When Summer Never Ends

Leia em 🇧🇷Português aqui

For years, my body felt like it was constantly unwell.

I lived with intense, recurring inflammation in different parts of my body—especially along my spine; a chronic fatigue that no amount of rest could fix; a persistent fog of low mood, with depressive symptoms that turned even the simplest tasks into something impossible; high cholesterol; prohibitively high triglycerides. I was a regular at the neighborhood pharmacies, relying on corticosteroids just to get through flare-ups. A single glass of wine could land me in the emergency room with liver intoxication. Any extra muscular effort turned into tendinitis.

I took mood stabilizers and hormone regulators. I took supplements and vitamins. I tried reiki, crystals, Bach flower remedies. I had become my own living version of “O Pulso Ainda Pulsa”, the famous Brazilian song about surviving despite everything.

What I didn’t yet understand was that my body wasn’t broken. It was overwhelmed.

When I was 25, I found a doctor who helped pull me out of rock bottom, and I managed to turn things around. My metabolism - completely compromised - slowly began returning to baseline. I changed my habits, added movement to my routine, adjusted my diet. And still, the flare-ups kept coming back.

The real turning point came when I began to understand the role of insulin, and how chronically elevated levels of this hormone were quietly driving much of what I was experiencing. Learning how to regulate insulin, rather than constantly stimulating it, was essential for me to feel alive again.

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For most of human history, carbohydrates were seasonal.

Fruit ripened in the summer. Roots and tubers were harvested at specific times. Honey was rare and difficult to obtain. For most of the year, the human diet was based on proteins, fats, fibrous plants, and whatever nature allowed at that moment.

When they appeared in the summer, they stimulated insulin release, helping the body store energy as fat: an essential evolutionary advantage for surviving winter. Then, as carbohydrates disappeared, insulin levels dropped, allowing the body to access stored energy and “reset” its metabolic systems.

This rhythm of abundance and scarcity was not a problem. It was the essential blueprint for our survival.

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Now let’s look at modern life.

Today, carbohydrates are available all the time - every day, all year long - often in highly refined forms our bodies never encountered during evolution. Bread for breakfast. Snacks between meals. Sugar hidden in sauces, drinks, and even foods marketed as “healthy.”

From an evolutionary perspective, we are living in an eternal summer.

And insulin - a hormone designed to rise, do its job, and then retreat - is continuously activated.

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Insulin is vital. It allows glucose to move from the bloodstream into cells. But it was never meant to stay switched on all the time.

When insulin remains chronically elevated:

• Cells begin to resist its action (insulin resistance)

• The pancreas is forced to produce more and more insulin

• Blood glucose regulation becomes unstable

• Systemic inflammation increases

• Cellular energy production is impaired

Over time, this pattern is strongly associated with type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and chronic inflammatory conditions.

There is also a growing body of research suggesting that insulin resistance in the brain may be linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, sometimes informally referred to as “type 3 diabetes.” While this is not an official diagnosis, it highlights something crucial: brain health is deeply dependent on metabolic health.

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Looking back, my symptoms make perfect sense.

The chronic fatigue wasn’t a lack of willpower—it was compromised cellular energy. The inflammation wasn’t random—it was metabolic stress. The low mood wasn’t weakness—it was a nervous system under constant overload.

When I began eating in a way that allowed insulin to rise and fall again—respecting periods of metabolic rest—my body finally had space to recover.

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I neither want nor intend to demonize carbohydrates. They are not the enemy, and they never were. The real issue is constant availability - without pauses, without intervals - creating a silent, vicious metabolic loop inside the body.

This is not about going back to the past. It’s about making evolutionary wisdom an integral part of modern life.

We were never meant to live in an eternal summer. Healing begins when we allow the seasons to return.