🌿 Understanding Insulin Resistance: When Blood Sugar Looks Normal but the Body Struggles

Insulin plays a central role in regulating blood sugar, energy storage, and metabolic health. However, early signs of insulin resistance can be missed—especially when fasting insulin levels appear normal on lab reports.

Modern lifestyle stressors such as high-carb diets, sedentary behavior, poor sleep, chronic inflammation, and toxin exposure silently contribute to metabolic dysfunction long before diabetes is diagnosed.

In the Functional Medicine approach, we go beyond standard labs to uncover the hidden patterns and root causes of insulin resistance. Key areas include:

✅ Glucose-insulin relationship — understanding post-meal spikes, fasting-postprandial gaps, and compensatory hyperinsulinemia

✅ Body composition & waist-to-hip ratio — central obesity often reveals insulin resistance before labs do

✅ Mitochondrial health & energy production — inefficient cells need more insulin to do the same job

✅ Inflammation & oxidative stress — chronic inflammation impairs insulin signaling and glucose uptake

✅ Toxin and endocrine disruptors — hidden environmental exposures can worsen metabolic dysfunction

A personalized plan in Functional Medicine involves targeted lifestyle strategies, nutrition, movement, and root cause correction — aiming not just to manage blood sugar, but to restore true metabolic balance before disease sets in.