How Two Women Reversed Type 2 Diabetes With 5 Simple Steps

Can you reasonably walk up a hill and not feel overly stressed by it? What is your blood pressure like? Is it really volatile? Is it pretty stable? I think metabolic fitness means you can meet the demands of your life and still stay in a healthy range for your biomarkers. And I think if the demands of your life mean that your biomarkers go bonkers, you're no longer metabolically fit. Are we really stressed? Do we have poor sleep? How's that meal timing doing? What are our food choices? What's nutrition look like? What about exercise with an emphasis on strength training? It's not about deprivation or restriction. No blame, no shame, no judgment. Let's meet you where you're at so you can get to where you need to go.

Could you be metabolically unfit and also not be overweight? Could you be overweight and actually metabolically fit? Today, I'm joined by my dear friend, Dr. Beverly Yates, who is a diabetes expert.

Expert.

And she's on a mission to help 3 million people heal from type 2 diabetes and pre diabetes. In today's conversation, I'm sure you think that you know everything there is to know about insulin resistance, diabetes and the risks, especially with a woman in perimenopause and menopause. But we got into a little bit of a deep conversation about that science and how body weight and insulin resistances is oversimplified and inappropriate. And Dr. Yeats went through some of the very important things that are in her upcoming book called the Yates Protocol, Five Simple Steps to Fix youx Blood Sugar and reverse type 2 diabetes. And it's making peace with food to never feel deprived again. And this book is on early release. We got a sneak peek into the science and some deeper dives into understanding metabolic health in a way you probably haven't heard before. So join me today on menopause mastery with Dr. Beverly Yates. Dr. Beverly, we're going to. We're going to get rid of some of the myths today about decline as we get older, and particularly around metabolic health and weight gain, diabetes, insulin resistance, all the stuff that we hear. And, and I think a lot of times, particularly it gets presented like you're kind of screwed. You're sol.

Right, Right. It's hopeless.

Now that's kind of a vibe that's hopeless. The decline is inevitable and particularly around body fat. Like doctors especially are very, very much at play here where it's like they see somebody and they go, okay, you need to lose weight. You need to exercise and eat less. They might have a few more comments that they Make. But the reality is weight is not really the issue, particularly when we talk about metabolic health and maybe one of the features or symptoms. So I want to dig into that today because. Because it's a symptom of it. It's not the thing. Right, right. So let's. Let's dig in. So explain that to the menopause listeners and menopause mastery listeners that may or may not be in menopause. Maybe they're Perry. But it's not. It's not the thing.

Right? It's not the thing. It's a distraction, I feel. And, you know, let's keep it real. There are times when people really do way too much, and they do need to release weight and find a way to sustain that. But there's such a way in which we message anything around women's health. It has to do with suffering, deprivation, and restriction. And, you know, I have plenty of patients that I've worked with who were overweight or obese on the front end of their healing journey, who, as they lost the weight, found that they still had the other chronic health problems, but the weight was now gone. And then when they go to see doctors, they realize, wow, they never really saw me or listened because they couldn't even hear the fact that, let's say I had asthma or I was struggling with my bone health, raised. I had osteopenia, osteoporosis. You know, maybe they had other health problems that aren't typically related to obesity. And until they lost the weight. Now they could finally get the full lab workup, really get treated and seen as a human being. And it's really unfortunate that people have gotten so obsessed with this, because the reality is, particularly if we're talking about blood sugar, glucose control, diabetes, type 2 diabetes, pre diabetes, when you look around the world, the reality is most of the people with type 2 diabetes are leaning if they're outside of the United States of America. I'm gonna say it again. The majority of them are lean. They aren't even overweight. They're not obese. They're lean. So clearly, it is not just fat that is the factor here. So people can be lean and metabolically unfit. And, you know, you can't look at someone just because they're lean. It doesn't necessarily mean they're healthy. And if someone is fat or overweight doesn't necessarily mean they're unhealthy. It's just not that simple.

So I'm so glad you said that, because, yes, insulin resistance, leptin resistance, blood Sugar control can be part of the feature and parcel of that. But you also get people, particularly in, you know, online that they're like, oh, it's always insulin resistance. I'm like, not necessarily.

Sometimes that insulin relationship is great. And if you do objective lab testing, so you're looking at their fasting blood sugar number, their A1C, which is that longer term control because you get brand new red blood cells every 90 days or so. So you can look at it every three months to know, hey, what's the A1C doing for glucose control? If you're looking at fasting insulin, if you're looking at C peptides, let's back it up to fasting insulin. That's a great marker to look at to see what is your body doing when you aren't eating. If we're looking at fasting blood sugar, fasting glucose, that's great. That's one part of the picture. The other part has gotta be fasting insulin, right? If that number's creeping up and it's going into the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, you know, the pancreas is in overdrive, it's working too hard. Ideally, fasting insulin is in the single digits, 9 or less, 10 to 20, start paying attention. It could be that there's more demand on the pancreas. There's no need to panic yet, but pay attention here, right? But that person can be just really lean. They can look absolutely fine from the point of view of the stereotype we've been relentlessly taught about what a healthy body should look like. And I found that it is so upsetting because sometimes, particularly women who feel so disrespected in the medical setting and not heard, not seen, they wind up spending years not getting the care that they deserve. It's exhausting to have to advocate for yourself that hard. So if you're someone who's overweight or obese, or you're someone who's really lean, you might not be seen accurately. So the lean people often do not get full workups. The people who are overweight, who are obese, who are fat, get blamed, shamed, judged and stigmatized, and often wind up not getting help for anywhere from eight to 10 years because of all of the emotional baggage that gets heaped on when really could we just stop and objectively have consistent lab criteria we put people through that are objective. And that's part of why I developed the Yates protocol. Give people a personalizable framework to think about their own health and then they can take this to their health professional, their medical professional, and say, look, you know, here's five things that matter. How come you've only talked to me about one?

You know, Well, I think that gets to the, you know, there's so many things broken in our, you know, effed up health, health care insurance, and we're right in the middle of all of this health care reform and, and the rollbacks of protections for people.

They're not trying to fix it. They aren't trying to help any.

They're making sure that the companies in between are making money. Right. And they don't care whether it costs Americans their lives. But the reality is, is, is our current medical model does not help people understand that there is an underlying problem. Like, I, I could tell you my dad was a type 2 diabetic for two decades, and I think I'm the only one that ever ran an insulin and a C peptide on him and even did a glucose insulin tolerance test to see what his hyperinsulaemic response like, does it go over the top? The doctors were just like, no, cool, stay on Metformin. And when that doesn't work, we'll add, you know, Jar Jardians or whatever. Right. And, and I, and I, I think it's, you know, equally, we can have somebody who is, you know, know, metabolically unfit. Right. Unwell, but absolutely have a body that looks like they don't, based on our current, you know, aesthetic standards that keep shifting. And on the other side of it, I run into a lot of women who might be packing some extra junk in the trunk. Right. They're not happy about, you know, the extra body weight they're carrying, but you look at their insulin numbers, they're great. You look at their hemoglobin A1C and it's A5. You look at all those things and on the other side, you. It is not that. Right. And, and so if you're listening and you're like, I don't know what Beverly, Dr. Yates is talking about, but, but the reality is, is we're being told all the time that it's this one single thing and it really isn't it. But metabolic fitness is so much greater. And so let's talk about what does it really mean to be metabolically fit and be at a reduced risk, particularly as we get older for prediabetes, diabetes and metabolic disorders? Because I think people know how to, like, parrot the words, but we don't know what does it mean to be truly healthy?

That's a great place to start, right? So to be truly healthy, we want to have balance in these things. We don't want to be extreme. And there's a lot of things culturally that gets rewarded around extreme, whether it's extreme nutrition, extreme diet, extreme deprivation, extreme indulgence. Like, whatever it is, it's extreme. And so to be metabolically fit, you want to have a hemoglobin A1C in that healthy range, and that's going to be a 5.6 or lower. I would say even a 5.4 or lower. Right. 5.6 is okay. Back in the day, 30 years ago, they changed. It was about 30 years ago, actually, they changed the standards. I remember some of the older doctors I worked with then, as I was going through my own training, they were suspicious because they thought, oh, wait, they're changing it so that the A1C number, now we have a much wider range for what's considered at that point, 30 plus years ago to be pre diabetic. And they thought, man, they probably have some drugs coming out to give people for that range. Ah, so you're enough. Right. So we see these markers that are objective. Sometimes these goal posts are changed in order to fit certain pharmaceutical prescribing guidelines. Now, that's not to say that it's not about health, but I just say, you know, everybody pay attention to what's going on when the goal posts literally move from here to here. Right. So as the numbers became lower for that A1C, so now that pre diabetes range became 5.7 to 6.4. Well, well, metformin is the basic starter drug, and from there they've added other ones. Meanwhile, though, the thing that I've always felt is not right about this is that people are not giving clear information about what they can do. Those five simple steps that will make the difference for their metabolic health. So you want that A1C in a healthy range, you want your fasting blood sugar numbers to be 99 or lower, ideally 70 to 99. I would say optimal control is 75 to 85. Here's why. Once people get a fasting blood sugar number in the 60s or boy, the 50s, that's usually hypoglycemia. They don't feel well. It may feel shaky, they might be sweating, they might feel a little woozy. So we don't want blood sugar too low the same way we don't want it too high. Fasting blood sugar numbers of like 100, 101, 125, 150, heaven forbid, it's in the 203 hundreds because now we've got an emergency. That's the bad situation. These are things that we have to deal with. Right? So that's two. Two parameters. Fasting insulin is a lab marker that's rarely looked at. It's not routinely prescribed. And I love the fact that you talk about it. I certainly talk about it, and we have other colleagues that we work with or that we know of who promote it, but we haven't quite yet gotten into the general consciousness, into that zeitgeist that says, this is a standard lab test. Fasting insulin lets you know how well your pancreas is doing. The pancreas is making insulin. If you have type 2 diabetes or pre diabetes, right? If you're a type 1 diabetic, you're taking insulin as a medicine, as an injectable for the rest of your life until they figure out a cure for that. They're not there yet. They've made some progress, but they're not there yet. I'm praying that that can happen. That would be so freeing for people with type 1. So if you look at it right now, about 95% of the people who have diabetes have type 2. Didn't used to be such a huge pile of people with type 2. When you said diabetes back in the day, you were talking about one. So the whole thing has shifted. So if we want to be metabolically healthy, we want to look at those things, right? So that's your A1C, your fasting blood sugar number, fasting insulin. You want to make sure C peptide's okay because you don't want C peptide to show either exhaustion in the pancreas or it's working too hard, there is a range in there for C peptide. C peptide is a great marker. So if someone is in, let's say, an emergency room, and the doctors need to decide, hey, has this person become a type 1 diabetic or are they a type 2 who's in a bad spot? Maybe they are newly diagnosed as type 2. Sometimes that happens, right? And your A1C is at A13. And you know, they had no idea they were even in trouble. That C peptide can help make that decision. And sometimes that gets missed. Mistakes happen, so it's good to be well informed. Metabolic fitness. Hey, can you reasonably walk up a hill and not feel overly stressed by it? What is your blood pressure like? Is it really volatile? Is it pretty stable? Is it too high? Is it too low? I think metabolic fitness means you can meet the demands of your life and still stay in a healthy range for Your biomarkers. And I think if the demands of your life mean that your biomarkers go bonkers, that's you no longer metabolically fit. I just want to make this practical so that people can understand. You know, we got like a third of teenagers now who have pre diabetes. This is crazy.

Like little kids, like grade school children getting diagnosed with what we used to call adult onset, which was type 2, which is now as young as age 8.

That's crazy. That should never happen.

So if somebody were to think about it, like I think your exam, your example of metabolic fitness, regardless of your waistline.

Yeah.

Can you walk up a hill? Can you go to San Francisco and walk the hills of San Francisco without being winded and have to have to lay down like that? That shows lack of metabolic fitness right at the cellular level.

Seattle, that's another city with the hills, especially in downtown Seattle. Those hills are no joke. You know, if you're in Colorado, anywhere in Colorado, Utah, you're going like this. Here's another one. And I'll bet you've talked about this plenty and I love your blog or your website. I've always think you do such a great job with the information as well as making it understandable for people, which is to talk about bmi, which is not a marker of health. It was never intended to be scaled up to be used for all of humanity. It was for particular population cohort, full stop. Instead, what's more useful from the point of view of metabolic fitness is the relative measure of your height to the circumference of your waist. That ratio is far more sensitive for metabolic health. Why? Because if you have metabolic problems, they're more likely to show up around your waistline. And if you have too much fat in your belly area, in your abdomen, particularly in the organs of the abdomen, that's a problem. And that doesn't just mean someone has a quote, unquote, beer belly, but rather sometimes that fat is not visible. Doesn't always push, push the belly out, but sometimes you need imaging to know what's happening internally. This is why so many people can be lean and still have a metabolic problem. You can't just look at someone and say, oh, they're skinny, they're fine. Because it's a real disservice. Somebody walks in and they're lean to the doctor's office. And a lot of doctors are like, I don't need to order these lab tests. Why are you here? I don't even check something like an A1C or a fasting Blood sugar number, never mind fasting, insulin, C peptide, et cetera. What if you're a more muscular person? Right. What if you have some kidney concerns? We already have dismissed why BMI is confusing and not helpful. It wasn't meant to be used the way it's used, right. Height to waist circumference. And if you have kidney concerns or you're a more muscular person, we know BMI is not useful. It will always show up bad if you are more muscular person. Instead, Cystatin C, and I'm going to spell it C Y, S T A T I N space letter C. That's a great biomarker to show kidney health if you're a more muscular person because the BMI is just worthless. Ask a nephrologist what they think about a bmi, PSI statin C muscles and then you've got a more objective measure. You know, I mean, it's just amazing the misunderstandings that are out there. There's so many myths.

Well, yeah. And then we get told that as the population and we're trying to figure out how to address our health problems with these sort of flippant remarks about these kind of things that aren't really accurate. Ladies, if you're noticing more fine lines and wrinkles, it's not just about aging. It's about the loss of estrogen. And that affects our skin structure, making it drier, thinner, less firm. But here's the great news. I've created Biased Mastery Cream to help. This luxurious bioidentical estrogen cream supports your natural hydration and elasticity. It's packed with nourishing oils like olive jojoba, aloe and coconut. So it feels amazing and helps soften those lines and bring back that healthy glow. I've been using it and let me tell you, my skin has never looked or felt better. It's smoother, more radiant, and those little cracks, increases are way less noticeable. If you're ready to give your skin some extra love, check out BI EST mastery on the Metabolic Blueprint website. And that's metabolicblueprint.com biestmastery. That's B I E S T Mastery. M A S T E R Y and your face will. Thank you. I want to dig in a little bit. So we talked about, obviously the fitness of being able to walk around other things, the waist circumference. Even if you don't have the beer gut, you can still have. You could still have. You can have somebody really that doesn't look like they are carrying a lot of visceral. Fat, but they are. Let's talk a little bit about the junk in the trunk, right? Like, women always are. Like, I don't like, look at my hips. I can't get my jeans up. But that stuff is actually somewhat protective and does not carry that metabolic risk.

It's interesting, you know, that fatty deposition. Some of it for us is genetic. Some of us, it's a reflection of our own hormonal balance or imbalance. And some of us, it's a matter also of muscular tone. Some people definitely have more muscular tone and fitness. And so they're going to have a tighter butt and maybe more pronounced glutox. Right? Or glutox. Gluteal muscles. Yeah, I like that. Glutox. That's a good one.

There you go. We're glutox.

I love it. Right? Why not? We just made a new word right here. And with that, you know, some of that is like, you can just look at your family and see what is your hereditary inheritance. Right. And with all of this, you know, we have industries that are designed to plump up the butt, plump up the calves, plump up the lips, and, like, can we just accept ourselves as we are? So much insecurity is built on making money so somebody else can try to convince you to be something that isn't really your destiny. You know, it's just interesting. And the. The aesthetics that go with this, it, like you said in the beginning, it just. It changes with the wind. Yeah.

We had body positivity for the first time for a couple of years during COVID and just slightly behind. And now we have skinny talk again. Right. I don't know if you heard about that, but there's a big thing, younger age group. But hey, we'll get pulled into it too, where they're. They're talking about taking the shots, right. And using them and then, you know, not eating. Like, there was one yesterday that was somebody sauteing a bunch of syringes. Like, so we have this pedestal, like, we have this desire and urge for being skin skinny over healthy. And healthy wins every time, especially as you get older. Right. Skinny is not helpful. You know, metabolically unwell is a recipe for disaster. And so it's not about that.

I think there's a range of what's really fit and a range of health. And I think that the way research is done and the way things are marketed to people is just a complete disservice. It doesn't fit anything that's really accurate. If you look at people around the world. If you look at people on your own block, if you look at people around the country, you see such a wide variety of humanity. If you look within a family, people rarely have the same body shapes and sizes. So I'm like, why are we struggling with the fact we have such a range? It's clearly, you know, it's not an accident. And different people respond to different things. You can have a family, let's say mom and dad, six kids, right? Total, eight people. And you can see that maybe of the five kids, maybe five of them are plump and one is lean, or the other way around, five are lean, one's plump, they're eating the same thing, they're drinking the same water, they have the same emotional environment at home. But clearly it's not being expressed the same way. I just think sometimes we just have to come to grips with feeling comfortable in our own skins and take our power back and have objective measures about our health. Let's look at that A1, C. Let's look at the fasting glucose numbers. You know, let's look at the fasting insulin. Let's look at the C peptide, cystatin, the waist to height ratio. All of these objective measures take the full experience of how we live our lives. Are we really stressed? Do we have poor sleep? Hey, how's that meal timing doing? What are our food choices? What's nutrition look like? Do we even have choice when it comes to food? Because frankly, some people don't. What about exercise with an emphasis on strength training? You know, those are the five steps of what I put together as the AIDS protocol as a personalizable, customizable framework for people to get a hold of their blood sugar. And if they're struggling to be able to reverse type 2 diabetes, literally make peace with food and never feel deprived again. It's not about deprivation or restriction. No blame, no shame, no judgment. Let's meet you where you're at so you can get to where you need to go and get a hold of your blood sugar so you don't wind up at high risk of things like dementia, of things like heart attacks, strokes, vision loss, going blind, dialysis, danger to your kidneys, chronic kidney disease, neuropathy, and all the things that happen when type 2 diabetes gets away from people.

Yeah, I think, I don't think people are aware enough of sort of the, the decline that happens with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes, like, often. Yes, it is like cardiovascular event or whatever, but the complications of that, the vascular damage and the other, the other things Are so great that, you know, I don't think anybody wants to live with an amputation. Right. But it happens. And, you know, I think we were talking earlier, before we hopped on, about a recent study that came out looking at hyperdensities. So hyperdensities are damaged areas in. And they're looking particularly in the brain. So brain scans and they had tied these together. Hyperdensities are associated also with, like, dementia risk and things like that to correlation to hot flashes. So the more frequent the hot flashes are, night sweats, those sort of the. The, you know, body temperature changes that are associated with menopause increase the risk for these hyperdensities. And a lot of it is around. Women have more, what we call microvascular disease. Like, so the small, little, tiny capillaries like you find in your fingers or in your. In your brain at the very ends or even in your heart. On one side, we can build more of those than men. We're better at it. But on the other side, we can have more damage there. And you started bringing up some things that, you know, because diabetes is directly in line with that, it damages your vascular system. Right. Specifically around women and. And heart attack and things. Can you share that with my audience? Because I don't think they have any idea. Because we look so different than men when it comes to heart attacks and strokes.

Yeah. In terms of how it presents, whether it's the symptomatic or just the bigger backgr. Right. The presentation of vascular disease, of blood vessel disease for men and women is quite different. And some of this is fundamental. I first became aware of this both of my work with women in cardiovascular disease, especially with, like, congestive heart failure, mitral prolapse, things like that. And looking at intravenous nutrient therapy, something that I did back when I had my residency program here in California, and with the nutrient program for chelation and things like that, one of the things you could readily observe was that women have that microvasculature around the heart, the cardiac tissue itself. So the blood vessels that feed the heart are critical, because if the heart's not working, folks, it's game over. We're done. You know, that's a wrap. So in that scenario, and microvasculature can be life saving. And one of the reasons why I think women tend to outlive men by about 10 years, we have more workarounds, more natural ways to create more blood vessels where there might be blockages before the heart has a literal heart attack, a myocardial infarction before a stroke appears. We'll create other blood vessels. We naturally do that with that in mind. It means then that we might be at risk in a different way. Because if we have these blockages up in the brain and some of these things are occurring silently and think of like TIAs or transient ischemic attacks, mini strokes, smaller strokes, and we aren't able to build that natural workaround, right? Because this stuff is silent. Then now we got a trouble. And see, this is part of the problem with type 2 diabetes. Pre diabetes, most of the early stages, it's silent. People don't have obvious clues. Recently someone asked me about, oh, come on, there's gotta be something. So I've been trying to do a better job putting this stuff out on social media, YouTube, wherever. The only, not only, but the, the silent things you can notice is if you have changes in the color of your skin, especially on the back of your neck. So who looks at the back of their neck? It's not that easy, right? If you go in your bathroom, go to your mirror, take your phone, and with selfie style, look at the back of your neck. If you live with someone else, have them look, but you look too. Take responsibility, because sometimes other people don't pay attention no matter how much information you give them. Look at it, right? Expand out that selfie style so it can zero in on magnify so you can see what's going back there. And if you. The back of the skin, the skin rather on the back of your neck has changed color. Typically if there's an issue with insulin resistance or pre diabetes, it will have changed color and it will be a darker color than whatever is your baseline color. So whatever your baseline color is, no matter how much melanin, it will look darker. It might also feel fuzzy, almost like velvet, right? It has a very fancy name called livericansens. Acanthosis Nigricans. Acanthosis. It's just a mouthful to get that out. Latin, of course. Why? Because it's hard to say. That's why. No, I'm kidding. But anyway, that's the real name. And if you have that going on, you may also see changes in the color in your armpits, right? Your axillary area and in your groin, particularly the front part of your pubic area of your labia. The color will change and it will be a darker color. And those are great places to look. Another clue is around the neck. You might have skin tags. Front, back, sides, and they'll grow almost like little weeds, these skin tags. And they can get tangled up, like in necklaces, stuff like that. That's another early warning sign of pre diabetes and insulin resistance. So if this is ringing any bells, folks, please go get objectively tested with the tests we've suggested here. Those tests aren't expensive. And now over the counter in the US you can actually order your own lab test. So if you can't get your medical or health provider to cooperate, you're not trapped. You can take charge of it and go get it for yourself and then go to someone who will work with you to help you interpret it and you can take your next steps. Okay, So I want to make sure people have clear action things they can do to help themselves. Because I feel like in this moment, not only as you and I have talked about before, does someone need to be an advocate. They need to have a sense of, hey, how do I live my life? And are things going the way they need to go? Am I overly stressed? Did I have a series of traumatic events? Events? A series of stressors? Am I chronically stressed? Did I have a severe blowout kind of stress? Is my sleep a mess? You know, is it hormonal chaos? Is it hot flashes? Because I'm not able to sleep at night? Maybe it's night sweats. So maybe I go from freezing cold to incredibly hot and back and forth, right? Because that's a workout, right? By itself, you know, do I have enough hours in the day? Did I go to bed early enough? So I had enough opportunity to sleep long enough and then was my sleep deep? Maybe you use a wearable technology that helps you to assess your sleep. That's one way just again, to get some objective information on board. I find that sleep and stress are two of the things of the three of the five steps in the H protocol, they don't get talked about in terms of blood sugar, right? When you go to sleep, that's the beautiful healing opportunity every night for your blood sugar to hit the reset button. And if it doesn't do it, then instead of your blood sugar, let's say you went to bed, maybe it was not in a healthy range, but when you were asleep, because you were fasting, you're not eating, it got to the healthy range. Let's say that doesn't happen when you go to sleep. So you went to bed, your blood sugar was already in an unhealthy range. It didn't reset, it stayed there. Then the next morning, let's say you had bad sleep, maybe you're stressed. And now in response to those events, your blood sugar is going to creep up, right? Too much cortisol, too much stress, your body releases. The extra response to cortisol is going to release glucose whether you like it or not. It's not going to ask you. It's going to do it. Here goes your blood sugar up. Oh, you're snacking because you're stressed. Oh, you're snacking because you didn't sleep well. And leptin and ghrelin are out of whack. Oh, there goes your blood sugar, right? You can start climbing up. And this is how people get into these problems with butcher. Nobody explains what happened to get them there. And instead it says, oh, it's your fault. Even though you have no education about how this happened and what you can do to make that different. You know, it's just. It's just real. The food scientists are paid a ton of money to make sure that snack foods, other things, brightly covered, they overly excite your tongue. Your tongue talks to your brain and it says, I don't want a handful. I want five bags of that. I mean, it's crazy. You know, when we were kids, right, you could buy. Well, that was a whole different thing, like for a dime a quarter, something like that. A bag of chips. And the bag of chips. Betty, how many chips were in the bag? Thank you.

It was like five happy meals and adult pork.

You could not get into trouble with five to seven chips. You know, if you had soda or if you had a juice glass, like orange juice, it was 4 ounces, 3 to 4 ounces. It was not 64 ounces. This bucket, it's for a horse. You know, these portions are crazy. So, yeah, we got some work to do. But first off, to reclaim our own power, we need to be informed about what to look for, why to look for it, and then what's your lived experience, you know, how about your meal timing? You might be somebody who starts out the day with breakfast and lunch maybe gets away from you, and you wind up not eating lunch. And by the time you get to dinner, you want to eat a horse, a bear, and a tiger, you're so hungry, you're just gonna shovel in whatever, right? Cause you're hungry. Meal planning along with meal timing, there's such a way to win. But if you're really stressed and running fast and you've got way too much on your plate, some people are bookended, some people are caregivers, some people are first responders. It's a really stressful time to just try to pay attention to your health. And then when you show up with poor health, there will be people ready to blame you for the whole thing. Even though you weren't trying to destroy your health, that wasn't your goal.

No. And I think it's, you know, we talk about a lot of it on menopause mastery that, you know, metabolically we change as we lose estrogen. And when people do hormone replacement, it helps, but it's also not magical. It's not like you put estrogen and then all of a sudden the blood sugar starts to normalize, even though estrogen plays a role. So I think, you know, it's also recognizing that women have a unique metabolic change that happens during menopause that doctors quite frankly, still dismiss. When we have good research showing that we have increased visceral fat weight gain from the loss of estrogen alone, and exercise and diet alone doesn't change it if the goal is just to eat less and, and work out more. And I think that's why your protocol is important, because it gives people objective measures. These are the measures that we look at to help understand even if you don't have extra weight, you could be in metabolic risk. And we don't want that because the long term effects are just not ideal. But I think because I, we do run into a lot of women that all of a sudden are like, why is my blood sugar 105 on a fasting and my A1C has just gone up and, and I'm doing the same stuff, you know, talk a little bit about that because I think it's important for women to kind of hear it in multiple ways, that there are just changes.

There are changes the same way when our reproductive window opens and we go through puberty, right? So we enter that phase of life now where we could potentially bring another life into this world. And there's all kinds of things that shift. Again, this is part of our genetic heritage. We don't get to decide how this unfurls, but it happens, right? And in that moment, then, now as puberty starts, we sometimes, some of us, for about six months to a year. And we can readily observe this in children. Some of us will gain weight during that time quite easily. It's usually about five to seven pounds. Sometimes literally, the cheeks will chub up, look like little chipmunks, you know, carry weight right here. And often you can see, oh, this, this child's about to shift towards their adult self. Similarly, Ben, when we go to menopause now, we're putting a button on that, we're wrapping it up, it's coming to an end. That reproductive window is closing as such, that insulin resistance that may have shown up at the beginning may revisit us. The difference in today's world is profound, though. We have so much more junk in the air and the water and our food supply that interferes with our hormones and definitely our hormone disruptors. And this includes insulin. Insulin for some reason, is often carved out from the other hormones. It's like it's in the not cool kids club. It's kind of weird. We talk about estrogen and progesterone and testosterone and DHEA and all the rest, but we don't talk about insulin here. And it needs to be in the conversation. It's part of the homo club. Right. And so that insulin resistance that shows up, you know, with menopause can be a real thing in terms of being a troublesome factor. My mom and my grandmom used to talk about these shifts and their point of view. And I don't know if this is resonant. Maybe women in your family talked about this, you know, when you were a kid or a teenager. They talked about it being that they thought it was healthy for women to put on 5 to 10 pounds because it gave them more weight to poor pull from. That's how they talked about it. So if they got seriously ill, if they had a really bad cold or flu or a pneumonia, and this was in an era before antibiotics was a thing for pneumonia because pneumonia used to kill people. So they had some weight to pull from. So if they were sick, they didn't waste away, that they would still be alive. And so I often wonder for us as women and we become women of a certain age, we are postmenopausal and. And we enter those crone years, if this isn't a gift from nature for us to have an additional 5 to 10 pounds, not 50 to 100 pounds, but 5 to 10, so we have something that we don't just waste away. Also, if we wound up in a time of famine, again, we would be the elders in a society. In order to care for the younger people, somebody needs to not need quite as much for a bit. So if you need to, you know, decide who's going to like. I just wonder. Yeah, if you look at.

I mean, if you look at the research. So if this is enough for women of a certain age, highly seasoned, which is what I like to call it, we not need to pay attention to skinny talk.

Yeah, Spicy women. We're spicy.

Women are amazing. And I think that, you know, microdosed and dosed appropriately for the women who need it and the men who need it is great. But I can tell you the research is a hundred percent clear. If you happen to be skipping skinny and under muscled, your likelihood of dying from what is common like a simple uti, a simple pneumonia, a simple cold or flu is much, much greater than the woman who's packing an extra 15. Because the reality is you have no reserve. You are skin and bones and your body will, will eat away at itself so rapidly. I mean, I can tell you I hurt my hip, I think you may know this. I hurt my hip. I'm going to have to have hip surgery. I've been it since somewhat immobilized this year to some degree. I just, I have a lot of, I've got more than just the hip, like they gotta sew stuff back together. And I can tell you I haven't gotten on the body composition because I quite frankly can't take it because I've lost three pounds of muscle and it's in my legs. I and that, that was a couple months ago and it freaks me out. I know I will get it back and I'm working a lot on the other leg, but you know, this leg, I can't even leg press £20 because of the injury. And, and so, and this is somebody coming from having a lot of muscle mass. And I'm only 55 going on 56. So what happens when you're 65, 70, 75 and you get laid up for a couple weeks? You will lose pounds and that puts you at risk. Women die from frailty, we die from frailty. So it's better to have a little.

Extra, you know, I love that you brought this part up. So when we think about that muscle and muscle mass and what it's doing for us, right. Active working muscles are blood sugar sponges. Quite literally. One of the fastest ways to get out of blood sugar trouble if you're struggling with high blood sugar is to get active in the moment. And so doing squats against the wall or just above a chair if your balance is not good with the chair backed against the wall so you don't fall taking a walk, you don't have to be an Olympian, you know, five to 10 to 20 minutes of activity will do wonders for really high blood sugar in a moment. So if you've got a blood sugar emergency, straightforward to handle it. Having said that, building up that precious muscle mass is a gift that you just gives you so much benefit for your entire life, it helps prevent falls as we get older. And it's helping with our blood sugar control. It also helps us to feel powerful in our world, in a world, frankly, that doesn't always want us to have our power. So to not get fooled by that, I know you will recover well and thoroughly because you have such excellent information. And more important than information, you are an action taker. When there's stuff going on, I know you can handle your business. I don't worry about you like that.

You know, people don't really think about it, but I'm like, it can rapidly happen. You know, we want to be able to lift up our grandkids and we want to be able to, you know, put our suitcase over our head and all these things. And it really does take being strong and in and metabolically healthy. So we've talked a little bit about your five points, but I want you to talk about your book because that's getting released and we have some pre order. So we have pre order benny bonuses that you guys want to get and pre order her book because even if you don't have diabetes or pre diabetes, you probably know somebody who does. But if you are over 55, you're at risk. Right, because we aren't as metabolically sound. So, Dr. Beverly, talk about your book.

Absolutely. So my book's coming out. So friends, please get this for yourself and read it. I just finished recording the audiobook version for it. So it's available as Audible and on other audiobook platforms. So you can go to the link and buy it from your preferred bookseller. It doesn't have to be the biggest name. It could be some of the smaller booksellers, they will all say thank you for that order. You can make it a gift for other people. I know a lot of people who are making this a gift. The thing is, is that this is a gift of health at any time of year. And in that it's the five steps of the eighth protocol. It is customizable and personalizable, designed intentionally by myself as both a naturopathic physician and an MIT engineer to meet you where you are, wherever you might be on that healing journey. Five steps are nutrition, meal, timing, stress, sleep, and then exercise. With its twin, an emphasis on strength training. Why strength training? Because muscles can really absorb excess blood sugar. They even have a receptor called GLUT4. That's a clue. So it helps bring your glucose, your blood sugar right into your muscles. So having said that, with nutrition, I explain what are the. I have fi, excuse me, four food groups in there. There's what you would expect, protein, the healthy fats, along with smart carbs, the carbohydrates, the kinds that are helpful for your blood sugar and not the kinds that hurt. Along with a fourth group that I include of leafy high fiber foods, including things like leafy greens, chia seeds, flaxseeds, et cetera. Because that fiber is doing wonders for your blood sugar. That, along with the active working muscles, those are blood sugar sponges. Meal timing. A lot of people, frankly, they eat dinner to vape and then they go to bed an hour or two after they've eaten. And this is a way to have blood sugar disaster all the time. Then the next thing to look at is your sleep. Do you have good quality sleep? Did you have enough time to sleep and did you feel refreshed when you woke up? The kind of energy problems people with diabetes often report, it's specific. It's the once to, but can't kind of fatigue and exhaustion. They want to get off the couch, they want to go out and exercise, they want to hang out with their family and friends, but they're wiped out. They're exhausted. And that is real. The extra blood sugar in their blood. Think of it as potential energy that's not realized. It's really unfortunate. Right? The other thing to know about this is with the issues that go on with sleep, unfortunately can have a direct impact on stress, and stress can have a direct impact on sleep. We talked a little bit earlier about those hormones, leptin and ghrelin. Ghrelin is the hormone of hunger. You should feel hungry in between meals. I always recommend people not snack because snacking typically will mess that up. It's also gonna mess up that fasting insulin we were talking about earlier. Right. The other thing to know about hunger is you should know when it's time to stop eating. And that's leptin. So ghrelin, which sounds a lot like growling, as in the stomach that's growling because it's hungry. And then leptin is, hey, I've had enough, I'm satisfied. I have satiety talk about all that in the book and how it feels. This book is written from the point of view of people's lived experiences. You know, I've worked with people for over 30 years. I'm very fortunate for the kinds of people who trust me with their health. And there's plenty of stories to make it relatable and bring all of these points together. And there's two quick stories that I'll share because it Makes this point for us. Right? And then finally, you know, after we talk about the issues with sleep and stress, then we look at exercise. Aerobic exercise is great. You also need to do strength training. People are rarely told this, and especially women and ladies, you don't need to worry about, like, how you will look. You're not going to become someone who looks like a male bodybuilder. You don't have the hormones to do it. You just don't. Unless you're taking anabolic steroids, in which case you will look like that. Because you're doing that. You're creating that profile in yourself. You don't naturally have it. Right. So let's visit quickly the story of Pam. She was a person who worked with me who had type 2 diabetes for over 25 years. And when she first got started, her A1C had been pinned at 7.5 for years. She had Was taking Manjaro. She had gotten some benefit from it. But again, her A1C had pinned at 7.5. She was still deeply fatigued and tired. She also had some challenges before with sleep, but she had resolved that. So that was good. And so now she was coming to ask for help because she really wanted to see that A1C come down because she knew having it at a higher level like that on men, she's like, this has got to still get better. What can I do? So we started working together. In her case, we started working with energy. She was so exhausted, so I put her on a particular supplement protocol to get her energy out of the basement, and it worked for her. Three to four weeks later, she goes back to the gym, she hires her trainer, starts working on muscle. But she took me seriously about building her muscular mass. Okay, great. Then from there, she's like, what's more, doc, what else can we do? The next things that we worked on for her had to do with her nutrition specifically. She got more energy as she went back to the gym, and she decided, you know what, the kind of foods I have in the house and all these snacks, why are they even here? This is just way too easy to select things that, you know, I don't feel good about and I know are completely against what I need. Right. So with that in mind, she then got rid of all the junk. And she said, I went literally from craving three bean. Excuse me, we're gonna start the part over. Okay? She said, literally, I went from craving crapola to craving three bean salad.

That's. That's a huge change, right? Yeah. To, like, went that yeah, you gotta.

Train your taste buds, right? They turn over every 10 to 14 days. So the taste buds talk to the brain. You know, you take your food in, your tongue senses it. The taste buds go, ooh, it's sweeter. Ooh, it's sour, it's bitter, whatever. And the brain calibrates based on what the taste buds are telling it, how many calories are coming. This is why diet sodas and artificial sweeteners can be such a trap. Because if you trick the brain and say, oh, it's sweet after a while, takes about an hour, hour and a half, it's like, where's my calories at? And then you want to snack. If you recognize yourself in this. Okay, yeah. Ding, ding, ding, Right? The light bells go off. Okay. So for her, this was powerful. So she took real charge of her nutrition. The next thing that happened after that for her was understanding in her relationships, in her community and in her family and friends. She had some events where, you know, life was life and. But the bottom line was she was able to stay steady with her health choices. She continued to go to the gym even as she got busier and had other more emotional demands that happened. She also just. I'm just so happy for her. She just took charge of her whole healing journey. Now, a different story with a woman that I worked with. She was a business owner. She owned a restaurant. So she had all the healthy food in the world potentially, but she wasn't eating it. Her deal was she pretty much sat around all day at the restaurant, told everybody else what to do, and she would eat dinner with her husband about half hour to an hour before going to bed. That was a heavy meal. Now, this was an Italian restaurant. Italian food can be amazing and so beautiful and light and healthy, but what they liked to eat was heavy dishes like fettuccine Alfredo. So within an hour of bedtime, can you imagine? So she had the things wrong that you would expect. She was a relatively short, petite lady, maybe about 5 foot 1 or so, 5 foot 2. And she was seriously overweight and obese. She had high blood pressure, an unfriendly cholesterol profile. She had sleep apnea. She had gastroesophageal reflux disease, gerd. She had heartburn. Right. Which was really painful, along with all these other problems. And where we started with her on that journey was meal timing. Her story is in the book, as are other people's, to give you ideas as you read along or as you listen. Hey, this can work for people even when they've got serious multiple issues going on. Often when you start to unwind one, you start to unwind the others. So for her, for meal diming, I was the only doctor out of 12 that had talked to her about that. And so we got it. So she ate dinner at 6:00 clock instead of 11:00pm this was a huge win because it also meant that that heartburn now eased up. It went away, in fact. Why? Because when you're eating, you're vertical. If you go to bed right away, that food's just sitting in your stomach. Your body hasn't had a chance to digest it. She goes to horizontal now, it's too soon. Of course she's got heartburn. That acid is leaving that stomach and going to those sensitive tiss, the esophagus and throat that want nothing to do with stomach acid. So for her huge win then, she had better quality sleep because she wasn't on fire and in pain in the middle of the night, et cetera. On it went, right? And I worked exercise into her day because she just looked me dead in the eye and she said, Dr. Yates, I am not going to go to a gym, I'm not going to exercise. And I said, okay, I appreciate your honesty. We're going to have to work this into your day. So this is the idea of exercise snacks, not food snacks. Exercise snacks got her moving. So instead of her watching people do the work at the restaurant, I was like, you will be part of the team. So she would go to the back and she would help unload the food trucks, she'd help put the table, the chairs up on the tables at night, et cetera. Right. What a difference. And she started to feel better and it just made such a difference for her. Blood sugar, her blood pressure, her cholesterol, her sleep apnea, her heartburn. Right. Like all the things her weight, like, it, it just one pulled the other forward and she realized this is a lifestyle. Like. Yep, it's a lifestyle.

Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean it's powerful because you really shared like two very different stories of women with different demands, but how they could integrate your, your steps, your five steps into their life. So that's awesome. So I want to repeat, I'm gonna repeat the website. We're gonna have the website and also the follow up site where you can put in your receipt and get the extra bonuses. So the book website is Dr. Beverly yates.com forward/the Yates Protocol book. And there's a, there's a dash between one, so the dash Yates dash protocol Dash book. And if you go there, you can buy the book and then there is a link in the show notes where you can upload that, that receipt and get a undisclosed chapter that didn't get into the book because it's newer. So you want to get that because it's newer stuff and the exceptions that you may want to get into. Dr. Beverly, thank you for being on Menopause Mastery. This has been awesome. Thank you so much.

Welcome. I'm always delighted to be your guest. I appreciate you and your work and just all the difference you're making in the world.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We'll see each other soon, hopefully, Dr. Yates. And please, everybody, go get this book. You have somebody in your life that needs this life saving message. And I'll be back with you next week. I'll on Menopause Mastery.