Insulin Resistance Starts With This — Here’s the Fastest Way to Reverse It | Dr. Robert Cywes

Jesse Chappus (0:00)

Coming up on today's show.

Robert Cywes (0:02)

I have a glass of wine, I'm using it. I get hammered, I've abused it. If I do it repetitively to the point of harm, that's addiction. Same thing with carbohydrates and with snacking and eating. My easy to measure metric is insulin resistance. When insulin resistance results in type 2 diabetes, in obesity, if you've got those two diseases, you are a carbohydrate addict. In the ideal situation, energy flow is governed backwards from the mitochondria toward the liver and then toward the brain and then toward the consumption of food. The polar opposite has happened in our country for the first time in an unprecedented way. Under those circumstances, our energy flow is no longer demand-based. It is oversupplied in terms of protein, fat and sugar. You want to eat the food that provides nutritional value and minimize your emotional eating. The people that criticize insulin suppression are the people that have never seen it because they don't take care of patients clinically and they don't check blood work. When you look at blood work in folks that are already carnivore, you see this. The most predominant person that saw this and he got lambasted was Paul Saladino. So insulin suppression occurs when you overcorrect, when you are so carnivore that you are not even releasing insulin. How do you fix that? There's three ways to fix it.

Jesse Chappus (1:24)

Rob, why do intelligent people keep eating foods they know are harming them?

Robert Cywes (1:30)

Jesse, because it's not about intelligence. Every human being has incoming things from our environment, from our daily lives that trigger emotional tension, whether that's anxiety, stress, depression, anger, fear, frustration, boredom, exhaustion, pleasure, and we all have to deal with it. And the human brain develops at a very, very young age, within the first two to four years of our lives, develops strategies from our parents. We learn these from our parents by observation, strategies that help us to deal with emotional tension. And those strategies can either be predominantly instant gratification or they can be effort based. We all have a diversity, but we all have a propensity to use one strategy or another. And the instant gratification strategies are either external things that we consume or actions that we do, yelling, screaming, shouting, gambling, pornography, physical violence, emotional violence. All of those things are forms of instant gratification that give us instant relief, but cause harm on the back end. As does nicotine, alcohol, carbohydrates. Those are also forms of instant gratification, endorphin relief that give us relief. That Cy gave me a degree of relief. Talking with my hands gives me a degree of relief. And we all have these strategies. However, when we use a particular pathway in a dominant, excessive, and often exclusive way, it goes beyond the relief. And over time, that excessive use causes harm. And if you ignore or distort the reality of the harm to continue the relationship, that's where it comes from. So alcohol doesn't harm anybody.

Alcohol doesn't harm anybody. It's our relationship with alcohol that causes the harm.

And, you know, screaming, yelling doesn't harm anybody. But if you're yelling and screaming as a way of life and you use it in a dysfunctional way, that causes harm to the recipient as well as to yourself. So all of these strategies give us emotional relief, but also can cause harm. And it doesn't matter who you are. You know, if you look at the last set of presidents of the United States, Donald Trump, morbidly obese, Barack Obama, smoker, George Bush, alcohol recovery, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky. So all of these folks, bright intelligence people, had these emotional off ramps. And really, what are we doing? Let's step back from this. Why do we need this? Well, early on, the human brain is dominated by the primitive hindbrain or the primitive reflexes. You watch a baby, it's got a bunch of primitive reflexes. And slowly over time, we have to integrate and subdue those primitive reflexes so that what makes us human, which is our complex cerebral cortex, the gray matter, can be functional and operational.

And the primitive brain is sending us signals all the time that stress that emotion, that's a primitive brain reflex. And in order to focus and deal with issues and be productive as a human being, we need to address and suppress those so that we can function. And we all develop strategies to do that.

This is the current strategy for me. This is coffee. I don't drink coffee, but I sip on it all throughout the day.

Gives me that little mind-cleansing moment so that I can focus. And I'll tell you this, Jesse, don't you ever get between me and my coffee, okay?