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Far 2 Fabulous
Join Catherine & Julie, your feisty hosts at Far 2 Fabulous, as they lead you on a wellness revolution to embrace your fabulousness.
Julie, a Registered Nutritional Therapist with over 20 years of expertise, and Catherine, a former nurse turned Pilates Instructor and Vitality Coach, blend wisdom and laughter seamlessly.
Off the air, catch them harmonising in their local choir and dancing to 80's hits in superhero attire. Catherine braves the sea for year-round swims, while Julie flips and tumbles in ongoing gymnastics escapades.
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Far 2 Fabulous
Mastering Metabolic Health: The Detailed Guide to Blood Sugar Management and Continuous Glucose Monitoring
Epsiode 37
Can you imagine how something as simple as sugar could be controlling your energy levels and overall health? This week on Far Too Fabulous, Catherine and Julie take you on an eye-opening exploration into the world of sugar. We break down the journey of sugar in your body—from ingestion to conversion into glucose, and the critical role insulin plays. Discover how different carbohydrates, like white rice and jacket potatoes, influence blood sugar levels and the potential complications of excess glucose, such as fatty liver and fat storage.
Fruit juices might seem like a healthy choice, but did you know they can be laden with more sugar than you think? We debunk common misconceptions about these so-called health foods, emphasizing the benefits of consuming whole fruits for their fiber and nutrients. We also delve into the importance of monitoring blood sugar levels to prevent conditions like type 2 diabetes, and why the HbA1c test might not be the ultimate solution for everyone. Learn the significance of maintaining stable blood sugar levels for your overall health and well-being.
Lastly, we dive into the world of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) and how they're transforming the way non-diabetics understand their metabolic health. Julie shares her personal experience using a CGM and uncovers surprising insights about stress and its impact on blood sugar levels. Explore the connection between blood glucose, sleep quality, and stress responses, and understand how CGMs can offer personalized health data. This episode is a treasure trove of information for anyone looking to better manage their metabolic health, packed with practical tips and real-life experiences. Tune in and take control of your health journey with us!
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Welcome to Far Too Fabulous hosted by Julie and.
Speaker 2:Catherine, join us on a mission to embrace your fabulousness and redefine wellness. Get ready for some feistiness, inspiration, candid chats and humour as we journey together towards empowered well-being.
Speaker 1:Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Far Too Fabulous podcast. I'm here again with Catherine and Normal Format, and today we're going to talk about sugar, but not in a way that you're expecting. We're going to be talking about what happens when you measure your blood sugars, what it's telling you and some devices that are used and things like that really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Usually we're fairly mean about it. We're going to be just a bit more, um, hopefully informative and useful about it. Really, let's hope so. Let's give it a go anyway, and I'm really I've been looking forward to this one because we're jumping ahead a bit, but, um, julie really closely monitored her blood glucose for a while and I've been looking forward to picking her brains about it, so you can get to come along for the ride. But let's start at the very beginning, because it's a very good place to start.
Speaker 2:No, I'm not going to have that song stuck in my head. Don't rain me, no no, no. So what happens? I'm going to start singing Spoonful of sugar as well in a minute as well, no let's just get them all over and done with. What happens when we have a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. What happens in our body?
Speaker 1:great questions. So last week, when we were talking about brain health, we were talking about that it's important to have a low sugar diet. Yeah, but we didn't necessarily go into what that actually means. But I'm going to start by explaining to you what happens when you actually eat sugar and what we got to remember is that sugar, I think sometimes we think that sugar is just the white stuff- literally, yeah, a spoonful of sugar.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but actually last week, when we were talking about sugar, we were talking about white rice yeah, we did talk about white rice, but it's basically any of your carbohydrates are going to have glucose in them. That's the sugar. When it goes into your system, the body is changing it into glucose and that goes into your blood. So, if everything's working correctly, you eat your food, and that could be a jacket potato. So you eat your jacket potato and your body recognises that the starch in that potato is going to be used as fuel in the body in the form of sugar, and sugar is the body's predominant ingredient for making energy.
Speaker 2:So it's very important does it know the difference between a jacket potato and a spoonful of sugar?
Speaker 1:no, it doesn't when we're looking at glucose, but when the glucose turns up at the place it needs to be, which is inside the cell, it knows if it hasn't got the co-factors that it needs to make energy. So a spoonful of sugar like we said about the rice last week is it's not got any of the minerals or the vitamins with it. But if you eat something like a jacket potato, then you've got the other cofactors that it can then change the glucose into your energy, which comes out the other side. I always think about it like a factory yeah, that comes out. The other side is atp, that's your energy, and then you can spend that energy on the things that are happening in your body. But yeah, you eat your jacket potato, it goes into your stomach, it goes through to your small intestines. At that point the glucose gets absorbed into the bloodstream and then it needs to get into the cell. So you get a signal to your pancreas that says release the insulin. The insulin is the thing that pairs the glucose to take it into the cell.
Speaker 1:Now what happens if the glucose doesn't get into the cell or there's too much glucose? So when we're looking at measuring blood glucose levels, we're looking at how much is circulating in the blood. We're not looking at what's in the cells. Yeah, so we're just looking at the blood level. But from our perspective on using the sugars and getting the energy, we want the glucose to get into the cell with the aid of insulin. But there's only so many receptors on the cell for that to get inside and some people have issues with getting their product into the cell because they've got genetic issues or they've got nutrient deficiencies and some people have too much sugar.
Speaker 1:So it arrives at the cell and it overloads that system and then the body knows, because the body's clever, the body knows that if the blood sugar levels are too high it has to do something radical. So it will immediately send any of that excess to the liver to get converted to glycogen for storage later, for when you haven't got any sugar and you need some energy. Then it gets released by the liver. But if we have too much going to the liver, we get fatty liver, fatty liver, yeah. Yeah, go into the liver, we get fatty liver, fatty liver, yeah. And if we've got too much, generally, the body can convert it into fat and it will get stored. Excess glucose will get stored as fat, but that is a more well, it's a less efficient way of making energy, then. So you actually want your insulin to work, you want the receptors to work, you want the sugar to get from the bloodstream into the cell and you want to have the cofactors to make your energy.
Speaker 2:I literally think in all my years of, of nursing and well-being, that has never been explained quite so simply and brilliantly as that thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm glad that you that that's come across in a simple way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like to make things simple, as you know absolutely because you can then literally like picture your blood filled with all I can because I like those visual things filled with sugar and then those insulins coming along and and and sorting it out. And if there's too much sugar, if you've gone and absolutely binged to either as a nice carb binge or a a sweetie binge, how there's, then there's then way too much for the body to deal with, yeah, and then it kind of sweeps it off into the liver.
Speaker 1:Yeah, terrifying yeah, it is. It's quite terrifying. And of if we eat too much sugar and we are not firing up our pancreas as well as we should and we don't send out the insulin or the numbers of insulin aren't enough, then that causes a problem as well, because then you get extra rogue sugar molecules in your bloodstream that then can cause inflammation and end up where they shouldn't be yeah, in the brain, for example, although the brain does need sugar, which is why we give diabetics who are really low sugar they have to carry a packet of sweets with them yes, yeah, yeah, to give them a an instant hit yeah, which you would need in that situation.
Speaker 1:so if you are insulin resistant, which is a metabolic disorder that is becoming more and more common, it's because, basically, your body's got so sick of too much sugar coming in it decides not to bother, to be receptive to the sugar. That's basically what happens. So the sugar's there waiting to get into the cell and the cells just like yeah, I've seen this before, can't be bothered. You keep sending this to me and I'm just I'm all sugared out, I can't take any more stimulation from the sugar. Nothing's coming in. Now I'm not having it.
Speaker 2:That is a dire situation, by the way, being insulin resistant, and so that is just from continually having too much sugar in your diet too much sugar, or too much sugar without the co-factors or the pancreas not releasing enough insulin yeah, yeah there's lots of factors involved there, but basically insulin resistance is diabetes, isn't it?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah so that's basically, in a nutshell, how your body deals with sugar when you eat it, and the thing I find really fascinating is that, because back in the day we didn't have access to sugar like we do now, our body still thinks that when it signals us to have sugar, it thinks that we're literally going to go forage for some berries. Yes, that's what our body thinks. It doesn't think we're going to go down the corner shop and buy a bar of chocolate, does it?
Speaker 1:no um the capacity for our system to deal with sugar is very limited, so when we get beyond five teaspoons of sugar, that's when the body really starts to struggle.
Speaker 2:And there's a huge difference, isn't there, between a handful of berries and a handful of Haribo, when you're talking about the amount of sugar.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can imagine that's a hell of a shock for the body.
Speaker 1:It is, and the body's got a really clever way to slow the sugars down and that's called fiber.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean it makes you a little boat of fiber so that it steadily goes down there. So that's when I think about orange juice and I quite like orange juice and this has kind of ruined it for me but you think about like gulping a glass of orange juice and it just I'm back into slides again now and it's sliding straight down into your system and your whole system going ah, I don't know what to do with this, Throw it at the liver. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I can just imagine this absolute chaos going on, Whereas if you ate an orange or something like that, and it creates that, little fiber boat, so it just it just meanders down the river going here I have some sugar, here I have some sugar, yeah, yeah yeah, that is pretty much what happens.
Speaker 1:And you're right, your body when you put in a load of sugar and we all like sugar, don't we? It is nice and that's because we are dependent on it and we've got those signals in our body that tell us that we've, we've we've mentioned this before we've won the lottery. Yeah, especially if we put the fat and the sugar together.
Speaker 2:Remember we spoke about that before like ice cream and stuff.
Speaker 1:You put those two together, the body's like I am good for the winter, I've got a good stock up of of sugar and fat and it keeps coming in at the moment. That's great. So, yeah, we get. We get those that side of it, which doesn't help us. But if we have a lot of sugar going in at once, like your orange juice, it's a massive emergency situation for the body to deal with and the hyperactivity that comes from it Makes sense when you think about it. If you've got too much sugar In your body bloodstream and your body needs to do something with it, what's the easiest way for it to manage it to burn it off?
Speaker 2:is to get you going yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So it wants you to go running around like a crazy one? Yeah, and we've all seen our. We've all seen kids at a birthday party when they've had too much sugar. Right, we've all been there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely no, that's, that's really. It's. It's very interesting and it's. The thing is like and I used the example of the orange juice because lots of people think that they're being good drinking orange juice and we were talking about apple juice, weren't we earlier on how you think that you're, you're being good, but even the and again and we don't want to talk about goods and bad thinking about I think about being good just for use of that word and it not actually being good. And then thinking about I think about being good just for use of that word and it not actually being good. And then thinking about the uh, like synthetic versions of orange juice and and apple juice from the concentrate, and how how much more sugar there is in those, and so you're being doubly bad. My english teacher is now. He's like turning in a grave probably she's not listening.
Speaker 1:It's fine, you can. You can botch the english language as much as you like. Doubly bad. I do a lot and I always say it's because I'm from strewed. Yeah, that my that I that I have these uh issues with the english language and my husband picks me up on it all the time and it so irritates me I'm pretty sure that people from hereford don't say doubly bad, but I do doubly bad, yeah.
Speaker 2:So yes, orange juice and apple juice highly concentrated doubly bad, doubly bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you do get the vitamins in that scenario, yeah, but you don't get the fiber. Yeah, and you've got when you, if you make actual juice yourself, you see how many pieces of fruit you have to juice to get, yeah, a glass of juice that says it all really doesn't it?
Speaker 2:yeah, absolutely. No, that is a good point. You do get, yeah, you do get the kind of the vitamins in it if you, if you're having the actual juice and not the highly concentrated stuff yeah.
Speaker 1:So what we're really aiming for when we are eating our food is that we've got sugar going in, that's got the cofactors and the fiber and there's not too much sugar at once, yeah, which, if you think about the foods that are processed and are inverted commas bad for us not doubly bad, bad. You're looking at food that's got no co-factors, no fiber, yeah, and just a load of sugar yeah and that's without talking about artificial sugars.
Speaker 2:That's another conversation, right okay, we'll have it, we'll. We'll have another podcast for that then. All right, so that was such a great explanation. So how can we know what our blood sugar is doing in our body? What? What tests are available? What can we do?
Speaker 1:okay, so we've identified that. It's a good thing to know. Yeah, and we don't want to leave it into the point where we've got symptoms and we go to the doctor and they run blood tests and then tell you you're pre-diabetic or even worse, you're diabetic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you can go and say your thing about being pre-diabetic I know you can't see me prickle on a on a podcast, but pre-diabetic just makes me prickle because surely we're all pre-diabetic, yeah, until we're diabetic. So I mean we're all doing everything. I mean I'm not actively not getting diabetes, but I am always looking after myself, hoping that I'm not not hoping. Because I'm not hoping I'm actively, I'm gonna give up talking. I'm actively working to not be a type 2 diabetic now we don't want to do that, do we?
Speaker 1:because we know that risk factors are involved and it's hideous and and no one wants that for themselves, and like we were talking last week about Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes is pretty preventable. Not only preventable, but reversible.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love a bit of reversible. But that could be quite a controversial thing, I've just said there for some people.
Speaker 1:But anyway it is, so let's leave that there for the moment, leave it hanging so say we would want to know in advance, and we've spoken about being in awareness and being in prevention. You know it helps to do these tests to know where you're at, but you can go to your doctor and get these done because they're quite it's quite a standard test and if you get over a certain age, they kind of want you to be prodded with these things Because, again, it's a massive, massive strain on the NHS. Yeah, absolutely, people who are diagnosed diabetic. So the test that you will mostly get with the doctor is the HbA1c test, and what that actually means is it's the amount of haemoglobin in your blood that has glucose attached to it, and because the haemoglobin, which is the protein in the red blood cells, has a shelf life of, or lifespan of, three months, it gives you an idea of your average blood sugar levels over a three-month period.
Speaker 1:So it can be really, really useful to know that. However, there are some, you know, if you've got really high blood sugars and then you get really low blood sugars it's the average, so you can kind of get around it that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's's really interesting. I mean because I thought that the HbA1c was the gold standard. But actually when you think about if somebody's having lots of highs and lots of lows and not very many sort of stable blood sugars in that three months and then you take the snapshot and the average comes out as a great blood result, that's uh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's not quite what you want, no, no, and you don't really want your blood sugars to be on a massive roller coaster you don't want mountains and icebergs, do you? You want it to be really gentle, rolling hills, because our blood sugars do go up and they do go down, but we want it to be in a nice parameter that's not too high, not too low. A lot of the things in the body I find are like this yeah, it's like the goldilocks thing, isn't it?
Speaker 1:yeah it's in the middle yeah, what's in the middle? Not too, not too sweet, not too salty, but just right exactly so if you've had an hba1c test done, then normal level is normally classified as 20 to 41, sometimes 42, which is on the cusp of pre-diabetic, the risky area, and then you get pre-diabetic and it depends again on what doctor and who's doing what. But 42 to 47 to 53 are considered pre-diabetic, and then diabetic is anything over 53, but sometimes we'll consider over 47.
Speaker 2:And I guess these have to also be looked at in conjunction with the rest of your lifestyle as well, don't they? I mean, you don't want to be as well, don't they? And you don't want to be getting up anywhere near the. You don't really want to be heading up into those 40s, let alone the 50s no, exactly, and there is some research, early research.
Speaker 1:I think it's fair to say that suggests that the normal level is actually too high yeah, well.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I guess, considering our increase in sugar consumption. And then we start, and then, when these blood tests evolved, to then start looking at normal ranges perhaps they were already sort of high by then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you might be right. So that's one of the tests and that's the most typical test that will get done. And if you do any private testing yourself, that would normally be a marker. That's included the tests and that's the most typical test that will get done. And if you do any private testing yourself, that would normally be a marker that's included, the hba1c. But you can also get your. You might be asked to go to your gp and do a fasted blood test. So, yeah, you don't eat, you go to the the nurse, she takes your blood and then they're looking to see what your fasted levels are, because that gives you a different indicator. But blood sugars should be fasted between 4 and 5.9 millimole per liter and then, after we've eaten, it should be less than 7.8. So you can see it's quite a tight parameter isn't it yeah?
Speaker 1:absolutely, absolutely so. Within about an hour like an hour to three hours after you've eaten you want your blood sugars to be going back to a fasted state or at least below 7.8.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I just think about the roller coaster and then the kids at the party and you think about when you send them absolutely high on all the goodies at the party, and you think about when they you send them absolutely high on on all the goodies at the party and then you have that absolute roller coaster crash down don't you yeah and that's again.
Speaker 2:That's what you're trying to avoid, isn't it? You don't want those ups and downs, you just want everything a little bit more stable yeah, and kids in particular are really good at the response to sugar going in.
Speaker 1:So when it goes up really high, the body is so good at sending out insulin. Because they're younger, yeah, and they haven't got to that point you would hope of insulin resistance. But because it's so good, it often will take the sugars down too low.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then they get really grumpy, oh, really grumpy. Yeah, we've all had those children hangry actually being hangry is a very good sign that you are not good with managing your blood sugars, and the same thing goes if you can't go without food you know there are people that you know they've got to eat they couldn't imagine missing. Imagine going out all day and you miss lunch. Yeah, if you can't handle that because it affects your mood and you feel shaky or whatever, that is an indicator of problems with blood sugar management.
Speaker 2:And it's funny, isn't it? Because, like hangry is, and now that it's a word and a term, it's almost glorified. But actually, if you are getting hangry at any point, it's not a great sign, is it?
Speaker 1:No, no, it means that there's an imbalance going on, so that's never, never, good.
Speaker 2:No, absolutely, absolutely Okay, absolutely Okay. And so then, what you did? To monitor your blood glucose, was used a continuous glucose monitor.
Speaker 1:Yep, tell us what that is and what your experience was with it. Okay, so CGMs have become really popular in recent times. Cgms have become really popular in recent times. I know that dr chattergy went on about them for a while. He wore one. A lot, of, a lot of those people in the health space have been wearing them.
Speaker 1:So it's non-diabetic people wearing a continuous glucose monitor.
Speaker 1:It's that white disc that you see on someone's arm. Before, probably, I don't know one or two years ago, the only people that would have had them would have been diagnosed as diabetic. But now we've got a trend of using them when you're not diabetic, just to see what's going on with your blood, your blood sugars, because, as we already know, the hba1c is not telling us the whole story and just going and having a fasted test is not telling us the whole story. We want to see what if our roller coaster is as bad as that, or if we've got a nice gentle, gentle curve, and we might want to know what impacts our blood sugars, because you know it's, it's good to know. So I ended up wearing a cgm because because I was doing some extra training in metabolic health and it was recommended that we wear one to see what was going on with ourselves. And so, yeah, I wore the white disc on my arm for three months, I think, in the end and monitored what was going on, and it was very interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I loved some of the things you were saying, because I think the brilliant thing about this is that we all react to things individually, and so the hba1c will not tell you what it was particularly that spiked it or dropped your your levels individually, and this and this did. You could literally see it on your phone, watching your blood sugar go up and go down, depending on either what you ate or what you did or what you stressed about yeah, exactly, and also what exercise was done.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, if I slept well. So it basically you put this disc in your arm and it is. It has a small needle on it which which obviously connects to um, the the under surface of your skin, so it can access that information to see what sugars are are in the blood and it. It basically connects to an app on your phone and it can hold. The disc itself can hold six to eight hours of data, so you can then scan your phone and it will tell you what's happened for the last eight hours. I always had a gap in my sleep because, as you know, I turn my phone off at a certain time. Yeah, and it was longer than the period that the disc would have held. Yeah, okay, so I always had a little gap in my data. But, yeah, you get an app and it shows you and the period that the disc would hold?
Speaker 1:yeah, okay so I always had a little gap in my data. But, yeah, you get an app and it shows you and you can input, yeah, what your, what time you went to bed, what your sleep was like, your food intake, exercise, you were doing stress levels and, yeah, you could see how that reacted with your, what your blood sugars were saying yeah, what were the um foods that you had and the results that you got from them?
Speaker 1:that surprised you so, generally speaking, food was okay for me, even, actually, even if I ate or drank something that I expected my blood sugars to go up say, I drank some wine to see what impact that would have purely purely, uh, experimental right, just to see what the results were the things I do on a sake of research selfless.
Speaker 1:So if I drank something like that, I was expecting to see my blood sugars rise, but what was interesting is that it didn't for me, yeah, but I think it's because my food was good. So even if I was drinking wine, I was eating my meal, yes, and my meal was good, so that it didn't spike my blood sugars, which was, yeah, that was quite interesting, I would say.
Speaker 2:Generally speaking, I could have a reasonable amount of sugar and my body could handle it yeah, do you think that was because you were kind of eating it with the, with the fiber boat that took the sugars down?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean I did have. I did have a play around to see what would happen if I ate things that I wouldn't normally eat. So I might have eaten a white bread sandwich, for example. Yeah, to see what it would do. Yeah, and I did. It was higher, but it wasn't super high. So I think that's because I look after my metabolic health and I think if I did that, long term came to those white bread sandwiches or whatever, I would get a different picture. So your response would become sluggish, wouldn't?
Speaker 1:it caned, those white bread sandwiches or whatever, I would get a different picture the response would become sluggish, wouldn't it?
Speaker 2:it would like you were talking about earlier and it'd be like oh, I can't do it again yeah, there was.
Speaker 1:There was a couple of things that spiked it and I cannot, off the top of my head now, remember what they were, but I wasn't going to worry about that yeah because you know the curve was pretty good.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I was pretty stable there on my blood sugars.
Speaker 1:So what did spike it? Stress, yeah yeah. And it was so fascinating because, even though I know this from a textbook perspective, I know what happens in the body when you get stressed. I know that that spikes blood sugars. But until I physically saw it on my app and the thing that most surprised me is it happened when I hadn't eaten, so I didn't have any food in my like, I had no glucose in my bloodstream.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is what you associate this whole test about.
Speaker 1:and yeah, and it wasn't that at all no, because under stress the body releases sugars into the bloodstream and it spiked very high on some occasions where stress was high, and it was I. I think I said to you it was when I was going to run up and do my vault, so I was at a competition and so stress was higher anyway, because I'm at a competition and but the vault is the one that scares the bejesus out of me.
Speaker 2:No, I'm not surprised.
Speaker 1:I can't watch it myself, let alone do it so I'm standing at the end of the vault runway and I'm having to do my wonder woman power pose to try and get my cortisol down. I'm doing my breathing, I'm telling myself you've done this 100 times, you can do this, blah, blah, blah, but still I'm looking at this vault going. I've got to get my whole self over it. It's really scary. And anyway, I did my vault and then later, when I was looking at my data, the blood sugar spike was enormous at the point that I was stood at the end of the vault because I knew what time that was. That's so interesting, but I mean so in for that example.
Speaker 2:Actually, that was a perfectly normal response, wasn't it for your body and for your blood sugar to to get you up over that vault. Yep, however, the the reactions within your body are exactly the same, as either you're stood looking down at that vault or you're sat on your sofa ruminating about something that's pissed you off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, stuck in a traffic jam.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Got in the wrong line at the supermarket when you're in a rush. Just had a notification ping up on your phone that your account is overdrawn.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All of those things, the same response.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the same response, without the running and jumping over a vault. Yeah, so you just then sit with that in the body.
Speaker 1:yeah, so your blood sugars will stay up higher. You're right, because then I went and ran and then my body recognized that immediately afterwards the threat had gone. The vault's gone, yeah, yeah you do have to do the vault twice. Funny enough, so yeah, and the medals on.
Speaker 1:We're cheering. That did show. So, yeah, I found that really interesting, especially because I hadn't eaten. Yeah and yeah, so that was purely my body. So what this means is that you could be on a really good diet, you could be doing all the right things, but if your life is stressful, you are going to push up your blood sugars without even knowing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this we were talking about this earlier, weren't you? You could be doing all of the all of the right things and with, and you have the stress. And then you are continually, for instance, if you're thinking about losing weight, if that's your, if that's your goal I wouldn't make that your sole goal, but if it is, it often is that and you're looking at your diet, thinking, oh my god, what it's not working, and maybe you then start going down that slippery slope of like stripping stuff out of it, so there's barely anything left, but you are still banging on with the stress. You're then looking at the wrong thing.
Speaker 1:You need to be looking at stress yeah, and we've mentioned before about with connected with that weight loss thing is if you reduce your food intake and push up your activity levels to your body, that is a massive stress. Yeah, that's like I'm required to output more, but not enough is coming in. This is a disaster. Yeah, signal the stress response and then remember that if you have that flood of sugar into your bloodstream which is high, the excess that's not going into the cell, because only so much can get into the cell is going to the liver or and or being converted to fat. So if you're trying to lose weight and you're stressed, it's, it's not happening.
Speaker 2:No, absolutely and it's just. It's so interesting because and I think I said this last week we're often looking in the wrong places for the, for the fixes yeah, yeah, there are some.
Speaker 1:Apart from looking at the blood glucose level with regards to stress, it also helps to look at what happens with your sleep. If your sleep is poor, versus when you've got a day where your sleep is good, the type of exercise that you might be doing, and then one of the things that I like for my clients is that it will tell them if something doesn't react well with them. So you can tell from the blood glucose levels if you're intolerant to something, because, again, when you're intolerant to something and you put it in, it's a stress response yeah, no, that's really interesting.
Speaker 2:What did it do whilst you were asleep or whilst you monitored the six to eight hours of sleep it could store?
Speaker 1:yeah. So if I say I had drank some wine, yeah, and then I would. Generally my sleep would not be good if I'd done that and I would tend to wake up about 3 aam because that's the liver time. My blood sugar would be low, too low, if I'd done that. Oh, really. So again, if I've drunk alcohol, yeah, at the time that it was um being consumed, it didn't raise my blood sugars. But in the body's processing the toxic element out, yeah, it caused the blood sugars to plummet because it's using up a lot of energy and I'm not eating at that point anyway, so, and it's one of the reasons why you get that you need to eat um carbs when you're hungover, don't you?
Speaker 1:yeah? Yeah because you've crashed your energy in the process of detoxifying it.
Speaker 2:So body is like come on, give me some, give me some of those, yeah, those good, good solid sugars so it'll wake you up at 3am because your your sugars have dropped too low and it's an emergency situation. So again, it's like we need some fuel here, yeah, um sugars are too low oh, so maybe I should just get up when I get woken up at three o'clock in the morning with a hangover and make my fry up then.
Speaker 1:No, no, no you can't face it because your liver is active and if you try and and eat when your liver is really active, it actually makes, it gives you nausea. So if your sleep is disturbed and you've messed up your circadian rhythm and you're not asleep by 11 o'clock at night, which is when your liver will really be ramping up okay, ramping up towards your 2 3 am. If you've shifted it and it doesn't kick in till later and then you have to get up at 6 am for work and your liver's still working, you'll feel sick and won't be able to eat breakfast that's really interesting, that and that's with or without wine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the night before, yeah, yeah those two aren't necessarily connected.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it's um. It's fascinating, isn't it really how the body works, how it's all connected absolutely.
Speaker 2:We will briefly say, because I know that we'll get questions about it we, um, we did have a quick look, before we were recording this, at the systems that julie used for her glucose monitoring and the app, and they are actually no longer available, which is which is a shame, so you will have to have a little search. There are some, there are some other ways that you can do it. Uh, it just depends if you are, if you are not, diabetic. It just depends how much, uh, money you want to shell out.
Speaker 1:Really, yeah, it is. It is reasonably expensive. I can't tell you off the top of my head now what I spent monitoring my blood glucose for for three months, but I'm talking a few hundred pounds here. Yeah, to do that. And the yeah, the system that I use, because you have to have an app that will read the discs that you put in your arm. There's subscriptions involved and the discs are expensive, and that particular app now seems to be connected to the aura ring but we couldn't work out how that works with the getting the discs and connecting it, so I don't know.
Speaker 1:But the the one that most people will be aware of because the adverts are everywhere is the zoe one. But the zoe one is not just about monitoring blood glucose levels. There's a whole other stuff to it and that's a subscription and that's collecting your data and you might not want to do that yeah, yeah, and we were also talking about, so we were we'll go on to this now.
Speaker 2:Actually, we were talking about the, um, the positives and negatives to that, and so, with regards to not necessarily just, uh, the zoe one, but, um, the cgms like as a whole, what was the negative that you were talking about?
Speaker 1:so I think there are a couple of negatives with anything that you're. When you're testing and looking at markers in your body, you can be obsessed by it even wearing things like the aura ring, or tracking your sleep, or tracking your steps. It can become an addiction, can't it?
Speaker 2:and so there can be some unhealthy obsessive behaviors yeah, you're trying to get those parameters regardless of what else is going on around. Is that you're just like blinkered on those things?
Speaker 1:that's no good for you exactly. So I do think that people that have got any history of obsessive issues definitely dietary, you know, anorexia or anything like that.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't want them to be using these types of devices certainly not out on their own need to be, like, really supported yeah, absolutely so, I think you can.
Speaker 1:You can become too obsessive with it, but if you just want to have an idea of how your body works, for a month is enough, yeah, to know and see what's what's happening. And I like if you just measure what you're doing without making any changes. Yes, and that's why I did mine for three months, because I did like a month of how is it with me just being my normal life and food and everything. How is it, when I've started to change things, if I mix things up a bit, what happens? Yeah, I just wanted to see the impact. But, yeah, I think you can use it in that way. But yeah, you've just got to be aware of getting too obsessed by it.
Speaker 1:You don't want another thing that you're constantly scrolling about? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And the other one is being aware that, especially on something like the Zoe, I think, because they're a little bit more, the information that you get seems to be more about what foods suit you and which foods don't. But it can really narrow the diet down and it can limit it, and it can also advise you to eat things that aren't necessarily good for you for other reasons yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:What would that apple example that you said earlier on when we talk about it?
Speaker 1:yeah, so. So, for example, this is probably a little bit extreme, but you know, I come across lots of people that don't eat fruit, for example, but they may eat one. Yeah, they may go. Okay, I say, I really need you to eat some fruit because you've got I'm looking for you to get these nutrients and it's all right, I can eat an apple, I can manage to eat an apple. I'm like great, you eat your apple. Brilliant, tick that you're eating your apple. Then, if they were to monitor their blood glucose and it showed that apple was a problem for them as in it spiked their sugars, and they stopped eating the apple, but they didn't replace it with another piece of fruit yeah, it's, it's not so good, is it?
Speaker 2:no, absolutely just takes that whole benefit away from eating the apple.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but I have seen people come through to me that have really limited their diet through doing this type of monitoring and, like food intolerance testing is another one the list of foods that people will exclude and not even understand how imbalanced their nutrition is and why they're filial.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's yeah, that's massive. So I think the message there is if you're going to do it, before you go and get obsessed, or get in touch with Julie and let her help you, like you, guide you through it, so that you understand what these results mean and don't just look at them very, very blinkered yeah, the other way that you could do it is not through a cgm.
Speaker 1:you could do it the old-fashioned way where you pinprick your finger, yeah, and you measure your um, your levels of blood glucose, and you measure your levels of blood glucose and you do that before you eat so you know where your baseline is, and you do it after you eat. And I do have a device that I send to my clients so that they can we normally do it for a week and they can measure ketones and blood glucose at that point, and that's a lot cheaper but it does mean you have to pinprick your finger and you have to do it at specific times, and it doesn't give you the continuous picture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now is that funny that that's old fashioned now it makes me feel very old. That's brilliant. So, but what are some of the positives? We've probably covered quite a few of them already. But what are some of the positives? Or, we've probably covered quite a few of them already, but what some of the positives from monitoring.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the most important thing is it can act. It can give you an insight into how your body is working. When you feel it's working anyway, yeah, you know. So, before you get to the point where you think, oh, things aren, things aren't quite right. I feel really tired. I keep going to the toilet a lot. Oh, I'm really thirsty, you know whatever's going on. And then you find out, oh, you've got, you know you're already there, you're at the 42 level and you're yeah, then you're in that, then you're in the system, aren't you? Yeah, the system for the diabetes, so, for the diabetes. So I think it gives you understanding of how your body works.
Speaker 2:Yeah is probably one of the most important ones. Would you want to do it? Would you want to? Oh, yeah, yeah, I'd love to know, to have that individual answers to, to what foods and what actions have as a result of my blood sugars. So, for instance and I know that we are in the process of looking quite deeply into fasting and things like that but it would be even as simple as knowing whether, so for some people, if you have a cup of coffee with and I mean, like the americans, quite like cream and things with that with theirs, knowing whether that individually would spike my, my blood sugar or I would remain fasted, would be like things like that I think would be really interesting, because it it varies from person to person. Yeah, and so then when I went and exercised, if I exercised fasted, or if I exercised having had something half an hour ago, what does that do?
Speaker 1:and just being able to play around with like what worked best for me, I think would be really interesting yeah, it would be interesting and we didn't really talk about using it with that scenario with fasting and knowing what takes you out of a fast. So we would definitely have to cover that when we do talk about fasting, because it can be really valuable to know that information If you're fasting for certain reasons.
Speaker 2:You don't want a drink to take you out of a fast and you not know it a drink to take you out of a fast and you not know it, yeah, yeah, and, and the fact that for some people, it would take you out of a fast and for some people it would actually enhance that fast, and yeah, and this, and having that continuous monitoring is the only way that you would really know that. I mean, you could do that with finger prick tests and, with, um, with the ketones, ketone strips as well, but it's not as accurate. Well, and that's the trouble is also with things like with using the strips is there's a lot more human error involved as well, like dirty fingers or not getting enough blood and all that sort of stuff, not to mention not really wanting to prick every single one of your fingers. No, exactly.
Speaker 1:Um, I was just thinking that one of the other benefits of using or, you know, monitoring your blood sugars and understanding them is when, if you're someone that has been diagnosed with your blood sugars being high or you're looking at your general hba1c test, you're like I'm I'm kind of at 40 I know I'm okay, but yeah, the last time I had this done I was at 36.
Speaker 1:I'm now 40. There's a trend going upwards there and if especially because I've seen this a lot when I've been working with clients if you're someone that is doing all the right things and you don't understand why your your blood sugars are raised or going up yeah then at least if you, if you have something like a cgm on, you can look and see. Mostly it's stress.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's normally what happens yeah, that's really interesting and is it, and it's on, always the focus is on food, and so it was really interesting that you got that, that response from it yeah.
Speaker 2:I loved that. Thank you for letting us pick your brains about it and I would yeah, I definitely love to do it be really interested in in what my, what my body did, with all the things I think I'm doing like good for it. And yeah, it'd be nice I mean, hopefully I, you like I get that confirmation, like you did. But uh, I'm sure there'd be sure there'd be things that, um, that uh will surprise me and please me, do you know what your hba1c is?
Speaker 1:have you had any recent tests done?
Speaker 2:no, no, I haven't, and I've started thinking back at not even I didn't require any like glucose blood tests while I was pregnant or anything like that. So no, I've got no idea like what's going on in there so it would definitely be good to know yeah, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 2:So if you guys, as always, want to continue the conversation over on the far too fabulous facebook page, we would love to hear from you. Have you done, um, continuous glucose monitoring? How did you find it? Uh, and yeah, just just talk to us. We, as you can hear, like to chat. Thank you for keeping us company today.
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