I wonder if there is a definitive answer to this. Does insulin cause one to gain weight, or at least increase appetite? I once heard it said in passing (or while surfing the web in passing) that all food hormones will do this. What’s the SD and might you bright SD’ers have cite(s) to post?
The only cite I have is my own experience. I had gained about 40 pounds since beginning insulin therapy about three years ago. Previous to that, my weight was fairly stable for about 30 years. My endocrinologist says this is usually the case.
Since August I have dropped 10 pounds, by daily walking. So it seems that the way to avoid (or reverse) the weight gain is through exercise.
In virtually every study I’m aware of using insulin in diabetes, there was significant weight gain associated with it. Presumably, the weight gain occurs because the insulin leads to better (lower) blood sugar levels thereby reducing or even eliminating loss of sugar from the body in the urine, i.e. in the absence of insulin, there may be high levels of sugar in the blood and that can lead to sugar “spilling” into the urine. Sugar lost from the body that way represents lost calories. Prevention of such caloric loss is the equivalent of increasing caloric intake.
This is one of the tenets of the Atkins diet - avoid carbs, especially starch. Mainly this is to convince the body it is starving despite eating decent amounts of protein and fat, but also because carbs bring on insulin; one job of insulin is to add sugar to cells. Atkins maintained it caused the body to store carbs as fat.
Most of what I’ve read about insulin and weight gain says that the weight gain is primarily due to 2 things:
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pre-insulin, you got used to eating a lot more than you needed to maintain your weight, as you weren’t actually getting the nutrition/calories from a lot of the food you ate. You literally pissed it out. So you got used to eating more than needed. Once you started taking insulin and your blood sugar control got more in line with what a non-diabetic needs, and if you kept eating your pre-insulin diet, you gained weight.
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pre-insulin, you may have lost a lot of weight, once again because your body wasn’t properly using the food you ate. You gained back the weight once insulin made it so you were more properly processing the food. This is in line with KarlGauss’s first link.
This link from Joslin Diabetes center summarizes it pretty well.
Also note that most studies agree that weight gain associated with analog Insulins (which is what the vast majority of diabetics are prescribed) is not as prevalent as with the older style Insulins.
As for myself, I lost about 20 pounds before I was diagnosed, all whilst eating truly massive quantities of sugar. Those were the days! Once I got my blood sugar in control, I gained back about 5 of those pounds over about 2.5 years. I’m OK with that, and can honestly say I don’t think insulin has anything to do with it; I just eat a little more than I should.
Insulin is widely used as an Anabolic (weight-gaining) drug by bodybuilders. It is considered the most anabolic hormone, even more than testosterone. It’s also cheap and legal, although it is much more dangerous to use than steroids.
The notion that insulin increases appetite is a common misconception. Insulin is actually a potent anorexigenic hormone, so it decreases appetite and promotes satiety.
In my early morning stupor, and given my background, it didn’t even occur to me that you were asking about non-diabetic people using insulin. What I wrote above is, of course, only applicable to diabetics.
Since insulin’s main function is stimulating glucose uptake into cells and it doesn’t discriminate between adipocytes and other cells, it doesn’t seem surprising at all that it would lead to weight gain. That elevated blood sugar has to go somewhere.
Hmmmmm . . . I am currently on both insulin and testosterone (both are prescribed by my endocrinologist).
Are you putting on weight?
What I have read is that insulin helps fat cells turn sugar into fat. What I know is that in the first two years of using metformin (which lowers blood sugar by inhibiting the release of glucose from the liver) I lost about 20 lb without trying. But I keep reading that insulin use leads to weight gain. Nothing to do with appetite AFAIK.
I’ve read that metformin can have a sort of appetite-suppression effect in some people. I know that, when I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I was only on metformin for the first 6 months or so, and lost about 10 pounds. OTOH, I also had a small peptic ulcer at that point, so there may have been extenuating circumstances.
Some bodybuilders use insulin (extraneously) to gain weight and put on size (muscle).