6 Ultimate BENEFITS OF EXERCISE For Diabetes, Insulin, Weight Loss, Your Brain & More

best exercise for diabetes insulin resistance and weight loss

everywhere you turn someone tells you to exercise but why what are the benefits

and if they tell you its calories or no pain no gain or to lose weight they are

telling you the wrong thing so we're going to go over different principles of

exercise that you get the big picture and you can start exercising the way

that's going to make you healthy coming right up so how do you exercise the

right way or even more importantly how do you avoid exercising the wrong way as

we're going to talk about there are ways to exercise that will actually worsen

your diabetes your insulin resistance and your ability to lose weight so we

absolutely don't want to go there but we need to understand some basic things

first the first thing is that what are these three things diabetes insulin

resistance and weight loss what do they have in common and the answer is

hormones they have hormone imbalances the system has been pushed out of

balance over a period of time until it doesn't have the ability to regulate

itself under those conditions and those hormones are primarily insulin cortisol

and human growth hormone insulin is a storage hormone it responds to blood

sugar and whenever blood sugar rises insulin rises so that the insulin can

guide the blood sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cells all of

these diabetes insulin resistance and weight loss - and we should emphasize

we're talking about type 2 diabetes here all of them have too high an insulin the

second hormone is cortisol cortisol is a stress hormone in response to stress

your body wants to increase the ability to produce energy and the fastest source

of energy in an emergency is glucose so cortisol response to stress cortisol

increases glucose and glucose in turn stimulates insulin so insulin of course

is the main problem here but cortisol contributes it adds to the production of

insulin under stress and exercise is stressed so we need to understand how to

maximize the hormonal benefits and reduce the negatives

the third hormone is human growth hormone and human growth hormone is a

rejuvenating hormone it's a muscle sparing muscle building hormone and it's

a hormone that increases metabolism so if you can workout and increase your

human growth hormone then your metabolism stays higher between workouts

so it has nothing to do with the calories that you burn during the

workout it has to do with are you moving closer to balance and are you improving

or worsening your metabolism so these three hormones are what we're going to

talk about and that's what we have to understand that all of these issues are

about hormones and insulin is primary and diabetes insulin resistance and

weight loss cortisol and human growth hormone are critical in response to

exercise how do we exercise to get these two principle number two is about

insulin resistance so traditional we hear that if you exercise you become

more insulin sensitive you reduce your insulin resistance and that's only a

little bit true because you can be insulin resistant at the level of the

muscles or you can be insulin resistance at the level of the liver and exercise

is going to help the muscles become more insulin sensitive during exercise while

the muscles are active they become hungrier for fuel they want more fuel so

they sort of bypass this rule that says we need insulin to bring the glucose in

the muscles say during exercise I'm gonna let the glucose in anyway because

I really want that fuel right now so the muscles become much more insulin sense

so in terms of blood glucose it will help lower blood glucose with a low

level exercise because it will pull the sugar straight out of the bloodstream

long term for insulin resistance it does nothing because the main part of the

insulin resistance is the liver the liver is clogged up the liver is packed

up its said no I don't want any more fuel I can't handle any more fuel that's

where the insulin that's the basis of the insulin resistance and exercise

that's really nothing to reduce that long term insulin resistance so yes

exercise is good but just walking unless you do something else to address the

liver insulin resistance it not going to have a major impact on your overall

insulin resistance so the regular guidelines the American Diabetes

Association this is principle number three that we need to understand what

not to do and just because they're official guidelines doesn't mean they're

right they recommend moderate to vigorous exercise five times a week at

least thirty minutes or they say if your busy schedule doesn't allow that then

you can do a ten-minute brisk walk after each meal so first of all there's a huge

difference in hormone responses between moderate and vigorous exercise we'll

come to that in a second moderate to low and low to moderate intensity is okay

that will help you vigorous will come back to bite you and if you do a

ten-minute brisk walk after each meal what happens after a meal what does your

body want to do after a meal it wants to sit around and digest that food so you

put food in your body and your body says okay I get I get it this food is here we

need to allocate resources to digest that so it starts making

stomach acid it starts allocating the blood it redirects the blood to the

intestinal tract it sends more blood to the all the

internal organs so that they can make enzymes and they can start preparing and

digesting and absorbing this food but if you go for a brisk walk right after each

meal because you're so busy now the resources are being required elsewhere

now you don't have the blood you don't have the resources you're not going to make

the stomach acid you're not going to make the digestive enzymes and what do you

get now now you get GERD reflux heartburn you get digestive upset you

get irritable bowel syndrome you get leaky gut and the list goes on and on

and on if you don't already have a bad digestive system this would be a recipe

to create one so we have to understand the wisdom of the body that it always

knows what to do in different situations and we can't force it to do different

things than what it's designed to do even in so-called informed camps like

even among chiropractors they still talk about calories I saw this on a video

that oh yeah walking is good for you it'll

burn 170 calories in 30 minutes and if you run then you get the results better

that's faster and stair-climbing burns two to three times the calories of just

walking so they're stuck in this mindset that it's about calories it's about

punishing the body it's about more is better no pain no gain etc so we're

gonna debunk this and understand how this stuff really works

so the main thing to understand is that there's three basic broad divisions of

exercise of how it affects so the first one is aerobic aerobic means with air

and when you do aerobic exercise that's something that you can keep up for a

very very long time you can do it for an hour 90 minutes to 3 hours even if you

enjoy it because you have fuel in the body and

providing oxygen you're providing air as an aerobic at the rate where your body

can keep up for the level of intensity of exercise you need a certain amount of

oxygen as long as you can provide that amount of oxygen you're not falling

behind you're keeping up you're not getting lactic acid you can breathe at a

comfortable rate you can maintain a conversation you can speak a full

sentence or at least a part big part of a sentence while you're doing it and

that means your body is in balance there is no crisis there is no significant

stress you are exercising but you're not punishing your body that's aerobic

exercise and aerobic exercise means without air it means you can't breathe

fast enough to at a normal pace to keep up and even if you start breathing

faster then you're not producing enough energy with that oxygen to provide for

the activity you're doing the activity is too intense so you're falling behind

now the body has to start breaking down glucose instead of fat and you're

producing lactic acid as a byproduct of of that activity so the way you know is

if you start panting and your muscles start burning you are in the end

aerobic mode in the aerobic mode the body's preferred fuel is fat in the

anaerobic mode the fat isn't enough because the fat is burned by oxygen and

when that's not enough anymore you got to start breaking down glycogen and

glucose through the glycolytic the sugar breakdown pathways now a byproduct is

lactic acid you start panting and the muscles are burning this one if you

really want to punish yourself then you can keep that up for maybe thirty

minutes some people are just really good at suffering so they might keep it up

for sixty minutes or even maybe longer like a marathon

if your life depends on it but that's a very stressful state and a lot of

exercise that's being recommended is an aerobic because we have this idea that

of no pain no gain that the benefits of exercise are only proportional to how

much I suffer and that's simply not true you can get some fitness benefit from it

but you're stressing your body at a very high level and one example of this is

all the people who are overweight middle-aged they have skinny legs they

have the big belly called the adrenal body type or the apple body type these

people are already too high in cortisol the producing cortisol cortisol is

triggering insulin insulin is packing the fat back onto the liver and the the

middle of the body these people do not want to do anaerobic exercise and

yet when they go to the gym and they seek the help of a professional they're

told you need to do boot camp and they new aerobics and do the spin class and

they do circuit training and they keep their heart rate at much too high a

level and they're producing too much cortisol they are actually making things

worse so what happens when you're making a lot of cortisol is your body is

burning through the sugar you're making glucose you are packing the excess back

on the body and then as a result you get way way hungrier than you were before

you get out of control hungry so the cortisol packed the fat back on the body

and now you overcompensate by eating to make up for the fat that was packed on

so you're perpetuating a vicious cycle and you're actually getting fatter and

fatter and fatter and your midsection is growing the harder you work because you

are exhausting your adrenals and you're making too much cortisol and then

there's a third type of exercise which is high intensity

interval training and this is an aerobic exercise but it's at such an intense

level that you can't keep it up more than a few minutes even if your life

depended on it you just crash that's how intense it is so why would you want to

do one or the other of these and how do you recognize what they are

well aerobic we talked about you breathe slowly and you can keep it up for hours

that means your heart rate is at about 60% of your maximum heart rate so let's

take a 20 30 year-old or for most people 20 to 40 let's say their aerobic limit

is going to be about a hundred and twenty maybe a hundred and thirty beats

per minute of heart rate at that level you can still speak comfortably you can

keep it up for a very long time the anaerobic now you're falling behind

you're craving air and your heart tries to compensate by increasing the heart

rate it's pumping faster and faster and faster and now you're somewhere between

sixty to eighty so now these are people that if you measure the heart rate it

would be like a hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty hundred and sixty

and you can maintain that for for a good bit hit however high-intensity interval

training is when you get close to a hundred percent you go in all-out you're

maxing it out you're pushing it and normally you would do that in like

30-second increments you do it thirty seconds you rest thirty seconds or a

minute you do another thirty seconds and each time you're pushing the heart rate

higher and higher until at the last one or two of those intervals you hit more

than ninety five percent of your maximum heart rate so your maximum heart rate is

somewhere around 220 minus your age so you should be able to get within a few

points of that so I'm for example I'm 55 and my maximum heart rate theoretically

would be about one sixty-five now I've done this for a

while so I've sort of maintained a higher heart rate higher maximum heart

rate and I can still get my heart rate to a hundred and seventy five but if you

get within the ballpark you're doing pretty good and the total duration of

that should not be more than a couple of three minutes if you add up all the time

that you are above 80 percent heart rate eighty to a hundred percent it shouldn't

be more than just a few minutes what are the benefits well we said that the

benefits are hormonal the benefit you're looking for is growth hormone growth

hormone is rejuvenating its fat burning it increases metabolism so aerobic

exercise any activity will increase it just a little bit and aerobic because

you can keep it up so long still has a significant or at least modest impact on

growth hormone not a huge impact but it does something

anaerobic has a greater impact because it's higher intensity it's pushing the

body and you still you get more benefit because you can keep it up for a longer

period of time but high-intensity interval training produces a tremendous

and enormous a fantastic amount of human growth hormone in a few seconds duration

if you can get up to that maximum level for even a few seconds you can increase

your growth hormone by three to four hundred percent and that's the beauty of

this that it doesn't have to go on very long and also hormone decreases very

very slowly once the body produces growth hormone it wants it to stick

around for a while and it only decreases at a level that it's still detectable it

still increased 48 to 72 hours later insulin on the other hand goes away in

seconds because its purpose is to manage the blood sugar

the present moment as soon as that blood sugar is gone insulin is gone unless you

become very insulin resistant and now it stays up because it's just not working

so that's human growth hormone let's look at cortisol and cortisol is a

stress hormone it increases blood sugar and indirectly it drives insulin so

aerobic exercise when you are comfortable when you can speak a

sentence when you can't breathe normally you are not stressing your body you're

not putting your body in a place where it's urgently looking for more resources

it's keeping up it's doing fine so the cortisol is virtually zero it is

essentially baseline cortisol the body sees no reason to change anything

because it's keeping up when you do an aerobic now it's proportional the

cortisol is proportional to how much you increase it but as soon as you start

huffing and puffing your body is not burning fat for fuel it is switching

more so over to carbohydrates and now you are creating cortisol you are

changing from a fat-burning to a carbohydrate burning metabolism and the

cortisol goes through the roof so anytime that you're having to pant

you're going to increase it but here the idea is no pain no gain so you're

supposed to keep it up as long as you can spin class might last 45 minutes or

an hour so you're making cortisol for a very long time and I've seen some

information that oh don't worry cortisol it's only for an hour that is not

correct okay cortisol for a second or a minute

that's fine but if it goes on for hours you're really really stressing your body

now here's the beauty about high intensity interval training even though

it is the highest level of stress even though it is the highest level of

cortisol need it goes on for such a short period of time that the total

stress on the body is not significant not on the hormone

system and because growth hormone stays up so long you only need to do this for

a few minutes two to three times a week and with a total duration of only a few

minutes per week your cortisol production is very very slight what you

want to do here is you want to focus obviously on aerobic and hit and we'll

talk next about what are some different examples of of these exercises so the

aerobic that you can kind of figure this out for yourself but just a simple

example walking biking swimming rowing gardening stair climbing depending on

the intensity if you have a shallow set of stairs and you're walking up slowly

then you can still stay in aerobic if it's steeper stairs and you're hurrying

then obviously you're moving into an aerobic jogging or running big question

mark ninety-five percent of people cannot jog and stay in the aerobic mode

if you can run and speak a complete sentence then you're okay that these are

people who are elite runners they can run really fast really long but if they

run super slow then they're still in aerobic mode most people cannot jog or

run and be in aerobic mode and because it's gentle you want to keep this up for

30 to 90 minutes at a time if you have you can do as much as you have time for

because it doesn't where the body significantly and I wouldn't recommend

ever doing anything every day I think it's good to give the body a break even

from the gentle stuff so I'd say five to six three to five to six times a week an

anaerobic are things like aerobics class spin class tennis soccer anything where

you're gonna sweat profusely you're going to pant more of the time than not

and it's gonna be something that you keep up for more than if

minutes that's anaerobic and my advice is unless you're a tennis player

who really enjoy that and you do it for a reason other than exercise I mean

obviously if you love it and it's your thing do it but don't do these things to

try to get healthy if you have diabetes insulin resistance or weight loss or if

you have adrenal fatigue then you want to avoid this category as much as

possible you could do a minute or two here and there then it sort of starts

moving a little bit toward the high-intensity but don't try to do this

as a sustained activity it will not improve your health it can improve your

fitness but there's not there's a difference between fitness and health

and we have to understand that high-intensity exercise so this depends

on your health this depends on your fitness this depends on if you have

aches and pains so you have to be cautious you have to start gradually if

you're hurting then you can't go out and do sprints

but figure this play with it and figure out what you can do the one of the

safest things is a stationary bike that it's it's a little bit limiting because

it's hard to get way up to your maximum heart rate but it's a safe way to start

so you sit down you pedal for 30 seconds as fast as you can you take a short

break and you get right back at it again if you're outdoors biking then I would

suggest going uphill find yourself a steep hill and you go as fast as you can

up that hill like the life depended on it

then you could roll back down and then you go right back up as fast as you can

I do this mostly with Sprint's because I enjoy running I'll go to a course and on

a trail and I'll jog very gently to keep it under a hundred and 20 and then when

I find a nice big hill I start sprinting and I just keep sprinting for a minute

or two until I hit a very high heart rate and I'm done that's my

workout that's my hit workout if I hit my maximum heart rate 165 170 175 I made

my growth hormone I'm done then I walk or jog keeping my heart rate below 120

for the rest of that workout other things you can do our burpees like you

do get down to a push-up stand up jump up get down to a push-up and so forth

involving most of the muscles in the body the more muscles you can involve

the easier it is for your body to reach this this high heart rate you can also

do it with weights if you do something it's not necessarily for heart rate but

if you do weights then you want to do heavy weights until you fail basically

and that's to get the hit weight training in general is a good thing

because you're stressing the body you're imposing a demand that produces growth

hormone anytime that you stress the body to where it has to change something

you're making more growth hormone so resistance training is a good thing also

just don't turn it into a circuit training where your heart rate is up for

30-40 minutes because now you fall right back in here when you do the weights

your time of fatigue your time of exertion should still be very short the

time where you're close to failing should be very short so this I would

recommend less than three minutes about two to three times a week so with this

understanding that it's about hormones it's about insulin resistance and

obviously you want to combine this with a low carb diet because carbohydrates

will trigger insulin which is the the source of this problem in the first

place but it's about hormones it's about knowing that exercise triggers different

hormones it's about knowing how the different intensity exercises

triggers desirable and undesirable hormones now we can balance it we do a

lot of aerobic we do very little anaerobic and we do a tiny tiny little

bit of extreme intensity and now we've gotten the best of the best and not so

much of the worst so finally number seven we want to talk about the actual

benefits of exercise and these are in reverse order and this is probably not

something that you have ever heard because everyone tells you that you

exercise to burn calories if you go on a thousand websites 990 of them are gonna

mention calories first but even though it does burn some calories first of all

it's not the goal the goal is to get the body in balance and the calories that

you burn only are a benefit if you are reducing insulin resistance at the same

time if you are doing a low carb diet if you're doing intermittent fasting then

you're reducing insulin resistance if you're not then you're doing what the

Biggest Loser people are doing you are doing all anaerobic that one are saying

you are but they did all an aerobic exercise they did calorie restriction

they did not reduce their insulin resistance at the level of the liver

they only did it at the level of the muscles so they reduced their blood

sugar they became non-diabetic while they were punishing their bodies six

hours a day but as soon as they stopped they have really had and changed their

insulin resistance significantly and because of that their basal metabolic

rate crashed they totally crashed their metabolism their bodies were desperate

to get back to that original weight and that's what happened for most of them so

it does not help to burn calories if you're not low lowering your insulin

because all that's going to happen then is you lower your basal metabolic rate

and then you're going to fight forever to

your body's gonna fight to gain the weight back and you're gonna fight to

keep it down and you're gonna lose it does help if you are addressing insulin

resistance it does help burn calories in the sense

that you have a certain stored amount of fuel in your liver and on your body and

as long as you're getting rid as long as you're lowering the insulin you are

helping the balance between feeding and burning so the problem with most people

is they feed more than they burn and they become insulin resistant so it will

help you burn more in that sense but only if you address the insulin at the

same time that's the least important benefit of exercise number two benefit

is circulation it increases circulation when you have if you go out for a walk

if your basic heart rate is about 60 to 70 your your resting heart rate and then

you go for a walk it doesn't feel like you're doing anything but your heart

rate is about 120 you basically doubled your heart rate but not only that the

heart now also squeezes harder it has a higher stroke volume so between 50 to

100 percent increased stroke volume depending on your fitness level so that

means even walking you're increasing your circulation by 3 to 4 times 3 to

400 percent and that's a tremendous increase what the circulation do it the

blood is your transportation system it delivers stuff and it picks up stuff and

to the degree that the blood is circulating you can clean up so you get

a tremendous benefit in terms of detox cleaning up waste products debris

metabolites fourth benefit fourth and fifth are hormones and like I said these

are an increasing order of benefit as far as the profound effect they have on

your health growth hormone we talked about it is muscle building

it increases metabolism and what these growth hormone and BDNF brain-derived

neurotrophic factor what they do together is they allow the brain to make

new synapses it allows repair and even growth of your brain every time you

learn something your body reconfigures your neural pathways these little

threads that carry messages and help you learn things every time you learn

something you got to reconfigure you have to make new synapses but that can

only happen if you have growth hormone and BDNF present so exercise helps

increase these hormones so exercise makes you smarter exercise helps you

fight dementia exercise helps you fight memory loss it makes you better at

learning better at focusing number six is brain benefits and what does that

mean it means that your brain is tissue your brain consists of cells just like

every other part of your body so we think of muscles when we think of growth

we we know that if we if we work out a muscle that muscle will tend to stay

strong or grow stronger if we don't if we hurt our arm if we break an arm we

put it in a cast then four weeks later when the cast comes off the muscles are

gone use it or lose it so we understand that with muscles but it's equally or

more true with the brain the difference is muscles do mechanical work the brain

does signal work the brain is two percent of your body weight it uses 20%

of your calories 20% of your oxygen etc so working out

moving the body provides 90% of the signals that keep the brain alive the

signals that's the juice that's the stimulation that's the use-it-or-lose-it

for the brain so if you want a strong if you want pumped brain cells you gotta

activate it and motion and exercise is what does that 90% of the signals that

the brain is provided 90 percent of the signals that reach the brain that keep

the brain alive are from movement that's why you exercise I can't emphasize that

enough forget everything else you've ever heard about the benefits and just

remember that movement stimulates your brain and when your brain grows stronger

especially the frontal lobe which is your cognitive center which is your

motivation which is your management your abstract thought it's what makes you

human when that brain gets stronger by this

activation it helps balance your stress responses it helps balance your

sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system and because of that

improved balance now is why you feel better

now is why your mood improves your focus improves you are strengthening cells

you're improving neural networks you're less prone to get dementia you're

managing stress better your healing better because of the balance between

the sympathetic and the parasympathetic I have separate videos on that that will

go into more detail and it will also help your digestion because that's all

about sympathetic parasympathetic that's how you exercise whether you want to do

it for weight loss diabetes insulin resistance or just overall health

there's really not that much difference and yes you should exercise for all

those reasons but the primary benefit is to keep your brain alive and to get all

the benefits of a healthier brain if you enjoyed this content make sure that you

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well thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video