Metabolic Medical Newsletter #6 | December 2025 | The Magic Formula for Weight Loss and Chronic Disease Reversal
- Heidi Hlubinová
- Dec 2, 2025
- 7 min read
The “Thanksgiving-Halloween-Christmas-New Year” celebration corridor results in the most cumulative weight gain year after year.1 Discipline softens, booze flows, the days are darker, and the tin of Quality Street chocolates is always open! Weight loss is something our bodies do not do easily. Through evolution, our metabolism became adapted for gaining as a safeguard for survival.2 Weight loss is so difficult that it has become big business. We have spent trillions from Weight Watchers to Ozempic. We have endured mixed messages from “everything in moderation” to “grapefruit diets.” We have emphasized activity but neglected the fact that “you can’t outrun a bad diet.” And none of this addresses the relationship people have with food from soother to reward. Given all of these factors and our modern food environment, little wonder 75% of us end up living with overweight and obesity.
At the heart of weight loss success or failure is the science of fat storage. After all, it’s not protein or carbohydrate storage we want to shed! Fat loss is not as simple as “calories in less than calories out.” The processed food industry has supported the metabolic myth that blames you for the harm of their products. You are not a high school thermodynamics problem. For example, ingesting a can of Coke or two large eggs will both provide 140 calories. But these two “foods” have very different metabolic effects. One strongly stimulates fat-storing hormones, has zero nutrients, makes us hungry, and triggers inflammation. One mildly stimulates fat-storage hormones, is packed with nutrients, and satiates for hours. I bet you can figure out which one is the problem “food.”
Obesity is driven by two metabolic dictators that call the shots on fat storage: insulin and cortisol. These hormones are essential to our everyday metabolic processes. We need a little of both to function and thrive. However, when we live in a way that doesn’t align with our biology, these hormones get overproduced. Then our weight and health suffer. Once we learn how these hormones operate, we can protect ourselves not only from fat storage but also from chronic diseases. Let’s tuck into the “rules” of the metabolic game!
First, let’s talk about fat. Location matters! We all have and need some subcutaneous fat. It is soft, jiggly and pinchable. We might not like how our jeans feel when subcutaneous fat grows, but it poses no significant metabolic concern. The fat we do need to worry about is the “beer belly” fat: the visceral (Latin for organ) fat that firmly protrudes from the abdomen like a basketball. This is the highly inflammatory fat that causes disease and premature death. This is “heart attack fat.”
Many physicians are unaware of how little glucose is dissolved in our blood. There is less than ONE TEASPOON of glucose in our FIVE LITERS of blood. Even minor elevations of glucose are TOXIC in our blood. And ALL carbohydrates in our diet break down to glucose. It doesn’t matter if it’s homemade organic sourdough or a chocolate cookie. To your pancreas, it’s all glucose.
Our clever body is constantly on the lookout for high glucose to prevent damage to our blood vessels. The pancreas is the glucose cop. The pancreas is a small Nike “swoop” shaped organ in the back of our abdomen that releases an appropriate “dose” of insulin depending on our blood glucose levels. Slam back a frappuccino with 65g of glucose, and the pancreas has to secrete a hefty dose of insulin to protect the blood vessels from that high glucose harm.
Insulin is critical because it allows glucose to enter our cells. Glucose goes first to our muscles, the biggest “glucose gobblers” we have and then to the small carbohydrate storage capacity of our liver. All the other unused glucose from the frappuccino is directed to our subcutaneous fat cells for growth. But even the fat cells have a limit on how much energy they can process. When we burn glucose, we are asking the cellular “furnace,” our mitochondria, to work harder. But the more glucose they burn, the more toxic byproducts the mitochondria make. This metabolic “exhaust” from the mitochondria is called reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROS oxidize mitochondria, rusting them out so they don’t work as well and produce less energy.
The cell does not want this to happen, so the subcutaneous fat cells are the first to become “insulin resistant”- they start ignoring the signal from insulin. They refuse to take in any more glucose because the mitochondria are burning out! The cells use insulin resistance to try to protect themselves. After all, the poor mitochondria can only make so much energy and never get a rest.
But the pancreas still needs to remove glucose from the blood and deliver it to cells. If the cells won’t respond to a regular dose of insulin, the pancreatic “glucose cop” sends out EXTRA insulin to force the cells to take the glucose. The cells respond, but as mitochondria become damaged, they don’t produce as much energy. Cells begin to die, leading to decreased organ function, such as the liver. As insulin resistance progresses, fat storage gets redirected to other places. Like a hoarder running out of space, the body starts storing fat in areas that were never meant to hold it. The body stores fat in and around organs like the liver, heart, and kidneys, as well as in muscle. This is called ectopic fat, and it is HIGHLY INFLAMMATORY. Specifically, the visceral fat produces inflammatory chemicals called cytokines that drive diseases. A common issue is during the menopause transition. As women lose estrogen, they become more insulin-resistant. This results in fat stores shifting from safe subcutaneous fat at the hips/ buttocks to inflammatory visceral fat.3 This is when women’s disease risk, from diabetes to heart disease, mirrors men’s.
Visceral fat is worsened by chronic stress and poor sleep. Even people with a normal BMI can have dangerous visceral fat. These “TOFI” people are “thin on the outside, fat on the inside” because of chronic stress or a diet high in refined carbohydrates or alcohol. These factors stimulate the pancreas’s neighbour, the adrenal glands, to make a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol helps regulate our water balance, stress hormones, and blood glucose. Each day, in the hours before we wake up, our adrenals send out a small burst of cortisol to raise our blood glucose from stored glycogen in our liver. This glucose boost is known as the “dawn phenomenon" to ensure sufficient energy to hunt for our first meal of the day. Aren’t you grateful you don’t have to kill a small animal before you go to work?!
Cortisol works great for short stressors, but chronic elevations cause metabolic chaos. Cortisol increases blood glucose and worsens insulin resistance. Insulin and cortisol are fat storage double trouble. This combination of high cortisol and insulin resistance creates a vicious cycle. The high cortisol drives up blood glucose, stimulating more insulin, but insulin resistance means cells don't respond appropriately to it. Blood glucose and insulin then elevate again.
nsulin rises every time we eat, but WHAT and WHEN we eat also matter. Carbs are the most potent insulin stimulant, followed by protein, but fats barely stimulate insulin secretion at all.
Our high-carb diets and frequent grazing habits stack insulin on insulin! This results in something called “hyperinsulinemia” (translation: high blood insulin). Once that insulin is elevated for hours, days or longer, we face four brutal metabolic truths:
We can NOT use our fat stores for energy
Our metabolism slows
We move less
We look for fast energy: crave carbs
The take-home message: high insulin promotes weight gain and obesity. This is why I call insulin “the fat-hoarding dictator!” We are also more insulin-resistant later in the day. This means what is consumed at 7pm requires MORE insulin to metabolize than if it were eaten at 7am. Hyperinsulinemia builds fat stores and causes us to overconsume, driving hunger. And isn’t it interesting that type II diabetes, a disease caused by carbohydrates and hyperinsulinemia, is treated with injecting MORE insulin into the patient?! Much like giving alcohol to the alcoholic, injecting insulin into a type II diabetic patient satisfies the short-term goal of normalizing blood glucose, but at the expense of weight gain and chronic disease development. Wouldn’t it be better to address type II diabetes through a low-carbohydrate diet? That’s how physicians like Sir William Osler treated patients with diabetes over a century ago. Elevated insulin is the hormone that drives ALL CHRONIC DISEASE. If we want to heal or prevent chronic disease, we have to lower our insulin levels.
So what is the magic formula? The 7% of people with good metabolic health are good at the metabolic game. They eat to keep insulin low. They live to keep their cortisol low, too. This means:
Eating meals and no snacks
Prioritizing protein and eating the fat that comes with it (yes, enjoy the chicken skin!)
Move their body daily
Stop eating when the sun goes down
They manage stress and make sleep sacred
Sounds like how we lived a century ago! We can learn so much from the past. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, has many quotes. He told his students, “Before you heal someone, ask him if he's willing to give up the things that made him sick.”
Addiction was an issue 2500 years ago; it’s a bigger issue now. Hippocrates also said, “Everyone wants healing until medicine shows up in the form of discipline.”
If we want a different outcome, we have to make other choices. Creating boundaries to protect from harmful foods or behaviours. Showing up for yourself with choices that nourish, strengthen, satiate and heal.
The magic formula is focusing on what YOU CAN CONTROL. YOU CONTROL your commitment to yourself through safe boundaries and discipline; discipline is freedom!
Walk past the Quality Streets…
References:
Cooper JA, Tokar T. A prospective study on vacation weight gain in adults. Physiol Behav. 2016;156:43-47.
Johnson RJ. Nature Wants Us to Be Fat: The Surprising Science Behind Why We Gain Weight and How We Can Prevent—and Reverse—it. BenBella Books; 2022.
Kodoth V, Scaccia S, Aggarwal B. Adverse changes in body composition during the menopausal transition and relation to cardiovascular risk: A contemporary review. Womens Health Rep (New Rochelle). 2022;3(1):573-581. PMID: 35814604.
Bikman B. Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease—and How to Fight It.2020:152.