Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You are listening to episode number 301 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. This podcast is for you. Let's talk.
[00:00:28] Hey there. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:32] I am glad that you're here. I'm glad you're taking some time with your help for your health today, and I am glad that you're spending it with me, friend. Today I want to discuss the four main areas that I teach people to focus on to fix their blood sugars and their health in general. And then I also want to discuss why we struggle with it and then how to shift our mindset into a place where we can implement these strategies effectively. It's very easy to get stuck on the what do I need to eat? And miss out entirely on the struggle that most people typically experience.
[00:01:16] So before we get started, I want to talk about medications. I give this warning on all of my podcasts. If you are medicated for your type 2 diabetes, please be careful making the changes to the diet and lifestyle and exercise that I recommend in this podcast. The medications that you have been started on were started because of the way you ate in the past. And if you change the way that you eat, you're going to need to change your meds. And if not, you're going to get real sick. The kind of sick that looks like an ER visit. A hospitalization impossible. Believe in death. And that's not why you're making these changes. You're making these changes to live healthy. So you need to be real careful. If you're on meds, you need to open up a line of communication with your provider who prescribed these meds, call them up, talk to their assistant, their nurse, whomever, and ask them, how do you want me to share my blood sugar logs with you? And how should I expect to hear the changes you want me to make on my medications? How do I expect to hear that back from you? If you don't do this, you can end up over medicated and very sick. And I don't want that for you, and you don't want that for you. So open up that line of communication with your provider and be real careful as you're making these Changes. If you're not sure what to eat, you know that I have help for you. There's a 14 days to better Blood Sugars guide on my website that is free to you. You can Download it at delanemd.com Better that's B E T T E R and DelaneMD iS-E-L-A-N-E-M-D.com Better try that out. Women send me emails all the time telling me about the amazing results that they're getting. I want to hear that because I love to hear that. I love to hear that people can make some simple changes and really change the trajectory of their health and their longevity, but also that it's not as hard as they thought it was going to be. That is something I hear from my clients all the time. I just had a client, her A1C dropped in our time of three months working together. Her A1C dropped from 7.2 to 5.6 and three months. And of course it's something I consistently hear from the people I work with. Like it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. I don't know why I waited so long. So this 14 day guide is really an opportunity for you to start seeing similar results. Download it, try it out, send me a message, tell me your amazing results. I want to hear about it. If for some reason you're not getting amazing results with it, you found that you couldn't implement it, you found that it didn't work for you, you did everything to the T and you did not see better blood sugars. I really want to hear from you. I want to know if there's something I need to do to improve that blood sugar, that 14 day guide. But I also wanna know how I can help you start to determine what your next step is to moving towards a healthier life and better blood sugars. You can do this. We can have this conversation during a better blood sugars assessment call. These are 30 to 45 minute Zoom calls where you and I hop on a zoom call and we talk about what you've been doing, we talk about where your numbers are and then we kind of put together a strategy for you moving forward to start seeing better blood sugars. You, you can schedule one of those. You can access my calendar, you can go to calendly.com forward/delanemd forward/call. So calendly is C-A L E N D L Y.com forward slash D E L A N E M D forward slash C A L L that gets you to my calendar. You can set up a call with me, we can get on that, that zoom call and figure out what you need to do next. If you did the 14 day program and you're like, yeah, it was amazing, I don't know how I'm going to do it for the rest of my life. Also set up a better blood sugars assessment call. Let's figure out how to make that extend to the rest of your life and put diabetes behind you entirely.
[00:05:16] So today I want to start with the four basic strategies that I teach people for improving their blood sugars and their type 2 diabetes. I always bring this back, whether I'm talking to a client or whether I'm talking to a patient. I bring this back to kind of what our biology is meant to do.
[00:05:34] And the biology that lives, that we live by the way our body works is something that's been present for hundreds of thousands of years.
[00:05:47] This biology that lives in our body, that kind of, it's not living in our body, it is what our body is. This biology really developed hundreds of thousands of years ago in the pre modern human.
[00:06:02] And that means that it developed in the environment that was available to the premodern human hundreds of thousands of years ago.
[00:06:13] What's different, why we're all sick, why 9 out of 10Americans have insulin resistance and prediabetes and diabetes, is because we do not live in a way that was available to the pre modern human. We live our lives in a way that does not match that hundreds of thousands of years ago that pre modern human living and therefore it doesn't match our biology. And this is what creates illness, this is what's creating insulin resistance. This is the root cause of most chronic illnesses, is that we just simply are not matching our biology because our biology developed hundreds of thousands of years ago in a pre modern time. And in our modern way of living, it doesn't match. It's really that simple. So the four strategies that I always talk about are food, exercise, stress and sleep. And then I encourage you to think about what the pre modern human was doing hundreds of thousands of years ago. So when we talk about food, I'm always asking, was this food available hundreds of thousands of years ago, 10,000 years ago, was this food available to the pre modern human?
[00:07:30] And if the answer is no, then you probably need to seriously consider if this is going to move you towards your health or away from your health. You need to think about that. If the food was available 10,000 years ago, awesome. It's probably matching your biology.
[00:07:47] There are caveats to this. This is a generalization.
[00:07:51] So carrots were available 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, they were available to the pre modern human. Nobody's getting diabetic from their carrot problem. That's not the problem. Food Doritos on the other hand were not available to the pre modern human and they make us sick. Chocolate wasn't available to the pre modern human. It makes us sick. Donuts weren't available to the pre modern human. It makes us sick. Pasta and bread wasn't available to the pre modern human and it contributes to our insulin resistance and our diabetes.
[00:08:24] So considering the food, when you're eating it, was it available to the premodern human? Yes or no? The caveats that can come up, I always talk about coffee when I think of these caveats. Was coffee available 10,000 years ago? It probably was not. 100,000 years ago, was it available to the pre modern human? It probably was not available to the pre modern human. However, is coffee contributing significantly to your diabetes? It is not a primary player. As I understand the science, it is not one of the top five players in the development of insulin resistance and diabetes.
[00:09:08] So that's the question you always ask, was it available to the pre modern human? Yes or no. And if the answer is no, then was it, is it a contributor to your type 2 diabetes? If the answer to that is no, it's probably fine.
[00:09:21] But understanding that if the answer is no, it wasn't available to the human being pre modern and it's probably contributing to my type 2 diabetes like donuts and Doritos and bread and pasta, then you probably need to say, you need to understand that that is probably moving you away from, from the health and the better blood sugars that you're looking for.
[00:09:45] So that question, that filter of putting your food through that filter, was this available to the pre modern human? Yes or no. And then is it causing my type 2 diabetes? That is the filter you need to put all your foods through. It's really that simple? Yes. There are some things that were available to pre modern humans that probably can push us over the edge. Bananas.
[00:10:09] They're pretty high carb and super sweet. But I'm going to offer to you, nobody got diabetic because of their banana problem. That's not their issue. Berries.
[00:10:20] Sweet fruits, definitely. They're pretty sweet. And you may see a blood sugar pump when you eat them. Honey is another one. Right? Honey was available to the pre modern human. But think about how those foods were available to the pre modern human bananas. Once you ate the bananas off the tree and there were no more ripe bananas, they weren't tasty and you didn't want them. Once you ate all the strawberries off the bush, off the vine, there were no more strawberries. You just had to wait until the strawberry bush made you more strawberries. It wasn't as simple as going to the store and getting an unlimited supply of these foods that you like. Honey, yeah. Available to the pre modern human and guarded by little stinging insects. It wasn't unlimitedly available. Or there was a cost benefit ratio, right, Like a risk benefit ratio that went along with it, that you had to consider that the pre modern human had to consider when they were getting that food or eating that food.
[00:11:16] Those are caveats. That's 10% of the issue. 90% of the issue can be addressed by asking yourself, was this food available to the pre modern human? Yes or no? The answer is no, it wasn't available to the pre modern human. Asking yourself, is it causing my type 2 diabetes? If the answer to that question is yes, you probably need to seriously consider about eating it.
[00:11:38] So that is what I teach about foods. Exercise is the other component, one of the other, one of the other main components that I really teach clients about.
[00:11:50] We as a society, in this pre modern way, or this postmodern way of living, or the modern way of living, I guess we are in a epidemic of sarcopenia. We do not have enough muscle on our bodies, period. End of sentence. There is no way around it. We are seeing more and more evidence of this. We used to think that osteoporosis was a calcium deficiency thing and maybe there is an element of calcium deficiency. However, what makes bone grow, what triggers bone growth and stimulates bone growth is tendons pulling on bones. The force applied to a bone, that is what makes a bone grow, makes a bone generate more bone cells. It is what makes a bone more bony. And osteoporosis is poorly ossifier, poorly calcified, like it's not bony bone, like there's holes in the bony bone because we haven't made enough bone. And part of this is not necessarily. Not only because we don't have enough calcium, it's also because we don't have big enough muscles pulling on our bones. In addition to that, as we age, if you have more muscle protecting your bone when you fall, you're not so prone to fractures because you have this muscle that pads it. It's like bubble wrap for your bones. In addition, you have muscles that are strong enough to catch you. In addition, you have muscles that are strong enough to push you up off the ground. In addition to that. All of that's very important for everybody, not just diabetic humans. But in addition to all of those benefits that building muscle creates for the human animal, the human being, recognize that muscle is the biggest place that your human biology wants to take blood sugar and store it outside of the blood. And then that when we can get blood sugar out of the bloodstream, that gives your pancreas a break. You're not pushing insulin out all the time and you have less insulin resistance.
[00:14:08] Your body needs to have big muscles that you have a place to store blood sugar outside of the bloodstream and give your body a break from exposure to all of that glucose. And if you've got itty bitty little muscles, you've got a very limited space to store that blood sugar outside of that bloodstream. In addition to that recognize muscle is really metabolically active.
[00:14:36] It's very active and it burns glucose as an energy source. And burning glucose naturally is going to lower your blood sugar level. And then there's also elements of when we're contracting and working our muscles, that our muscles will actually bring glucose inside of the cell in a way that is not dependent on insulin. So no matter how insulin resistant you are, you can still bring that glucose inside and burn it off. There is so much benefit to building muscle and exercise. This is why it's the second strategy that I talk about and I really hammer home on. I hammer home on not eating food that is not made for the human being. That's foods with boxes, bags and barcodes. I hammer home exercising and building muscle. These are the important aspects, the two most important things you can do to start seeing better blood sugars. The other two aspects of the four strategies that I teach are the four pillars that I teach to help people fix their blood sugars, see better blood sugars, and fix their diabetes are stress and sleep. And again, this goes back to that pre modern way of living.
[00:15:50] Pre modern humans got stressed about things that were trying to kill them, and in turn their body responded in a way that, that would immediately remove their human body from the risk of death.
[00:16:06] And sometimes that meant that we like maybe had some like the higher glucose and epinephrine response and higher blood pressures and higher pulse rates. We have this physiologic response that's never meant to be present forever. It's meant to be present for a short time to get you away from the danger and to get you safe, and then it's meant to go away.
[00:16:29] We are not, as human animals, our biology is not meant to be under constant stress.
[00:16:36] And what we have realized is, I think I remember as a kid thinking that, you know, stress and worry in my brain and the physiologic stress of like running or, you know, some other kind of exercise, or even like the stress of being threatened physically. The stress in my brain and the stress of a physical threat, they were different. I used to think that. And what we've realized is that your human body, your biology, only knows one way to respond to stress. And it is going to release hormones that are not meant to be in your system all the time.
[00:17:16] That's just what it comes down to. Those hormones are meant to be released and meant to have you achieve safety. And then those hormones, that neurochemistry and that biochemistry is meant to dissipate and you're not having it anymore. If you're stressed because of a relationship in your life, if you're stressed because of bills, if you're stressed because of work, if you're stressed because of your kids, if you're stressed because of what's going on politically, I mean, there's a long list of things that human beings stress out about. If you are stressed all the time, that just simply does not match your biology. In fact, I actually heard a scientist talking about a study or a theory. I don't, I, I really want to look into it because it's fascinating and I've heard it spoken about a couple different times since the initial time I heard it. But how human beings really achieve the most happiness, the most health, the most longevity, just in general, a whole, a more wholesome way of living when we are in communities of about 150 people, isn't that insane?
[00:18:26] And one of the scientists that I heard talking about this explained it, because the human being was never meant to know what was going on in other parts of the world. It wasn't available to us. We didn't know what was going on in the Ukraine or in some other part of the world because we didn't have access to it 100,000 years ago. And we couldn't stress about it. It was that simple. And so how we manage stress and are we implementing an active stress management philosophy or strategy in our life? I always encourage, you know, exercise will dissipate some of the stress neurochemistry and biochemistry.
[00:19:07] I also encourage meditation and yoga or tai chi, some of these meditative movement practices. All of these things are Going to help you learn to manage stress in a way that you're in control of it and not just under the experience of your world and what your brain is thinking, that you start to exhibit some control over what your brain is thinking so that you can manage that stress better.
[00:19:35] So stress management is the third of the four strategies that I always talk about. And then the last one is sleep.
[00:19:42] Hundreds of thousands of years ago, we did not have alarm clocks and we weren't waking up without enough sleep. We didn't have light that allowed us to stay up late so that we could not get enough sleep and then wake up early under arrested. Right. We didn't have the opportunity for these because in the pre modern human existence, alarm clocks, electricity and light bulbs were not available. When it got dark, the humans would maybe sit around a campfire, maybe there was fire. And we would sit around that and we would talk with the community that we had, which of course was maybe 150 people, but probably far less than that in that close knit area.
[00:20:25] And we would share stories and we would share connection and we would get along with each other as well as we could. And you know, within a few hours after the sun going down, you were going to bed and, and you would sleep all night long and get up in the morning to be a human being and you would get adequate sleep. You weren't setting an alarm and being like, oop, it's time to get up, even though I'm tired. No, if you were tired, you'd just sleep. The sun would usually wake you up and you'd get up and you'd be a human being. That of course is not how we humans work in the modern time. I, you know, a couple times a month I cover an overnight shift in the emergency department and it's almost always an overnight shift. Sometimes I get lucky enough to have a day shift, but usually it's an overnight shift. I definitely that is not aligned with my biology to do that and it is not a healthy choice, period of sentence. I understand that that decision to take those shifts, maybe it serves my community, maybe I help some people out in my professional endeavors. However, for my personal health, it's probably not the healthiest decision for me. We know there have been multiple studies done that show poor sleep, like inadequate sleep, like four to six hours, I think is what the studies show. Over five to seven days stimulates insulin resistance in human beings.
[00:21:49] No change in your diet, you're not eating Twinkies all day long. The only change in those studies was how much Sleep they were getting stimulates insulin resistance.
[00:21:59] This is why sleep is such a powerful strategy for improving your blood sugars and your health. If you are wanting to have better blood sugars, you need to sleep until you're rested. So you wake up in the morning rested. The sleep scientists say that you shouldn't have to rely on an alarm clock to wake you up. Fine, I have to rely on an alarm clock to wake me up. However, you should be feeling rested when you get up and that you should allow yourself at least seven to nine hours of sleep every night is what the average human being will require.
[00:22:38] So those are the four strategies. Food, eat food like the pre modern human did. Exercise, exercise like the pre modern human did. They weren't lifting weights because humans didn't have weights. They were outside moving like human beings do, gathering their own food, walking and running and exercising and just doing things as human beings were meant to move.
[00:23:01] We need muscle on our body. Movement is going to get it there. This is a huge, huge player in you being healthy.
[00:23:11] Stress, like a premodern human used to stress, figure out how to. If you need to go through therapy and work on some of the things that you think and you believe it is imperative. We know stress is a huge contributor to insulin resistance and higher blood sugars. And then the fourth of these strategies is sleep. Sleep is a huge player as well. You need to sleep like a pre modern human slept. And that means like at least seven to nine hours a night. Again, I agree. Like I struggle to not wake up with an alarm clock, although I probably could do it because when I try to sleep late on a weekend, I always wake up earlier because I'm so used to getting up early. But we need to be sleeping more. We need to not be doing four hours of sleep, five hours of sleep, six hours of sleep a night. It is not enough.
[00:24:00] So those are the four pillars and the four strategies that I teach my clients.
[00:24:04] What I find is I have not told you anything that's really enlightening. You know, most of what I've said, you know you need to stop eating junk food, you know you need to exercise more, you know you need to manage your stress and you know you need to sleep better. This is not usually news to people. What I do find that most people have not thought about is that being healthy means you're going to be living your life differently.
[00:24:30] And this, I think, is where people don't understand what that means. I see this in my running. I do. I've been trying to get faster in My running, I realized when I was 49, it was last year when I was 49, that it was never going to be easier to be faster. And if I wanted to be faster, it was time to or get off the pot and do it. And so I started working with a coach and I started really working on running faster. I have ran since I was 15 years old. I've ran regularly since I was 15 years old. I fell in love with running then. But what I realized is if I was going to be faster, I needed to learn how to run differently than I had done all of those years.
[00:25:12] So if you're going to be healthy, it means you're going to need to learn how to do things different, differently than you have all these years. And yes, I thought running it was like, oh, I need to figure out how to run faster. Like what's the exercise? What's the workout? You know, how many minutes do I do fast running versus slow running? There was some information that I had to learn there. But then what I had to do was on a Monday morning when I don't want to put it in, I just want to knock out a nice slow run at my old pace.
[00:25:43] That was where I needed to learn how to do things differently.
[00:25:48] What I find is that most people don't need me to tell them what the workout is, what the food is to eat. What they need to learn to do differently is to manage their life differently. If you've used food to manage fatigue or loneliness or stress or sadness or overwhelm or relaxation, whatever the emotion is, if you've used food to manage that, you're going to need to do that differently. If you intend to become healthy. If you intend to improve your blood sugars, you need to start looking at what it really means to be healthy for you.
[00:26:29] This is the part that I think people miss out the most on. They think that they just need me to tell them what to eat. And maybe some there, maybe there is information there that you do just need me to tell you what to eat. But taking it a step farther and figuring out what it means to you to be healthy has to happen.
[00:26:49] What it means, like what you have to change.
[00:26:54] Figuring out how doing things differently in your life so that you can be healthy will look for you. That has to be determined or you're never going to get long term results.
[00:27:04] I really encourage the people I work with to look at what health really looks like for them.
[00:27:12] Consider what your life would look at like when you're healthy. When your numbers, your blood Sugars. When you've like beaten this diabetes thing, what does your life look like? This means you're going to have to project your ideas years ahead, years into the future. You're gonna have to decide, like, what do I do when I have normal blood sugars?
[00:27:33] What are the things that I'm doing? What time do I get up in the morning? What time do I go to bed at night? Right, we talk about that sleep business. What are you eating?
[00:27:42] How are you exercising? When are you exercising? What exercises are you doing?
[00:27:47] What is your stress management strategy? How do you interact with humans in your life? The humans you love and the humans you don't love.
[00:27:57] These are all things that, this is the part that has to be figured out.
[00:28:04] If you've managed your relationship with your mother, with food all this time, like, okay, how am I going to do that differently? That has to be determined if you're going to get healthy. These are the things that have to be considered if you're going to determine how you're going to live healthy. Answering these questions give you tons of insight about how you need to be living your life.
[00:28:29] What you need to eat is of course avoiding junk food and that's a no brainer.
[00:28:35] What you don't need me to tell you that part. What you do need to figure out is if you're connecting with people in your life, with your girlfriends and you socialize by going out to eat all the time.
[00:28:47] Yes, you need to figure out what you're going to eat and you need to figure out how you're going to connect with your girlfriends in a way that doesn't use food.
[00:28:55] That's going to be a strategy you have to figure out. And you're not going to figure that out unless you start giving yourself the opportunity to kind of daydream about it. Think about it ahead of time. This is the work that has to be done. Again, you don't need me to tell you to not eat chocolate cake. You know that. This is the work that needs to be done to help you live healthy long term. This is what coaching will help you through, help you determine if you're ready to get started on that. Set up one of those better blood sugars assessment calls. Let's see what you have been doing. Are there just a few minor changes you need to make or are there longer or are there bigger changes that you really want to see yourself making? Set up a call and let's talk about that. As always, if you have any questions, please send me an email. Delanemd.com I always have an ask if you are enjoying this podcast or if you are getting benefits from this podcast. Please rate and review the podcast. The more ratings and reviews this podcast gets, the more the podcast players put it out to other people, to new people to see this.
[00:29:58] Recognizing again that nine out of ten Americans are affected with insulin resistance and prediabetes and diabetes. That means everybody really needs to hear this. You do not need to live your life tied to a medication, tied to the healthcare system in America. It is possible to live a healthy life without meds. That's what this podcast is dedicated to and people need to hear about it. If you rate and review the podcast, more people will that is all I have for you this week. I hope it's been helpful. If you have any questions, reach out to me.
