Can You Eat Rice With Insulin Resistance?

If you have insulin resistance or prediabetes, you have probably been told to stop eating rice.

That is hard advice to follow when rice is part of most of your meals.

You do not have to stop eating it.

No food is banned in the American Diabetes Association's standards of care ¹. Rice is not the exception.

01Why rice gets blamed

Rice is mostly carbohydrate. Carbohydrate becomes glucose in your blood. Insulin is the hormone that moves that glucose into your cells.

With insulin resistance, your cells respond to insulin less well. So your body has to make more of it to do the same job ².

That means a big bowl of white rice with nothing else is a hard meal for your body right now. That part is true.

That does not mean you can never eat rice. It means the amount and the rest of the plate matter.

02Cutting it out does not last

Most people cannot keep a food they grew up eating off the plate for long.

It works for a few weeks. Then a family dinner or a busy week comes along and the old habits return.

A plan you cannot keep does not help.

03Three things to do instead

1. 1

   Size it

   Rice becomes one part of the plate, not the base of it. Serve what you usually would, then put some of it back. Fill that space with sabzi and dal. You are not weighing anything. You are changing the proportions. How much is right for you depends on your body and your numbers.

2. 2

   Eat it last

   Start with the vegetables and the protein. Sabzi, salad, dal, paneer, eggs, chicken, fish. Then the rice. In a small 2015 study of adults with type 2 diabetes, eating the vegetables and protein before the carbohydrate led to lower blood glucose and insulin after the meal than eating the same food the other way round ³. The study was small, but this is easy to try.

3. 3

   Walk after

   A short walk once you have eaten. A 2022 review that pooled several studies found that short bouts of light walking lowered blood glucose after meals compared with staying seated ⁴. A few minutes counts.

04What this looks like at dinner

• Dal chawal. Sabzi and dal first. A smaller serve of rice after. A short walk when you are done.
• Biryani. Start with the raita and the salad. Add a protein if the biryani is light on it. Take a smaller plate.
• Khichdi. More dal than rice in the pot. A bowl of vegetables on the side.

You do not need to cook a separate meal from the rest of the family. It is the same food in a different order and a different amount.

05Brown rice, basmati, cooled rice

You will read a lot about which rice to buy and whether to cool it overnight. Those are details. Portion, order and the walk come first.

If those three are in place and you want to fine-tune, have that conversation with your coach or your dietitian, with your own numbers in front of you.

06Exercise and sleep matter too

Muscle is where much of the glucose from a meal goes. Strength training two or three times a week helps your body use that glucose.

Sleep counts too. In one study, a week of short sleep lowered insulin sensitivity in healthy men ⁵.

In the Diabetes Prevention Program, a large US trial, adults at high risk who changed how they ate and moved lowered their risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 58% over about three years, compared with a placebo ⁶.

That program was built on modest weight loss and 150 minutes of activity a week. It was not built on banning one food.