In a recent video, Dr. Ben Bikman, one of the world’s leading insulin researchers, made a statement so bold it stops most people mid-thought.
He said you could flood someone’s body with every hormone imaginable and feed them tens of thousands of calories every single day.
But remove just one hormone—insulin—and that person cannot gain fat.
Not won’t. Can’t.
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Insulin Is the Real Switch for Fat Storage
Dr. Bikman has spent his entire career studying insulin and what it does inside human cells. What he’s discovered challenges everything most people believe about weight loss.
Insulin as a hormone is the one metabolic hormone to rule them all. It will determine what the body does with energy at every single cell. This is a principle even many very educated clinicians don’t understand.
It’s not an opinion. It’s biology happening in real time, every day, in Dr. Bikman’s own lab.
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- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
Fat cells sitting in a sea of calories do not grow—not until insulin shows up.
If insulin is elevated, your body stores fat. If insulin is low, your body burns it.
The Type 1 Diabetes Case That Proves Everything
Dr. Bikman points to one clinical example that makes this undeniable: people with type 1 diabetes who deliberately underdose their insulin.
Imagine the temptation. Let’s say you’re a young woman who faces more pressure than her young men counterparts. She just gets diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and she has become used to eating whatever she wants and being very very skinny. That is one of the cardinal signs of type 1 diabetes. The person is just losing weight.
Once diagnosed and treated with insulin, two things happen immediately: she starts eating less and gaining weight.
Some people in hospitals gain so much weight in just days that they can’t leave wearing the same clothes they came in with. Not because they ate more—because insulin turned everything they consumed into stored fat.
Some young people abuse this fact. They’ll eat anything they want at holiday dinners, then underdose insulin to stay thin.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
That’s proof of a biological law, not a diet tip.
Why Calorie Cutting Fails Without Fixing Insulin
Most weight loss strategies ignore insulin completely. They focus only on cutting calories.
Dr. Bikman says that’s why contestants on shows like The Biggest Loser disappear from the public eye—they gain all their weight back.
Research from Dr. David Ludwig at Harvard showed exactly why this happens. When people ate meals that spiked insulin, total energy availability in their blood dropped sharply.
With the increase in insulin, as I noted a moment ago, insulin is so determined to store energy that it is directing calories to go from the blood to be stored in tissues like fat or in the liver.
Meanwhile, the brain doesn’t have a storage reservoir. It depends entirely on glucose and ketones circulating in the bloodstream.
When insulin spikes, glucose drops and ketone production stops. Both main brain fuels disappear.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
That’s why you feel brain fog, fatigue, and relentless hunger—even after eating.
The Morning Effect Sabotaging Fat Burning Before Breakfast
Every morning, hours before you wake up, your body releases cortisol naturally. This prepares you for the day by raising blood sugar and bringing your brain online.
But cortisol also raises insulin. Dr. Bikman calls this the dawn effect.
You wake up in the morning, anyone who’s wearing a continuous glucose monitor will find that their glucose levels naturally rise in the morning and that coincides with a mild state of insulin resistance every morning because of changes in cortisol and other hormones.
That means your body is already primed to store fat before breakfast even begins.
Eating starchy or sugary foods during this window doubles down on glucose that’s already elevated. Oatmeal, cereal, toast, fruit juice—all of it gets stored as fat.
What to Do Instead
Dr. Bikman recommends one simple change: skip carbs entirely at breakfast and lunch.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
So, first of all, zero to little to no carbs for breakfast and lunch. So any if a person wants to as much protein and fat as they’d like and I would say especially for lunch, let lunch be your biggest meal.
Your body has been fasting overnight. Insulin has come down naturally.
The worst thing you can do at that moment is spike insulin immediately with sugar and starch.
- Wait before eating
- Push your first meal to late morning if possible
- Keep it protein-focused: eggs, meat, fish
- Nothing that spikes insulin
The Hidden Force Working Against You Every Night
You can eat perfectly and still fail to lose weight. Why? Because poor sleep rewires your metabolism and your hunger signals.
When you don’t sleep enough, your body interprets it as stress. Cortisol spikes. Insulin follows.
But cortisol doesn’t stop there. It goes directly into your brain and changes how you experience hunger.
Cortisol’s metabolic effects do affect the brain and there it influences appetite and food cravings. And wouldn’t you know it, it particularly increases cravings for carbohydrates.
Cortisol crosses into the hypothalamus and amygdala—regions controlling hunger and reward. Once there, it upregulates proteins that stimulate appetite and inhibits leptin, the hormone that tells you you’re full.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
At the same time, cortisol enhances dopamine release in the amygdala, making junk food feel like a reward.
Your brain is chemically wired by cortisol to crave sugar.
Not because you’re weak. Because one bad night of sleep triggers a cascade that kills satiety, spikes appetite, and makes energy-dense food irresistible.
Why Continuous Glucose Monitors Change Everything
Dr. Bikman believes one tool can transform how people understand their own bodies: continuous glucose monitors (CGMs).
I have seen more people make changes of their own volition when they just are wearing a CGM and they don’t need someone to be nagging them. You know, you have that internal motivation because you see what’s happening in your own body.
A CGM lets you see in real time how every meal affects your blood sugar and insulin response.
No guessing. No generic advice. Just data from your own metabolism.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
The One Change You Can Make Tomorrow
Here’s what you now know that most people don’t:
- Fat cells cannot grow without insulin
- Calories aren’t the gatekeeper—insulin is
- Morning is a time of natural insulin resistance
- Poor sleep chemically drives you toward foods that keep insulin elevated all day
The fix isn’t another diet. It’s understanding the one lever that controls everything—and finally working with it.
One change. Tomorrow morning.
Don’t eat the moment you wake up. Let your overnight fast run longer. Skip starchy breakfast entirely.
Give your body the window it needs to finish what it started while you slept.
That’s not deprivation. That’s working with your biology instead of fighting it.
If you want something simple that actually works, this is one of the most effective tools I’ve used to build strength, conditioning, and endurance without needing a full gym setup.
- Full-body training with one weight using swings, squats, and presses
- Solid cast iron build that feels stable and lasts for years
- Comfortable grip that makes high-rep workouts easier to handle
