In this 10‑minute YouTube presentation, functional‑medicine dietitian Brigid Titgemeier explains why blood‑sugar fluctuations matter even for people without diabetes and outlines five common symptoms that signal an imbalance: (1) frequent hunger and intense cravings, (2) post‑meal fatigue, (3) brain fog, (4) mood swings, and (5) unexplained weight gain. She describes the physiological drivers behind each sign – rapid glucose spikes followed by drops, disrupted hunger hormones (leptin, ghrelin, GLP‑1), mitochondrial strain, impaired neurotransmitter balance (GABA, dopamine), and insulin‑driven fat storage – and cites recent research (e.g., David Ludwig’s work on carbohydrate quality). Titgemeier critiques reliance on hemoglobin A1C alone, recommending continuous glucose monitors, personal glucometers, and attentive symptom tracking as more actionable assessments. She concludes with a promotional “Blood Sugar Reset” program and a bundle of low‑glycemic recipes, promising noticeable improvements in energy, cognition, mood, and weight within about ten days. The talk blends educational content with a persuasive call‑to‑action, aimed at a general audience seeking practical nutrition strategies for better metabolic health.
Chapters
Hi, everyone. Today we're going to talk about five signs that you may have imbalanced blood sugar levels. This is such an important topic that I am so excited to dive into with you. If you're new here, I just want to quickly introduce myself. I'm Brigid. I'm a functional medicine dietitian. I've been working with people to improve their blood sugar levels for the last 10 years. I have thousands and thousands of people that I've helped to do this. My team of dietitians helps people do this as well in our being functional nutrition, virtual nutrition coach, coaching business. So I'm excited to help give you some snippets to apply to your own life. From my own experience, my team's experience, and hopefully we can get you on the road to feeling more optimal in your everyday life. A lot of people think that blood sugar imbalances can only happen if you have diabetes or pre diabetes, but that's really not the case. You could have blood sugar imbalances and not have any of the actual lab signs of having prediabetes or having diabetes because your blood sugar could just be fluctuating throughout the entire day. And the average that they're testing on your blood sugar levels, which is called a hemoglobin A1C, that's your three month blood sugar average, it could still be normal because your highs and lows end up equaling out to what a normal level would be. But if you're having these highs and lows, it's going to impact how you're feeling on a daily basis. There's not a lot of great standard assessments that help you understand this. Besides one, using a continuous glucose monitor, or two, checking your blood sugar on your own with a glucometer, or three, paying attention to the signs and symptoms that can be associated with imbalanced blood sugar levels, that will happen more often after your meals. We're gonna get into those signs so that you can start to be aware of them and pay attention to how you're feeling in correspondence with what you've eaten so that you can hopefully strive for better blood sugar. First sign is feeling easily hungry and having cravings. When you have cravings, this is typically a result of your blood sugar levels going really high and then going really low. When you're at that low point, that happens usually an hour or so after you've reached that peak level of being high, it's going to cause you to have more cravings. So it'll feel like you are trying so hard to Resist whatever it is that you're craving. When you just, like, wanna jump into the refrigerator and eat every single sugary thing in sight, it'll feel like you're white knuckling your way through resisting those cravings, or really having to use so much willpower that it feels abnormal. That's how you know that you're experiencing more of those cravings. The other thing is that if you're hungry often throughout the day, then you're either one, not eating large enough meals, or two, experiencing this blood sugar roller coaster that will impact your hunger hormones and lead to having higher levels of hunger soon after you've eaten. So when you have imbalanced meals that don't have enough protein or fiber or even healthy fats, sometimes it can lead to an imbalance in a lot of these hunger hormones. Things like leptin, ghrelin, GLP1, and several others that are used to help to regulate your satiety and make you feel more full. The more balanced that your blood sugar is, the better control you're gonna have over those hunger hormones, so that you feel in control of the crav that you're experiencing, and you don't feel like you have to jump into your pantry or your refrigerator in order to endlessly eat all the sugar in order to satisfy them. Okay. The second one is probably the most common symptom that we see, and that is fatigue. Now, it could be a combination of either having fatigue after about one hour of experiencing a meal that's spiking your blood sugar. So we've all been there in an instance that you have a piece of cake or something that your blood sugar is really gonna elevate quickly. You may feel more tired just an hour after eating that. But there can also be other foods that you're eating, like oatmeal, dried fruits, other foods that are seemingly healthy that are causing a blood sugar increase that can lead to fatigue within one hour after eating it, because of the toll that those blood sugar elevations and then dips have on your body and also on eventually your mitochondria. So your mitochondria is the powerhouse of your cells. It helps to support your energy. And having a lot of blood sugar imbalances will lead to mitochondrial dysfunction over time. That can really deplete energy. But even before you reach that point of having mitochondrial dysfunction, just having baseline level of health, if you eat something that is going to cause a blood sugar rise, you will typically feel extremely tired after that increase and then that decrease, because it takes a large toll on the body. In measuring my own blood sugar levels, I've experienced this several times where it's like, I feel as though I've hit a wall within one hour after my blood sugar is really rising. Let's say I have a banana all by itself with no protein or healthy fats. That's when I'm really hitting the wall to be like, I have no energy. This is also common in individuals that we work with. So I have a nutrition business being functional nutrition, where my team of dietitians and I work with individuals. We've worked with hundreds of people using continuous glucose monitors to track their blood sugar levels, to help them personalize their blood sugar needs. And we've worked with thousands of people overall in looking at all of the data points, the thousands and thousands of data points that I've seen in the last 10 years, I can very confidently say that people will report excessive levels of fatigue when they're having a lot of blood sugar imbalances. And once we're able to correct their blood sugar levels and improve them, they typically experience improvements in their energy levels very soon after. Like I'm talking, it only takes one to two weeks for you to start to notice a difference. The third one is brain fog. So your brain needs some glucose in order to function optimally, but too much glucose is really going to weigh your brain down and make it feel like you are just swimming through mush. You might have difficulty with word recall. You might just feel like you're thinking so slow that you're processing speed. Speed is very slow. It might feel like you have like 10% battery left on your iPhone, but happening in your brain because you're so low on your cognitive energy, and usually that is a symptom as well of having regular blood sugar imbalances that happen throughout the day. So if you wanna be smarter, if you wanna feel smarter, feel more cognitively aware and in tune with what's happening, feel just like that sharp level of execution. Then you wanna prioritize improving blood sugar B, because that is step one to better brain health. Okay? The fourth is mood imbalances. So mood imbalances are incredibly common, and you might even start to normalize them if they're happening to you all the time. But they are closely associated with blood sugar. Now, that doesn't mean that blood sugar balance is the cure for every single person that has anxiety or mood swings or depression. But having tightly regulated blood sugar levels can absolutely help to improve overall mood regulation because of the impact that it has on your neurotransmitters on neurotransmitters like gaba, which is the neurotransmitter that's gonna help you feel more calm and relaxed, or even dopamine, which is your neurotransmitter, that helps to make you feel more motivated. The field of mental health and nutrition psychiatry. This is an emerging field that a group of Harvard researchers really brought onto the map, showing how much nutrition impacts, risk of anxiety and depression, and mood imbalances. So if this is something that you're experiencing on a regular basis, your doctor might not necessarily recommend focusing on your nutrition, focusing on blood sugar balance. But I promise you, the latest research that's been published in the last three years absolutely points to the fact that not only nutrition, but also proper blood sugar balance plays a huge role in supporting your mental health. And then the last sign is weight gain. If you feel like you are gaining a lot of weight and you don't understand why, because you feel like you're eating really well overall, you may want to consider whether you have any blood sugar imbalances. Now, of course, weight gain can happen for other reasons outside of blood sugar imbalances, but there is a close correlation between the two, so you don't want to rule it out. The idea behind calorie counting, eat less, move more calories in versus calories out. I covered in another video, but I want to highlight the fact that blood sugar imbalances can directly lead to weight gain. Even if you're on a calorically restrictive diet. I can't tell you the number of people that we work with, even women that are going through menopause or have gone through menopause, which is typically a harder time for the body to really be able to lose weight, increase muscle mass, improve lean body composition. I can't tell you the number of people and women in particular that we've worked with that are able to really improve their lean body mass, even in a phase like menopause, when they're focused more on optimizing their blood sugar balance and improving insulin sensitivity and decreasing insulin resistance. There was a paper that was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by a fantastic researcher, Dr. David Ludwig, and he talked about the fact that we need to change this mindset of calorie counting to one that's focused more on the quality of calories. And he specifically talked about how eating more refined carbohydrates and too many carbohydrates overall that are going to increase blood sugar levels fosters fat accumulation. This is because of the insulin role, the role that insulin resistance plays in increasing abdominal or visceral fat, which is the fat that's around your abdomen specifically. And the best way for decreasing nads, or the most effective way, I should say, not only in the last 10 years of me helping people with improving blood sugar and all of the people that my team of dietitians have worked with, but also in what we're seeing in the research, is that we have to focus on blood sugar balance. So those are the five signs. I'm just gonna recap really quickly. Let's go through them. Feeling easily hungry and having cravings, especially those uncontrollable cravings, the skin. The second would be thinking about fatigue, third, brain fog and just slow cognition overall. The fourth one that we talked about was mood imbalances and then the fifth one was weight gain. If you feel like you're experiencing some of those symptoms, I would encourage you and invite you to join us in the blood sugar reset. We also do offer a blood sugar reset bundle where we package a ton of low glycemic recipes and meal plans that we have done in the past so that you can buy those and incorporate them into your day to day routine so that then you can start to experience the benefits of changing your diet and improving blood sugar balance in a very short window of time. You would be amazed at the number of people that we hear from who talk about the changes in energy, the changes in cognition, the changes in their weight, the change in their mental focus and clarity just in 10 days of following these low glycemic blood sugar stabilizing recipes. I'll include more information about it in the show notes and I'll see you soon.
