[00:00:00] You are listening to episode number 290 of Better Blood Sugars with Delaine, Maryland. 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, 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 help today. Feel privileged that you're spending it with me and I hope you find something helpful to move you towards a step closer towards the health that you're looking for. Today I want to talk about one of the most powerful tools that we have available to getting better blood sugars and in general, to improving our health. I want to talk a little bit also about what you can expect while using this tool. It's unexpected sometimes because we think the impact is going to look differently. So I want to talk about all that. We're going to talk all things exercise today, but before we get started, there are a couple of things. First, I want to share an email. An email that comes from a listener. Again, if you are getting amazing results with this podcast, please send me an email. I love hearing a good success story and I love to share them. Not only because it fuels what I do here and the mission of this podcast, but it also gives you, as a listener, a wonderful example to see what is possible.
[00:01:36] So I want to share that. The email goes Delaine, A year and a half ago, my A1C was 6.1. I didn't want to go on Metformin and my doctor told me I could try doing some other things. I tried eating healthier, at least what I thought was healthier, and it didn't budge. About six to nine months ago I found you on Facebook and started listening to your podcast. I started doing restricted eating, eating more protein and lifting weights. I have lost more than 20 pounds. My joints don't hurt and today my A1C was 5.7. I feel better than I felt in years. I'm turning 59 next month and I feel better than I did when I was 45. I'm so thankful for the information that you are so willing to share and the simplicity of how you give it. I also started using the Nutrition X app a week and a half ago and I'm excited to keep going with it. I love seeing how much protein and carbs I'm actually eating. This is a lifestyle I am planning to keep. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Rebecca. Rebecca, thank you so much for sharing this email, for sending it to me. Again, it fuels me to hear the benefits that other people are getting from the information I share in this podcast. And it also, it really floats my boat to share with other women what is possible.
[00:03:00] It is possible. You know, I mean, like, it'd be great if you hired me as a coach. I think that would be wonderful. And I'm here if you need that, but you don't need to do that. It can really be much more simple than that. So thank you, Rebecca, for sharing. If you have a similar success story, send a girl a message like, throw me a bone, let me know how it's going. I love to hear that. Second thing I want to talk about before we get started with discussing exercise is the med warning that I always give. If you have been medicated for your type 2 diabetes, understand that you are medicated for the way you've eaten in the past, the way you've lived your life in the past. If you change those things, you're going to need to change your meds. If you do not change your meds, you can get quite sick, the kind of sick that looks like an ER visit, a hospitalization, and possibly even death. That's not why you're making these changes. So make sure that you're smart about this. I want you to call the provider that gave you the meds and open up a line of communication with them. Ask them how you should share your blood sugar logs with them and how you can expect to hear back from them what medication changes they want you to make. This is going to keep you safe. As you make these changes. Please do that so that you can start to see one, you come off your meds, which I think is what most of us want is to come off our meds, not be tied to the health healthcare system, but two, so that you can stay really safe if you're not sure what to eat. You know, I have a solution for that. You can go to my website and download the 14 days to better Blood Sugars guide. You can find
[email protected] forward/better. This is a 14 day guide that gives you straightforward menus about what to eat in order for you to start seeing better blood sugars. It is very powerful. So again, open that line of communication up with your provider so that you can stay Safe. Try it out, see how it goes. If you get amazing results and you're trying to figure out how to apply that 14 day guide to the rest of your life, set up a better blood sugars assessment call. This will be a 45 minute Zoom call where you and I sit down and we develop a path for you going forward. If for some reason you've tried the 14 day guide and were not able to see changes in your blood sugars, I really want to hear from you. I've yet to hear this, but if it's happening, I want to know about it and I want to know how I can make that guide better, but also help you individually figure out a path to better blood sugars for you. So you can set up a better blood sugars assessment call by going to calendly.com delainemd call so I'm going to spell all of that out. Calendly c a l e n d l y dot c c o m forward slash d e l a n e m d forward slash c a l l so calendly.com delanemd call so let's talk about exercise.
[00:05:56] This is the most powerful tool that I feel you can combine with changing your food. I used to think that food was more important than exercise, and I still truly believe that there is no amount of un exercise that's going to undo bad food choices. And this could possibly be from my own personal experience of running a marathon and, you know, training for a marathon and running 35 to 40 miles a week. But I was on a steady diet of junk food and pizza and I managed to gain weight and worsen my insulin resistance during that time. So maybe it's a personal bias I have, but I've yet to see the individual that can exercise off poor food choices. And I think this also is probably related to my knowledge of how our mitochondria, which is our powerhouse of all of our cells, how they function and how they don't function well when we are eating foods that are not meant for our human bodies. So I want to talk a little bit about the power of exercise and how to use it to improve your health overall. Why exercise is so important is because it overall improves your insulin sensitivity. And to understand what that means, we need to talk a little bit about what insulin sensitivity is and what insulin resistance is. Insulin sensitivity is the opposite of insulin resistance, and insulin resistance is the reason that you are diabetic. This is one of the things that what I do with people, what I do when I coach you why? It's different than what your doctors are doing and your nutritionists are doing and your dietitians are doing. They almost always focus on your blood sugar.
[00:07:43] And yes, there's an element of that that is relevant and important. However, to fix your diabetes, you must remedy your insulin resistance. And insulin sensitivity is the opposite of insulin resistance. Right. If you're hot and you want to be cooler, cold is the opposite of hot. Right? You want to not be hot, so you want more cool. Right. If you want to not be diabetic, you want to be less insulin resistant, and that means you're going to be more insulin sensitive. So what does all of this mean? Insulin is a hormone that's released with the hopes, with the function of moving fuel from the bloodstream into your cells. That fuel that insulin works on is glucose. Insulin is released in order to move glucose from the bloodstream inside of your cells to allow your cells to burn the GL glucose off as fuel. Insulin resistance is when your cells are resistant to doing this, they resist the effect or the message from insulin and they don't move the glucose inside. And in turn you get a high blood sugar, a high glucose on the outside in the bloodstream, on the outside of the cells. Okay, so insulin resistance is when your cell is resistant to moving glucose inside. That allows your blood sugar to climb high, which is what you measure on your GL glucometer or your CGM is measuring when it reads high, when it reads an elevated blood sugar, a blood sugar of 200. Right. That means that there's 200 milligrams per deciliter. Right? There's 200 units of blood sugar and it's of course per volume outside of your cell.
[00:09:31] What you want is that glucose inside the cell so that it can be burned off. Insulin sensitivity is what does this. It's the opposite of that resistance. Your cells are able to bring that fuel, that glucose inside of the cell and burn it off. So this not only fuels your cells to do the work they need to do, but it also lowers the blood sugar, the glucose in your bloodstream.
[00:09:55] So exercise improves your cells abilities to do this. The ability of many of your cells, not every population of cells are impacted by that, but many of them are.
[00:10:07] So primarily muscle is the big player here. Your muscle cell recognize when your muscle cell is exercising is in the exercised state versus the non exercise state. So non exercise state is going to be the resting state versus the exercise state is the moving, contracting state. Your muscles need fuel during the exercised state so much that your Muscle cells override insulin resistance in order to bring glucose inside and burn it off as fuel.
[00:10:41] So think of this. If you have an A1C of 8.0, you're clearly insulin resistant. But when you're exercising, your muscle cells temporarily disregard the insulin resistance and move glucose inside of the cell in a way that doesn't rely on the insulin and it burns it as fuel.
[00:11:02] This temporary state lasts for about 48 to 72 hours after an exercise event.
[00:11:10] Exercise is really, really powerful to improving your blood sugars. It's incredibly powerful.
[00:11:18] So in addition to that effect that exercise has on your insulin sensitivity and your blood sugars, exercise also builds muscle. And this is a really, really powerful part of improving your insulin sensitivity, of reversing your insulin resistance, of reversing your type 2 diabetes.
[00:11:44] Muscle is a powerful tool to improve your blood sugars not just by burning off the glucose as fuel, but also it acts as a storage site for your glucose. Muscles are responsible for so many important things, right? Movement, the ability to run away from danger, the ability to keep your heart beating, that's a muscle contraction. It keeps you alive. Gut motility, vascular movement, heat generation, all of these involve an element of muscle contraction in action. It is responsible for such important things that the muscle actually keeps energy inside of it in the form of what we call glycogen. Glycogen is glucose stored inside of the cell. Glycogen can also be stored in the liver, and that's fine, but glycogen is stored in the muscle as well. And again, it's because it's so important that our muscles keep moving, keep doing muscle things, that we actually, our bodies have developed a way of storing that energy within the cell.
[00:12:50] So not only will the muscle take and immediately use some glycogen during times of exercise, or, I'm sorry, some glucose in the time of exercise, but it also, in the non exercise state, when you're not exercising, your muscles will store glucose in the form of glycogen in order to have it ready and available when exercise is happening.
[00:13:11] This is so powerful because it brings glucose outside of your bloodstream.
[00:13:18] When glucose is in your bloodstream, floating around when your blood sugar is 180, that means that you're sending a message, a stimulus to your pancreas to say, we need some insulin to bring this glucose inside of a cell.
[00:13:33] This is how it works, right? The pancreas releases insulin in order, in response to glucose in your bloodstream, in order to bring it inside of a cell and burn it as Fuel. That's how it's supposed to work.
[00:13:48] Insulin resistance happens when we are overexposed to insulin all the time.
[00:13:54] That is insulin resistance. That's one of the main causes of insulin resistance, is we are overexposed to high concentrations of insulin all the time so much that we are over. You know, your cells are hearing this message so repeatedly that it just goes deaf to it, and it doesn't hear the message.
[00:14:13] So when your blood sugar is always a little elevated, you're constantly sending that message to the pancreas to put out insulin.
[00:14:22] When you have muscle that can store glucose inside of it, it brings that glucose outside of the bloodstream and it shuts down that constant stimulus to the pancreas to make more insulin. This is very, very powerful to reversing your insulin resistance, to improving your insulin sensitivity, to stopping your diabetic state to have a place for glucose to be pulled out of the bloodstream and stored so that your blood isn't constantly full of glucose, telling the pancreas you need more insulin, and that higher doses of insulin or that higher response of insulin is constantly creating that insulin resistance.
[00:15:06] So when you have a bigger muscle, your muscles can store more glucose inside of them and therefore lower the glucose floating around in your bloodstream and stop the message to the pancreas. I think of the muscles. This is a space issue, right? If you think of your muscle as a closet and glucose as stuff that you have cluttering your house, you can only declutter a small amount of stuff into a small closet. If you wanted to clutter more stuff, you need a bigger cloth deposit to improve your insulin resistance or increase your insulin sensitivity. You want less, less insulin in your bloodstream, and to do this, you need less glucose in your bloodstream. And you can get less glucose in your bloodstream by having a bigger closet, I. E. A muscle to store that glucose in. This is a really powerful way to improve your insulin sensitivity, to decrease that insulin floating around in your system and decrease your insulin resistance.
[00:16:11] So I always think of this as this decluttering thing, like you want to bring glucose outside of your bloodstream and store it in your muscles. If you have small muscles, you can't do this.
[00:16:24] I want to lovingly offer this to you, that this is really not optional. Lots of us think that we can get healthy just by changing the way that we eat. And yes, that's a big part of it, and I'm not disagreeing. But if you're interested in fixing your type 2 diabetes, building bigger muscles is likely a requirement for this.
[00:16:45] So figuring out how you can do this. Lots of women will ask me about strength training over cardio. And I'm going to tell you ladies like I am all about the cardio. I love nothing more than a good run. If I can't get a good run in, let's go for a long walk. If I can't go for a long walk, let's go for a long hike. I'm all about the cardio, but cardio will help. You only burn what's there. It does not. And of course you get that two to three day effect of that, and that's great.
[00:17:10] Having bigger muscles is a long term change in the way that your body manages glucose. You are going to get more bang for your buck. This is a more permanent answer. So if you have 20 minutes to work out and that's all you've got, I highly Recommend you spend 20 minutes building bigger muscles. I want to talk for a moment about what you can expect to happen because this is a big question that I get. I went and exercised. My blood sugar readings after exercise are always high. I don't understand. I thought exercise was supposed to help. This is totally normal. I'm sure your blood sugar readings are actually higher after an exercise event. And the reason for this is because your muscles require fuel for exercise. Your muscles will release that glycogen and again, it's to fuel the cells and to moving the glycogen turns into glucose and glucose fuels the cells. Not only do your muscles do this, but also your liver does this.
[00:18:12] It is a normal response for your body to release glucose when you are exercising in order to fuel your active muscles.
[00:18:20] When you start at a baseline elevated blood sugar, when you're diabetic and your baseline, your fasting blood sugar is high. It makes sense that when you release more glucose in order to fuel those cells, your glucose is gonna climb higher from that baseline. And that's what we see. So if you are seeing your blood sugars be 150, 160, 170, 180 even I've seen mine go as high as 170 during an exercise event. But I think that that was maybe due to heat and we'll talk about that in a minute. But if you see your blood sugars climb but you are starting at 110 or 120, I don't know that that's, that's abnormal. I don't know that's abnormal at all. I think that if, I mean, like it's not unusual for me to See mine go from 80 or 90 to 120 or 130 during my morning runs, even when I'm not in the summer heat. So recognize that this is not necessarily abnormal. Your muscles are requiring fuel when they exercise. And the higher blood sugars are just that, fuel that your muscles are requiring.
[00:19:24] There are a few things I want to talk about. If you're wearing a cgm, recognize your CGM will artificially. It's not because your blood sugars are actually high when they get hot, they read higher, they just read higher numbers. So if you're hot with exercise, if you're hot because you took a shower, if you're hot because you're outside on a summer day, all of these things will cause your CGM to falsely read elevated. It's nothing you did, it's nothing you ate. There's no problem. When you cool down, it will normalize.
[00:19:56] Outside of that, you can expect to see a bump even on a prick machine, a finger stick, a glucometer, not the cgm, but the ones that you stick and you bleed on. Even those will see a bump in your blood sugars when you exercise. It's normal. I do this, you do this, your neighbor does this, your spouse does this. This is normal biology. The difference between people who are diabetic and not diabetic is the baseline that you're starting at.
[00:20:22] This is where building that bigger closet will help you see the long term benefits from exercise. Ladies, we need to lift heavy, build bigger muscles. It is imperative to fixing your biology, your insulin resistance. I really truly used to think food was the most impactful thing that you could do to fix your diabetes. And the exercise was like secondary ambience, I used to say, and I still think it's good for your heart, it's good for your lungs, it's great for your soul. I still think that over the last one to two years though, I've learned the impact of muscles on our metabolic health. And diabetes is a metabolic disease. And if you're looking to improve it, you need to improve your metabolic health.
[00:21:03] And I've become very convinced that it is a 50 50. You need both. It is a 5050 partnership. I've seen this with my clients. They will not fix their blood sugars if they have a small muscle mass. In the medical literature, this is termed sarcopenia and it's seen as a disease. And it's a lack of muscle. And there are reports that we are in an epidemic of sarcopenia. We do not have enough muscle, not enough muscle is a health problem. And yes, your blood sugars rise when you exercise. That's normal. But your biology requires you to build more muscle if you are going to be healthy. It's truly that simple.
[00:21:44] That is all I have for you this week. As always, if you ever have any questions, never hesitate to send me a message. Delanedelinemd.com I do have a favor to ask. If you are getting benefits from this podcast, please like it, rate and review the podcast on your podcast player. The more ratings and reviews that this podcast gets, the more it will be presented to new people. Share it with your friends and social media, whatever. Recognize that insulin resistance affects 9 out of 10Americans. People you know are struggling with the same issue. Help me get the word out that you don't need to be sick. You don't need to be tied to the healthcare industry. It is possible to be healthy. People need to hear this last thing. If you ever need anything or want to set up that better blood sugars assessment, call. Don't hesitate to do
[email protected] delanemd forward/call. I want you to keep listening. Keep avoiding the foods that are making you sick. Keep making choices for your longevity and your vitality. We'll talk soon. Bye.
