Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You are listening to episode number 258 of Better Blood Sugars with Delane, Md. Welcome to Better Blood Sugars with Delane, MD, where you can learn strategies to lower your blood sugars and improve your overall health. I'm your host, Doctor Delane 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.
[00:00:29] Hey there. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for taking some time with me today. I hope you are congratulating yourself on committing to your health today. Really, when we take time to acknowledge what's working and what we're doing well for our health, what it does is it shows us what we need to keep doing. I like to call it throwing a gasoline on the fire. It shows us what's burning, where the heat is, what's working, and it also gives us a clear indicator of what we need to keep doing. And so I think it's really important to see that and to be willing to do that and to acknowledge it, like literally verbalize it and put it together. I'm doing this, and I'm doing it for me today, and it's important, and I'm proud of myself for that. So I hope you're doing that. And I really appreciate that you're here with me today trying to commit to your health a little bit. So I want to talk today about vacations. That is the season we are in. Last week, I talked about the importance of envisioning what it looks like to have a vacation as a healthy, a naturally healthy individual, a non diabetic individual, and non insulin resistant human being. And we're going to talk a little bit about that today. But today I want to talk about the tools that you can use for managing your vacation in a way that keeps, keeps you healthy. So, first step, again is that visualization. And that's why I talked about it first thing last week. I want you to make sure that you are visualizing what it looks like to live a healthy life. So if you haven't done it already, go back and listen to last week's podcast episode, because the quality wasn't great. It's not because it was great, quality podcast. I had a lot of tech issues with it, and I still don't know if those tech issues are cleared up. So please be patient with the podcast. But the information and the tool is really, really important.
[00:02:25] If you don't know where you're going, it's hard to get there and you're not going to get there. Clearly, this visualization component allows you to determine where you're going. It's kind of like if you're building something and you just start buying tools because you know you're going to need some tools, like you just start buying them without having a vision of what you want to build, you are going to buy a bunch of tools that you don't need. You're going to practice them. Maybe you're going to, like, use them and then realize you don't need them. So you're wasting both time, which is something you can't ever get back, and money and doing that process. Okay? So I don't want you to waste anything. I want you to get a clear picture of what it looks like to live a healthy life for you.
[00:03:08] Allow yourself to spend time and get that vision and then decide from there how you want to use the tools that I'm going to teach you today to create that healthy life on vacation.
[00:03:22] So we're going to talk about planning because, you know, I'm a big fan. We're going to talk about fasting. We're going to talk about exercise. We're going to talk about eating low carb or keto. We're going to talk about stress management. We're going to talk about sleep. We're going to talk about things like apple cider vinegar and lemon water. We're going to talk about all of those things. And we're going to talk about a mindset of making decisions and the power of making decisions. So let's talk first about planning. Planning, because this is the first part. Even if you envision I'm building some stairs off of a door off the back of my house, I am. I had to have the time to envision what I wanted because if I just went out and bought the wood and bought the tools and bought the brackets and did all these things without envisioning, how many brackets do I need? How much would do I need? Where am I going to put this? How wide is it going to be? If I didn't have the vision, I wouldn't be able to make the plan. And the plan has to be there before I decide which tools I'm going to need, right? So the planning, I always talk about this and I do really think it is the most important part of getting healthy, determining how you're going to do it and how you're going to put things together.
[00:04:30] You're going to have to do this for your vacation also. So recognize if you have used plans in the past and you're like, that shit doesn't work for me. It just doesn't ever come together the way I hope it will. I don't think that's what I need to do. I need to do something else. If that's what your brain believes, please understand. It's not that plans don't work. It's that you probably need to tweak the plan that you're using until it does work. That's all that needs to happen. So if you make a plan for a. I don't even know how to make a chicken cord on blue, but it just sounds like a lot of work. If that's your plan for dinner, and you're like, yeah, I planned that yesterday. It didn't come together because you didn't go to the grocery store or allow yourself enough time to cook it. It's not that the plan was bad. It's that you have to tweak the plan to also include time to go to the grocery store and time to cook, cook the meal. Okay, plans, it's not that they don't work. It's just that they need to be adjusted until they do work. So that's the first thing I want you to realize, making a plan. And I realizing that you may have to tweak it along the way.
[00:05:35] When you start to make the plan. Some things that you're going to have to consider are how do you want to have the end of your vacation look like? What do you want that to bully to be? So what do I mean by that? Do you want your blood sugars to be better at the end of your vacation than when it started? Do you want them to be the same? Do you want there to be no change at all? That's fine. Or you want them to be worse? All of these are fine. There's no right answer or wrong answer here. It's just, again, that's giving you evidence or information about what, where you want to be so that you can kind of determine how to build your path there, how to make a plan to get there. So some women want their blood sugars. They want to continue to improve their insulin resistance while they're on vacation. And that's going to look different than if you're okay with your blood sugar staying the same and not being any different from day one to the end of your vacation. That's a different approach that you're gonna have to use different tools to get there if you're okay with your blood sugars looking worse at the end of your vacation than when you started, that's fine too.
[00:06:40] There's no right or wrong answer here. The most powerful thing about normalizing your blood sugars, reversing your diabetes, improving or fixing your insulin resistance, whatever phrase you want to use. The most powerful thing about doing it once as you realize you can do it again, you know exactly how to do it. So if you're one of those women who are like, I'm okay. If my blood sugars look a little worse at the end of vacation than they do when I start, that's totally fine because you know how to get them to look better again. That's all it means.
[00:07:11] So starting with that because you're going to utilize the tools that I'm offering you differently because based on what you want to have the end of your vacation look at look like once you've made that decision, then I want you to start planning what you want to do that's important during that vacation. Maybe it's sites you want to see, experiences you want to have with your family, memories you want to build with your family or friends. And then how you want to incorporate food into this or how your brain will want to incorporate food into it. Allow your brain to start to do that.
[00:07:49] We're going on vacation. We leave on Monday to go to Colorado. Me and my kids are going to Colorado. My parents are meeting us out there. A girlfriend of mine from residency is meeting us out there. It's going to be a blast. It's going to be amazing. Part of that trip is my son and I are going to climb a mountain. I know big shock are there. We're going to go climb a mountain and I am going to bring s'mores so that he and I can have s'mores as we spend the night on the trailhead. I don't even know if the campfires are like legal. I may have to do s'mores over like little fire starter thing, a little camp stove. But either way, like that's important to me. I want to have that experience with my son of eating s'mores. Just one. Turns out I've had s'mores and I don't really like them that much. I used to when I was a kid and I certainly have overeaten them no less than 3000 times. It turns out I don't like them that much. But I definitely want to sit and have a fire under the stars with my son the night before we hike up a 14 er, it sounds like the most. Okay. So my brain is building that memory in my head, and it definitely involves s'mores. I want you to allow your brain to determine what food is going to be brought into this. If you're going on a cruise with your best friends and you know there's going to be eating, you're going to have to figure out, like, how important is that to you? How is that going to work for you, and how are you going to make plans based on that? Okay, so here's the deal, guys. If I eat s'mores all vacation long, my blood sugars are probably going to go up. Okay? If that's all I did was sit and indulge in s'more like foods all vacation long, my blood sugars would probably go high. So I have to have a plan if I don't want my blood sugars to go high and I don't, I have to have a plan for how I'm going to manage that, how I'm going to mitigate that high blood sugar. And that's really what these tools are, is I'm going to teach you ways to dampen the effect of what you may be doing on vacation. Now, some people will go on vacation, and they're not going to have s'mores or any kind of food like that. They're going to go on vacation. They're going to just not have any of that food. In which case, they don't need to mitigate the effect of food on their vacation. They may need to mitigate the effect of stress or anxiety, or how do they bring joy into their vacation? And we're going to talk about that next week. How do I bring joy in my vacation? That has nothing to do with s'mores or other foods that make me sick. Okay?
[00:10:21] So I want you to decide, what is your vision? What, what is important on your vacation sites. You want to see experiences. You want to have memories you want to build, and then where is food going to come into those experiences that you're wanting to build? If there are joy eats, like, say, a s'mores at the trailhead overnight, like when you're camping with your kid, like, that's a joy eat for me. I don't eat s'mores on a regular basis, and I don't intend to start eating s'mores on a regular basis while I'm on vacation with my son. Where, you know, where am I going to have exception meals? Joy eats foods that I would not usually consume foods that do not serve my biology in any way and maybe even foods or drinks that actually actively work against my health. Okay, where are those going to be in my vacation plan for them? Be very clear what they are. Literally. I mean, like, I. I have mine so clear. I'm going to. I know what the sky is going to be doing. Like, in my brain, I have that planned out now. There could be rain and I hope not, knock on wood, but I have. I mean, it's going to be dark, so that means it's going to be late at night. That's also something I usually do not do, is eat late at night. There's going to be dark. It's going to be late at night. There's going to be graham crackers, and they're going to be marshmallows and there's going to be chocolate, and there's going to be my son, and I'm going to be sitting in this specific orange chair that I have. That's a camping chair, and there's going to be a tent set up and there's going to be some sort of flame, whether it be from a stove, a campfire stove, or whether it be from a campfire that we've built. That's. I mean, it's a very clear vision that I have of this and I want you to get clearer. The more clear you are with the vision, the more likely you are that you've planned for all of the obstacles that will come your way so that you can execute the plan that you're making for this joy. Eat without stumbling is really what it comes down to. So plan your joy eats, your joy emails, your exceptions. Okay? Plan those out before you go.
[00:12:20] And then I also want you to plantain for the typical meals you're going to eat. Like, what's going to be typical for you? Maybe it's going to be breakfast around ten before you leave the house with omelets. And then you're going to leave the house and you're going to go on adventures and you're going to do things, and then you're going to come back at night, maybe have a meal, or maybe it's going to be, you know, for me, that's typically what it is when I go on vacation, there's like eggs and breakfast in the morning and then we'll have a meal out. Like, that's probably going to be my reality on vacation. Okay, so at least get a protocol for your typical foods. Plan your joy eats. Clearly get a protocol for your typical foods.
[00:13:03] So after you have this plan of how, like this, this outline of how it's going to work, then you're going to figure out where you're going to implement these tools. Fasting, exercise, low carb or keto eating in those forms, stress management, sleep, and some of these other tools like apple cider vinegar and lemon water, you're going to start. Where are those things going to be implemented in this plan to, again, to mitigate, to dampen the effect of some of these negative outcomes that are looking, that I'm looking at. So fasting is a great tool to use. I love using fasting when I travel because I've realized where as much as, like, I think when I used to travel when I was younger, I probably negatively impacted my health more on those travel days than anything else because it was just a junk food aroma. It was twizzlers, it was Teddy Graham's. It was soda. It was just awful. What I've learned is travel days are great fasting days because there's nothing worth eating at a gas station. Even the healthy stuff like hard boiled eggs that I can get a gas station. Yeah, that's fine. And granddaddy, but there's nothing fancy about a hard boiled egg, right? I can have those any day, anytime, anywhere. An orange from a gas station. What I've realized is the fruit from gas station is it's not even like that. It's not organic or something. That's not what I mean by low quality. It's just low flavored food. It's cheap and it's low flavored or it's old. It's just not good. So, like, there's nothing at a gas station that is horribly compelling for me to eat. So fasting during travel days is kind of a gift. Same thing at an airport. Like, trying. Like, especially if you go to an airport and you eat at one of the nice restaurants, they are overpriced and their food is not that good. I don't know what it is about airports that they can't have decent food there, but even at the nice restaurants, the food is not that good. So travel days are great fasting days. So that is one place that I really like to utilize fasting. The other things that if you're going to have food that you know is not great for you, you know, how are you going to maybe utilize fasting to dampen the insulin effect of that food? So this might be, usually I eat in an eight hour window and I fast for 16 hours, but on vacation, I'm going to try to do a ten hour window of, um, eating or, I'm sorry, a six hour eating window and a 18 hours fasting window because I know I'm overeating. I'm either eating more or I know I'm eating food that is not healthy for my body and I want to give a little bit more time for my body to heal up from that before I start eating again. So decide how you're going to use fasting, your fasting regimen to help the other really powerful thing. Are you going to fast before you go on vacation? Maybe you decide. Before I go on vacation, I'm going to do, I'm really busy trying to get everything done and I know I fast easier when I'm really busy. So I'm just going to do a few longer fasts before I leave on vacation because that's going to help pre prep my biology for the food that I intend to eat on vacation.
[00:16:18] So it's interesting doing something beforehand out of being, you know, strong and proud and preparation, like doing something beforehand out of planning versus having to fast because you ate a bunch of junk you didn't plan for after vacation, like having to do the fast after vacation out of this place that I did some things I wasn't so proud of. I think that's a huge difference and how we utilize fasting. I would never encourage you to utilize fasting to make up for something that you were out of control doing. Like you're going to probably need to figure out why you were doing something out of control. And we'll talk about that a little bit. But I do think sometimes it's powerful. I use fasting this way on the holidays, like on Thanksgiving. Like my fast will start on Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and I usually fast through until I eat my Thanksgiving meal. And the reason that I do it is because I know I'm having grandma's apple high and I'm going to have, you know, some foods that aren't part of my typical eating regimen.
[00:17:17] So fasting beforehand can be something that's a useful tool to help you prepare for that vacation. Food that you're going to eat that's not part of your typical food.
[00:17:27] So that's how you can use fasting. Let's talk about exercise. Exercise is definitely something, you know, as I think about the s'more that I'm going to eat with my son, I'm going to have a s'more. And I don't even know, he may not even smores, but I bet he will. Um, at the campfire, like the next day, I'm going to be hiking 15 miles.
[00:17:45] Right. So how do we utilize exercise to mitigate, to lower, to dampen some of the negative impact of the foods that we're eating? Remember, exercise helps your cells become insulin sensitive and the impact after exercise. So from one exercise session, that impact can last for up to 72 hours after one single exercise sessions. Session. If you're not familiar, if you don't know the information on exercise and how it impacts your blood sugars, go and check the podcasts from June of this year, June of 2024, there are three different episodes. I think it's 254, 55, and 56. I talk about exercise and how it helps your blood sugar. So go and check that out if you're not sure. But exercise is a very powerful tool to help improve your insulin sensitivity. So reverse your insulin resistance. How are you going to use this and deciding ahead of time and using this as a tool, maybe you're going to increase your exercise. Maybe you're going to do more intense exercise because, you know, you're eating more foods that aren't typical for you, making sure that you have a place to exercise. So if you're going on a cruise ship, like where's the gym? Because almost all cruise ships have a gym, and they almost always have a track, how is that going to look for you? If you're not going to be on a cruise ship, if you're going to be somewhere else, how is that exercise going to look for you? Get that planned ahead of time.
[00:19:07] Low carbon keto is another great tool to use for, you know, our time on vacation. So I will offer, I used to teach keto as a pretty, um, I don't know, staple of how to improve your blood sugars. And although it will improve your blood sugars, I don't know that it improves your health overall.
[00:19:27] It can, it's not that it cannot do it, it's just it takes a lot of planning and a lot of calculations to get you there. Recognize when you go keto, you're cutting out carbs. When you cut out carbs, you're cutting out fiber. And fiber. Fiber is a huge player in our health, the health of our biology of our body. When we're not eating fiber, we're not feeding the gut microbiome in our body. When we're not feeding the gut microbiome in our body, they're not producing the healthy chemicals. And there are all sorts of messengers that come from that, from our gut microbiome. They are producing things that benefit your biology, your endocrine function. So make sure that your eating lots of fiber. And when you're doing keto, it's really hard to do that. And so that's why I don't recommend this as a long term tool. But if you're using it to, um, again, to dampen the effect of some of the higher carb foods that you're eating while you're on vacation, I think that that makes a lot of sense. Um, stress management, this can be a huge thing. Depending on where you're going on vacation and what you're doing. If you're seeing family that stresses you out, that can cause you may need to really invest some energy into developing a stress management tool. If you're going out with your kids and they're at a certain age, they can be stressful. Okay? So, you know, exercise is part of stress management. Yoga can be part of stress management. Meditation can be part of stress management. And ladies, setting time aside for you to relax is clearly part of stress management and should be a part of every vacation. So start to protect some time out of your day on out of each day on vacation. This is part of your plan, right? Start to protect some time for you to enjoy yourself and relax a little bit while you're on vacation.
[00:21:11] Sleep is another important player on vacation. You're going to want to make sure, I mean, like, you should be coming back rested. You're going to want to make sure you're getting seven to 9 hours of sleep. Do understand, when you're sleeping in beds that are not yours, you're not your typical bed. They may mess with your blood sugars and with your sleep cycles and with your stress. So don't be surprised. It may say, take some time and you may have to devote more time. Like, instead of sleeping 7 hours a night, which you do at home, you may have to sleep eight, eight and a half, 9 hours a night to get rested because you're sleeping in a weird place.
[00:21:45] So I also want to talk about apple cider vinegar and lemon water. Both of these have been, I mean, you can put them together, but I do them separately, but both of them have been, um, shown to have benefits on your blood sugars. They just improve your glycemic control. And again, part of this is because of what they. The interaction between the apple cider vinegar and the gut microbiome, the chemicals that that gut microbiome is making when it is exposed to this apple cider vinegar. If you know you're eating some foods that aren't great. And you're wanting to, again, dampen that impact on your body and on your insulin resistance. Two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar in the morning and two again in the evening. So four total throughout the day has shown benefit to improving your blood sugars and improving your insulin sensitivity. Okay. And that's the opposite of what's caused your diabetes. Insulin resistance is the opposite of insulin sensitivity, and insulin resistance causes your type two diabetes. So if you can improve the insulin sensitivity, you're. You're, like, reversing. You're doing the opposite of the diabetes. So, um, apple cider vinegar and lemon water, and again, a tablespoon of lemon juice, real lemon juice, and 32oz of water is usually enough. I honestly just take it and dump it upside down, squirt some in there and call it good and drink it. Those two things can be helpful to help dampen the effect of some of these foods. Now, recognize, guys, there is no amount of apple cider vinegar or lemon water that you're going to have that's going to pull your a one c from a twelve to a four. That's not going to happen. But again, it will dampen the impact that some of these foods are having on your biology.
[00:23:22] So, last, I want to talk about this as a decision. These are all decisions.
[00:23:28] S'mores are not good or bad. They're just s'mores. The food that you're eating is not good or bad. It's just food. It's just food. Like, some of it's not really food. It's like food, like substances, but you consuming foods that are not, you know, ideal for your blood sugars, it's not a good or a bad thing. It's just there's a biological consequence to the things you eat. Okay?
[00:23:51] Recognizing that you are always in control of deciding to have that consequence or not.
[00:23:59] Don't make food choices from this feeling of being out of control or something's right or wrong. You're always in control when you're eating from a sense or from a feeling of being out of control, you're going to have results that are out of control. It's just how it goes. Okay? If you're at a restaurant that you've never been to before, as happens when you're on vacation, and your thought is, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to find anything that I can eat here. I don't know that there's anything even on this menu that works for me. You feel out of control at the very least you feel uncertain and your action is to order something that's like, oh, it's the best I can do, right? Like, I guess lasagna is the best I can do. I'll order that. I guess I'll order buttered chicken fingers and fries. I guess I'll have the barbecue and the baked beans. Right? Barbecue and baked beans shouldn't be bad. Except everybody, if you're not aware, barbecue sauce is actually meat syrup. That's all it is. And baked beans are loaded with sugar. Okay? So those things are going to pop your blood sugars up like nobody's business.
[00:25:02] It shouldn't be that way. It's like barbecue should be meat, but it's not. It's meat smothered in meat syrup. Okay, barbecue sauce. So when your brain's like, there's nothing I'm going to be able to eat here, I don't know what I'm going to be able to eat here. And you feel that out of control, like, I've got to eat something that's not right for me. Your results are going to be out of control. Your sugars are going to jump up in an out of control fashion. The fact of the matter is, shifting your thoughts here is so important. You are always in control of the food that goes into your mouth.
[00:25:36] When you're going to a restaurant you've never been to, you're always in control of what you eat there. You have options.
[00:25:46] There's always the option to not eat anything. You can fast through that meal.
[00:25:52] There's also the option of getting something small like a cup of soup. Even if it's tortilla chicken soup and it's got tortilla in it. You can get that soup and just have a few bites or pick around the tortilla.
[00:26:04] You can always split something with somebody and you just have a couple bites of it and they eat the rest of it. Even if it's lasagna or some other horribly egregious food. Right. You can just have one or two bites, ladies, one or two bites of anything did not make anybody diabetic. You can have one or two bites of a Twinkie and ain't going to make anybody diabetic. It's eating a whole Twinkie and eating it all the time. That's what makes you sick.
[00:26:30] When you truly believe that you are always in control of the food that goes in your mouth, there is an in control feeling, a calm feeling that comes from that, from that calm space, you are going to create in control results you're going to just have a few bites. Whatever the crap tastic food that they have, you're going to have just a few bites of it. Or worse, you're going to order that dumpy side salad because it's lettuce and cucumbers and shredded carrots and tomatoes, and that is boring as all get out. But you're going to order it and you're going to eat it because you're in control of what you eat and you want to be in control of your blood sugars, and that's how you're going to get there, okay? So don't allow your brain to go to this out of control feeling when your brain does, when you feel out of control. And you'll know when you feel it, when you feel like you're out of control, when you start hearing the story, well, there's nothing I can eat here. I guess I'm just going to have to eat junk. When you start hearing that story in your brain, stop yourself and get that in check. You're always in control, okay? And when you know that you're always in control, that's when you start to always be in control of your blood sugars, okay? That's when you get the health that you're looking for.
[00:27:40] Next week, I want to talk about building joy into your vacation.
[00:27:45] We should not be spending money on big trips that don't have any joy built up in it. In the past, a lot of time we used food to bring that joy to our vacation. Those days are gone for you. So how are you going to bring joy into your vacation in a way that doesn't make you sick? That is what we're going to talk about next week.
[00:28:06] That's all I have for you this week, except for my warning about meds. If you are medicated for your type two diabetes, you have been medicated for the way you've eaten in the past. The barbecue at the restaurant on vacation. Right? The lasagna at the restaurant on vacation. You have been medicated because of those food choices. If you change those food choices, you're also going to have to change your medications. If you don't do this, you can end up quite sick with your those medications that will cause your blood sugar to go very low, the kind of low that involves a hospital visit, possibly a hospitalization, possibly even death. And that's not why you're making these choices to die early. You're making these choices to learn how to have a longer life, a more vital life, a more robust life. Okay. So you're going to have to get a clear line of communication open with your provider who's given you these meds so that you can share your blood sugar log with them and you know how to expect from them to hear back about changes you need to make on your medication regimen. Okay? So call their office and ask them how they want you to share your blood sugars with them and how they intend to tell you the changes they need you to make on your meds so that you're safe making these changes. If you're not sure what to eat, go to my website, delanemd.com. go to forward slash better. B E T t E R. There's a 14 days to better blood sugar log there that will tell you 14 days of menus of what to eat. I am revamping that. I'm so excited. I'm revamping that. I'm doing the same food, but I'm going to, um, also calculate the carbon or, I'm sorry, the protein count on those foods so you can make sure you're getting enough protein, so you can make sure you're building the muscles that are important for you to normalize your blood sugars. And also, I'm adding fiber so some of those carbohydrate counts are going to go up because we need to be getting more fiber into our food. So stay tuned for the new and improved version of 14 days to better blood sugars. But go and get that guide. It will get you on my email list and I will email out the new version as soon as it's ready to go. You can also find me on Instagram and Facebook. And lastly, I have a request. If you have been finding benefit from this podcast, from these episodes, you're learning ways to improve your health, improve your blood sugars, normalize your insulin resistance. If that's been helpful for you, recognize that nine out of ten Americans are insulin resistant. That means the more people that hear about this, the more people can realize that they don't need to be sick either. Share this on Instagram. Like it on your podcast player, share it on Facebook. Tell your friends about it. The more you do that, the more people see this podcast and the more people can get the salt. I want you to keep listening. I want you to keep avoiding the foods that are making you sick. I want you to keep making choices for your health, your longevity and your vitality. I will be back next week and I'll talk to you then. Bye.
