Diabesity – what’s that? Diabesity is the newly coined term for obesity + diabetes, and refers to the link between obesity, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. Since this is about the link underneath these conditions, you don’t even have to be obese to have diabesity. Does this matter to you? Half of you are probably there right now. This is not overt diabetes yet, but is well on its way down that road. This is not just about diabetes either. It is about the metabolic process that underlies most chronic disease – heart disease, stroke, cancer, kidney disease, dementia; the list goes on and on.
This is not a newly discovered process even though more is being understood every day. But this used to be the arena of the 50+-year-old folks, so no one really got alarmed and just chalked it up to aging. But now it is so rampant we are seeing it show up even in teenagers. This is obviously not about aging. This is about accumulating toxic damage to the body – as we now specifically understand, damage to the energy producing organelles in every cell – the mitochondria.
Abdominal obesity: greater than 35 inches for women and 40 for men.
Dyslipidemia: Low HDL or high LDL or high triglycerides
High blood sugar (fasting above 100 mg/dL, Hb1Ac above 5.5)
High blood pressure
Systemic inflammation
A tendency to form blood clots
The subjective symptoms of diabesity include (but aren’t limited to):
Sugar cravings – especially after meals
Eating sweets does not relieve cravings for sugar
Fatigue after meals
Frequent urination
Increased thirst and appetite
Difficulty losing weight
Slowed stomach emptying
Sexual dysfunction
Visual problems
Numbness and tingling in the extremities
Considering all the different ways diabesity impacts our health, it can now be considered as the leading cause of death in America. Now here is the kicker – it is completely preventable and even reversible. It is caused by failures with attitude, diet, and exercise. Our genes can make us more susceptible, but it is these first three factors that control what genes get turned on and what get turned off. So bad genes don’t cause it, but especially good genes might make us more immune to the problems. How can the biggest killer in the industrialized world be due to something as simple as attitude, diet, and exercise? Let’s see.
Attitude – this is the core general term for our in-the-moment stress management skills. There are lots of after-the-fact stress management skills like mindfulness meditation, yoga, prayer, music, and so on. But it is your general attitude about life that determines how stressed you get in the moment. This is critical for health, because it is the immediate reactions that ramp up your fight-or-flight nervous system and pumps out adrenaline. Adrenaline literally burns your artery walls and inflames your body. You can actually produce a bleeding ulcer within a few hours from extreme stress like this. Attitude controls your nervous system reactivity to life. Your nervous system controls your hormones and immune system.
Diet – what can I say, garbage in equals garbage out. If you eat metabolic poisons, you eventually die from them. Diet controls the chemical side of inflammation production in your body in chronic disease, and inflammation is the cause of chronic disease. The biggest culprits are inflammatory omega 6 oils and trans fats – think anything fried, slathered in salad dressings, or filled with vegetable oils in the recipe. The second biggest are sugars and simple carbohydrates – think soda, sweets, pastries, breads, snack foods, and even excess fruit. The third biggest culprits are the thousands of chemicals added to our foods – preservatives, antibiotics, pesticides, food colors and flavors, artificial sweeteners, conditioners, etc. The fourth is simply overeating. Overeating feeds the growth of bad bacteria in the gut and promotes leaky gut, which in turn hyper-activates the immune system. There are many more, but you get the idea. We are designed to eat fresh, real unprocessed food prepared just prior to our consumption.
Exercise – use it or lose it rules the body and the brain. Interestingly, physical exercise is the best stimulator of brain function to prevent brain atrophy. Exercise opens up blood flow to the tissues, and blood flow is vital for all cellular health. Exercise is especially critical for reversing insulin resistance, the key to metabolic syndrome and diabesity. Insulin is the hormone that tells cells to open up and let in sugar and other nutrients. In insulin resistance the cells of the body say they already have too much sugar and don’t want any more. Too much sugar is toxic so they lock their doors and ignore the insulin. This means too much sugar is now trapped in the blood stream where it is also toxic, so the body tries to force the cells to take in more by producing excess insulin. The cells refuse, so the excess insulin causes the liver to convert the sugar into triglycerides to be stored as fat in the fat cells. Even if you eat no sugar or carbs at all, your body will steadily create more sugar to feed the white blood cells, so anything you eat that is not immediately utilized will turn to fat and be stored because of the high insulin levels. There are only two ways known to reverse this excess insulin from insulin resistance – total fasting for extended periods of time and exercise intense enough to use up the stored sugar in the muscle cells.
Once you use up the sugar in the muscle cells, they will stop locking their doors and become responsive to insulin again, because now they want more sugar to replace what they have lost. Exercise is the preferred method to deplete stored sugar because most of the stored sugar in the body is in the muscle cells. Total fasting works, but your tissues that don’t store sugar get raided and their proteins are stolen to be turned into sugar. There are ways around this, but professional guidance is needed to try this route.
So there you have it. If you want to fight off diabesity and the host of chronic diseases that come along with it, you have to address attitude, diet, and exercise. Traditional medicinal methods are great for emergency medicine – injury and illness, but they fail terribly for chronic diseases. Now you know why they fail – because they don’t address the real causes – attitude, diet, and exercise. These interventions are entirely in your ballpark. Only you can choose to change your attitude, your diet, and choose to exercise – its up to you.