Topic
Insulin resistance
Everything we've written on Insulin resistance — 6 articles covering the mechanism, the evidence, comparisons, and practical considerations.
6 articles
Metabolic healthMOTS-c and insulin sensitivity — what animal research has exploredThe weight that arrives in your forties doesn't announce itself as a metabolic problem. It shows up as pants that fit differently, a number on the scale that moves stubbornly in one direction despite the same habits that kept it stable for years, an afternoon energy dip that coffee doesn't fix the way it used to. You eat more carefully and exercise more deliberately and the situation improves slowly if at all, or it cycles — better for a stretch, then quietly worse. Nobody says "insulin resistance" until something dramatic happens. Before that, the story is just: your body isn't responding to what worked before.6 min readWomen's hormonal healthPCOS — the metabolic-reproductive condition and the peptide conversationYour cycles have never been regular. Or they were, and then they weren't. Your skin produces oil faster than you can manage it; there are cysts along your jawline that come back in the same places regardless of what you use. There is hair growing where you don't want it — along the chin, the sideburns, sometimes the abdomen — and hair thinning where you do. Your weight doesn't behave the way effort should predict: you eat carefully, you exercise, and the number on the scale moves reluctantly or not at all, while visceral fat distributes itself around your waist in a pattern that feels metabolic rather than dietary. When you mention any of this in a clinical context, you are sometimes told you have PCOS; sometimes you are told you might; sometimes you are told to lose weight, as though that were the first step rather than a symptom of the same underlying dysregulation that's driving everything else. The diagnosis, when it arrives, often arrives late — sometimes years after the symptoms began, sometimes only when fertility becomes the immediate concern.10 min readMetabolic healthThe energy crash after meals you didn't have beforeAn hour after lunch — sometimes forty-five minutes — a wall comes up. Not tiredness exactly, though it presents as tiredness: the eyelids that get heavy, the mind that loses its sharpness, the body that would like, very much, to be horizontal. It's the quality of energy that was there before lunch that is simply gone, and a certain glueyness has replaced it. It's not every meal. It's most meals with meaningful carbohydrates — the sandwich, the pasta, the grain bowl that seemed like a reasonable lunch. And it's not because you're sleeping badly or because you're working fourteen-hour days, though you might be doing both of those things. It's happening on the reasonable days too, at reasonable lunches, at the unremarkable midweek moments when you have no particular reason to be running low. Your doctor's response, when you mention it: everyone gets a bit sleepy after lunch, that's normal, maybe cut back on the coffee so the afternoon isn't a crash from caffeine. Which doesn't address what you're actually describing at all.8 min readMetabolic healthFoggy after meals — when food shouldn't make you slowerAfter lunch you lose an hour. Not to sleep — you're at your desk, your eyes are open, you're technically present — but something has left the building. Decisions feel harder. Words come slower. You read the same paragraph twice and absorb roughly nothing. This isn't fatigue exactly, or not only fatigue. It's specifically cognitive. The screen looks fine. Your body is sitting still. But your brain has moved to a different timezone, and the distance is most obvious in the thirty to ninety minutes after you eat.8 min readMetabolic healthThe mid-afternoon wall — what your 2pm exhaustion is signalingIt's 2:07 in the afternoon and the words on your screen have stopped meaning anything. Five minutes ago you were moving, or at least the appearance of moving — now the eyelids are heavy, reading requires a kind of deliberate muscular effort, and the task that flowed reasonably well this morning feels like it has been coated in something viscous. By 3:30 you're calculating how long until you can have coffee without ruining sleep. By 4:00 the calculation has lost and you're eating something sweet from a desk drawer. You didn't used to need this.8 min readMetabolic healthThe mood that came with the weight — when body composition starts affecting how you feelIt's not that you're depressed. You've thought about that word and it doesn't quite fit. You're functional. You're getting through the days, meeting the obligations, showing up. But something has flattened. The spark that used to be there — the one that made you want to start things, that made a good conversation feel genuinely good — is turned down. You feel more muted. Less yourself. And it tracked, you've noticed, with the weight that came on over the last few years. Not sudden weight, not dramatic weight, just the slow accumulation that happens when a lot of other things shift at once. And the question you keep circling is whether the mood caused the weight — the low motivation, the less movement, the eating that felt comforting when you felt flat — or whether the weight caused the mood. Or both.8 min read