One in three Americans have this deadly disease. I don’t need a lab or a tissue biopsy to diagnose you. I can spot insulin resistance from across the room.
Insulin resistance, what does that mean? It means your body has grown resistant to the message that insulin is sending to your body. When insulin is high for too long, it stimulates growth. It makes things grow that shouldn’t.
That inappropriate growth causes strokes, heart attacks, and kidney failure. t ages our body at hyperspeed, causing brain or memory problems like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or other causes of dementia. Years of excess insulin causes arthritis and cancer to grow.
And most patients are totally unaware. Lists of criteria help doctors to diagnose insulin resistance. But after 20 years of seeing these patients, I can spot them from across the room.
Let’s start with the easiest one. Take a look at these pictures. Thanks to her insulin, this woman is filling her storage cells with fat.
Notice how the weight around her belly button is where she’s putting on the weight. As she does this, her body mass index changes. As soon as she has filled enough fat cells for her body mass index to be above 25, she’s probably got insulin resistance.
Next, I focus on skin for signs of health problems. Specifically, I look at the skin in the creases of the body. It is a dead giveaway if they’ve got darkened skin on the back of their knees or the creases of their elbows.
If there’s a darkness to their skin on the back of their neck, it’s not dirt or ring around the collar. It’s extra skin cells piled too high for too long. These skin cells overgrew because of insulin.
And if it goes on for too long, her skin grows enough cells to make appendages or skin tags. Biopsies of that thickened skin or even the skin tags show that there’s sugar in between the skin cells. Insulin will put that sugar anywhere it can find it, with sugar in good supply, the yeast grows in these dark, moist skin folds.
That’s a yeast infection. From armpits to vaginas, when yeast infections happen, it’s a dead giveaway of insulin resistance. Well, obviously you can’t see into those folds from across the room.
So let’s look at something you can see, ankles. Healthy ankles show off with beautiful bony prominences of a slimming or tapering leg. Swollen ankles are a sign of poor health.
When health problems leave fluid stuck in your ankle, the shape is different. You can’t see the bones that normally define the ankle because it’s surrounded by fluid. Sometimes there’s enough fluid to give you a clue of a sock line or a crease in the front of their ankle.
All signs of trouble. Hairy toes means healthy toes. If their shoes have open toes, ‘ll steal a glimpse to see if they grow hair on their toes.
That’s a sign that insulin is working for you, not against you. Did you push pause and check your toes for hair? I will admit this is not the best clue for insulin resistance, but the thumb shin print is. (3:00) Check to see if you have this.
Start by finding your shin bone and then locate the spot about three inches north of your ankle. Now push down on your shin really hard with your thumb. Hold your thumb there for 30 seconds.
When you take your thumb off, healthy people don’t have an impression. People with early signs of insulin resistance have a thumb print on their shin. Insulin resistance causes blood pressure to rise, but you can’t see that from across the room.
It also causes people to feel tired after eating carbohydrates, but you can’t really see that from across the room either. What you can observe is a change in their speech about 30 to 40 minutes after they swallow those carbs. Listen carefully to their speech.
Specifically, how well do they enunciate their words? In patients with insulin resistance, they have a slight swelling of their brain after eating too many carbs. A slower cadence along with almost a slurring of their words gives me a solid clue about the health of their insulin. Okay, if you’re still not sure if you have insulin resistance, there is one surefire way to know if you have insulin resistance.
It’s a test you do at home and it’s relatively cheap. Test your Dr. Boz’s ratio. his ratio is calculated from two data points and is best done if you check it first thing in the morning before any activity, food, or drinks.
Prick your finger and check your morning fasting blood sugar and then immediately afterwards check your blood ketones. Take the big number, the glucose, and divide by the ketones, the little number. In scientific articles, the Dr. Boz’s ratio is the same data found in a glucose ketone index or GKI.
The difference, they properly match up the units. I skipped the algebra that cancels out the units. That’s the Dr. Boz’s ratio.
If you’re morning, Dr. Boz’s ratio is less than 40 and it’s been at least 12 hours since the last bite of food, you don’t have insulin resistance. If your Dr. Boz’s ratio is between 40 and 80, I’m a little bit worried about insulin resistance. And if it’s greater than 100, you have insulin resistance.
