INSULIN: The hormone behind cravings, weight and fertility.

When I do a search on my website, insulin comes up in a dozen blogs, and a hundred other times in different pages and resources. My recent blog posts "Don't feed the insulin beast" and "Everything sucks when insulin is high" highlight how insulin has become part of my daily language. I talk about insulin like it were my best friend, and at times, my archenemy. I'm very familiar with the hormone and how involved it is in our metabolic functions from head to toe, not just in blood sugar regulation. But then I asked myself a question: do YOU understand insulin as well as I think? And the importance of lowering insulin through Therapeutic Eating and a Fast-Mimicking Diet, when needed?

That is where the idea of making these easy-to-read guides came up. Even though at times people just want to be told "what to do" and I'm happy to do that, I think for lasting results and commitment it's important to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it.

I've been doing this a long time: been a naturopath for 22 years, a coach for over 10 years, an author for 6 years… but I realized that what I most like to do is create diagrams, guides, structures, plans, charts, systems. I talked a bit about this in this week's podcast: Episode 5 What I Bring to the Table. I like to take complicated information and make it make sense.

The last guide I made is exactly on the most important and key topic: Insulin.

It walks through what insulin actually does in the body, how it connects to PCOS and PMOS, liver fat, blood sugar and diabetes risk, belly fat and fat storage in general, cravings and "food noise," and the weight changes so many women notice in perimenopause and menopause. My hope is that by the end, insulin stops feeling like some abstract lab number and starts feeling like something you actually understand — how it shows up in your day, your body, your cravings.

When you finish going through the guide, I'd love your feedback. Of course, once you understand insulin better, I don't want to leave you there, there are guides and plans to help you lower insulin, but I encourage you to know this "frienemy" better.