I was thinking about this. If I’m fasting, and therefore not elevating my insulin, I’m burning fat for fuel (being Keto adapted assumed). But what if I do something that triggers insulin, that doesn’t bring in calories to burn, say a sweetener in some water, what happens? I stop burning fat because the insulin blocks it. But I’m fasting, so where is my energy coming from if insulin is blocking my fat stores?
How things work
Justin_Jordan
(Justin Jordan)
#2
The idea that insulin shuts down fat burning is a useful oversimplification that I think people have latched on to as a kind of absolute truth. There’s always energy moving out of your fat cells, even in a state where energy is moving in.
The simplified version is just to get a handle on relative states. But even without getting into biochemistry, you can work this out just with logic - if insulin did stop fat burning entirely, you would die as soon as you ran out of stored glycogen if you had insulin. Which means that anyone taking insulin would die after a day or two of fasting,
Which, they don’t. And likewise, you can (and indeed, I just did) lose weight while taking insulin. Or that people couldn’t lose weight eating carbs six times a day, which they do (it’s difficult to do long term, but literally millions of people have done it).