In today’s chat, I am going to discuss the hows of keeping your blood sugar in check, and why this is important for long lasting, vibrant health. It (almost) goes without saying that the very first and most effective switch to make is to reduce sugar intake in your diet. Today I’m going to introduce you to 3 ways to help support your blood sugar that you may not already know about:
“Hello everybody. Hi, how are you today? So, my name’s Claudia le Feuvre. I am co-founder of Mighty Green and also a nutritional therapist with nearly 15 years clinical experience. So yesterday on our stories I started a poll and I said, how’s your blood sugar? It’s National Diabetes Week after all. So how’s your blood sugar, and 25% of you responded it’s A-OK, fantastic and 75% of you said no clue. So I thought this is a great opportunity. Let me jump on a live. Let me explain a little bit more about blood sugar, why it’s important, what diabetes is, and my three secret weapons that I have discovered in my 15 years of clinical practice and nutrition, which can absolutely help reverse the diagnosis of pre-diabetes and even diabetes. Now, what I do need to say is that there is no cure for diabetes. What we can do is we can manage it.
So when we reverse the diagnosis, when someone goes back to their old lifestyle, of course, diabetes can come straight back. So it’s nutrition and these secret weapons I’m going to tell you about are an amazing way to manage your health completely naturally and avoid the side effects that diabetes can bring. So let me start by explaining a little bit about what blood sugar is. And I would say, maybe about 80% of clients that I’ve seen in my clinic have some degree of a blood sugar imbalance and I’m not talking pre-diabetes, just the energy rollercoaster, the fluctuations in energy through the day and when our blood sugar dips, that’s when we can feel a bit tired, a bit jittery, we can lose our concentration, we can become hangry. Have you heard the word hangry? It’s like hungry and angry together.
It’s not a nice combination. We can also get heart palpitations. We can get headaches, migraines, all those kinds of symptoms. A lot of people recognize these symptoms. They think, “But hang on, my blood sugar is low. This is not pre-diabetes because diabetes is obviously when your blood sugar is too high.” But quite often the high precipitates the low which I’m going to explain about. So the body at any one time has to try and keep blood sugar levels on an even keel between a certain parameter let’s say. Between here, X and Y, which works out about two teaspoons of glucose in the whole bloodstream. And when the blood sugar is too low, we get those symptoms that I’ve just described. And when the blood sugar is too high, it can be very, very toxic for the arteries, for the nervous system, for the retina.
It can make it harder to transport nutrients. So people often get slow wound healing. So the body is always trying to reduce the sugar levels and to get the sugar back into this normal range. It’s kind of like an emergency situation. So imagine that you started the day, I’m sure you don’t, but imagine that you started the day with a bowl of Frosties and a black coffee say with three sugars, obviously that’s a really sugary start to the day. Your blood sugar levels are going to rise way over what they should be. If the limit’s here, it’s going to go over. And so what happens, the body responds by the pancreas produces the hormone insulin, insulin’s job is quick, get the sugar out of the bloodstream, get it into the cells, get it out of the blood, into the cells.
But what happens is because it’s such a knee-jerk reaction by the body, the body produces too much insulin which ends up taking too much sugar out of the bloodstream. So it can be that a couple of hours later, you have your breakfast at eight, by 10:30 you’re thinking, “Ooh, maybe I need another coffee.” “Did someone say chocolate biscuits?” You’re back on the low. And a lot of people are living day to day on this rollercoaster. This is simply a blood sugar imbalance. And what we want to do, we always want to do is get you onto an even keel.
So say you start the day with a lovely bowl of porridge oats with some nuts and seeds on top, and what happens is your blood sugar levels rise slowly, they don’t jump too high, they rise slowly, they don’t dip too low either because another hormone kicks in called glucagon and glucagon says, “Oh my goodness, blood sugar looks like it might be dropping. Let me convert stored fat, convert it into sugar and put it back into the bloodstream.” So the person with a balanced blood sugar can stay on an even keel, even energy all through the day. And this is one of the secrets to burning our body fat stores. When we’re on the rollercoaster, the blood sugar rollercoaster, our brain is just going from one fix to the next. And it is very, very difficult to burn fat stores. So let me just take a moment to explain the symptoms of type two diabetes, because for many people, this blood sugar imbalance is just the norm, it’s how they normally feel.
They don’t know that they’ve got a blood sugar imbalance and a lot of people, as I said at the beginning, don’t realize that they’re developing symptoms of type two diabetes. So this is national diabetes week. Let me just quickly talk you through those symptoms. You might recognize them for you or for someone you love. One of the obvious things is pear peachy smelling breaths, sweet breath. I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled that on someone, but it’s quite a distinctive smell. Another thing is excessive thirst and excessive urination. The body is really trying to dump that sugar out of the bloodstream quickly. You seem to urinate a lot more than you’re drinking almost. That’s kind of the feeling. There’s some less obvious symptoms as well. For example, people with high sugar in their blood might suffer a lot with fungal infections or thrush or bacterial infections because there’s obviously high sugar in the urine as well.
And that sugar is feeding the bacteria and the yeast. So if you have any of those symptoms, please check in with your doctor or pop into a pharmacy and get your blood sugars measured. You can do a blood glucose test which is usually a fasting test when you go to the doctors. So you don’t eat your breakfast. You go straight to your doctor in the morning and get your bloods taken so we can see your blood sugar without having had your breakfast. And then there’s also another test that you can do, which is the HcA1b, which is a reflection of your blood sugar over the last two to three months, which is a more valuable indicator. So that’s the one to ask for if you’re at all concerned. So that’s a little bit about diabetes, and I’m now going to share with you my three secret weapons.
The first one is, I so often encounter people, they come into my clinic and they say, “Claudia, I’ve got uncontrolled blood sugar levels and I really don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. I have switched from white bread to brown bread, white pasta to brown pasta.” One of my discoveries I have made is that when someone suffers with a wheat tolerance, an underlying gluten or wheat intolerance, when they eat those foods, it is a stressful response by the body, by the immune system and that in itself can trigger the blood sugar and escalate the blood sugar. So for someone who is intolerant to wheat, it doesn’t matter if you are eating white bread or brown bread, you’ve got to ditch the bread altogether and it can resolve very, very quickly in a few days. So it’s very easy for you to figure out of this is relevant to you, just avoid the gluten or the wheat completely for 10 days and just see where you’re at with your blood sugars.
But a lot of people, it’s the missing piece in the puzzle because they’ve been told just switch from white to brown. But when there’s underlying food intolerances, which happens fairly frequently I must say, it really, really can make a difference. My next secret weapon is of course CBD. Even diabetes.co.uk have said very openly that CBD can help reduce the inflammation and it can reduce the blood glucose level. So CBD, absolutely number two. And my third secret weapon, there’s so many more things I could say, but my third secret weapon is sleep. Getting enough sleep. Sleep and stress, these are all factors that are outside of what we’re eating, but they can make a huge difference. And I’m thinking of one client in particular, he’s got type one diabetes, which is autoimmune. It’s a different type, but it’s still all about controlling the blood sugar levels. And we find with him on nights he doesn’t sleep so well, he needs 24% more insulin the next day.
So it’s kind of a vicious cycle because when we don’t sleep well, we’re far more likely to make poorer food choices the next day because we’re tired. But also the blood sugar is naturally slightly more disrupted when we’re tired. So getting adequate sleep is really important. And of course that’s where CBD can help as well. What makes us different at Mighty Green is that we are a team of health professionals and Rory, my fellow nutritionist who works with me at Mighty Green, he actually completed his master’s dissertation in personalized nutrition and his dissertation topic was on the role of cannabinoids, iCBD to help with type two diabetes. So diabetes is a very, very serious condition. It’s not something to mess around with. We need to get the blood sugar levels under control for a long and healthy life.
We always say the aim is to die young at a ripe old age, and we want to reduce the inflammation. We want to keep the bodies healthy and you’re living your best life. So I’m going to check out now and thank you so much for watching, and see you soon. Bye.”