Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You are listening to episode number 263 of Better Blood Sugars with Delaine, 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. Hey there, and welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad you're taking a few minutes today to commit to your help, to commit to you, to give yourself some space to learn some things that are important to you. I'm glad you're doing that, and I'm really grateful that you're choosing to spend this time with me. This month, we're talking about stress. It's the month of August. Last week, I talked about the physiology of stress in your human body and what happens with your blood sugars when we're stressed. And today I want to talk about other ways that stress, stress impacts our experience and of course, in turn, our health. I want to discuss buffering today. And buffering is an unhealthy way, sometimes unhealthy way that we manage stress. And I want to talk about some strategies or at least break down what we do and why we do it. So maybe you can find some other ways to manage stress in a way that doesn't necessarily have the negative health impacts.
[00:01:21] So let's talk about what buffering is, and what do I mean by that? So, buffering, if you look it up in the dictionary, the verb means to lessen or moderate the impact of something. So, where I see this in women with type two diabetes, is when we use food to lessen or moderate the impact or negative feeling of a certain experience. So some of these examples you're going to be really familiar with, or if you're not telling if this sounds familiar, because I think it probably is something we've all experienced. You're overwhelmed in the afternoon, and so you want to visit the candy drawer. In offices that I've worked at, there's always this drawer, there's always this place where there's candy, right? Maybe it's a jar, maybe it's a dish. Or when I was in residency, one of the nurses had an entire, I mean, entire drawer in her desk that was devoted to candy. So may, you know, maybe it's overwhelm in the afternoon, and you turn to the candy drawer to manage that feeling of overwhelm, or you've gotten home, you're exhausted, you've run the kids different practices. You're done cleaning the dishes from dinner. You help the kids with their homework. They're in the rooms getting ready for bed, and suddenly the ice cream starts talking to you, and you start eating the ice cream, or you want to eat the ice cream.
[00:02:44] These are times when we rely on food to manage our emotions, our situations, or the way that we feel. These particular examples really lead to many negative outcomes. Certainly, insulin resistance is worsened by these behaviors. Nobody's stress eating celery, nobody's turning to carrot sticks when they're overwhelmed in the middle of the afternoon. These processed foods, you know, the things that we turn to to manage these emotional emotions are typically processed foods. They have additives in them that make you heavily crave for them. Okay? They create cravings. They're designed. They are engineered to make you want more of them, because the people who make processed foods only make money if you buy it. And so if they can make you want more of it, they're going to do that because they make more money that way. I don't know that it's evil or the devil, but it is what it is. These are foods are designed to make you crave them and crave them heavily. The more you consume them, the more you will want them. So that's one issue, right? Like, if you're wanting to get in control the way you eat, if you're wanting to be the one making the decisions, and you don't want to be pulled around the world by your desire for foods that are making you sick, if that's something you're wanting to fix. Cutting processed foods from your experience is a. I mean, it's just a requirement of. Of fixing that part.
[00:04:14] The other part of processed foods that makes using them to manage overwhelming exhaustion an issue is that they cause insulin resistance. And I talked about this a little bit last week. I really talked about how stress impacts the cells. But there are multiple mechanisms that the additives or the ingredients in processed foods use. They're not using it intentionally, but there are a number of different mechanisms that occur from these foods that create insulin resistance in our cells. And if you are not aware, recognize your type two diabetes is a result of insulin resistance. In 99% of Americans, it is a result of insulin resistance. Okay? So type two diabetes, in 99% of the cases is a result of insulin resistance. And what this means is when your cells get exposed to insulin, they do not behave the way they should, the way they normally would in a non insulin resistant situation.
[00:05:18] Normally the way they should, or the non insulin resistant situations, what cells should do in the presence of insulin is open up and bring glucose inside and burn that glucose off as fuel. That's what should be happening in insulin resistance. There is not. That mechanism does not happen. They. Your cells are not recognizing the insulin, insulin. They're resistant to doing what the insulin is asking them to do. So they don't open up, they don't bring glucose in, and they don't burn that off as energy. Okay? That, of course, allows your blood sugars to climb very high outside the cell. And that's what we pick up on laboratory findings or perk machines, as being elevated blood sugars or diabetes. So, in addition to the cravings that these processed foods create, they also create insulin resistance and your diabetes. So managing foods or using these foods to buffer your negative experience, of course, is not. It's going to lead. It's going to contribute to your diabetes.
[00:06:28] So, a lot of times, we will have this experience. I'm exhausted after work. The kids are finally getting into bed, and I'm going to relax with carton of ice cream. Or we have the candy drawer, because we're overwhelmed. In the afternoon, we start eating the candy, and then we start to let that feeling of out of control or failure set in again. We have this negative emotion, and because we've made a habit of turning to something to kind of, you know, minimize that negative experience, because we've made that habit now we have this feeling of out of control or failure, and we want. Want to minimize that. So what do we do? Oh, for dinner, instead of making the chicken salad that I thought I would make, I think we're just going to get pizza. I'll just have one or two or four pieces. And then, because I'm such a failure at the whole entire day, I think I'll just have the ice cream. Okay. This behavior of using food, buffering with food, buffering away a negative experience with food, leads to the feeling of being out of control, and it leads to the feeling of failure. And because we've made a habit of managing our negative emotions with food, it tends to cause us to turn to the food more. I want you to think about how it would feel. If this sounds familiar, if this afternoon story of feeling overwhelmed and turning to candy drawer sounds familiar to you, if the evening of feeling exhausted and turning to the ice cream is something you've experienced, I want you to stop for a moment and think if you were not going to use the foods, if you were not going to use the candy drawer and the chocolate in the candy drawer, if you are not going to have the ice cream or maybe popcorn or whatever it is in the evening, if you weren't going to eat those foods, what would you be feeling?
[00:08:16] What feeling would come over your body?
[00:08:20] Would it be overwhelm? Would it be exhaustion? And then I want you to think about what actually fixes those feelings for overwhelm. What fixes those feelings is making a to do list and going through it and doing the things on your to do list for exhaustion. What fixes that feeling is getting a nap or going to bed. Ice cream never fixes exhaustion. Ice cream does not resolve your sleepiness. Sleep resolves your sleepiness.
[00:08:54] Chocolate does not resolve the task list that you have to do. Getting it organized and doing the task list. That resolves the task list. I call this hiring out food to do a job it's really not qualified to do.
[00:09:09] Sleep fixes fatigue. Taskless or, like, organization fixes overwhelm. Food does not. And you're hiring food to do a job it doesn't do. It doesn't do it well. And now our brain is all under the effect of dopamine from all this highly processed foods that we're not even thinking clearly. So we make a decision like, you know what? I'm. I'm not doing salad this evening. I'm gonna do pizza. I'm gonna have two pieces or maybe even four or five. And then because I've screwed it all up, I'm gonna continue making bad decisions because my brain's under the effect of dopamine, I'm gonna have some ice cream. This is buffering, and I hope it sounds familiar. Most women, fine. I mean, I think we've all had this experience.
[00:09:48] When you stop using these techniques for buffering, a lot of times what you find is that you use other things to buffer, right? So, like, you're not having the candy. So you've realized, okay, this is a problem. I'm not having the candy in the afternoon. I'm not going to eat the ice cream after everybody's in bed. I'm done doing it that way. I'm going to do something else. But then we start to turn to other buffering techniques. So that might be watching too much tv and not getting in bed. That might be shopping. That might be overworking. It can be a ton of different things, but I think it's important to see what makes something buffering. So I want to talk about, what does it mean? Why is it buffering? Why is eating, you know, one piece of candy is not buffering. One piece of candy does not create diabetes. So what makes it buffering?
[00:10:36] I want to talk a little bit about what true pleasure and what artificial or false pleasure is. Okay? Because that is a great way to distinguish about when is it buffering.
[00:10:46] So what makes it buffering? When you're using something in a way that makes you sick, certainly that's buffering.
[00:10:53] If you feel out of control and you're continuing to do it, even though you don't want to do it, like you're feeling out of control, like it's controlling you as buffering when you're actively. No, I'm avoiding this feeling. In turn, I'm going to use this activity, whether it be food, alcohol. We do this with social media. We do this with netflixing and chilling whatever it is, no matter how, like, which thing you're turning to, if you're avoiding a feeling with that, that is very clearly buffering. Okay. And there's nothing wrong with this. There's not a problem with this. And I'm going to talk about what I mean. But I do want you to see it's not just the food. Many things can be buffering.
[00:11:40] Cleaning. Cleaning is a great one. So, yes, netflixing, that's, you know, netflixing and chilling. Instead of taking care of tasks that we need to be doing, we choose to binge watch a show. Cleaning I use used this all the time in medical school. I always used to joke that my kitchen was never as clean as when it was test week, because if I had a test, anything sounded more appealing than studying for the test, including cleaning my kitchen. So the joke was that the kitchen was the cleanest it was ever going to be during test week. We can shop using shopping. Thank God for Amazon. We can shop all the time, anytime. And it's so easy. And a lot of times we'll use shopping as a buffering technique. Instead of doing something like, there's a boring task I need to do, there is a, I've got to clean the kitchen, and I don't want to clean the kitchen now. So anything. And suddenly shopping, it's like, oh, but I need that brush off of Amazon or whatever, and we're ordering some random thing that you've lived for years without, but suddenly it's so imperative. You've got to do it. Shopping can be buffering. Buffering social media is a big buffering thing. We're starting to see what everybody's doing, what is my old friend from high school doing? Oh, what's her mom doing? What's her sister. I can't believe her sister did that. What's my ex doing? What's their new girlfriend doing? I mean, like, we just, like, rabbit hole, and it's all buffering. Okay, so none of these things are inherently evil, including the ice cream or the chocolate drawer, the candy drawer. None of it's inherently evil. It's simply a question of what are you avoiding, and are you using these things in a way that you don't like or that causes a negative effect?
[00:13:25] This is the key. It's not the specific behavior. It's not the specific food.
[00:13:31] It's, are you using it in a way that you don't like? So are you shopping for some crazy thing on Amazon? When you want to be saving money, you're doing something you don't like. This is not the way you want to be showing up instead of, like, randomly going down a social media rabbit hole and searching everybody that you've ever known since you were five.
[00:13:52] Are you, like, I should be doing this task. I should be paying the bills. I should be cleaning the kitchen. I should be painting this area. I should be getting ready for something, whatever it is. Are you doing something? Are you doing this buffering activity in place of something else and, like, showing up to the world in a way you don't like it is really what it comes down to. So I want to round this out with true versus artificial or false pleasures. So I want to define these things. Pleasures are things that make us feel good. True pleasures are things that make us feel good but are slow to create a negative outcome versus faults. Or artificial pleasures are things that make us feel good and are quick to have a negative or a bad outcome. There's a poem. It's called comes the dawn. The author apparently is unknown. I've known this poem since I was probably 14 years old, and I think of it regularly. It has a line in it. It says, even sunshine burns if you get too much. We, as human beings, need sunshine. We make vitamin D with it. We have all sorts of things that. I mean, it's warm. It warms our heart. It warms our soul. It's good for us. The sunshine is. But even the sunshine burns if we get too much. So there are things that can bring us pleasure, but if we overdo it, it can. Anything, even sunshine burns if you get too much. Anything can cause a problem if we overuse it.
[00:15:17] True pleasures, though, tend to be things that create something real. So creative work, artwork can be a true pleasure. Now, can you overdo it and skip out on the rest of your life because you're busy painting or doing pottery? Yes, but for the most part, there is something real that is created from the pleasure that we derive from doing art or doing something creative. The high of exercise. Right? Like me, for when I go for a run in the morning. Yep. I'm sure I have no idea. I get this dopamine hit. I love it. It's wonderful. I do that. That's awesome. But certainly you can over exercise to a point that it's not great for you. Loved ones. Getting hugs from my babies, all my babies, any hugs that I can get from my babies, that gives me a huge surge of feel good neurochemistry. But if I'm getting hugs from people and leaning on that feel goodedness, even though it's a toxic relationship, that's a problem. Time in nature also creates. That's a natural, true pleasure that we get as human beings. But if you're skipping out on everything else in life, to go out and nature walk, like that's going to be a problem. A warm bath, playing with your pet, connecting with good friends, or a loved one. All of these are true pleasures that actually create amazing things in our experience, things that are known to be healthy. All of it can be overdone. Even sunshine burns if we get too much. But artificial pleasures are a lot more like processed foods. They're typically technologically enhanced or an experience of modernity. Right. There's something in our modern world that we didn't have 10,000 years ago. There's something enhancing these experiences, and they kind of create this unnatural experience and neurochemistry that kind of allows us to lose ourselves in the activity or the experience, and we overindulge in them in a way that doesn't add to our lives. Video games are a really, really great example. The natural experience of video games is that we are being successful and accomplishing something.
[00:17:23] But of course, in a video game, it's an entirely unreal, non real sort of way. Shopping can be the same thing. We're drawn to want to accumulate things.
[00:17:34] However, if we already have enough, there's no need to accumulate more. So it's like drawing us in this artificial way. Also, 10,000 years ago, there wasn't the opportunity to over accumulate. Right? Alcohol use, drug use, same thing. We feel good, but there's no good outcome. In fact, there's only negative outcomes that come from that all sorts of things really draw us in to over experiencing something because we feel good while we do it at the expense of something greater. In our experience.
[00:18:02] These, you know, I guess, faults, you know, as the word I'm using, artificial pleasures or false pleasures are typically causing an enhanced neurochemistry in our brain. And then that leads us to make compromises that give us negative effects that we don't want in our life.
[00:18:20] So anything can be overdone and lead to a negative outcome. Artificial pleasures certainly tend to do this more quickly. But see, in your life, if you are eating in a way that you have created type two diabetes or insulin resistance in your body, it is almost always because you're doing it from this out of control phase or place. You know, that the chocolate cake's a problem, yet you continue to eat it. If that's happening, I want you to pause and not eat it and see what feelings it is that comes up when you don't eat it, because that's what you're running from, okay? And you're using the chocolate cake to buffer it. And that's why it's important to understand this. Like, oh, this is buffering and this is not working for me. I need to find some other way to do this. I highly recommend turning to the natural pleasures, but kind of like the natural pleasures I talk about this, you know, sugar and flour stimulate the same neurochemistry as heroin and morphine do, right? But nobody's stealing from grandma to get M and Ms. Recognize there's an intensity with the artificial things. There is a higher intensity with the artificial pleasures than there are with the natural pleasures. So if you think you're going to get the buzz that you get from M and M's or chocolate cake from a hug from a loved one, it's probably not going to be as intense. And that's.
[00:19:43] So I want you to check this out, and if you have any questions, make sure you reach out to me. Delanemd.com dot before we sign off, I do want to give you a warning. If you are medicated for your diabetes and you make these changes that I recommend in these episodes, you probably will need to change your meds. Also, you need to get in touch with your doctor and find out how they want you sharing your new blood sugars with them and how they intend to share med changes with you. It's really important that you do that so you don't get sick. Like death kind of sick. Okay. If you need to know what to eat, go to delanemd.com. better and you can download the 14 days to better Blood Sugars guide. If you have any questions about any of it, you email me. Lastly, I do have an ask if you're enjoying this podcast and getting benefits from it, please rate and review the podcast on your podcast player. The more people that know about this podcast, the more people can figure out that they don't need to live sick for the rest of their lives. Write it and review it on your podcast player. Share it on your social media. Lastly, keep listening. Keep avoiding the foods that are making you sick. Keep making the choices for your health, your life, your longevity, and your vitality. I'll talk to you next week. Bye.
