[00:00:00] You are listening to episode number 289 of Better Blood Sugars with Delaine MD welcome to Better Blood Sugars with Delaine Md 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, and this podcast is for you. Let's talk. Hey there, and welcome to the podcast. I am so glad you're taking some time for you and for your health, and I feel privileged that you're spending it with me. Today I want to discuss some of the foundational approaches and considerations when you're attempting to fix your type 2 diabetes, your insulin resistance, and start to see better blood sugars. It's the beginning of the year. Kind of seems like it's a great time to do that. I always try to present this information in the early part of January, and I know I'm kind of running behind. It's February, and, you know, in the interest of people who are having New Year's resolutions of getting healthy, I want to make sure that they have information for that. And I also think it's important I realized that, you know, I've been doing this podcast for seven or eight years now, and my information, my understanding of the science and what it takes to. To normalize insulin resistance and fix our biology to get healthy, my understanding of that science has changed over those years. So I even think that at least once a year, kind of representing and bringing together all the different pieces of information as I understand them is really important because that's changing information.
[00:01:41] And so today is going to represent some information that I probably haven't presented in previous Basics to Better Blood Sugars podcast episodes. This information may be a little different, and that's okay. That just really represents kind of my understanding and the changing of my understanding as new information is available. So we're going to discuss the basics.
[00:02:08] We're going to discuss what it means, what's really meant by insulin resistance, what strategies that are going to help improve your insulin resistance. And then we're going to talk about what can be expected in the process, you know, how long it takes, what's normal during that healing process. All of this was prompted by an email that I received from a listener. So, again, if you haven't ever emailed me, if you're having burning questions or if you have something that doesn't seem to be working for you. If you want to share with me your success story, whatever it is, I love hearing from you as a listener, do not hesitate to email me. Delaneelainmd.com the whole purpose of this podcast is to help people understand that they do not need to be tied to the healthcare industry for the rest of their lives because of dietary things that they're doing that don't match their biology. If you're having a hard time getting that fixed, maybe you need to coach with me. Maybe that will help you. But maybe you just need a simple question answered, please send it to me delanend.com I'm happy to answer any of that.
[00:03:16] Before we get started, I want to give you my typical warning about being medicated. If you have been medicated because of your type 2 diabetes, understand that your meds were started because of the way that you have eaten. If you change the way that you eat, the medications that you need are going to be different. If you don't change the medications and you do change the way you eat, you can end up quite, quite sick. The kind of illnesses that look like ER visits, hospitalizations, possibly even death. And that's not why you're making these changes. So please, please, please get an open line of communication with your provider who's prescribed these medications. Call their office, find out how they want you to share your blood sugar logs with them and find out how they will share medication changes with you. If you don't do this, you can end up very sick and I don't want that for you and you don't want that for you. So please call your provider and get that line of communication opened up. If you're not sure what you need to be eating to produce better blood sugars, please go to my website and download the 14 days to better Blood Sugars guide. You can find
[email protected] forward/better B E T T E R.
[00:04:32] Try that 14 days to better Blood Sugar Guide out. It's very straightforward. It's 14 days of breakfast, lunch and dinner, men. It has all of your macronutrients broken down. It's very straightforward. Eat this, eat this, eat this and then watch your blood sugars drop, my friend. If you think that the food isn't the issue, it's your genes, it's something else. Go try those 14 days out because I will guarantee you you will see better blood sugars with this. Now, I understand that some women have a hard time applying that to the rest of their life that's fine if that's what you do. You do the 14 days, you see rocking hot blood sugars and you are like, I don't know that I can eat this way for the rest of my. If that's you, set up a better blood sugars assessment call. You and I are going to hop on the phone and you and I can discuss strategies for applying this long term. Maybe again, maybe coaching is what you need. That's awesome. I've got options for that. But if you're just not sure how you're going to apply it long term, set up a better blood sugars assessment call. If you have done the 14 day guide and you didn't see better blood sugars, I really want to talk to you, I want to hear from you. Please set up a better blood sugars assessment call. I want to know what didn't work for you, for you. And I want to help you troubleshoot ways that you can find to change your diet to start seeing better blood sugars. I've yet to meet the person, the human being that will not see some improvement in their blood sugars by doing dietary adjustments. So if you're not seeing the changes that you were hoping to see, please set up this call so you can set up this
[email protected] forward/delanemdash call so I'm going to spell that out because it's long, so it's C-A-L-E-N-L-Y.com forward/D E L A N E M D forward slash C A L L calendly.com forward slash delanemdash call all right, so I'm going to start with a listener's email. I'm going to read it to you. When I read this I thought, oh my, this is a great question. And I haven't presented this information all in one concise way and I thought this was a great opportunity. So it was a really great question. Wonderful email and I think it's going to be wonderful information for everyone. So hi Dr. Delane, thank you for all the good information you put out into the world. I've listened to your podcast for a year or so and after seeing my A1C numbers creeping higher and higher, both of my parents have diabetes, very poorly managed, eventually became insulin resistant and I really don't want to go there and down that path. This year I turned 50 and my A1C finally crept its way into that pre diabetic territory at 5.9. So last week I got a continuous glucose monitor and I started your 14 day program, or at least my version of the program. I'm vegetarian, semi pescatarian and I've developed my own meal plan aiming at similar macronutrients targets.
[00:07:32] I am reasonably active and have been doing strength training. I do a lot of walking in my daily life. Unfortunately, I'm finding that even quote unquote healthy high protein foods like beans, farro or quinoa have too many carbs and will cause a glucose spike and my veggie rich meals aren't giving me enough protein.
[00:07:55] I don't know what's okay in terms of a spike, but my blood sugars jump up to the 160s to 190 range and that's above my target of 140. Of course I know I can eat low carb veggie proteins like tofu session nuts and occasionally fish, but it makes me crazy to think that those would be my only options. I can absolutely forego the candy and the bagels and the such, but I can't imagine a future in which a warm veggie grain bowl would be a no, no. I have two thoughts that comfort me. Maybe if I eat stricter, a stricter diet for a few months, my body will heal and I'll be able to eat a reasonable, more varied vegetarian diet than that or the second thought she has. Maybe my target of 140 is too low and I should allow myself higher readings as long as they are caused by foods that I know are healthy. Sorry, I know this is a lot for an email. I'm really motivated to make lifelong changes, but I have to know that the change is sustainable. Do you have any thoughts, any words of wisdom with gratitude sharing? So many women think that I'm going to have to give up all the good foods that I love in order to fix my diabetes. I think many women avoid attempting to fix their diabetes based on this worry, on this concern that they're going to have to give up everything that they love in order to do it. The foods that they believe they can't live without, they aren't willing to give up and they don't even attempt fixing their type 2 diabetes. What I want to offer you is I've not seen this to be true. I'm going to say it's rarely true because I always feel like the more I know about things, the more I know I don't know everything. I really truly believe that in my soul. So I'm going to say it's rarely true. But I have never seen it to be true that women have to give up everything that they love or 100% have to give up the things that they love in order to fix their insulin resistance, their metabolic health, and their diabetes.
[00:09:57] With all of the diabetics I've worked with, I have yet to meet anyone who's had to 100% give up the foods that they love in order to fix their numbers. If the fear of giving up a food is keeping you from going all in on this, let me reassure you that that is unlikely to be the case. My friend. Please hear that it is possible for you to get healthy, to do it on your terms, and. And to not give up the foods that you love in order to do that.
[00:10:22] So I don't make up all the rules, but for the hundreds of women that I have worked with, I've yet to meet one that needs to do this. Okay, so let's discuss what the basics are about fixing your type 2 diabetes and your blood sugars. What you can expect, what tools you can use, what fixing it looks like. How do you know when it's fixed? We're going to talk about all of that. First things, what is insulin resistance and what does it take? What is it caused by, and what does it take to fix it?
[00:10:51] Insulin resistance is when your cells do not respond to insulin in an effective way or as expected.
[00:10:59] So insulin is a hormone that's released by your pancreas in response to glucose in the bloodstream. Okay, again, there's glucose in the bloodstream. Your pancreas is an organ in your abdomen that perceives or senses that there's glucose in your bloodstream and releases insulin in response to that. The insulin is meant to go to your cells and cause your cells to open up, bring the glucose inside of the cell, and then that cell can burn it off as fuel. That's how this is supposed to work.
[00:11:34] What happens when you're insulin resistant is that doesn't happen.
[00:11:38] Your pancreas likely perceives that there is glucose in your system, and it likely produces insulin in response to that glucose. But at the cellular level, either the cell does not perceive the insulin, or the cell does not open up and bring the glucose inside.
[00:11:56] These are two different processes that can cause. That can be the source of your insulin resistance.
[00:12:02] So when our cells are overexposed to insulin for a prolonged period of time, the receptor, the part of the cell that is supposed to perceive insulin as present, becomes overwhelmed with all of the insulin that's there, and it just stops responding to it. I Describe this like when your kids are like, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, and you start to, like, you drown it out. You don't even hear mom, mom, mom, mom, mom anymore. You are not responsive.
[00:12:36] You are resistant to the message that you're hearing from your kids. You just don't hear it, and in turn, you don't respond to it. Right. So insulin works the same way if you're overexposed to mom. If your cells are overexposed to insulin, similar to how you stop responding to mom, your cells stop responding to insulin. Okay? And that means that your cells do not open up. They do not bring the blood sugar in, the glucose, and they do not burn it as fuel. That allows the glucose outside of your cells to climb high. And that's what we, as providers pick up as high insulin or high blood sugars, your elevated blood sugars, hyperglycemia, diabetes. That's what we call it. So that's one way that we know insulin resistance occurs. The other way that insulin resistance recur occurs is when your cells will bind the.
[00:13:28] But they just don't open up in response to that binding. Okay, so what should happen is a receptor on the surface of your cell binds insulin, and then that binding sets off a message inside the cell that goes to another area of that cell membrane, of that surface of the cell and tells a port to open up and bring glucose inside.
[00:13:52] That message that's supposed to go somewhere else in the cell on the surface and tell it to open and bring glucose in, it gets blocked. Okay, what causes that is typically what we know. I mean, there may be other ways that cause this, but what we know is ceramides, which are abnormal fats, kind of misbehaving fats inside the cell block that process.
[00:14:19] So where do ceramides come from? Where does too much insulin come from? Right. Where do these things occur? Like, what are we doing that's creating this? Processed food is the primary culprit for creating this in your body.
[00:14:34] And both. Both mechanisms, whether it's overexposure for prolonged periods of time to insulin, creating insulin resistance, or whether it's that intracellular blocking of the messaging, both of those are highly associated with processed foods. Okay, so what is a processed food? What do I mean by a processed food? We have natural foods. We have apples and we have nuts, and we have fruits and vegetables that are grown on the ground. Those are natural foods. And then we as human beings like to process those natural foods. Right? So we have wheat. Wheat is a natural food, but humans process it into Flour.
[00:15:17] So when we process a natural food, we almost always concentrate carbohydrates.
[00:15:24] We concentrate the carbohydrate component of the natural food in a way that just does not match our biology. So when we take wheat, which is, you know, there's going to be fiber, there's going to be macronutrients, micronutrients, there's going to be all these things associated with wheat. But we pulverize that wheat down into flour.
[00:15:46] That flour is the concentrated carbohydrate. We lose the fiber, we lose the micronutrients, and we just concentrate the macronutrient of carbohydrate in the form of flour. Now, yes, we add back, like, micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, and sometimes we add back fiber, but it is not the same as when that comes with a natural food. Another example is a strawberry. A strawberry is a natural food. It's God's candy to us, right? Like it's fruit, it's sweet, it's delicious. It's grown in a very limited amount on a strawberry plant. And it's amazing. And eating that strawberry, it's bound to fiber. It's got micronutrients, vitamins, minerals associated with it as polyphenols. It has phytochemicals. It has all of these things that are amazing that come in its natural form that are good for the human being. But what does the human being do? It takes it, it cooks it, and it makes a syrupy consistency with it. Right? And when we cook it, we break down the fiber. A lot of times we lose the phytochemicals, we lose the polyphenols. We break them down with the heating of it, and then we make a jelly or a jam with it. Right? That's the processed. The processed form of a strawberry is jelly or jam. I mean, there are other ways to do this also, but that's the. The example I'm using in addition to breaking down the fiber. And then, of course, we're not just eating one or two cooked strawberries when we're having jam, we're eating many. So we're concentrating the carbohydrate component, taking away the micronutrients and the fiber. And then because we're human beings, we love sugar, so we add sugar to it. We are taking a natural food and we're concentrating the carbohydrate component, and we're eating it. This is what gets us into trouble. That carbohydrate is what makes our pancreas sense glucose, right? We eat carbohydrates I don't care whether it's a cracker or whether it's candy. All of it is absorbed into our bloodstream as glucose. And that glucose then goes to our pancreas and it tells our pancreas that there's sugar there and it should make insulin. And then we release insulin. And because we've eaten so such a concentrated carbohydrate, such a concentrated form of glucose, we're releasing a ton of insulin and we get overexposed to high concentrations of insulin. And because we as human beings eat all the time, we have prolonged exposure to insulin. This is how processed foods create insulin resistance. In addition to over concentrating our carbohydrate component, processed foods also have substances that the human animal would not come into contact with in a natural environment. Some of these are fats, right? Corn oil, canola oil, vegetable oil, all of those are corn oil. Canola is a little different, but it's a corn oil type substance. Okay? If you think of corn, my friend, corn is not a naturally oily substance. We have to do a lot of chemistry to make corn oil. It is an industrial oil that again, a human being in a natural situation would not come into contact with corn oil in the amounts or the frequency that we do in processed foods. These are the substances like these are the things that are added to our processed food that create then that second intracellular blocking component, right? Those industrialized oils are what lead to ceramides, and those ceramides lead to that blocking of the message. If the insulin can bind to our cell and tell the cell there's insulin there, you need to go open up that port.
[00:19:43] If that binding can occur. These ceramides that come from these industrialized oils that are in processed foods block that internal messaging that says, open up the glucose port and bring the glucose in.
[00:19:57] This is how insulin resistance is occurring. And this is how processed foods are the primary culprit to creating this in the human being. You'll talk to diabetic educators and nutritionists and they'll be like, you need to cut back on bananas. And my friend, what I want to tell you is nobody got diabetic because their banana problem. It's these processed foods that create the disease. Maybe you do have to cut back on bananas while you're healing. Okay, fine. But it really fires me up to hear somebody say that sugar free candies are okay, but bananas are a problem. That is not the case.
[00:20:36] That is not what is creating your disease. We really have to cut out these processed foods in addition to These oils, there's also all sorts of additives that contribute to poor metabolic health that are, like, poisoning our mitochondria. They just contribute to poor metabolic health that are added to processed foods. So when you're looking at a label and you see a bunch of scientific words that you don't know what they mean, you need to be suspicious of that food. You probably need to avoid that food if you're trying to heal yourselves up. If you're not sure, a good rule of thumb is anything in a box, a bag, or a wrapper, Those are probably problem foods. Apples come in a bag. I'm not talking about apples. Strawberries may come in a carton. They're not really a box. So maybe that's an issue, maybe not.
[00:21:29] But rice, pasta, those all come in boxes. You probably need to avoid those. Potato chips, Cheetos, candies, those all come in a bag. You probably need to avoid that. Candy bars, protein bars, granola bars, they all come in wrappers. You probably need to avoid them. Those are the things that are processed foods that have hidden things in them that make us as human beings, sick. Okay. I always say we're the only animal on the planet. You've heard me say this before. I'm sorry. If you've listened for a long time, you're like, I'm so sick of hearing this. But we are the only animal on the planet that is not eating the food that the earth makes for us. Squirrels do not get sick of acorns and ask for pizza at night. And deer doesn't get sick of grass and ask for Chinese food. We're the animal that says, yeah, I see your lettuce, your cucumbers and tomatoes, but I'm gonna eat Red Bulls and Doritos instead. That is the stuff that makes us sick. And it makes us sick not because the food is inherently evil. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it makes us sick because it just does not match our biology. That's all it is. If you think of going to the zoo, zookeepers aren't taking the tiger food and feeding it to the giraffe because the tiger's food doesn't match the giraffe's biology, and the giraffe's food doesn't match the tiger's biology.
[00:22:51] We have to eat food that matches our biology. And if we're not doing that, we are going to be sick. And it's not because we're broken or genetically defective or anything else. It is because the food that we're putting in Our body simply does not match our biology. Okay, so that is the first part. If you're wondering what insulin resistance is, that's what it is. If you're wondering what causes it, processed foods are your primary culprits that will cause you to be insulin resistant.
[00:23:23] Avoiding those foods is the answer. If you're wanting. I mean, it's just the requirement, and it's because it matches our biology. It's not because you're bad or you're good or any of that jazz. It just matches our biology that food. Avoiding it is what we need to do to match that biology.
[00:23:42] So the question that I typically get from women is, how long do I need to make these changes? And what I want to offer you is that it really takes consistent, consistently avoiding these foods for six to 12 weeks, depending on how long you've been diabetic and insulin resistant. You have to consistently avoid these foods for 6 to 12 weeks before you normalize your cellular function, normalize that biology. I liken this process to being sunburned. I think this is the easiest example to explain it. If you think of insulin as the sun and insulin resistance as a sunburn, you understand that if you go and become sunburned, it's your first day at the beach on vacation, and you get out in the sun, and you're there for eight hours and you're loving it. And then you come in and the next morning you wake up and your skin's red and tender. You've been sunburned, you have been overexposed to the sun. And the fix for that is staying out of the sun.
[00:24:41] There's nothing else to do. You just got to stay out of the sun. You got to let your skin heal up before you get back out in the sun. If you're insulin resistant, that resistance is similar to the sunburn. You have to stay out of the exposure of insulin until your cells heal up.
[00:25:02] Once they heal up, once your skin heals up, you can go back into the sun and you're not going to damage it more because you let it heal. But if you go out too soon and your skin isn't entirely healed up, you're going to re damage it. You're going to make it worse before it can get better.
[00:25:21] Okay? The same thing has to happen with the insulin. You have to bring your cells out of constant exposure of insulin to let those cells heal up. Or if it's the ceramides like you got to bring them out of, the exposure to the processed foods is really what it comes down to. Because that's what's causing all of it, right? You got to bring those cells out of exposure to those so they can heal. But if you bring it like, if you bring the processed foods back in, if you bring the insulin at high expo, you know, high concentrations, overexposure to that insulin, if you bring that back in too quickly, your cells are going to quickly be damaged again.
[00:25:59] They're not ready for that. No more than your skin would be ready to go back out in the sun after two hours and not being in the sun, thinking you're going to heal it up.
[00:26:07] So you have to wait until you're entirely healed and then maybe you can go back out in the sun. But if you overexpose your skin to the sun again, it's going to burn again. Because that's just the biology of our skin.
[00:26:19] It's the same thing with our cells. If you overexpose your cells to processed foods making high insulins or having too much of these, you know, abnormal food sources that aren't really food to the human being, these industrial oils or other additives that are in these processed foods, if you overexpose your cells again to those foods, you will redevelop insulin resistance, not because you're broken, but because it's the biology we have to work within.
[00:26:48] So many women in one of these, you know, one of. And again, I'm going to answer the email that I got and make sure all of those questions in there are answered. But women often want to know, how do you know when the cells are healed? How do you know when you've done it? And what I want to offer to you, there are like one, you know, because you're not eating the junk food. How do you know when you can start testing, getting back out into the sun again, seeing how it goes though, your fasting blood sugars are going to consistently be below 100. Really 95 or below, probably they're going to consistently be that low. You've probably experienced some weight loss if you reversed your insulin resistance. And this is because insulin resistance is hand in hand. Like what causes obesity is overexposure to insulin. Usually for most people, 99% of people, okay, so you're going to have normal fasting blood sugars. You're going to have probably experienced some weight loss.
[00:27:48] And then what we do, how do you know if you're still insulin resistant? Well, you challenge your body with a carbohydrate challenge.
[00:27:56] So when I work with women, we do this, we do a 75 gram carbohydrate challenge. You get to choose what your 75 grams of carbs are. Some women want to do it the soda and a sundae. Some women want to do it with a burger and fries. Some women want to do it with whatever it is that they love. Awesome.
[00:28:16] Remember when I said you don't have to cut these things out forever? You don't, because we're going to do a carbohydrate challenge with it. And then you're going to eat that. And then we're going to see what happens to your blood sugars. At 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 120 minutes, we're going to see does your body respond to that carbohydrate challenge appropriately, as we would expect effectively.
[00:28:39] That's how we tell if. That's how you know. That's how we determine if you're still insulin resistant.
[00:28:47] So that is the strategy for learning how to do this. I do want to make sure you understand the skills for how you create this. How do you fix your insulin resistance? One, my friend, I need you to avoid processed foods. It is, hands down, the thing that is causing your insulin resistance.
[00:29:06] Now, if you've avoided, you're like, no, listen to Lane. I have cut the processed foods out. I've cut the crappy foods. I'm not eating those anymore. That is not the issue.
[00:29:15] Then I would ask you, how much muscle do you have? Those are the two things that will affect your insulin resistance most. The food that we eat and how we exercise move our body and build muscle on our body. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue, and that means that it is constantly wanting to burn glucose because that's its, you know, fuel source. It can burn other things, but it wants to store, it wants to burn. Like muscle uses so much glucose or easily uses so much glucose that it actually keeps it stored in the muscle.
[00:29:52] So how much muscle do you have?
[00:29:55] This is one of the things that I always ask. If you are not exercising effectively or enough. If you are not building muscle, you are do not have a place to pull glucose outside of your bloodstream and store it. Remember, glucose in the bloodstream is sending a constant message, a constant stimulus to the pancreas to make insulin.
[00:30:19] And having too much insulin in your system is one of the primary causes of insulin resistance.
[00:30:26] So if you're seeing a fasting blood sugar of 105 or 110, it is likely because you know you've made all the dietary changes. You're not eating junk food. That's great and grand. But if you're still running those fasting blood sugars in that abnormal quote unquote range, it is likely because your body doesn't have anywhere to store it outside of the bloodstream. And then my question to you is, how much muscle is on your body?
[00:30:50] If you only have a small amount of muscle on your body and literally you can feel it, like how much muscle when you flex your muscles, can you see muscle there? If you're saying, yeah, I see muscle there, awesome. Maybe we need to use it more, Maybe we need to get it bigger. Maybe we need to do some other things. But my suspicion and what I have seen with the women that I work with is if they do have that high fasting blood SUGAR and that 105, 110, maybe even to 120 range is they need more muscle. I liken muscle to a closet. If you think of a closet in your house and you got stuff in your house that you want to get, you know, you want to declutter your house, the clutter is the glucose and the closet is where you put the clutter, right? Muscle is the closet. If you're wanting to take glucose out of the bloodstream and store it somewhere, you have to have bigger muscles. If you got a small closet, you can't store as much clutter. If you got small muscles, you can't store as much glucose. And as long as that glucose is still in your bloodstream, you are still sending a message to your pancreas to make insulin. And that insulin is going to keep you low grade insulin resistant. You need more muscle. That's the other big lover. The food is one thing, the muscle is the other thing. Women want to know how do, how long am I going to have? How long is it going to take? What do I need to do? How do I know when it's fixed? We've went through how long it's going to need to take. 612 weeks we went through. How do you know what it takes? Cutting the processed food, building muscle. Stress and sleep are two other really important things. But most women find that they will get 90% of what they are looking for with the results with food and exercise and building muscle.
[00:32:31] So what does it mean for you after you've normalized your biology? I love the women that are like, oh my gosh, my A1C has went from 6.5 to 5.4. I've lost 28 pounds. I feel better than I felt when I was 25. I love hearing this, but women often want to know, so how frequently can I have the junk food now, right? Like we always want to know. I know I can't go back to the way I was doing it, but how frequently can I do it? Because remember, I just told you you don't have to cut it out forever, right? You don't have to do without all of your favorite foods for the rest of your life. You don't have to do that.
[00:33:07] So I want. If you're asking this question, okay, after I've normalized my numbers, what does it mean going forward? I really want you to consider, what does it mean to you to be healthy? When you think of you as a healthy human being, what does that mean? The more I know about processed foods, the more I know that it's never healthy. Like, there's no amount of it. I look at it like cigarettes. I still consume it, guys. I still eat it. It's not that I never eat junk food, but I never tell myself a little bit is okay because it's not. I truly see it like a cigarette. One cigarette is never healthy. But one cigarette is not going to give me COPD or lung cancer. And the same thing is true. One Twinkie is never healthy. But one Twinkie never created anybody's diabetes.
[00:33:55] So with that in mind, I want you to really identify what it means for you to be healthy. For me, it means maybe once or twice a week. I indulge in something that I know is unhealthy for me. I think that that's reasonable for being healthy. I also exercise almost every day of the week. I also really prioritize my sleep. I also have learned to let go of things that stress me out because it's not worth it.
[00:34:26] Those are the things for me that identify what it means for me to be healthy. Okay, I want you to identify what that means.
[00:34:36] Once you have clearly identified those four pillars. Food, exercise, sleep and stress, what being healthy in those four pillars look like for you, then I want you to try it out and test your numbers. It's that simple. For me, I know I can eat a treat, quote, unquote, a treat, food once or twice a week and not have any problems. I know that because I watched my numbers long enough to know that they don't go into the abnormal range anymore, meaning my A1C and my insulin level don't go in the abnormal range anymore.
[00:35:10] I exercise again every day. This morning I got up before work, it's a Friday. It's like not a Saturday or Sunday before work, and I ran eight miles because I know that that, for me is Part of being healthy, it may not be for you, but you need to determine what exercise, when you're healthy, looks like for you, what's reasonable. Right? Like, you may be like, girl, seriously, I'm not running eight miles in the morning. That's eating stupid sandwiches. And that's fine. But there's something between running eight miles every morning or in the morning and doing nothing that you believe is healthy. And I want you to identify that and I want you to start doing it and see what results you create from that space. You may do it for six or 12 weeks and realize that your numbers don't do what you expect them to do. And you may have to make some adjustments to what you think is healthy. It's that simple. I cannot tell you what it means for you after your numbers have normalized. I don't know. I don't know your biology. If we work together, I would have a better idea. Right, that's fine. But what I want you to identify is what it means to you to be healthy. And it's likely different than what you've been doing. Start moving towards that and see what results you get. And then you may need to tweak some of that, change some of that, and that's okay.
[00:36:33] That is what I have for you. As far as what does it mean? How do you get there? What's causing the problem? What is the issue?
[00:36:42] As far as the questions that the listener had in the email, maybe if I'm stricter for a few months, my body will heal and I'll be able to eat more reasonably, a more varied vegetarian diet after that. Absolutely. Again, bananas never made anybody diabetic. Processed foods did. But as your cells are sick, like the sun, like going out for a little bit in the sun never made anybody have skin cancer. Right. Like, we're human beings, we live on the earth, we're exposed to the sun all the time. Like some of it is probably expected. That's just part of our experience.
[00:37:18] Some of these foods, a banana is expected. It's not part of the problem. But when you are sunburned, you have got to pull your out of the sun until your body heals. When your cells are insulin resistant, you have got to pull yourself your cells out of overexposure to insulin until they heal. So sometimes this does mean you have to make some dietary changes while you're healing that are not going to be something that you do long term, and that's fine. So, yes, I agree with that thought that the reader had. Right. Or the listener had. Maybe if I eat stricter for a few months, my body's going to heal and I'm be able to have more reasonable stuff again without the candy, without the bagels, without those things. Yes. But, yeah, I agree with you. Pharaoh never made anybody diabetic and neither did pinto beans. Like, that's not the issue.
[00:38:07] So I agree with that. The other question that she had is maybe this target of 140 is too low and I should allow myself higher readings as long as they are caused by foods that I know to be healthy. Probably not.
[00:38:19] A blood sugar of 142 hours after a meal is right on the border of what is probably reasonable. Okay, keep working to bring that down. Now, if you jump to 140, 150, 160, 60 minutes after eating, that's probably not abnormal. Okay. People ask me all the time, how much should I allow it to go up. There is no great data to say X number of points. I am keeping looking at that. If you come across something, please send me a message. Delanedelanemd.com I want to hear about that. But the data out there about this is difficult to come by. And people are like, well, it shouldn't jump more than 30 points. And I'm like, well, if my fasting blood sugar is 80 in the morning, so I shouldn't jump more than 110. That doesn't make sense to me. So I don't know that I feel that 150 or 160 within the first hour, hour and a half of a meal, like a banana or an apple, is abnormal. But definitely at two hours, you should be below 1:40, probably closer to 1:30, 30, 1, 35. So I don't know that releasing that expectation is the answer. You may have to cut some of these higher carb foods out while you're allowing your body to heal. I think that makes more sense. I hope that's been really helpful. Certainly there's a lot of information in here. If anybody has any questions, I always want to hear about them. Send me an email. Delanemd.com I'm happy to answer anything. I will be back next week. But until then, I want you to keep making the choices for your health, your longevity, and your vitality. I want you to keep listening and let me know if you have any questions. I'll talk to you later. Bye.
