It’s Not the Food That’s Spiking Your Insulin. It’s the Restriction.

You can raise your insulin without eating a single thing.

Not a mouthful. You can be sitting at your desk at eleven in the morning, nothing since a coffee at seven, doing everything you were told to do, and your insulin can be up.

That one fact undoes most of what women have been sold for the last thirty years, so it is worth sitting with for a minute.

What insulin is actually responding to

Insulin’s job is to deal with sugar in your blood. When there is sugar in there, insulin comes up to move it somewhere useful. While insulin is up, your body is in storage mode. Not because anything has gone wrong, but because those two things cannot run at the same time. You are either putting fuel away or you are pulling it back out.

Most women are taught that food is the only thing that puts sugar in your blood. It is not. Your body makes its own, and it does that whenever it decides it needs some.

When your body decides to make its own

Cortisol is the hormone that gets that done. It frees sugar up so you have something available to run on. It goes up when there is a genuine emergency, and it also goes up when your body reads a shortage.

An under-fed morning is a shortage. So is four hours of broken sleep. So is a day that starts at six with three people’s lunches and does not stop until nine at night. So is a decade of eating a bit less than you need.

Your body cannot tell the difference between a diet and a famine. It has no way of knowing you chose this. It only reads the signal: not enough coming in, hold on to what we have got.

So cortisol releases sugar. Insulin comes up to deal with the sugar. And insulin being up is precisely the state that keeps everything locked in place.

Which is why the harder you tried, the less moved

This is the bit that lands hardest for the women I work with, because it reframes years of feeling like the problem.

The woman eating twelve hundred calories, walking every day, skipping breakfast and getting absolutely nowhere is not lying to her food diary. She is under-eating hard enough that her body has taken over the job of feeding her. And the whole time it does that, it is sending the exact signal that blocks the thing she is trying to achieve.

She did not fail. Her body did its job properly. It protected her from what it read as a shortage, which is exactly what a healthy body is supposed to do.

So what actually works

The answer looks like the opposite of what she expects, and that is usually why she has never tried it.

Eat properly. Three real meals with enough protein in them, so your body stops having to make its own fuel.

Sleep. Not perfectly, just more than you are getting. Sleep is the cheapest cortisol intervention there is and the one everybody puts last.

Take some pressure off somewhere. It does not have to be the big obvious thing. Emotional load is metabolic load, and your body is reading all of it.

Then stop adding. Whatever you pick, run it long enough that it stops being effort before you add the next one. Your body does not respond to volume. It responds to a signal it gets often enough to believe.

Change the signals, change the outcome. That is the entire method, and there is nothing in it to restrict.

If you want a place to start, the Six Systems guide walks you through exactly which signals your body is reading right now.

Stacey Oldham is a certified metabolic nutrition and mental health coach in Christchurch, working with women who have done everything right and got nothing back.