Insulin Resistance and PCOS

It is September which means that it is Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome Awareness Month!  I am hoping to bring more awareness to this syndrome and help educate you along the way.  I am not a doctor or a nutritionist.  I am a woman who was diagnosed early in life and has been learning about my diagnosis ever since.  If you have specific questions, you can, of course, ask them, and I will do my best to answer.  However, I would encourage you to take them to your doctor as well.

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As I have mentioned before, each case of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome is different.  Each woman has their own unique story to share with their own unique symptoms.  No two stories are identical.  While some may have the same symptoms, the varying degree of the symptom is what sets each other apart.

 It is very common for women with PCOS to also see insulin resistance.  We already know that PCOS is a hormonal imbalance.  It's not just the estrogen and progesterone imbalance, but insulin plays a big factor as well.  Typically, I hear that PCOS and insulin resistance go hand-in-hand.  This is why Type 2 Diabetes can be a symptom and/or a risk of PCOS.

Allow me to get a little bit "science-y" with you right now.

Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, in It Starts With Food, say that "insulin is about as close to a 'master hormone' as you can get."  They go on to say that insulin "directly controls or influences energy storage, cell growth and repair, reproductive function, and, most important, blood sugar levels."

It's the job of insulin to use or store the energy (or food) that we eat.  In a perfect world, our blood sugar levels would be in a normal range, which means our body would be functioning properly.

For example, let's say we eat some cake.  A cake is made from sugar. We eat that cake, and then our pancreas can tell that we ate that cake. The sugar in our blood stream rises.  So our pancreas produces the perfect amount of insulin and tells it to go out into the blood stream and grab that glucose (read: sugar) from it and put it in storage, which would usually be the liver or muscles.  Then our blood sugar returns to the normal range after insulin does its job, and the stored sugar is now called glycogen, which can then be used as energy.

However, when your hormones are out of whack, it's not an ideal world.  Women who have insulin resistance have a different story.

Let's say we eat some cake. But this is the real world.  So we probably ate some cake and before that, we had a meal full of carbohydrates, with very little real food. And we probably have had meal after meal after meal like that as well. So anyway, that cake is still made from sugar.  We eat that cake, and then our pancreas can tell we ate that cake.  The sugar in our blood stream rises even more. But because we've eaten so much sugar, our body has nowhere to store it.  The glycogen stores are full (the liver and muscles), so it converts to fat.  But we continue to eat like that, our blood sugar is still high, our pancreas is still making insulin, but it has nowhere to go.  Our bodies will burn that sugar off as energy first before it taps into our fat stores. So we continue to accumulate fat.

That then means that we still have high blood sugar, high triglycerides, and that sends a message to our brain which messes up our leptin, yet another hormone.  Leptin tells our body that we are full.  If this hormone is messed up and doesn't allow it to communicate with our bodies, we will continue to eat.

If we become leptin resistant, meaning our body doesn't know when it's full, so it keeps telling us to eat, we can become insulin resistant.  Because we've already had a diet full of junk, our cells are already full with the necessary storage.  The cells then become insulin resistant, meaning they won't allow insulin in because it will cause more damage.  So our blood sugar remains high, the body continues to produce more insulin, which then elevates fat in the blood stream.  The vicious cycle continues.

With chronic high blood sugar and insulin resistance, this can lead to Type 2 Diabetes.

If what I just describe is confusing and crazy, it's because it is.  Insulin resistance is definitely something that has to be watched.  If you have a hard time losing weight, you may be insulin resistant.  But with the right lifestyle changes, you can reverse this!!

If you are struggling to get out of this vicious cycle of insulin resistance, I would love to help you! This is why I'm so passionate about living this lifestyle.  I personally have to be careful about what I eat, and I can share that information with you!  Please reach out if I can help.

If you know someone who could benefit from reading this blog, by all means, share it!  After all, sharing is caring and greatly appreciated!