Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You are listening to episode number 291 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 popped podcast is for you. Let's talk.
[00:00:28] Hey there and welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad that you're taking some time for you and for your health today, and I feel privileged that you're spending it with me. Today I want to discuss a stepwise mindset, the real mindset that's kind of prerequisite to fixing your type 2 diabetes. It's very, very easy to get overwhelmed with what's my fasting Sugar? What's my A1C? How do I get my fasting insulin level even checked? Are these meds going to make it worse or make it better? How many carbs should I be eating? What about protein? Is fat good or bad? How much exercise do I need? How long should I fast? Should I fast at all?
[00:01:07] For those of us women who are type A personalities and getting shit done, the number of different levers that we can push to fix our health and to improve our health can be overwhelming when we think about them all in their entirety. And today I want to talk about a mindset that I use with my clients to approach all of these and get to the end of it with a functional, effective way of fixing your health. At the end of our the podcast today, I'm also going to give you a list of podcasts where I've discussed many of the different issues more in depth so you can start getting a straightforward plan of action to get started today. But before we get started, I want to remind you if you've been medicated for your type 2 diabetes, you've been medicated because because of the way you have eaten in the past. If you change the way you eat, you will need to change your meds. If you don't change your medications, you can end up very sick. The kind of sick that looks like hospitalizations, ER visits, and even death. That's not why you're making these changes. So if you are on meds, you need to be very careful as you make these changes. And what that means for most people is they need to get a clear line of communication open with Their provider who's given them these meds. Whoever wrote you this prescription for these meds, you need to call them and say I'm going to make some dietary changes. I think I'm going to need less meds. How do you want me to share my blood sugar logs with you? And they're going to say I want you to call my nurse every day. I want you to email them to me, I want you to fax them to me once a week. They're going to give you some information and then you need to ask them in that same conversation how should I expect to hear the medication changes that you want me to make? And they're going to say I'm going to have my nurse call you, I'm going to send you an email, I'm going to send you a message through the portal. Whatever it is, you just need to get clear. How do you share information with them and how can you expect to hear information back from them? If you don't do this, you can get end up very, very sick. The kind of sick that you're not looking for. So get that line of communication open and be very careful as you're making these changes. If you're not sure what you should be eating to Fix your type 2 diabetes, to see those better blood sugars, that's awesome. I have help for you. You can go to delanemd.com better that's B E T T E R at that place, at that find my 14 days to better Blood Sugars guide. That guide is a straightforward menu of what you should eat for the next 14 days. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. There is the opportunity to make changes like there's add ons and there's in that guide it talks about add ons and how you will account for them. But you can have a straightforward menu for 14 days of how to eat to see better blood sugars. It is a very powerful menu. It's a powerful guide. So again, if you're on meds, make sure you've contacted your provider before you start eating these foods and do the 14 days and see the change in your blood sugars. This guide is so helpful for a few reasons. One, if you're not sure what to eat, it gives you that information. Two, if you believe that you're diabetic because of your genes or because of biology or because of some unlucky twist of fate and that the food that you're eating cannot possibly be contributing to it, this guide is going to give you that answer. If this guide you Follow it, you see better blood sugars, then you know clearly the food that you're eating has a powerful impact on your health and your blood sugars. And then from that space, you can take that information and go forward and make some changes. If you have downloaded this guide and you've done the 14 days and you saw amazing changes, real life, seriously, I don't think I can do that for the rest of my life. For you, I want you to set up a better blood sugars assessment call. You can schedule that at calendly.com forward/delanemdash call. So calendly is C-A L E N D L Y.com delanemd forward slash call. Okay, set up that better blood sugars assessment call. You and I will go through what you've been doing, what your numbers are, how that 14 day guide worked for you, and how to change it. You know, where are your struggles for applying that for the rest of your life? We can talk a little bit about what it looks like for us to coach together and what it would look like for you to make these changes long term.
[00:05:28] Part of learning to be healthy is learning what to eat, but also part of it, and that's what I want to talk about today, is learning how to, you know, how to bring all of these other ways of adding health to your life, into your life. Okay, and what does that mean again? We're type A ladies, we're successful, we're high achieving women. And, and if that is the category you identify with, you likely already know that you struggle with the feelings of imperfection.
[00:05:59] And part of learning to be healthy really involves a ton of imperfection and learning to get really comfortable with being imperfect and then twisting that, changing that, learning what is to be learned from that imperfection into a functional, effective strategy for going forward.
[00:06:21] When we type A's struggle with that imperfection and cannot feel or make those imperfections be a functional step forward, we stay stuck.
[00:06:33] This keeps us stuck when we're attempting to be healthy.
[00:06:37] So if you've listened to podcast episodes, you know that I got all sorts of recommendations, right? Recommendations about food types, about carb goals, about protein goals, about fasting goals, about workout goals, about meditation goals, about food logging goals, about blood sugar monitoring goals, about journaling practices, about gratitude practices. I've done podcasts on all of these things. I got things to say about all of these things. These are all different tools, different levers, different things that will have an impact on your health. And really, that's probably a small list. The List probably is much longer than that. If you're a type A person, type A woman, you hear this long list of all these different things that you can do, all of these different aspects that go into creating the health and the better blood sugars that you want, and overwhelming just floods you. And then we that overwhelm keeps us stuck in inaction or ineffective action.
[00:07:35] So today I want to talk about the strategy that I use when I coach clients to help them get a visualization about how to take each one of these aspects and apply it in an effective way.
[00:07:50] And part of this starts with not pushing for perfection. If you are a type aer, you hear all of these things and you're like, I need to be perfect in all of these different areas.
[00:07:59] And that is not usually true, number one. But number two, it is hard to master seven different things at one time.
[00:08:11] So I like to think of fixing your metabolic health, fixing your blood sugars, fixing your diabetes as a Rubik's Cube, of approaching it with the same mindset that we approached a Rubik's cube in the 1980s when we were trying to solve it. Now, I'm going to be real honest. I always talk about Rubik's Cubes. I've never actually solved a Rubik's Cube in any way that didn't involve peeling stickers off and replacing stickers. I never actually learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube, but I watched many people solve a Rubik's Cube and the way that they were able to tolerate a previously solved side getting unsolved so that they could solve another side and then resolving the sol, the original side. So what am I talking about? So if you are of a generation or like, you just don't know what a Rubik's Cube is. A Rubik's Cube was a cube that had nine different squares on each face of the cube, and each face was a different color.
[00:09:14] And the solution, like the point of the Rubik's Cube, is that you got all of the colors. So the white side had only white, white squares on it, and the red side had red and green. And there was a yellow, and I think there was an orange and a blue.
[00:09:28] You solved the Rubik's Cube, which presented to you with, you know, multiple different colors on every side. And that was not. That was an unsolved Rubik's Cube. The solved Rubik's Cube only had one color on each side.
[00:09:42] So when you watch somebody solve it, I'm sure you can YouTube this, watch somebody solve a Rubik's Cube. What you realize is they may solve the red side, but then in order to solve the white side, they have to break the red side, they have to unsolve, they have to mess up the red side in order to solve the white side. And what I've realized about, about fixing your metabolic health is frequently it's similar.
[00:10:06] So if you're trying to figure out how many carbs to eat, you may have to do something for the next two weeks that is not going to be part of your long term solution. Okay. What that does is it gives you information about how much you know. So if you're, say you've been eating, say your macronutrient breakdown that got you type 2 diabetic involved 270 carbs on average every day and maybe 50 grams of protein on average and maybe 75 grams of fat. Maybe that was your macronutrient breakdown.
[00:10:47] If you want to solve your diabetes or improve your blood sugars, you are going to have to cut that carbohydrate macronutrient down significantly, probably less than a hundred.
[00:10:59] And maybe you're not going to be able to eat enough protein or maybe you're gonna have too much fat or, you know, your protein goals really should be 1 gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. For most of us that's somewhere around 130, 150, 170 grams of protein a day. It's a huge amount of protein in a day. Sometimes we find that we can't get to that, but we need to keep that carb count low. And so we're breaking the protein part with the interest of solving the carbohydrate part. Same thing. Like if you're looking at calories, you have a caloric goal. You want to meet so many calories a day and you think you have to. In the solution of the carbohydrate issue that's driving high insulin levels and insulin resistance, you may find that you're not getting enough carbs or that you need to cut down your carbs significantly but not getting enough calories in turn. And that's okay.
[00:11:53] That's okay. This is the mindset that I think has to change. You're not going to fix it all once in one setting. You're going to have to, it's going to take time for you to fix them all. It's going to take time to cut your carbohydrate down, your carbohydrate count down to 120 or 100. It's going to take time for you to cut that down and see what changes happen in your blood sugars in order for you to then be able to say, okay, that worked. Now how do I get my caloric goal? Or how do I get my protein goal? I've got this part solved. And when you go to get your protein goal, you may find that that carbohydrate component that you found that worked suddenly has to be broken a little bit, too.
[00:12:37] And then you get to the protein, and then you're like, okay, how can I get that carbohydrate count back to more of what I needed? Or I wanted it to be where it was before, and you move closer to that center point, that normalizing point, those goal points. I will tell you, for me, on any given day, I have my food logs on MyFitnessPal. If you're not in the DelaneMD Facebook group, go find it. Better blood sugars with DelaneMD. It's on Facebook. You can get into that group. But I occasionally will post on there for people to. If you want me to review your food logs and you're on MyFitnessPal, friend me on MyFitnessPal, and I will review your, you know, food logs and we can, you know, kind of have a conversation about that. But my food logs are also available for everybody to see on MyFitnessPal. And what that means is you can see that there are a lot of days I don't meet my protein goals, or there are days that I don't even come close to meeting my carbohydrate goals, or there are days that I don't meet my calorie goals, or there are days that I overshoot the calorie goals and then totally fail on the protein goals. All of this happens. And my A1C is in the ideal range and my insulin is in the ideal range, and my weight is where I like it. All of my health parameters are in the range that I want. But there is variation. There's fluctuation around the perfect, the norms, right?
[00:14:06] Allowing ourselves to let go of the idea of perfection, like the Rubik's Cube. Like, I've got this side perfect, and I want to hold that perfect so much that I can't solve the rest of the cube. We have to learn to let go of that perfection of the side that was solved in order to learn how to solve the other sides, to get effective with the other tools, to get the most results that we want out of the other tools, right? So maybe you're Working on carbohydrates, and you do that for 14 days, and then you work on the protein and you do that for 14 days and then you add exercise. But when I add exercise, there's not enough time for me to food prep all the time. So suddenly my macros are a little out of whack. That's okay. It's okay.
[00:14:54] You're going to fix that as you come back and master. When you've realized it and feel you've mastered the exercise component, you're going to come back and add the mastery of the carb restrictions or the carb limitations and the protein goals and the exercise goals. You can bring all of those together in one mastered place.
[00:15:15] When we focus on the whole, it usually keeps us from fixing and mastering the single individual component. And that's the shift that has to happen. Now, this still requires that you do the same basics. Like, it's not like, oh, I added exercise. So Twinkies for breakfast are okay. That's never gonna be okay. Maybe your carbohydrates are a little off from what they were when you were focused on mastering the carbohydrate part. Maybe your protein's a little off when you were focused on mastering the protein part. Maybe when you start to add meditation or focus on sleep, your exercise goals become a little off because you're focusing on those other parts. But it never turns into Twinkies for breakfast, never any exercise, and staying up all night partying, like, that's never going to be the reality. You still have to focus on the same basics.
[00:16:08] So the stuff that I talk about, the food, journaling, the blood sugar monitoring, like watching your macros, watching your exercise, journaling those things that you're doing, and then comparing it to your blood sugar results, that still has to happen. These are the foundational pieces that guide your future changes. Did eating 120 grams of carbohydrates each day, did that lead to the results I want? Yes or no?
[00:16:33] You're not gonna know that if you're not journaling the food and watching your blood sugars. Did daily exercise for 14 days, every morning exercising for 14 days, change my blood sugars? You're not gonna know that unless you're monitoring what you're doing, watching your blood sugars and watching the food that you're choosing.
[00:16:51] So I encourage my clients to pick a change. Pick a side of the Rubik's Cube that you want to solve, solve for that one thing, then pick another side and solve for that.
[00:17:02] Be willing to make some unintended changes to the first side that you solve, the first thing that you chose to change in order to learn how to solve the second part.
[00:17:13] You're not going to be able to learn how to fix multiple different issues that are impacting your health without seeing some of these changes, without having some variability, some flexibility on some of those other areas. Again, if you figured out how many macronutrients you needed and then you add exercise and now there's not enough time for you to go and make your food like you were doing so particular with. But now you've taken that time and you've put some of the time towards exercise and now there's not the same amount of time to focus on the food. You may see some shifts. There's, it's okay, figure out how the exercise is impacting your results and then go from there. And then maybe, yeah, you tighten up both after you've mastered the exercise component, you see what it does, you saw what the food did. Bring them together, Bring them together. What results do I get then?
[00:18:04] That is how you get long lasting, effective changes in your health and your blood sugars. So I want to talk a moment. If you're wondering, you know, how, what, what are the food recommendations? What are the fasting recommendations? What are the exercise recommendations? I am going to go through a few of the different podcasts. I'm going to just share with you the podcast numbers for you to go and check out so that you can start. Oh, food. These are the things I need to focus on. Oh, if I'm going to do fasting, I listen to these episodes and it says that these, this is how I'm going to effectively add fasting into my life. If I want to learn what exercise does, this is how I'm going to effectively add exercise into my life. Meditation, gratitude, all of these things are things I've spoken about in the podcast. And so I'm going to share with you the episodes. I do want you to pick one thing and focus on it for 14 days. Monitor your blood sugars every morning for those 14 days. Day one, what was your blood sugar Day 14, what was your fasting blood sugar compare? Oh, this is how cutting my carbohydrates, cutting out my processed foods impacted my blood Sugars in those 14 days. Or this is how how exercise impacted my blood Sugars in those 14 days. Use that as a strategy for going forward versus what we've all tried to do. I'm going to change my food, I'm going to count my macros I'm going to do my protein. I'm going to add exercise. I'm going to start meditating. I'm going to make sure I sleep. I'm going to also start some, you know, yoga and then I'm going to start journaling. And we get overwhelmed and can't incorporate all of them at once and so we just give up. That's what keeps us stuck. Let's not do that. I want you to pick one thing and I want you to focus on it for 14 days. 14 days is usually enough for you to see a significant impact if that change is going to work for you. So food, what to eat, what not to eat. Episode number two 36 and episode number two 73 go into food at its basics. Really, if you're interested in fasting. Episodes number 2:40 through 2:42 go into fasting goals. If you're interested in exercising. Last week I did a podcast on exercise and the importance of exercise. That was episode number 290. If you're wondering if stress is an issue and you need to learn how to implement stress management, meditation, those sorts of things, check out episode number 264. I did that with Eva Whitmer. She is a licensed therapist and she talks about trauma, trauma responses and the regulation of our stress response. It's a great episode. Great science in there. Highly Recommend it. Number 264. And then lastly, gratitude practices that I discussed in 231 and the importance of gratitude in living a healthy life. So go check those out.
[00:20:50] I hope they're helpful. Certainly. If you ever have any questions, please email me delanend.com that is all I have for you this week. But I do have an ask if you are getting benefit from this podcast, I would ask that you rate and review the podcast on your podcast player. The more ratings and reviews that this podcast get, the more that the podcast players present it to new listeners. When you see and you understand that 9 out of 10Americans have insulin resistance, you realize that everybody needs to hear this. You rating and review the pod. Reviewing the podcast gets that put out to more people that need to hear this.
[00:21:26] Help me tell others that they don't need to be sick. They don't need to be tied to the healthcare system for the rest of their life. It is possible to live healthy without meds, without the healthcare healthcare system. People need to hear this. Last thing I have for you. Keep listening. Keep avoiding the foods that are making you sick and keep making the choices for your health, your longevity and your vitality. I will talk with you next week. Bye.
