Hey, so this might be tmi but I don't really know who to talk to about this. So I went to my dr with concerns mainly for a missed period. I'm not pregnant obviously but I had blood work done and I was told my body is creating too much insulin and it was too high. They said everything else was fine. I just have high insulin, low vitamin D and glucose. She said I'm not diabetic or anything. I don't know why my insulin is high. She put me on something called metformin er 500mg. I take 3 a day and next week I'm supposed to increase it to 4x a day. I've been having stomach pains and I've puked. Is there a way I should be taking this medicine? I've been taking them all at the same time with food. Is that okay or should I spread it out to lessen the symptoms? Thank you so much!
Hi Michianais,
I've done quite a lot of study of the consequences of having too high circulating insulin in the body . As far as I can understand it - the reason it gets too high is most likely because you have a diet which is too high in processed foods and in particular sweet things and things which have been made out of vegetable oils.
Your body needs to make insulin to deal with the consequences of your diet and it needs more of it to deal with processed foods, and sweet things. Over time if you eat too much of these food stuffs too often, then the result will be that your insulin levels do not get the chance to come down enough before you make it go up again and gradually you have more and more insulin in your body. Just like an alcoholic needs more and more drink to get the same effect , so you body reacts to insulin - in the same way, so it needs to produce more and more of it to enable to do the same thing in bringing down your blood sugar - that is then called Insulin Resistance .
At the same time because its quite a blunt instrument, sometimes that leads to producing too much and so you get both high insulin levels and low blood glucose. If blood glucose goes too low, it will make you feel ill- so its a double whammy.
Eventually a long time hence your body may develop diseases , including diabetes, but lots of other stuff as well.
Fortunately there is an easy fix for all this -
Metformin drives insulin down. but adopting a real food, lower carb diet does exactly the same thing - both without the side effects and depending how rigorously you follow it - a lot more effectively. The may find you won't need the metformin to bring your insulin under control if you simply change the components of your diet.
You can find all sorts of good recipes to achieve this on this website - the "low carb" plan, at dietdoctor.com, by eating an LCHF diet or by eating things from this list of foods instead of your current diet .
https://optimisingnutrition.com/2015/03/26/food-insulin-index/#comments
These are all items that will have a low impact on creating insulin, so if you switch your diet to them then you will find your insulin falls. The list is not complete but it will give you a good idea of where other foods you love might sit in the scheme of things .
In general terms all of these diets are called LCHF, Low carb, or ketogenic diets and do pretty much the same thing, they lower the amount of insulin your need to produce to deal with the foods you eat and thus overtime decrease the amount of insulin in your body, you will find thousands of recipes on the internet for them
Changing your levels of fasting insulin is quite a slow process ( mine fell from 20 iUI/ml to 8.3 in the SECOND 6 months of my diet) so you need to be patient and adopt the changes to diet for life not just for the short term
You mention yours is high , but no actual number so its hard to judge where you are. Ideally your insulin score should be less than 6 , but because western diets are so heavy in processed foods and vegetable oils, upto 25 is considered within a normal range .
If you would like to find out more about high levels of insulin, my blog here, sets out some of the issues.
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/blog-entry/a-unifying-theory-of-disease.1795/
Luckily - its seems like it might be fixable ( or certainly improveable) simply by diet and the earlier you fix it the healthier you are likely to be .
Vitamin D
Low levels of vitamin D are also connected to insulin levels in some way, though I don't think anyone has quite understood how yet. From my own research I think that vitamin D levels are intimately connected to the amount of Omega 3 you eat ( e.g. fatty fish ) and that you need to balance omega 3 with 6, by eating less processed vegetable oils at the same time.
For someone knew to this whole topic, its hard to imagine just how dramatic the changes to health can be by adopting a low carb real foods diet. Very many of us here have done so . So its all looking very optimistic!