Do These 3 Things After Eating (They Flatten Glucose & Insulin Spikes)

What you do in the 90 minutes after eating very often matters more than the meal itself. Now, the problem isn't that your glucose rises after food. That's completely normal and it's supposed to happen. The issue is what happens when those spikes occur repeatedly, day after day, year after year. The research on this is incredibly clear. Repeated or excessive glucose spikes drive chronic insulin exposure, which over time leads to dramatically higher risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, and several common cancers. This isn't just about one bad meal. It's about what happens after meals, repeated thousands of times across your whole life. And the good news is that there are three simple things that you can do in the window after eating that reduce your glucose spikes, lowers your insulin demand, and in doing so genuinely helps you live a longer, healthier life. My name's Dr. Alex, and over the last 10 years working in emergency medicine, I've become obsessed with the patterns that I see, the same preventable diseases showing up again and again in people who thought they were doing everything right. What I've realized is that longevity isn't about perfection. It's about understanding the physiology behind what actually works and then applying it consistently every day. So, I want to give you the insights that I've gathered over the years and hopefully teach you something that could genuinely add years to your life. Medicine these days is reactive. We have to wait for you to actually have a heart attack or get cancer before we do something about it. And it's time that we started learning about how to prevent these conditions in the first place. So, let me give you the three things that you can do and then we'll talk about why they work later in the video. These are three really simple actions that would dramatically reduce the height and the extent of the glucose spike after eating. You don't need to do all three of them. Just pick one that you think you could do consistently every day. You could even just rotate through them during the week if you think that works for you. The key here, like I said, is consistency, not perfection. So, first on the list is simply going for a walk. If you have a dog, then walk the dog or walk around the block with your family. Just put your shoes on and walk for 15 or 30 minutes after you have your evening meal. This really isn't a long time, and most of us just sit down for an hour after dinner anyway. Many of us for the whole evening just sat on the sofa in front of the TV. If you did this every day for the rest of your life, the impact these reduced daily spikes would have on your health is massive. And beyond the metabolic benefits, you get out in the fresh air. It's social time and it's time speaking with the family rather than just sat in silence watching the TV. Something as simple as a walk after dinner changes the trajectory of that meal entirely. The glucose that would have sat in your bloodstream for two or three hours, keeping insulin elevated gets cleared in half the time. That difference multiplied across every evening meal for the rest of your life is the difference between developing insulin resistance and not. Moving on to number two, which is to do some squats after eating. Now, obviously you'll have a full belly, so you're not training for a marathon or an Iron Man here. But for the next 15 minutes, if you did some squats every minute whilst watching the TV, contracting these huge muscle groups would force glucose into the cells. You don't need equipment. You don't need a gym membership. You don't need to change into any sports clothing. You just need to stand up and move. Even gentle body weight movements are enough to activate the muscles and pull glucose out of the bloodstream. Now, it might feel a bit odd at first, but once it becomes a habit, it's second nature. Your quads in the legs and your glutes in the buttocks are the largest muscle groups in your body. And when they contract, they create an enormous metabolic demand for fuel. That fuel is glucose and it comes straight out of your blood. The third thing you can do is your daily housework after the evening meal. If you spent half an hour tidying the dinner things, washing up, or maybe even longer doing the hoovering or the laundry, this hour of movement and being busy kills two birds with one stone. You get the housework done that you would do anyway during the day, but you time it so you get the added benefit of the glucose reduction after the meal. It's not a structured exercise. It's just movement. And that's exactly what the body needs in that window. You're bending, you're lifting, you're reaching for things, you're walking up and down the stairs. And all of that adds up to significant muscle activity without feeling like a workout. The beauty of all three is that they're free. You don't need any extra equipment and you can just fit them in around your normal life and that makes them sustainable which is the only thing that matters when we're talking about habits you need to maintain for decades. Now let me explain what's actually happening inside your body when you do these things because if you understand this then it makes it much easier to stick to. So most people think glucose is the villain. They hear everything about glucose spikes on the internet, but the real villain is insulin. Glucose is a normal essential fuel for every cell in your body. Your brain runs on it. Your muscles run on it. Your heart runs on it. It's not a toxin. The real driver of metabolic disease is chronic insulin exposure. When glucose rises after a meal, your pancreas releases insulin to shuttle that glucose into cells where it can be used or stored. That's a normal process. And in a healthy person, it happens smoothly and efficiently. But when that process happens repeatedly with high insulin levels staying elevated for hours at a time, your cells start to become less responsive to insulin. They've seen it so many times that they just stop listening. Well, that's what we call insulin resistance. And insulin resistance is the root cause of many of the major chronic diseases that we see in modern society. Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, polycystic ovary syndrome, even certain cancers, they all share insulin resistance as a common upstream driver. What makes this particularly insidious is that you don't feel insulin resistance developing. There's no pain. There's no obvious symptoms. There's nothing to alert you that something's going wrong. Persistently high insulin gradually damages the endothelial lining of your blood vessels, which over years leads to atherosclerosis, the hardening and narrowing of arteries that causes heart attacks and strokes. It drives visceral fat accumulation, the deep abdominal fat that wraps around your organs and releases inflammatory signals into your bloodstream. It causes fatty liver disease where fat accumulates in your liver cells and impairs their function. All of this can be happening while your fasting glucose looks completely normal on a blood test. This is the part that most people don't understand. You can have completely normal glucose readings on your annual blood work, while insulin is already doing long-term harm in the background. Your doctor looks at your glucose, sees that it's 5.2, and tells you that everything's fine. But what they're not measuring is your insulin, and that's where the problem is. By the time your fasting glucose starts to creep up into the pre-diabetic range, you've often had insulin resistance for 10 or 15 years already. The damage has been accumulating silently year after year after year, meal after meal. Your pancreas has been churning out more and more insulin to compensate for your cells becoming less responsive. That's when glucose finally starts to rise. And that's when you get diagnosed with pre-diabetes or diabetes. Four of my direct family members have pre-diabetes. And I've tried to explain to them many times that the disease process started a decade earlier. This is why what you do after eating is so critical. Because when you move after a meal, you're not just lowering glucose, you're lowering the insulin demand. And that changes everything. When muscles contract, something remarkable happens. They pull glucose into the cells independently of insulin. There's a completely separate pathway that gets activated when muscle fibers contract, and it doesn't require insulin at all. This mechanism involves proteins called glut 4 transporters that move to the surface of muscle cells when the muscle contracts, creating channels for glucose to flow in. And once glucose is inside the muscle, it gets used for energy rather than being stored as fat. This is one of the most important mechanisms in human metabolism. And most people have never heard of it. When you stand up and walk, when you do a set of squats, when you're moving around, tidying the house or doing the laundry, your muscles are grabbing glucose from the bloodstream and burning it as fuel. And they're doing this without needing insulin to unlock the door. This pathway reduces both glucose and insulin at the same time. And that's the crucial point. You're lowering the spike and you're lowering the hormone that drives insulin resistance. Over time, this compounds into a dramatically lower cumulative insulin exposure. And that's what protects you from chronic disease. Just think about the maths of this. If your average postmeal glucose spike lasts three hours when you sit still, but only 90 minutes when you walk, you've cut your insulin exposure in half for that meal. If you do that three times a day, then you've harved your daily insulin exposure. Do that every day for a year and you've prevented thousands of hours of elevated insulin. Do that for a decade and fundamentally you've altered your metabolic destiny. The impact isn't immediate, but it's cumulative, and that's what matters. What's even more powerful is that frequency of movement matters more than duration. Short repeated bouts of movement after meals are more effective than one long daily workout. If you go to the gym for an hour in the morning and then sit down for the rest of the day, your muscles are only metabolically active during that 1 hour window. But if you move for 15 minutes after breakfast, 20 minutes after lunch, and 30 minutes after dinner, then you're keeping your muscles metabolically active throughout the day, that constant low-level activity improves insulin sensitivity in a way that a single workout just cannot replicate. Your muscle cells become more responsive to insulin because they're being used regularly. They're not being asked to sit dormant for 23 hours and then suddenly process a massive glucose load. Instead, they're being engaged multiple times throughout the day, and that keeps them sensitive and responsive. It's not about replacing exercise. It's about adding movement where it matters most, which is in that 90minute window after you've eaten. That's when glucose is flooding into your bloodstream, and that's when your muscles can have the biggest impact on clearing it. Data from continuous glucose monitors has shown this pattern really clearly. People who break up their sitting time with short movement breaks have significantly lower 24-hour glucose levels compared to people who do the same total amount of movement, but all in one session. The difference isn't trivial. We're talking about reductions in average glucose of 10 to 15% just from spreading movement throughout the day. And remember, every point reduction in glucose means a corresponding reduction in insulin demand. Now, the flip side of this is equally important, and it's something that doesn't get talked about anywhere near enough. Sitting after meals is actively harmful. When you sit down and stay still after eating, you're essentially shutting off that muscle glucose uptake pathway. Your muscles aren't contracting, so they're not pulling glucose out of the blood. that leaves insulin to do all the work itself. And insulin pushes glucose into storage, often as fat, particularly around the liver and in the abdomen. Over time, this pattern drives insulin resistance, even in people who exercise regularly. You could be going to the gym 5 days a week, doing intense workouts, and still developing insulin resistance if you're sitting for hours after every meal. Prolonged sitting suppresses muscle glucose uptake. forcing insulin to work harder and stay elevated for longer. And it's that chronic elevation that slowly erodess your metabolic health. Your liver starts accumulating fat because it's being constantly bombarded with glucose that has nowhere else to go. Your visceral fat expands because insulin is a fat storage hormone. And when it's elevated, fat breakdown is inhibited while fat storage is promoted. And this explains why you can see marathon runners with fatty liver disease or people who exercise daily but still develop type 2 diabetes. Exercise is important absolutely but if you're undoing that benefit by sitting for extended periods after meals, you're working against yourself. The postmeal window is when your metabolic fate is being decided. When you move, glucose gets used as fuel. When you sit, glucose gets stored as fat. And over decades, those two patterns lead to completely different health outcomes. Beyond the metabolic effects, there's another layer to this that's worth understanding. When glucose stays elevated for prolonged periods, it causes direct damage to blood vessels. High glucose levels lead to a process called glycation, where glucose molecules attach to proteins in the blood vessel walls. These glycated proteins called advanced glycation endroducts or AES accumulate over time and make blood vessels stiff and dysfunctional. They lose their ability to dilate and constrict properly which impairs blood flow and raises your blood pressure. This process is accelerated when glucose spikes are frequent and sustained. Every hour the glucose remains elevated is an hour where glycation is occurring. By reducing the duration of those spikes through postmeal movement, you're directly reducing the glycation burden on your blood vessels. That translates into better vascular health, lower blood pressure, and a reduced risk of heart attacks and strokes decades down the line. Again, this isn't something that you'll feel tomorrow, but it's happening at the cellular level every time you choose to move instead of sit. And it's worth being very clear about this. The benefits of these strategies are long-term. They're not immediate. You're not going to feel healthier tomorrow morning because you walked after dinner the day before. You won't see a dramatic shift in your energy levels or your weight in the first few weeks. What you're doing is quietly lowering your cumulative insulin exposure over decades and that reduces your risk of diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, fatty liver disease, and cancers. As I've said many times, the impact compounds over decades. Think of it like this. If you eat three meals a day, that's over a thousand meals a year. Over 10 years, that's 10,000 meals. If you reduce the insulin spike after even half of those meals, you fundamentally changed your metabolic trajectory, you've lowered your lifetime insulin exposure by thousands and thousands of hours. And that translates directly into lower risk of the diseases that kill people most in the modern world. heart disease, strokes, diabetes, lung cancer, bowel cancer, dementia, all of these conditions are linked to insulin resistance at some level. So, by doing something as simple as walking after dinner, you're addressing the root cause of the most common chronic diseases. The analogy I like to use is compound interest. If you put a small amount of money into a savings account every month, it doesn't feel like much at first, but over 30 or 40 years with compound interest, that small monthly contribution becomes a substantial sum. If you put £500 into the S&P 500 every month, after 30 or 40 years, you'll be a millionaire. Postmeal movement works in the same way. Each individual walk after dinner reduces your insulin exposure by maybe 20 or 30% for that meal. That doesn't sound life-changing, I know, but when you compound that reduction over 10,000 meals, the effect is enormous. You're not just preventing one disease, you're shifting your entire disease trajectory. The main thing about all of this is to make it sustainable. And to do it every day, just pick one of these three strategies. Walk after dinner. Do some squats during the TV adverts. Do the washing up and the housework straight after eating. Whatever feels most sustainable to you is the one that you should focus on. Do it consistently and trust that the benefits are accumulating even if you can't see them yet because they really are. The reason I'm emphasizing sustainability here is because this only works if you actually do it. A perfect strategy that you follow for two weeks and then give up on is worthless. A simple strategy that you can maintain for the rest of your life is priceless. And that's why I've given you options that don't require a gym membership, any special equipment, or even any extra time. You're already eating meals every day. You're already doing the housework. You're already watching TV in the evening. All you're doing is adding movement into those existing patterns. What you do after eating matters just as much as what you eat. Standing up, interrupting sitting, and engaging in brief movement in that 90 minutes after meals changes the metabolic fate of that meal. It shifts glucose from being stored as fat to being burned as fuel. It reduces insulin demand which over time protects you from insulin resistance. Repeated over a lifetime, these small actions compound into lasting health. They're not dramatic, they're not flashy, and they won't make headlines, but they really do work. And they work because they align with the basic physiology of how your body processes food. And 10 years from now or 20 years from now when your friends are being diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease and you're still healthy and active, you'll look back on these simple habits and realize that they were the most important health decisions you ever made. Because longevity isn't built on dramatic interventions. It's built on boring, consistent actions repeated thousands of times. And this is one of those actions.