Blood sugar spikes and crashes drive cravings, anxiety, and inflammation. A protein-rich savory breakfast with vegetables stabilizes glucose levels, reduces cravings, and calms your nervous system.
when we're talking about anxiety is, um, anxiety is basically a feeling of a loss of control.
Yeah.
And it's very hard to control stresses externally to us, but this is clearly something that you can have a much higher level of control internally. What you put in your mouth is, for most of us, under, you know, our control.
Yeah, it is totally, Natalie. But for some people, if they're on a blood roller coaster, blood sugar roller coaster, they don't actually realize they're making the choices they're making around food because they can't control those cravings. So when you eat sugar or you eat carbohydrates, insulin is the hormone that's released in response to the carbohydrate to keep our blood sugars under control. So if the carbohydrate is very processed in the forms of cakes and biscuits, because those— that's already that, that processed that processed sugar is already released, is released into our bloodstream really quickly, the body releases insulin really quickly. So insulin is released to pick up the sugars and take them to the cells for energy production. But if we're sedentary, we don't need those cells, we don't need that energy. So insulin then leaves the bloodstream very quickly and takes the sugars to the liver to store them, basically. So we have this spike in insulin to pick up the sugars, we're not using them for energy production, so then we have a very quick crash because the insulin leaves the bloodstream and goes to the liver, and that crash down here is where the brain, because the brain functions on glucose, the brain says, we, we haven't got enough sugar in the system, we haven't got enough glucose in the system, eat some more sugar. So down here in this kind of low blood sugar state where we might be, um, feeling we're craving sugar, we're feeling a bit tired and exhausted, we need something to pick us back up again. Down here is where we reach for the quick sugary snack to pick our blood sugars back up, because that's what the brain's told us to do.
Mm-hmm.
That lifts our insulin really quickly again because it's sugary. We don't use the energy for energy production, so we have another crash in, in insulin because we— it leaves to go to the liver. And so this process carries on throughout the day. And sometimes we don't even realize we're on that roller coaster. We just end up craving things that we, we, um, we, we find it kind of feels like it's out of our control. And so that then adds, further fuels the anxiety because we kind of think, I can't control my cravings, you know. And also in the, in the, in 21st century life, we've been told that the way to manage weight, the way to manage our health, et cetera, et cetera, is to keep cutting things down, cutting things down. And if you then can't cut it down because you're on this blood roller coaster and you're constantly eating things, constantly looking at calorie content, all those kind of things, that just fuels more anxiety.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
It puts us in a real place around food of, of kind of like not being able to control things. And so we've got more anxiety going on, which is already fueling the anxiety and the inflammation that's already in our system. And it's just a vicious circle that some people really struggle to break. And one of the things that I really want to do is empower people to understand that actually it's really easy to break that cycle. You just need to know how to do it, basically. And one of the easiest things to do is to make sure that the first thing you eat at the beginning of the day is the right food to balance your blood sugars through the course of the rest of the day.
So if you can get a green, orange, or red, is it?
Well, yeah, and it's protein, and it's a more protein-based breakfast. So a savory breakfast that's protein breakfast with greens, reds, and oranges on it But if you, you know, if it was to be an omelette, for example, or scrambled eggs or something like that, um, that protein doesn't have a relationship with insulin. So if you had your greens and reds and oranges on there, you've got the carbohydrate to give you the energy, but the protein keeps your blood sugars really well balanced. And you should be able to go from one meal to the next without needing to snack. And if you can do that, that's when you know your blood sugars are really well balanced. That's when you're gonna get inflammation under control. That's when you're gonna improve your gut health. That's when you can control the cravings. You are in charge of the food that you eat. And then you can choose the right foods that are gonna nourish your body to help bring that internal stress down, which means you can cope with external stress much better.
