There are two emerging themes that are well worth paying attention to for fat loss as well as general health, wellbeing, and longevity. They are inflammation and glycemic variability.

Inflammation

There’s quite a lot of interplay between inflammation and glycemic variability. Reducing chronic inflammation is one way to induce fat cells to die off, or transform into more biologically desirable cell types. Chronic inflammation generates excess insulin, which is the hormone that partitions calories into fat cells.

Inflammation is a big topic in its own right, and is a topic for another day. Let’s talk about the other less-recognised fat loss driver: glycemic variability.

Glycemic variability

Glycemic variability refers to the oscillating swings in blood glucose levels that naturally occur at certain times of the day. Over the course of 24 hours your blood sugar level fluctuates between somewhere below your long-term average to the downside, and somewhere above your long-term average to the upside.

Those swings are the result of eating food (some more than others), stress, exercise, and other lifestyle factors.

When your mean (average) blood glucose level is chronically high, you are already experiencing the biggest risk factor for diabetes-related complications. Beyond that though, large and/or frequent variation in glycemic variability is increasingly being recognised as an important independent contributor to diabetes-related complications and shortened lifespan.

A recent analysis of a double-blind study found that a doubling in the amount of fasting glycemic variability in turn caused a doubling in the risk of cardiovascular death and all-cause mortality - even after accounting for confounding factors.

Over 90% of people who are pre-diabetic do not realise that they are. And of those, around 70% will go on to develop Type 2 diabetes. In terms of glycemic variability specifically, Stanford University researchers continuously tracked the blood glucose levels of a number of diabetic and non-diabetic people over a 2-4 week period in 2018.  Severe glycemic variability was seen in 25% of the non-diabetic participants.

So there are clear health reasons to care about glycemic variability, separate to your average blood sugar level.

Aside from the implications for diabetes and other diseases, glycemic variability is surprisingly important for fat loss. Your body has two basic avenues for dealing with high blood sugar: It can store it in your muscles and liver as a potential energy source, or it can store it in fat tissue.

Below we look at some strategies that you can employ, basically for free, to manage your blood sugar variability. These come to you courtesy of Ben Greenfield (bengreenfieldfitness.com), a world-renowned exercise physiologist, human movement specialist, coach and nutritionist.

Students of my Body Transformation Blueprint digital course will recognise all of these strategies from the modules of that training.

Strength training

Resistance training is one of the best ways to shuttle glucose into muscle tissue. This decreases blood glucose levels and increases (improves) insulin sensitivity. Benefits are seen at even relatively light loads, including body-weight exercise. However the positive effects do increase along with the weight and intensity of the exercise. In particular the speed and amount of glycogen depletion, the increase in post-exercise metabolic rate, and the level of blood sugar control itself.

So if you’re already relatively well conditioned, please try to get that intensity up to the levels that I have prescribed in Module 4 (Lesson 2) of Body Transformation Blueprint.

Fasted cardio

Exercising before breakfast, specifically fasted cardio, is a powerful way to control blood sugar. This regime increases the level of a muscle protein called GLUT-4, whose job it is to transport glucose out of the bloodstream and into muscle, in response to insulin. In this way GLUT-4 is a key player in maintaining insulin sensitivity.

An important study compared three groups of men: A control group that did no exercise; a group who did their fasted exercise before breakfast; and a post-breakfast exercise group who ate before they exercised. All three groups were fed 30% more calories than maintenance over the six week study period. All three groups got a big, carb-rich breakfast each day. The key difference in the fasted cardio group was that they got that big breakfast immediately after their fasted cardio workouts. The other group ate that same breakfast prior to their morning cardio workouts. The control group did no exercise at all. All three groups ate the same amount of calories overall.

At the end of the study period, the non-exercising control group had on average fattened up by over six pounds (2.73 kg).  They had also developed insulin resistance, meaning that they were no longer responding to insulin efficiently, and weren’t shuttling the sugar out of their blood and into their muscles very efficiently. This in turn was resulting in the storage of additional fat.

The post-breakfast workout group (who ate their breakfast before exercising) also gained weight, but only about half as much as the control group. Despite exercising pretty hard, they had also become more insulin-resistant and were storing fat at a greater rate, just as the non-exercising control group ended up.

There were some pretty amazing results in the pre-breakfast fasted exercise group: Not only did they show no signs of insulin resistance at all, but they had gained practically no fat. Their metabolisms had altered so that they burned stored fat more efficiently (via fat oxidation).

Go for a short walk after eating

Several studies have shown that going for a walk shortly after eating will reduce circulating fat concentrations and blood glucose levels, compared with taking that same walk before eating.  Moderate and high intensity exercise also do the trick, and the longer and more intense the exercise, the greater the reduction in post-prandial blood glucose and insulin.

But a short easy walk is accessible and do-able for almost anybody, so please consider incorporating this into your daily routine using some of the ideas we ran through in Module 4 (Lesson 4) of Body Transformation Blueprint

Stand up

While one of the studies above found that walking had the best effect compared to either standing or sitting after eating, standing certainly has some benefits. Studies of office workers show that standing after lunch is far superior to sitting, even when the two groups take the same number of steps over that time period. This hints at the difference being the standing, rather than the overall amount of physical movement.

Other studies show an 11% decrease in post-prandial blood glucose spikes when standing vs sitting, while sedentary time after eating can result in more than double the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

We looked at ideas like this for incorporating movement as play and weaving it into your day-to-day life in Module 4 (Lesson 4) of Body Transformation Blueprint.

Exogenous sources of blood sugar control

All of the above strategies are based on movement, particularly as related to eating times. Strategy #5 here is not movement-related, but can be very effective if you’re constrained in your ability to move in those ways.

There are certain natural plants, herbs and spices that you can eat whole or in supplement form to assist insulin response, glycemic variability, and overall blood sugar levels.

Examples are cinnamon (Ceylon only please, if you’re taking it daily), Berberine, Bitter Melon Extract, Apple Cider Vinegar, Rock Lotus, gymnema sylvestre, and pre-meal digestifs and bitters.

In Body Transformation Blueprint we examine Berberine and Cinnamon in some detail in Module 7, Lesson 2.

Eat more fibre

Fibre packs a positive double-whammy for both glycemic variability and inflammation.

It thereby reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes, and if that weren’t enough it also helps with obesity, reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke, helps manage high cholesterol, reduces the risk of certain cancers, and it improves gut health (which is the sole benefit that most people attribute to fibre).

You learned about the many benefits of this unsung nutritional hero, including for body composition, in Lesson 7 of Module 3 of Body Transformation Blueprint.

So there you are. A simple and accessible list of everyday things that you can do to remove hidden blockers to fat loss and good health. There’s nothing too crazy there, in fact it reads suspiciously like what your grandmother would have told you: go for a walk after dinner, sit less, lift things up and put them down, move while fasted, consider some bitters, herbs and spices, and get more fibre.

Funny how that works.