Glucagon and Weight

"Insulin and weight gain are practically synonymous. But there's more to it."

Glucagon regulates and creates more sugar in the blood.

When insulin converts sugar to glycogen, glucagon converts glycogen to sugar.¹

When your body goes for several hours without glucose, glucagon will go to work trying to generate glucose. It does this by getting glycogen stored in the liver and breaking it down by activating a enzyme called phosphorylase.²

Then, due to the rise in blood sugar,insulin is increased again to shunt the sugar in to the cells.

When liver glycogen depletes, your metabolism switches to using fat to create blood sugar.^3,4

Liver glycogen depletes in about 24 hours without food. Physical activity will shorten this period.⁵

So you can conclude here, that the liver being depleted of glycogen stores will eliminate a source of blood sugar. Without this, there become only two sources:

Dietary sources or your body’s glycogen stores. This will be a key in your program and ability to reset your metabolism.

In terms of dietary carbohydrate and whether it gets stored in muscle or the liver, there is a difference. Sugar in cakes and cookies for example, is actually part fructose and glucose. Fructose is primarily used to refill liver glycogen stores and glucose is primarily used to refill muscle glycogen stores. After both are refilled, both are stored as body fat.⁶

What About Fructose?

The next question or concern that arises out of the above fact is that sugar in fruit is fructose. Sugar in fruit when consumed in moderate quantity has so little sugar content because they are so full of fiber. Fruits also have so much micro and trace nutrients. So fruits in small quantities will not have fat-storing effects.

Glucagon Muscle-Destroyer

Because fat-burning is a much more complicated, involved and slower process than sugar burning, the nervous system will ALWAYS choose sugar burning over fat burning for energy creation.

For this reason it will be easier for the nervous system to create blood sugar from glycogen stores in the muscle preferential to using body fat. In the process of creating blood sugar from muscle glucose, muscle protein is degraded to amino acids to convert to glucose. This is the muscle destroyer aspect of glucagon.^7,8,9,10,11

The Trigger for Glucagon

Where carbohydrate is the trigger forinsulin, protein is the trigger for glucagon.^12,13,14

Protein does trigger insulin but at about a 30% strength.¹⁵

Also glucagon is triggered by too little food.¹⁶

Glucagon is another Fat Burning Hormones that is secreted after intense exercise.¹⁷ They key here is that unlike other methods of creating sugar in the blood, glucagon does so by breaking down body fat to do so.^18,19,20

References

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