Hey there and welcome to Pursuing Health. I'm Dr. Julie Fouche, family physician and

former CrossFit Games athlete. Here is your bonus weekly CrossFit Health Tip, which

was originally published on CrossFit.com. Enjoy.

Alright, I'm here with Dr. Tom McCoy, who is a family physician, and we're going to

be talking about insulin resistance today. So first of all, what exactly is insulin?

So insulin is an anabolic hormone, basically a building hormone that the cells in our body

utilize to uptake glucose that we ingest on the form of food to build and store energy.

So glycogen, protein synthesis, and fat storage.

Okay, so insulin's the storage hormone. It's helping to take sugar from our bloodstream

into ourselves.

Correct.

Now what happens when our cells start to become resistant to that insulin signal?

So you can think of insulin resistance as essentially our body having to create and

secrete more and more insulin to keep the same level of blood glucose.

Okay, and what is it that causes insulin resistance?

So there are a number of drivers for insulin resistance. The most common ones would be our

increased consumption of ultra-process foods, foods with a significant amount of added

sugar, a lack of regular physical activity or exercise. In addition, one that people often

don't think about, but a lack of regular quantity and quality of sleep, which causes elevations

and cortisol, which directly affects the function of the insulin that we have.

Awesome. So how common is insulin resistance?

Well, the scary thing is, is that one in three Americans have pre-diabetes and 84% of

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