[00:00:00] You are listening to episode number 284 of Better Blood Sugars with Delaine MD. Welcome to Better Blood Sugars with Delaine M.D. where you can learn strategies to lower your blood sugars and improve your overall health. I'm your host, Dr. Delaine Vaughn. Ladies, if you know you're capable of doing badass things at work and for your family, but you're confused and frustrated with why you can't seem to stop eating the chocolate cake, this podcast is for you. Let's talk. Hey there and welcome to the podcast. I want to welcome you to the podcast. I am so glad that you're taking a little bit of time for yourself in the new year in this busy time, and I feel privileged that you're choosing to spend that time with me.
[00:00:44] It's a new year. This is January 6th. As I'm recording this and I'm actually recording it late usually I have this recorded and posted by Monday. And there's been just craziness this last weekend, so that didn't happen for me me. So I'm just recording it now. But I will have it on and up on the podcast players by the end of the day. But it's a new year. The Bears beat the packers yesterday. It's a been a polar vortex in the Midwest right now, so the whole state of Kansas has shut down. The new year has a very new vibe. And today I kind of want to talk about, you know, what does it take to create new health and new experiences and new habits and new approaches to the way that you deal with your type 2 diabetes? I am going to recap a little bit about how I came to this work and how I can help you with it. It's come to my attention from a number of different people that it's not been made clear that I was also insulin resistant at one point and that I had to do this work also in order to reach my own personal health goals. Lots of doctors will talk about they will treat things that they've never had, and I get that. I mean, there's an element of help that can come from getting treatment by somebody who's never had to deal with the particular struggles that you deal with. But as far as metabolic health and insulin resistance, that is not the case with me. I definitely also was insulin resistant and had to learn how to live my life in a way that just aligns with human biology. And how that alone was able to heal my particular situation and can, if not entirely heal you will definitely get you a lot closer to that before we get started, I want to make sure to remind everybody if you are medicated for the type 2 diabetes, for your diabetes, if you're on meds for that, you need to be very careful making the dietary changes that I recommend in this podcast. You have been medicated for the way that you've eaten in the past and if you change the way you eat, you're going to need to change your medications. If you don't do that, you can end up quite sick. The kind of sick that looks like hospitalization, possibly even death. My experience is that's not why people make those decisions and make those changes. So if you are medicated, you need to make sure you're keeping yourself safe. The best way for you to do that is for you to get a line of communication open with the provider who's wrote the prescriptions for these meds for you. Ask them how they want you to share your blood sugars with them and then how you should expect to hear back from them. How they want you to change your medication regimen. If you don't do this again, you can get very sick and I want you to avoid that. So set up an open line of communication with that provider. I also want to remind you that if you aren't sure how to make these changes, right, it's the beginning of the year, it's 2025, you're ready to do it and you're not sure how to do it.
[00:03:42] If that's the case, I have help for you. There is a 14 days to better blood sugars guide on my website. You can go to delainemd.com forward/better B E T T E R. That is a 14 day menu plan of foods, breakfast, lunch and dinner. All sorts of options on there.
[00:04:03] This menu, these food choices will lower your blood sugars. So if you're not sure what to do, go download that guide. If you're medicated, make sure you talk to your doctor. You download that guide, you will see improvements. Lower blood sugars, significantly lower blood sugars following that guide. And it's very powerful. So if you're medicated, be really careful. But try this guide out. 14 days if you don't eat and if you're like, oh, I'm on the borderline, I'm not quite diabetic, I'm still in that pre diabetic range. My family was all diabetic. I'm not sure if even changing my diet's going to help. This guide will give you an answer to that. This guide will lower Your blood Sugars give it 14 days of everything you've got, watch your blood sugars go down and then if you see your blood sugars go down and you're like, oh, I don't know that I can do this forever, that's when I want you to make a call to me or send me an email delanemd.com let's set up a better blood sugars assessment call where you and I can sit and discuss what your previous problems have been or struggles have been. Obstacles have been for fixing your blood sugars and what results you got with a 14 day guide and how then you can set that up to work for you for the rest of your life. You can send me an email delanedelainmd.com or you can go to calendly c-a l e n d l y.com forward/delanemdash better hyphen, blood hyphen, sugars.
[00:05:30] So let's talk about kind of how I found myself to this kind of work. Many of you are aware that I have twins. I have boy, girl, twin. They were born in 2008. They are 16 years old. They are sunshine and everything wonderful and I have such good time with them. I also have an older son. He's 26, I think he's 27. I think he turns 27 in December. He's 27 years old. He's grown. He made me a grandmother six years ago. He has a lovely wife, a lovely son. Both of my pregnancies, which were 10 years apart, those pregnancies were both affected with gestational diabetes. The first one was if you use the new criteria for diagnosing gestational diabetes, my first pregnancy would have been diagnosed as type 2 diabetes or gestational diabetes. At the time it was, I was told I was borderline. And then of course, 10 years later when I came down with my twins, I definitely was fully into the gestational diabetes range.
[00:06:34] And so if you don't know gestational diabetes is a pre diabetes state, most women who are diagnosed with gestational diabetes, depending on the study you look at, 60 to 80% of women who are diagnosed with gestational diabetes will go on to develop type 2 diabetes. So recognizing the risk that you're at if you have gestational diabetes, I certainly knew those numbers. I was already in my medical training, I had been a nurse prior to that. I knew those numbers. So I understood the risk that I carried for developing type 2 diabetes. I managed to skip out on my postpartum Checkup where they would look at my numbers because I was busy, I was in training and I didn't have time to look at that. I thought it was just something, you know, it was a quirk. It was because I had a twin pregnancy. I made up all sorts of excuses. But what I did not do was look at that number because I really didn't think it was something that was relevant is really what it came down to. And so my kids, you know, grew and they started kindergarten and as they did, you know, I started to see my, my weight start to climb. And then I did a, you know, a 1C and my a 1C. Although not fully into the pre diabetic range, it was definitely not a gold star of health either. So I started to see that I needed to also make some changes. And so I started to do that. I was, my kids were, you know, six, seven, eight years old. I was changing my diet. I started exercising more and I was exercising like one to two hours a day. And that still did not seem to help what I was trying to accomplish. And I started to really become frustrated and worried and concerned. Right. I was a physician. I knew what the physicians were going to tell me and the things that I thought should be fixing it. I wasn't seeing the results that I wanted to. Okay. So I felt like I was a successful woman. I thought, like, I, I mean, I. It's so interesting when I think about it. I mean, I really did identify as a woman who gets stuff done. I was a nurse before I went to medical school. I worked through medical school as a nurse. I had kids, right? Like I had twins. My second year of medical school, I had a son. When I entered medical school, I was a runner. I trained and completed a marathon. In my fourth year of medical school, I felt like I was a get doner kind of person. And just like you, I imag like you feel that way too. You're not afraid of a little hard work. This should be something I could figure out. And just like you, I really found myself that I was really at a loss and frustrated and even a little afraid. I was really. I felt like I'd come to this fork in the road where I needed to make a decision about am I going to start meds and down this path of being chronically attached to meds and disease. Was I ready to start down that or did I need to do something different to really cement my health that I thought had been there? And really that was probably a figment of my imagination. I was not as healthy as I thought I was. And so I had a very similar experience to many of the women that I work with. I saw that I was headed down a path that I didn't really want to be on. And the things that I thought would fix it didn't seem to fix it or stop it. Then of course, I had, you know, my training. I was a nurse. My undergraduate degree is in. I have a bachelor in nursing with a minor in chemistry. My undergraduate degree was in nursing, and I worked as a nurse before I went on to medical school and then I went on to medical school, and then I went on through residency. And by the time all of this was culminating, it was my first few years out of medical school. But I certainly had the knowledge base of what happens with people who are sick. Like, how do we treat that? The medical community, which will put themselves up as the experts in health, will tell you that we treat medical issues with medications. Right? We treat diseases with medications. What I realized after I started looking into this more was like, I'm not needing more meds in my life. What I'm needing are less M&Ms. And probably a little less Diet Coke. These are the things that actually I believed were unhealthy. And I'm so grateful I had that belief because I was not a believer that I just needed to take more meds. I realized there was something that needed to change.
[00:11:03] And again, many women see this also. They understand they don't need a shot. It's not like they're missing Ozempic in their world and that's why they're sick. They understand that they are out of control with the foods that they're eating and the life that they're living. Like the health that they're trying to create, they're out of control and creating that because the foods they eat, things they drink and the way they move their body.
[00:11:26] So as a physician, I had been taught that medications were the answers. You treat symptoms with meds, and more meds are the answer if the symptoms don't get controlled. In medicine, there's very much a mentality of better living through chemistry. And lots of medical providers really believe that. I now see that these, these meds, treating medication or treating disease with medications is sort of like treating COPD with more inhalers. There's a disease of COPD and that's analogous to metabolic disease, whether that be prediabetes, insulin resistance, diabetes, non alcoholic fatty liver disease, whatever it is. There is a disease COPD in the, you know, in the example of cigarettes and metabolic disease in the example of food.
[00:12:17] But when we treat COPD with more inhalers, it will help the symptoms. Similarly, if we treat metabolic disease with medications, it will help the symptoms. But the source of COPD is the cigarette smoking. For 99% of COPD cases. If we do not stop the cigarette smoking, we can throw all the meds under the sun onto the symptoms of COPD and it's not going to fix it. And it's the same thing for the food. Like the food is the cause of the metabolic disease. And we can throw all the meds under the sun on the disease, but if we don't change the food that we're eating, we're not going to change the disease. Same thing with copd. If we don't change the cigarette smoking, we are not going to change the disease of copd.
[00:13:04] So we can add as many meds as we want, but if we're not fixing or addressing the cause of it, we're going to always be sick, even if the symptoms are improved. And that's what my experience as a physician was able to give me. It was giving me a clear picture of that many, many women will have a false sense of health. And that's what I had. I was never horribly overweight. I did manage to lose £20 when I changed the way I ate. But I was never outside of a normal bmi. But I was insulin resistant. That normal BMI gave me a false sense of health that wasn't real. I wasn't really healthy. I was insulin resistant. My experience as a physician very much showed me where we as physicians give this false sense of health. You're medicated and I've got your numbers. Normal, you must be healthy. You're thin, you got a normal bmi. You must be healthy. And that's not the case. And that's what I saw as a physician. So for me, I realized very early on that the thing that I was doing was creating my illness. And the thing that I was doing was really eating in and out, out of control way. And the thing that helped me with that was getting coaching.
[00:14:17] So going and working with a coach and changing some of the things I had to learn to let go of certain thoughts. Thoughts like a little bit of M&M's aren't that bad. A little bit of cupcakes aren't that bad. Or I can eat the pizza because I'm going to run it off. I always use a joke and you may have heard it or seen it on social media. I Have a picture of me finishing my marathon that I ran when I was a fourth year medical student and I joke that I am the only person I know who gained 10 pounds while training for a marathon because I very much had the mentality is I am going to run it off. Like I'm going to go and eat all this junk food because I'm going to run it off. That was a thought I had to unthink. I had to learn how to stop believing that because it wasn't true. I gained 10 pounds while training for marathon. Clearly I wasn't running it off.
[00:15:14] That is not the biology of our body.
[00:15:18] Other thoughts I had to fix Diet Coke was not a problem. I can remember running around the hospital and I would always had a Diet Coke in hand. Some mornings I would wake up and I'd pull a Diet Coke out of the fridge at 3:30 in the morning. I would not even start drinking it. I would just walk around with a Diet Coke in my hand because it was almost like a wubby, a comfort can of Diet Coke. It was really interesting. But I can remember I always had a Diet Coke in my hand and anytime anybody offered me any kind of criticism about it, I would say I do not have people here in the hospital dying of Diet Coke related illnesses. That was exactly what I thought. I thought Diet Coke was not a problem. I had to learn to unthink that thought. Calories in, calories out goes back to that I can run it off mentality. I had to learn how to unthink that. The thought. And this is probably, if not already floating through many people's heads right now, possibly your brain as well. It will be soon. But the thought I'm going to start again tomorrow. I had to learn to stop believing all of these thoughts and how to think something different. That served me because those thoughts kept me sick. This is a coaching issue.
[00:16:31] Reprogramming our thoughts is not a knowledge issue. It's not a tracking issue. It's none of that. It is a coaching issue. And that was really the first step that made a huge difference for me. Hearing a podcast just like this from another coach, talking about what was possible.
[00:16:51] Like it's possible to be in control of what you eat. It is possible to not feel like an addict to Diet Coke and M&Ms. Or whatever your food might be. It is possible to live a naturally healthy life without relying on meds. I had to hear that message and I had to learn how to incorporate that message into my brain in a way that created health and that was a coaching issue.
[00:17:19] Other things that I did that got me healthy and kept me healthy, reading books. So if you need a list of books, I'm going to give them to you here in a minute. But I like to think about this as filling my brain full of thoughts and help and ideas and information that helps me. Because if not, my brain is full of the information that it's had in the past, which is M and M's are your favorite. You love the way they taste. You love everything about it. You need it. It's hard to get through the day. You deserve it. All of those stories were filling my head before.
[00:17:55] Finding podcasts, finding books, finding information out there that filled my brain with something new was a huge step in getting me healthy and keeping me healthy. Books I would love to recommend to you. If you haven't heard it, here's a collection right here. Number one, Metabolical by Robert Lustig. That book is loaded with really good information. Dr. Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist. He went in, it's funny, he'll tell you in the book. He went into pediatric endocrinology because he thought he would only deal with genetic issues, not lifestyle modification. And by the end of his career, he was dealing primarily with pediatric lifestyle issues because the food that we were eating were making was making us sick, is making us as a society sick. And that is ending. That ended up being what he was dealing with. So his book is brilliant. I really like it. I highly recommend it.
[00:18:53] Another book by Michael Moss, Salt, Sugar Fat. Highly recommend it. The byline is how the food Giants Hooked us. Fabulous book. Follow Michael Moss on Instagram. He's a smart guy. He's got an interesting story. He's a journalist and he basically exposes industry, in this case the food industry, and how it's making us sick. That's really where he has focused his interest over the last probably decade. He's got that book which is Salt, Sugar Fat, and another book called Hooked, which is a follow up to Salt, Sugar Fat. Michael Moss, M O S S Highly recommend. Chris Von Tulakin's Ultra Processed People is another great book talking about how food makes us sick. Dr. Von Tulikin is a general practice doctor, I believe, in Britain. He does a lot with public policy in Britain on their food. He's brilliant. The book is well written.
[00:19:51] He talks a lot about how the food is created in a way to make you want it all the time, even though it makes you sick. Sounds a lot like cigarettes in the end. So understanding this information Getting those that information into your brain, really getting that in there helps you to combat thoughts. Like, it won't be that bad. A little won't hurt. I can run this off. Diet Coke's not a problem. Calories in, calories out. I'll start again tomorrow. You're getting thoughts and ideas and exposing your brain to other information to combat these stories that you've believed for so long that have kept you sick. And this is a coaching issue. The reading, the books that you can. You know, when I say read, I really mean listen. I'm the only illiterate physician you'll ever meet. I always listen to these books because they can be really heavy with data and literature.
[00:20:46] But I wanted the information, so I listened to it. So I highly recommend listening to them.
[00:20:52] But doing that fills your brain with new information and new thoughts that will move you towards your health. You can do that through just the reading of books that you can get anywhere else. But coaching allows you to uncover some of these thoughts that you may or may not be aware of and where they're showing up to create the results in your life that you're getting. Coaching was imperative for me, and that's really. I mean, coaching is what got me healthy. And that's why I offer coaching as a service to people who want to create that same kind of health for them, because this is really what changed it for me. And I think everybody should be able to live a healthy life free of medications, free of the healthcare industry. The way that I help women is through coaching. That is the primary way that I help women. I do work with some men. I frequently get that as a question. If you're a gentleman and you want this help, please reach out to me. Delaneelainemd.com I'm happy to answer any questions or we can have a conversation about what it would look like to work together. But I help other people get healthy the same way through coaching. Yes, there is an element, there's got to be an element of rethinking, of redeveloping thoughts about our health and about what's kind of made us sick and what's okay about our food and what's not okay about our food. And how important is exercise or is exercise important at all? Like, our brain has all these thoughts that. About these options that it's created, and we sometimes have to rethink those thoughts. We have to relearn what we believe about those things, because what you've believed in the past, that's what's created the health that you have right now. We have to rethink. We have to learn to rethink about these things in order to create something different. And that's what coaching is. I also help people through data evaluation, right? Like we look at your blood sugars and we look at the food you eat. If I had a nickel for every time somebody came to me and thought I and said to me, I didn't believe that food was so bad. But what happened to my blood sugar was awful.
[00:22:59] Taco Bell, I heard it was healthy. I don't know why it's a problem, but my blood sugars went haywire. Protein drinks, gluten free breads, keto breads, keto treats. At Kind Bar, a protein bar. There's so many different things, things that come to me. Quaker Oats is another great example that people really believed were healthy until we started looking at it. And that's data evaluation. That is actively you creating evidence, new thoughts about what you believed in the past. You are learning how to think it differently from looking at that data. And that is what I help people with. We do frequent, like daily data evaluation. That's part of what I do to help people. That's how I helped myself.
[00:23:48] I have years and years full of food logs that I kept until I created the results that I want. And I learned a ton about my biology and who I am and how I used food in a way that wasn't about nutrition, but more about my emotional regulation. All of that came from coaching and data evaluation.
[00:24:11] It's imperative that we learn to think about food and our health differently.
[00:24:17] I had to realize that thin is not healthy.
[00:24:21] I was really unhealthy and had been really, I mean, I had been insulin resistant. When I look at what insulin resistance is, I see evidence of that. Back when I was in college, in my early 20s, because I was thin, I never questioned it. Because I exercised, I never questioned it.
[00:24:41] The idea that you could be thin and exercising and not healthy was mind blowing to me. But when I looked at the data and had a coach evaluate it with me, it became very clear.
[00:24:55] I no longer believe that a little bit of junk food's okay, even a little bit. It's healthy. No, it's not okay. It's not healthy. It makes you sick. Is there an amount of it that your healthy body can tolerate without becoming diseased? Yes, my friend, there is. That's great news. But this story that a little bit is okay is something that's fed to us by the food industry and the diet industry to keep Us on their hamster wheel of staying in the same place and ending up on meds or in their programs for the rest of your life.
[00:25:30] Even a little, even one or two cigarettes is not okay. It still creates disease. It's just healthy lungs can tolerate it and junk foods the same way.
[00:25:42] So things I want to offer to you that I've learned over the years and over years, I mean, again, this is seven years in, and my biology is much different. And my weight loss, I maintain 15 to 20 pounds of weight loss from where I was seven years ago. And it's not hard.
[00:26:01] And I don't have to work at it. I don't have to fight for it. I don't have. There's not a big struggle that I have for that. It's just become something normal. And the way that I have created that is realizing that I have to fill my brain with stories that are different than what created my disease. That meant that I was listening to podcasts that I found helpful. That meant that I was challenging thoughts, right? The best challenge and a coach helped me through this. When I was like, I'll start tomorrow, that was the biggest that thought got me a thousand times over. I believed that lie to myself no less than a thousand times. And the best bit of help I got, really a shift and a turned a corner with this was when a coach called me out and she said, girl, listen, if you would start tomorrow, you'd start today because you said the same damn thing yesterday.
[00:26:59] And when she said that, I was like, oh, that's not true. I won't start tomorrow. This is a story I've told myself a thousand times. I had to learn to not think that thought. I had to practice that. Podcasts helped. Books helped. Coaching helped. All of those things helped me learn to think differently. I want to encourage you, as you're starting this out in the new year, to lean into the things that feel hard. It will not necessarily be hard forever, but learning anything new. A new thought, a new skill, new information, a new habit, whatever it is, anytime we learn something new, it feels hard. And that's okay.
[00:27:44] If you think about, you know, all the things over your life that you've learned, when you were younger, you learned them and you had to learn them. Like, your parents weren't going to let you get out of their house without knowing how to tie your shoe or use the bathroom, right? You weren't going to learn. Not, like, not learn how to drive. That isn't an option for most humans that are going to be functional Adults in the world. Most of our parents want us to be functional adults. So they made us learn these things and it wasn't an option. So you couldn't just quit when it felt hard, but it always felt hard.
[00:28:14] I watched my son, my 16 year old son, I watched him learn how to drive a standard transmission. I required all of my children to learn to drive a standard transmission. My son, my six, he's now 16, he'll turn 17 this spring. He would have these just outbursts of frustration as he learned to drive the standard transmission. Trying to master the clutch and the gas and stalling it, installing it in really embarrassing places like the middle of an intersection. And he would get so frustrated. And I could see the fact that learning new things is hard.
[00:28:51] And when I look into the science of this, what I realize is that the neurochemistry that's released in our brain as we're learning a new skill, it actually creates irritability. It feels that neurochemistry, those neurotransmitters feel irritating in our brain.
[00:29:10] Anytime we're learning something new, it is going to be uncomfortable. And if every time we shy away from discomfort, right? As a child, you weren't allowed to shy away from discomfort. As an adult, we are, we can make the choice. I'm not going to do that every time that you shy away from learning the new skill because it feels uncomfortable. You're not creating a new habit to create a new result that you want. So I want to encourage you on January 6th of 2025, please, my friend, lean into the hard things.
[00:29:42] The fact that it's hard is because it's. You're learning something new.
[00:29:48] I want to also offer you that the thing that makes it so hard, right? The thing that, you know, makes you have to be strict. The thing that makes you have to discipline and have. It feels like you have to focus so hard on it that it feels like hard work. Again, it's not because you're broken. It's not because you need to try a different program. It's not because you need to have a different way of doing it. It's because the neurochemistry in your brain makes it uncomfortable to learn something new. It is supposed to be this way. You're not broken. Nothing's wrong with you. This is the way it's supposed to be.
[00:30:27] So I want to encourage you in the beginning of this year, you know, again, this is the work I've done. If you're interested in that help and coaching, I've made changes to my coaching program this year. I'm not offering the group program, but more focusing on private coaching this year. If you're interested in that, send me an email delaneelainemd.com let's set up a better blood sugars assessment call. We can talk about where your blood sugars are at and how I can help you with that. There is help for this. It is possible to learn how to do this differently, how to create different health.
[00:31:04] Leaning into things that are hard is easier when you have a guide and a coach there to help you. And that's what I can offer you. As always, if you have any questions regarding this podcast or if you have any suggestions for other ideas on podcasts, please let me know. You can email
[email protected] and I do have an ask if you're enjoying this podcast. If you're getting benefits from this podcast, please rate and review the podcast on your podcast player. Remember that you know studies show nine out of ten Americans are insulin resistant on some level. If we look at their labs, we I feel like it is my responsibility to get the word out that people do not need to be sick and tied to the healthcare industry for the rest of their life. It is possible to live naturally, unmedicated, healthy lives and people need to know that. And that's what this podcast is dedicated to. The more people that like and review the podcast, the more the podcast players will put this out out in front of others. So if you could do that so others could hear it, that would be great. Lastly, I want to encourage you keep listening, keep avoiding the foods that are making you sick, and keep making choices for your health, your longevity and your vitality. We'll talk next week. Bye.
