In type 1 diabetes, could somone please explain to me how and why this causes weightloss?
15
Jul 2009
How Does Type 1 Diabetes Cause Weight Loss?
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[...] the original post: How Does Type 1 Diabetes Cause Weight Loss? | Santo for Hall Author: cauthenzzz Categories: Weight Loss Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) Leave a comment [...]
Uncontrolled type 1 causes weight loss. Essentially insulin is the key that lets nutrients (carbs) into your cells in your body to create energy. Type 1′s do not make insulin, so the cells are starving. For energy, the body will burn off fat cells and this is what causes a type 1 to have rapid weight loss.
Type 1 Diabetes
Type 1 diabetes, also called immune-mediated diabetes, was formerly called insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM). It is a disease that results from the body’s failure to produce insulin, the hormone that allows glucose to enter the cells of the body to fuel them. This is most often the result of an autoimmune process in which the body’s immune system attacks and destroys the insulin producing cells of the pancreas. When glucose cannot enter the cells, it builds up in the blood and the body’s cells literally starve to death. People with type 1 diabetes must take daily insulin injections and regularly monitor their blood sugar levels.
The cause of type 1 diabetes is unknown, but is is known that people inherit a tendency to get diabetes. However, not all people who have this tendency will get the disease. Type 1 diabetes usually starts in children or young adults, but can start at any age. More than 700,000 Americans have this type of diabetes — about 10 percent of all diagnosed cases.
Type 2 can cause weight loss also . My dad lost 40 pounds before he found out what was wrong. My son lost 15 and I lost about 10. I had to work to gain weight back because I was only 103 to begin with. I still have to fight to keep my weight up
because your on a diet, and because you can’t eat as much as you were able to when you didn’t have diabetes!
In uncontrolled type 1 diabetes, the absence of insulin prevents glucose from entering the body’s cells, forcing them to rely on ketosis (metabolizing fat and protein) for energy, as Anita said. Basically, the body believes that it’s starving to death and responds accordingly.
But the real answer to your question lies in what happens to that unusable glucose.
When blood glucose levels build up too high, your kidneys begin to remove the excess glucose from your blood and excrete it in your urine, producing the sweet-tasting urine which gave us the name “diabetes mellitus” (roughly “diabetes” = “passing through”, mellitus = “of honey”). Every gram of glucose excreted in this way rather than metabolized normally is effectively a 4 calorie reduction from your diet – if you’re eating 2000 calories per day, but half of them are carbs (which break down into glucose), you’ll be peeing out the 1000 calories of carbs, effectively leaving you on a 1000 calorie per day diet. A shortfall of 1000 calories per day relative to the amount of energy your body is burning translates into losing about 2 pounds/0.9kg per week.
This same process can and does happen in uncontrolled type 2 diabetes also, as noted by MamaSmur, but people with type 2 do still produce insulin and their bodies will produce a lot of it to try to compensate for the high glucose levels which will allow some of the glucose to be metabolized and the high insulin levels will also act as a trigger for adipose tissue to store some of the excess glucose as fat, so type 2 doesn’t tend to result in weight loss in this fashion unless the person’s pancreas has started losing the ability to produce insulin.