If you are gaining weight around the middle despite eating carefully, feeling an energy crash in the afternoon, or watching your efforts stop paying off, there may be a hormone working against you behind the scenes: insulin. And here is the part most people are never told — insulin resistance begins long before diabetes ever shows up on a lab.
What Insulin Resistance Actually Is
Insulin is the hormone that moves sugar out of your blood and into your cells for energy. When cells stop responding to it well, your body compensates by making more. Those higher insulin levels quietly tell the body to store fat, especially around the abdomen, and make stored fat harder to release. As Dr. Allen puts it, sugar and insulin are among the most underappreciated hormone disruptors of all.
The frustrating result: you can be doing everything "right" and still feel stuck, because the underlying signaling is pushing in the opposite direction.
Even Fit People Can Be Insulin Resistant
One of the most important points in Dr. Allen's chapter on this topic is that insulin resistance is not only a problem for people who are visibly overweight. Active, health-conscious people can have it too — which is exactly why it so often goes unrecognized. Standard fasting glucose can look normal for years while insulin quietly climbs.
Two Markers Worth Asking For
- HOMA-IRA simple calculation from fasting glucose and fasting insulin that can reveal resistance early — long before glucose alone would flag it.
- Triglyceride-to-HDL ratio (TG/HDL)An inexpensive, widely available clue to how your metabolism is really handling sugar and fat.
These are not exotic tests, yet they are rarely run in a standard visit. Asking for them can change the entire conversation.
A Different Approach to Weight
Addressing insulin resistance is not about another restrictive diet. In fact, Dr. Allen is direct that he does not recommend diets — restriction tends to backfire. The goal is to improve how your body handles sugar through sustainable nutrition, targeted care, and, when clinically appropriate, tools such as GLP-1 medications used as part of a supervised plan rather than a shortcut. You can read more about our approach on our medical weight management page.
Understanding the hormonal drivers of weight is a core theme of Dr. Allen's book, Why Do I Feel Like This?. If you suspect insulin may be part of your story, take our 3-minute quiz or book a consultation.