What is Insulin Resistance Really? And Why Almost Nobody Talks About It Until It's Too Late
Randy F.J. Laumen is a holistic health coach specializing in physical health, mental well-being, and identity-based lifestyle change. He is the co-founder of We The Fit People and the author of Your Metabolic Reset (2025), focused on restoring metabolic health and overcoming insulin resistance.
It may be the most common serious health condition you have never had properly explained to you. A large share of adults are living with some degree of it right now. Most of them have no idea because the one test that would reveal it early is almost never run until the damage is already done. Insulin resistance is the quiet engine humming underneath a huge portion of modern chronic disease. So let us finally stop and explain, in plain language, what it actually is.
Across this series, I have mentioned insulin resistance many times, always in passing, always as part of a larger story. This is the article that stops and explains it properly, no jargon, no assumed knowledge, because understanding this one mechanism will change how you see almost everything about your metabolic health.
First, what insulin actually does
Every time you eat, especially foods containing carbohydrates, the sugar in your blood rises. Your body needs to move that sugar out of the bloodstream and into your cells, where it can be used for energy or stored for later. The hormone that manages this is insulin, produced by your pancreas.
Picture insulin as a messenger who knocks on the door of each cell and asks it to open up and let the sugar in. In a healthy body, the cells answer readily. The door opens, the sugar moves in, and your blood sugar settles back down smoothly. The messenger does its job, the cells cooperate, and everything stays in balance. This is insulin sensitivity. The cells are listening, and they respond.
Now, what "resistance" really means
Now imagine the knocking never stops. Meal after meal, snack after snack, year after year, a diet heavy in refined carbohydrates and sugar, too little movement, poor sleep, and chronic stress all keep the messenger pounding on the door, constantly asking the cells to take in more fuel than they can use.
Eventually, like anyone hearing the same insistent knock all day long, the cells stop answering so readily. They become less responsive to the message. This is insulin resistance: the cells have grown deaf to insulin's signal. They no longer open the door as easily as they should.
Here is where the body does something revealing. It does not give up. It knocks louder. The pancreas responds to the unanswered signal by producing more and more insulin, flooding the system to force those reluctant doors open and keep blood sugar under control. For a long time, this is the crucial part: it works. Your blood sugar stays perfectly normal. But it stays normal only because insulin is now running in permanent overdrive behind the scenes, doing far more work than it was ever meant to.
Why almost nobody catches it in time
This is the answer to the second half of this article's title, and it is the part that should concern you most. Standard medical care screens for metabolic trouble by measuring blood glucose. But blood glucose is the last thing to break. As we have just seen, it can stay reassuringly normal for years, often a decade or more, precisely because rising insulin is working furiously to hold it there. By the time your glucose finally drifts up into "pre-diabetic" territory, the underlying insulin resistance has usually been building invisibly for a very long time.
The test that would catch it far earlier, fasting insulin, and a simple calculation called Homeostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance (HOMA-IR) that combines fasting insulin and glucose, are rarely ordered. If your glucose looks normal, conventional guidelines see no reason to look further. The standard reference range for fasting insulin is itself generous. As functional practitioners often point out, many labs will call an insulin level "normal" that a metabolic specialist would already consider a warning sign. The result is that the alarm is set to go off only once the house is already burning.
How to recognise it in yourself
The reassuring news is that insulin resistance usually announces itself through symptoms long before any laboratory value crosses a line. If you know what to listen for, the signs are easy to dismiss individually, but together they tell a coherent story.
Watch for a waistline that keeps expanding, particularly fat gathering around the middle. Energy crashes after meals, especially carbohydrate-heavy ones, and a heavy slump in the early afternoon. Strong and frequent cravings for sugar and starch. Feeling shaky, irritable, or intensely hungry between meals. Difficulty losing weight despite genuine effort. Brain fog and a mind that feels slower than it should. On the routine blood work that is commonly run, rising triglycerides, falling high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, and creeping blood pressure are all quiet fingerprints of the same underlying process.
No single one of these proves insulin resistance on its own. But if you recognise a cluster of them in yourself, your body is very likely telling you something that your standard glucose test is not yet equipped to reveal.
Why this matters more than you think
It would be a mistake to think of insulin resistance as simply an early step on the road to type 2 diabetes. Chronically elevated insulin is itself a driver of disease. Researchers such as Dr. Benjamin Bikman have documented how persistently high insulin promotes the storage of visceral fat, fuels inflammation, raises blood pressure, distorts cholesterol, and contributes to fatty liver, hormonal conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and a growing list of links to cardiovascular disease and even cognitive decline.
In other words, insulin resistance sits upstream of an enormous amount of what we call modern chronic disease. It is not a minor footnote on the way to diabetes. It is one of the central mechanisms of ill health in the developed world, which is exactly why it deserves your attention years before anyone would think to hand you a diagnosis.
The best news of all: It responds
Because insulin resistance is driven largely by how we live, it responds powerfully to changes in how we live. This is not a condition you are simply handed and must endure. In most cases, it is deeply reversible.
Movement is one of the most effective levers because your muscles are an enormous reservoir for glucose. Building and using muscle makes your whole system more insulin-sensitive, and even a short walk after meals helps. Reducing refined carbohydrates and sugar lowers the constant demand that created the resistance in the first place, giving the cells a chance to start listening again. Repairing sleep and calming chronic stress lowers the cortisol that quietly worsens the whole picture. Losing excess fat, particularly around the middle, improves insulin sensitivity throughout the body. None of this requires a prescription. It requires removing the conditions that produced the problem and giving the body the chance it is remarkably good at taking.
Do not wait for the alarm
The reason almost nobody talks about insulin resistance until it is too late is not negligence. It is that our medical system is built to detect disease once it has arrived, not to notice the long, quiet slide toward it. Insulin resistance lives almost entirely within that slide, visible in your symptoms, invisible on the standard test, and quietly shaping your future the whole time.
But you do not have to wait for the alarm to sound. You can learn the signs. You can ask for the right tests. Fasting insulin and HOMA-IR, not glucose alone. You can understand that this single mechanism is one of the most important and most reversible levers in your entire health. The best time to address insulin resistance is years before anyone would ever call it diabetes. The second best time is today.
See the full picture, early
If you recognise yourself in the signs above – the stubborn waistline, the energy crashes, the cravings, the sense that something metabolic is shifting even though your glucose is "fine", it may be time to look deeper than the standard test allows.
At We The Fit People, we read the full insulin picture, not just blood sugar. We help you recognise the early signs, request the right testing, and reverse insulin resistance while it is still entirely within reach, long before it hardens into something with a diagnostic name.
Book a consultation today and let's catch it while it is still easy to change.
Read more from Randy Franciscus Johannes Laumen
Randy Franciscus Johannes Laumen, Holistic Health Coach
Randy F.J. Laumen is a psychiatric nurse and an emerging voice in the health space, focused on preventing chronic illness before it takes root. With a background in mental health and applied training in Functional Medicine, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and lifestyle-based interventions, he bridges the gap between conventional care and long-term well-being. Together with his wife, Sabrina Gutierrez, he co-founded We The Fit People, a platform dedicated to empowering individuals to take responsibility for their health. He is also the author of Your Metabolic Reset (2025), available on Amazon.
References:
