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A low-carb diet plan may be an effective solution for anyone who has struggled with weight loss but has not found success on other diet plans. Many people don't realize, however, that low-carbing is about more than weight loss. It can also make a big difference in a person's overall health status, especially concerning diabetes and heart disease. To get the most out of low-carbing, it helps to understand how it works and how to do it properly.

Low-carbing works because the underlying mechanism in many cases of obesity is a faulty glucose metabolism. Scientists are still not clear on the causes of this, but it seems to stem partly from heredity and partly from poor dietary choices. Something about repeatedly consuming large amounts of foods containing high amounts of sugar causes the human body to become less responsive to insulin over time. Eventually the body can no longer control blood sugar levels in a healthy way, causing blood sugar to continually spike and crash rather than remain even, and possibly even remain at a higher level than is safe, resulting in diabetes.

The phenomenon of losing your ability to respond to insulin is called insulin resistance and is most often indicated by overweight, because if your insulin level remains high then your body never gets the chemical signals it needs to burn off your excess fat. A higher level of insulin in the blood not only signals the body to store fat but keeps fat-mobilizing hormones from doing their job as well. However, it is possible to be insulin-resistant and slender. If you suffer from uneven blood sugar and hypoglycemia but do not have a weight problem, it is still worthwhile to ask your doctor to test your glucose tolerance and insulin levels to see if this is your problem. Either way, a low-carb diet plan may be able to help you.

By the time you suffer from insulin resistance, your body has undergone changes in the way it responds to food and these are not easily reversible. It is, however, possible to halt your progress towards diabetes. To accomplish this it helps to understand some of what we do know about how the human metabolism works.

First off you should know about the fuels used by the human body. They are alcohol, glucose, and ketones, in order of preference. If you have had any alcohol to drink, your body will burn it off before anything else; this is partly to prevent alcohol poisoning. Then your body will burn off any extra glucose floating around, or glycogen stores in your muscles and liver,

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