. Yeah, because in those windows between meals when they'd be sipping on waters and as we deplete the whole purpose of the training for fat loss and that's like depleting the glycogen and getting that metabolism cranking, if they're then putting in an alternative source of fuel to their own body fat to be running as a muscle sparing, you know, because they don't want to get catabolic, I'm going to maintain that muscle. So that's what they're thinking, huh? They're thinking if I sip on this all day, I'm going to keep burning fat and preserve my muscle. But the reality is the body will use the branched chain amino acids as a source of fuel instead of tapping into your stored body fat that's in subcutaneous stores and that sort of stuff. That's the reality, huh? That's the reality. And then if you look at the converse side of guys trying to gain weight, when you go into, say, the old traditional bulking, you start bulking and you have all the best intentions, right? In the first three or four months, you're doing really well, you're eating all whole foods, and you stop gaining weight. And you're like, I just can't eat 5,000 or 6,000 calories in whole foods. So they start eating more junk, and then they start increasing that insulin resistance. The same thing happens if you're mega-dosing essential amino acids or branched-chain amino acids all day. Once you start tuning those insulin receptors down, you can't get sugar into the muscles, and then you start actually losing muscle, which is, if you look at diabetics, diabetics are insulin-resistant, metabolically resistant. What's the first thing that happens? Do they get fat first? No, they lose muscle first, then they get fat. And that's what they're basically doing to themselves. So you get a guy who's bulking, bulking, bulking. He's taking all these essential amino acids, all the branched-chain amino acids over time. they're going to systematically make themselves insulin resistant. So they're actually, they're getting bulk, but they're not getting the bulk they want. Then they wake up one day and they look at themselves in the mirror and they go, I look like a sloppy fat shit. Like how did this happen? Well, you've been eating Mac as an eating branch chains. Yeah. Right. So you, then they start, they go all the, all the way on the other side and they start massively dieting. And by the end of their transformation, they've put on maybe a kilo of weight and they don't look any different. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. And it's weird. And so just when you talk about that insulin resistance and the first thing that happens is our muscles stop. So what people don't realise is insulin resistance is actually a muscle disorder, not a fat disorder. So people go, insulin resistance is obesity related. So, well, obesity is a consequence of insulin resistance and initially it's actually resistance to insulin-like growth factor and the inability for the muscle to thrive with training and diet. And then the end result is the fat goes, well, I'll never become insulin resistant, so send it over here. and this is the thing I like as well too from a very lay point of view is that everywhere we look and we talk about it all the time nature knows best right there's summer and winter and obviously the seasons there's night and day it's like people are trying to outsmart nature they don't want the waves you know in terms of feast and famine night time, day time, that sort of stuff they just want a constant wave the whole time which is a tidal wave which is an absolute wreck You need those sets of waves. You need the cycles. And once you start to tap into that, optimizing health, whether it be weight loss or muscle gain and all the rest of it, is really about optimizing the cycles optimizing the damage then optimizing the repair optimizing the growth hormone all those sorts of things And once you can really start to understand that with both your training and your nutrition and your supplementation then you really going to start powering ahead And I've seen it since I opened my supplement store in 2002, is that people just constantly want to, and Matt says it really well, just constantly want to put the foot flat down to the floor on the accelerator without removing handbrakes. Well, a couple of things. You're going to burn out your engines, you're going to stuff your brakes, and when you do need to stop, you can't. And this is the whole thing about balance. And this is the intelligence that, again, people like yourself and Matt are starting to give this holistic whole view of how to train, eat, and supplement, which is we need more of it. You get a lot of people that get caught in these endless cycles of dysfunction, and they do it to themselves. So we've got a bikini competitor, and she starts taking branching amino acids all day because her coach said to drink three liters of water, but she hates water, so she drinks this. Now she's becoming insulin resistant. Now blood sugar is rising because insulin can't keep the alpha cells from secreting glucagon, and then you've got an influx of sugar, and now that insulin resistance, what's going to happen to you? You become hyperinsulinemic. Sex hormone bonding globulin is going to go down. Now estradiol is going to go up. Now you're estrogen dominant. Now you've got increased thyroid bonding globulin. Now your metabolic rate goes down, and you cannot figure out why. Metabolic crash. You're eating like 800 calories and you have no idea why you're not losing weight. Well, 800 calories is now your normal maintenance because you've crashed your metabolism so hard because of taking stupid shit with vitamins.