Insulin Resistance and GDAs

But you were discussing in one of the podcasts, I believe, you know, when we're like, for example, like a bodybuilder or a powerlifter, anyone in their off season, you start eating a ton of carbs, continuously eating more and more. you get more fat you become more insulin resistant so what's like the old way of thinking include some gdas maybe berberine reform whatever um you do this and um now that you're still trying to shove sugar in the cell that doesn't want it you continue to become insulin resistant and now you're free fatty acid resistant so i kind of wanted to know more about your perspective on gdas because there's a lot of people in the industry a lot of um you know a lot of fitness I don't know, fitness athletes, creators, bodybuilders, pros that use GDAs, anything like this in order to like help prevent this from happening. So, I mean, do you have a perspective on this? What are your thoughts? Yeah. Look, GDAs have been around forever, like forever. Um, and I used to use them when I was younger and then I realized it's probably

not the best thing to do. But in order to understand this, you have to look at what insulin resistance is. So people go, oh, insulin resistance is bad. I'm going to disagree with you. Insulin resistance is kind of a check engine light coming on, right? It's a protective mechanism that the cell does because the cell can't handle the amount of energy that's coming in. So this could be related to a lot of things. You just have way too much energy coming in, or you don't have the mitochondria to deal with it. And when you look at the biochemistry things, you really want things to flow in one direction, but when things can't go one direction, there's always other directions that can go down. And sometimes, and these are normal, normal, natural things for, for to happen. It's when it's done chronically and at a really high rate where it starts to get bad. Right. So I'm not going to say insulin resistance, a great thing, because if you've pushed yourself to that position, that means that you've overdone it somewhere. And we need to figure out how to not overdo it. It's like, if you can't, if we think about the food that we eat, that's not really fuel that is unprocessed fuel. Your body has to change that chemically to other things to drive creating actual energy. We don't run on sugar. We don't run on fat. And it's a matter of semantics. You know, someone could say, oh, well, actually we do. I'm like, well, you're not wrong. Like you're right, but I'm more right. I can tell you that way, right? Because you don't push sugar into the mitochondria. You break sugar down to make other things to now run the electron transport chain or whatever we're doing, making heat, to making energy. So if you are, let's say you're going to, you look at your labs and your blood sugar is high. It does kind of make sense, but well, I could take a GDA and clear that, make my labs look better. But what's the consequence of that? Because you can't get one thing without paying for, for somewhere else. So if we want to look, look at diabetics, right? And it realistically, you're getting insulin resistant. You're moving more towards diabetes, diabetics who use GDAs, maybe they're using metformin, maybe using berberine, alpha lipoic acid, whatever. One of the side effects is a massive increase in hydrogen in the muscle tissue. They can't actually, they lose the ability to buffer that stuff out where the lactate system is how we buffer that out. But you have a finite ability to move these things. You're always bottlenecked at some type of cofactor or multiple cofactors or organelles, or there's always something that's going to bottleneck that. So let's say you are at overabundance and you're eating way more than you need to support training. You have to do something with that because toxic levels of energy in the bloodstream can kill you. So if we look at sugar as a form of unprocessed energy, if your sugar gets too high, what happens? You can go into a coma and die. If it gets too low, what can happen? You can pass out. You could also die, right? What about your blood lip? If your blood lip is get too high, that has other effects that are not good. So people need to stop. What they need to realistically do is stop focusing on trying to gain the most amount of weight in the off season because there's, what's the point if it's not high quality weight? Like we were laughing at, you know, about Lee priest, Lee priest is notorious about this. Lee priest guys, he's short as shit and he would bulk up to like three close to 300 pounds in the off season, eating KFC and McDonald's and all this. And he'd shred it all back down and he'd get on stage and be shredded. Like that's the old school way of doing it. And we know that that's probably not the best way of doing it. Every time you bulk and cut your, your driving inherently unhealthy processes and bodybuilding is not about health. I mean, let's be honest, about winning, right? But we probably want to try to make this as, as healthy as possible. Well, there's always going to be some inherent risks, but we definitely don't want to drive it to being as unhealthy as possible. So you start taking GDAs. You're always going to have a consequence by trying to force the body to do something it actually doesn't want to do. What do you think, uh, what would you say those consequences are for the people to, that don't quite understand i don't either like like the increase of hydrogen in the muscle like what that well we'll say result in we'll say like this well the first thing is fat storage right so if the if let's say you have fatty acids and glucose in the bloodstream and it just it can't be put into muscle cells and stored you can't store dysglycogen you can't oxidize it it has to go somewhere because again if it gets too high in your bloodstream you're going to die so you start pushing that in the fat cells well now fat cells get bigger that probably what you don want when you trying to body build like we gonna accept that you gonna you are going to push at the point where you're gaining a little bit of fat but these guys who get like really fat in the off season like that's not it that's not necessarily a good thing and it's not it's not it's not doing anything productive it's not fat is not going to make you stronger fat is not going to make you contract the muscles harder so we just have to assume that muscle can only grow at a certain rate if you had drugs in there you can amplify that a little bit but even drugs have a limit as well yeah and so let's say you go on a massive bulk and you're you're everybody's commenting how big you look they haven't seen you with your clothes off they just see in your shirt and they're like oh man you're looking big blah blah blah and then one day you get out of the shower and you look like a fucking melted candle and you're like fuck i do not look good with my shirt off and now you freak out and you start trying to shred all that back off but we the body does have limits there's you know there's a range of what we can do and if we try to push it past that to extremes the body's going to it's going to react in a negative manner and something is not really going to be productive towards the goals that you're looking for that could be a result of um including things like gdas like increase of fat storage yeah i mean look there's some of the some of the side effects like you're going to like let's say again going back to a diabetic what is the one of the top what's one of the top side effects of taking metformin they'll say lactic acid but what they're really trying to say is it you you put it's going to create a situation where you're pushing so much sugar into the cell when the cell doesn't want it it has to get rid of it right because again there's a consequence if i'm breaking sugar down in the pyruvate i'm releasing hydrogen okay if i'm pushing a bunch of sugar into the cell artificially with the gda you're going to ramp that up faster than you can neutralize it. So your ability to neutralize hydrogen is going to be based on how much activated niacin you have. You need enough NAD to now take that hydrogen, bond it to an NAD, grab another hydrogen and reduce it with pyruvate to make lactate. So like with a bodybuilder, you might notice, you know, I started taking a GDA and yeah, now I've pricked my finger. It looks pretty good. But when I train, everything burns. Like every time I do a movement and I'm getting close, let's say, you know, you're lifting and you're getting when should you start feeling muscle burn on say a 12 rep lift last few reps yeah yeah but then you start training like on rep three your muscles are already on fire damn that is showing me that you're having a failure in that ability to reduce take take remove hydrogen and buffer that out that's going to kill your performance number one yeah right so that's a side effect of it okay then if you get to the point where your your body goes not fuck this starts pushing more fat into the bloodstream what's another consequence possibly getting fatty liver and that's a big thing that people don't address like a lot of people will look at their labs and they go oh my liver markers are up because i'm on uh 17 alpha-alkylated drug oral that is causing some liver discomfort they never seem to think maybe i'm getting fatty liver from my last bulk and then the doctor looks at this and goes well let's just ultrasound your liver and you go, oh God, I've got like early stage fatty liver. That's not good. If you let fatty liver go long enough, you get cirrhosis. Right? So it's like, you know, instead of taking the GDAs to make your labs look better and then causing another issue somewhere else that you might not even notice until it's too late, how about you just don't eat so much? Okay.