I used to think weight loss was pretty simple – calories in vs calories out. No matter what you consume, the total number of calories are what make you gain/lose/maintain weight, right? I was recently diagnosed with PCOS and mild insulin resistance. Everybody’s saying that IR makes losing weight incredibly difficult, which is quite a bummer as I’m currently trying to drop several pounds. What I’m wondering is: How does insulin resistance affect the whole CICO rule (the law of conservation of energy, nonetheless!)? It seems sort of unrealistic for IR to make you an exception to the laws of physics. Is it more related to appetite and increased food intake or does it actually alter the way your body uses energy?
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Ultimately, calories in vs calories out is inescapable. If you’re not getting energy from food, and for whatever reason it can’t be released from your various reserves either, you’ll just stop working and die.
Now, this is by no means my expertise, but I don’t think mild insulin resistance should really prevent you from dropping a couple pounds. Insulin is mostly involved in processing glucose that enters the blood, allowing it to be taken up by cells. Other hormones regulate the release of existing reserves like fat and glycogen. In fact, pre-diabetes is often reversible through *weight loss*. The IR might still be messing with normal metabolism and make things more difficult to some degree, though.
How PCOS ties into that is a different story, and not something I know enough about to comment on.
Source: general knowledge of human physiology from MSc in biomedical sciences
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