Insulin Resistance is a Useless Construct
Experimental Fat Loss
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Insulin Resistance is a Useless Construct<br>On scientific myopia
Experimental Fat Loss<br>Jun 29, 2026
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man, resisting insulin<br>There are a lot of people, many of them Ketards, who throw around the term “Insulin Resistance.” Some of them even hold PhDs, but nobody’s perfect.<br>I think the term is supremely useless most of the time because it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.<br>What IS insulin resistance?
In my opinion, the “X resistance” category of metabolic terms, like insulin and leptin resistance, is a way of trying to stick to a theory that has essentially been disproven.<br>A lot of low-carb people used to claim that carbs → high insulin → obesity. Similarly, when leptin was discovered and popular in the 90s, a lot of people hypothesized that lack of leptin kept obese people obese, because their body fat level was somehow not being detected correctly.<br>But then technology got better and we could actually test these things, and they were not true. Carbs didn’t necessarily lead to insanely high insulin levels, and overweight/obese people didn’t always have crazy high insulin levels.<br>And, in fact, most obese or overweight people had pretty much the leptin levels you’d expect, and injecting people with leptin doesn’t help 99.9% of them. (There is a tiny subcategory of people who don’t produce enough leptin, but it’s extremely rare. These people immediately lose weight when you inject them with leptin.)<br>You’d think that scientists, upon learning that insulin & leptin levels were not actually insanely dysregulated in obese people, would change their hypothesis.<br>But instead, they used a word game to keep claiming to be right. If insulin/leptin levels were actually reasonable, but the expected outcome wasn’t happening… there must be insulin/leptin resistance!<br>You can read Stephan Guyenet’s “The Hungry Brain” for a fascinating tale of how scientists fell in love with leptin, were proven wrong.. and just kept sticking to their story instead of changing their minds. (Hint: he’s one of them.)<br>Insulin resistance is defined as “for this level of insulin I expected your blood glucose to be this level, but it wasn’t.” Leptin resistance is defined as “for this level of leptin, I’d expect your appetite to be lower, but it wasn’t.”<br>They are literally defined by wrong expectations on the part of the people inventing these mathematical ratios.<br>Now, mathematical ratios are not necessarily useless. For example, we’d probably all agree that even if an obese person has the expected leptin levels, or a diabetic has the expected insulin levels, something is still wrong.<br>The issue is just that these terms don’t tell us any useful, new information. We already knew that diabetes and obesity are bad, and these terms are just rephrasing that in sciency-sounding word salad.<br>Analogy time!<br>Imagine you ran a sales department of door to door salesmen. Let’s say you’re selling… encyclopedias, I don’t know.<br>One year a lot of your sales guys come back from their long trips and report that they haven’t sold nearly as many books as previously, or as expected.<br>“Why?” you ask.<br>“Oh, there was sales resistance,” they answer.<br>Sales resistance means nothing. It just means you didn’t sell as much as you expected.<br>WHY did the good people of resist the sales of these fine encyclopedias? There could be any reason.<br>Maybe the quality of your books went down. Maybe the design went out of fashion. Maybe Wikipedia got invented and everybody’s using that now. Maybe people can’t read good any longer. Maybe they’re watching TV instead. Maybe your sales guys lost their edge. Maybe there’s a recession going on, and nobody can afford your premium quality books. Maybe crime has been going up and people are hesitant to open the door. Maybe your company sponsored a politically controversial figure because they hired some inexperienced, young marketing executive and alienated their entire customer base. Maybe there are celebrities on Youtube shooting your product with rifles. Maybe one of your sales guys is a sleazy scammer and has been ripping customers off, and word got out and now nobody trusts any of your sales reps.<br>We have no idea what is causing the decline in book sales. It would be great to know, so we could address it, but saying the word “book sales resistance” adds zero knowledge. It’s just literally rephrasing the problem: Lower than expected book sales → book sales resistance.<br>That’s what insulin resistance and leptin resistance are.<br>And on top of that.. is insulin resistance even bad?<br>The funny part is, there are actually clear mechanisms of what you could call “insulin resistance” in the body, and many of them are there for a purpose!<br>I recommend you read Jaromir Janda on various forms of Insulin Resistance to get a better picture, but let me just summarize it briefly.
Short term Insulin Resistance is the satiety signal
If your metabolism is running...