#302 Blood Sugar Balance: Why it's Key to Clearing HPV and Optimizing Health

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions.

Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself and in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and in this episode I'm going to be talking about blood sugar levels and how to optimize and balance your blood sugar levels. Specifically related to how balancing your blood sugar levels can help you to clear high risk HPV virus to negative and get a normal negative Pap smear result. How does that sound? The thing is, is as you optimize your blood sugar levels, you're going to optimize your whole health. So this video is also going to help all of you to improve your health. Because when we have optimal blood sugar levels, we have optimal immune function, we also are more likely to have optimal hormone levels, lower inflammation levels, more optimal microbiome, both gut and vaginal microbiome, and so much more. That means we can be preventing cancer as well as diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and many other health issues, including helping you with your energy levels during the day, your sleep at night, your focus and your memory and your body weight, either to help you maintain a healthy weight or to even lose extra weight that you've been wanting to lose. So there are many, many benefits to optimizing your blood sugar levels. And this is why I consider this is one of the first things that I teach patients and program participants is how to identify blood sugar issues and to address them. Because that gets you such a good foundation for improving your health in so many ways. And when you improve your blood sugar levels, it makes everything else easier. So if you're just starting off with your health goals or even if you've been optimizing your health for years, I still encourage you to revisit your blood sugar levels on a regular basis. Because sometimes our blood sugar levels have been normal for much of our life and then all of a sudden a change happens, a stress in your life or peri and post menopause happens and all of a sudden your blood sugar levels are out of balance and out of sync. So it's something that I encourage you to be aware of and on top of throughout your life. This is just part of the human experience, is Being aware of your blood sugar levels and learning what it is that affects your blood sugar levels, it may be different for you than others. So I'm going to be talking in general and yet I encourage you to always be individualizing and knowing your body and what works best for your body. And that's one of the things I love about looking at blood sugar levels is because we can actually see that individualization. We can see that two different people could be eating the same thing and have completely different blood sugar response. So it's an opportunity for you to know and accept and acknowledge your body's response and use your blood sugar levels as 11 of the C single even one tool or one number, one way that you can see what's going on inside your system, right? Something that you can track on a regular basis that gives you some insight on what's going on inside of you. There's few things that we can check on a daily basis or hourly basis or even minute by minute basis to give us that kind of up to date information about what's going on inside our bodies. And so that's one reason why blood sugar is also very helpful as it can give you a lot of data to help you understand your body better and how to feed your body to optimize your blood sugar. But it's not just about how we feed our bodies. It's also what we do to recover from stress because stress shifts our cortisol levels, which shifts our insulin and blood sugar levels. So depending on what your stress levels are, that's going to affect your blood sugar levels as well as many other factors. If you get more sleep or less sleep, that's going to affect your blood sugar. There's. And there's more items as well. So it's beyond just looking at your food, it's looking at your whole experience and exposure to various stresses and toxins that will influence your body's ability to maintain a healthy blood sugar level. So that's just to give you an opening general sense of this concept of blood sugar balancing. And let's go into some more of the details. So first of all, I want to talk about how to know if your blood sugar is an issue. Because a lot of times when I talk to people about blood sugar, they often think their blood sugar is just fine and wouldn't have a sense that it's off. Right? Sometimes we're. We assume that as long as we don't have a severe situation that everything's okay. And actually I want to point out that certainly in the severe imbalance of blood sugar, that's where we start to call it diabetes. Then we definitely need to be working on blood sugar. But I'm encouraging you to work on your blood sugar way before it becomes diabetes. We need to start way back when it first started to get out of sync and not wait until it gets all the way to the severe form of diabetes. Now, if you already have diabetes or even on the high side of blood sugar, there's still so much we can do. I help patients with diabetes all the time to optimize their blood sugar, so it's definitely not too late. So whether you're at the, at the thinking you're normal but wondering if it's a little bit off, or if you're in the middle, or if you're all the way over to a severe version of blood sugar imbalance, there's still a lot you can do to optimize your blood sugar. There's still hope. Don't give up. Never give up. There's always opportunity to improve blood sugar levels. I've seen all different severities of cases and I've seen them all improve. It's a matter of putting your mind to it, understanding how the body is, is working with your blood sugar levels because the body already has self corrective mechanisms. And if you understand how your body's responding to your blood sugar and putting into play its own corrective mechanisms, you're going to be able to work with your body instead of against your body. Right? But most times we don't learn this. We don't, we don't learn this even when a person has diabetes. This is not taught. And so I encourage you to just know there's the mo, there's more information and the more you understand, the more you're gonna be able to work with your body to help optimize your blood sugar levels. And it's so worth it. When blood sugar levels are more optimal, you're just gonna feel so much better in so many ways. So here we go, let's go into more of this. So the way you're going to know if your blood sugar is imbalanced, one of the quickest ways is to get a fasting glucose level. Right? Glucose is the same as blood sugar. And so you can do this in a standard blood work. Usually when you go in for annual blood work, they're going to check your fasting glucose. So you have to get your blood drawn in the morning before you eat for it to be fasting. And having fasted for at least eight hours overnight. Right. So you go in the morning, do drink water, but just don't eat. Get your blood drawn and that's going to be a fasting glucose. And in a, it's usually part of a complete metabolic panel. So they will be checking your glucose as well as your kidney function and liver function at the same in the same test. So look for fasting glucose. You want it to be definitely less than 100 and a fasting glucose, but I even want it to be less than 90. You know, to me I'm hoping to see in the 80s, in some cases the 70s is okay. But you also don't want it to be too low either, right? Because then you have low blood sugar. And so we want it to be right in the middle where your body's able to maintain a mid level glucose even if you haven't eaten for more than eight hours. Now, there's many things that can make that more challenging for the body and we'll talk about that. But that's where you want to start. Is your blood sugar, is your fasting blood sugar in the 90s or like 99? Okay, then that's already kind of on the edge. If it is above 99, maybe it's in the, you know, 105, 110, 120 or higher. Then we're going, okay, we need to help your body out here. Something is making it difficult for your body to get your blood sugar back down. And what that really means is think about it. We're looking at the sugar level that's floating around your bloodstream. What's supposed to happen is when we consume carbs or sugar that contain glucose, the glucose goes into our bloodstream. And then the job of insulin is to signal to the cells, to allow the glucose into the cells. Because it's when the glucose goes into our cells that our body can use that glucose to make ATP or energy. Right? It goes into the cells and to be able to make energy for us to use. If it's glucose floating around in our bloodstream, we can't really use it. It's just going onto places that's actually damaging to our cells and to our tissue. It's called glycosylation. It can cause. That's where you see the adverse effects of diabetes is because sugar is attaching to various cells in the body and causing damage like in the eyes and the kidneys and so on. So we want to be able to, when we consume glucose, we want insulin to get it into our cells. So Our cells can use it for energy versus just having it circulate around the blood. And so when you're measuring a fasting glucose, you're looking at how much glucose is floating around my bloodstream and not being used. It's stuck, it's literally stuck in your blood. And eventually that glucose is going to go through your liver and the blood is going to go through the liver and the glue, the liver is going to have to decide what to do with that extra glucose. And the liver has three options really. It can either turn the glucose into cholesterol or triglycerides that show up in your blood. It could turn it into fat and store it in your liver, or it could turn it into fat and store it around your waist, usually around the belly and the hips and the waist. So if you know that your body has high cholesterol or fatty liver or weight gain, especially around your middle, then likely your liver is getting to the point of being overwhelmed with glucose and needing to put it somewhere. And so what we want to do is say, okay, we need to make, do whatever we can to reduce the circulating glucose. That's just your liver is having to do, put it into storage. We would rather you use that glucose for energy or, or in glycogen storage. But that doesn't require so much glucose. Right? So we have to go back and reverse engineer this and say, okay, where, why is there so much glucose in your blood and why isn't it being used, your insulin, not being able to get it into your cells? Now, another test that we can do in blood work that you can easily order at, like a standard doctor's office would be, is called hemoglobin A1C. And hemoglobin A1C is measuring how much sugar is attached to your hemoglobin and your bloodstream. Right. So it's showing, is there extra sugar getting stuck to your, your red blood cells? And so we can measure that now it's considered to be an average over three months. So it reflects your average blood sugar over three months. So when you do a human, when you do a fasting glucose, it's right in that moment when you do a hemoglobin A1C, it's an average over the last three months of your, of your average glucose levels. So it can give us a sense of, are there times when your blood sugar is high, maybe it's not high in this moment that you had your blood drawn, but maybe there's other times when it is high. And that's how we can see it on the hemoglobin A1C. And so another test that can be really helpful is to do what's called a fasting insulin test. And fasting insulin will show us what is your insulin level when you're fasting, when you haven't eaten for at least eight hours. And the fasting insulin tells us about how well is your pancreas producing insulin. And actually you want to have a, you know, you'll look at the range and it should be at the lower end of the range. When the insulin goes higher, it means that your body is working harder to get the glucose into your cells. It's having to make more insulin because you're having more glucose and eventually the cell receptors stop responding to the insulin and your body keeps making more. So if your body's making more insulin, it means very likely your receptors have been exposed to a high amount of glucose over time. And so what we want to do is I'm going to talk you through some starting steps of what you can do to fix this so that your insulin starts coming down and your hemoglobin A1C comes down to about a 5.0 or maybe even down to 4.8. But you want, I'd try to get in there, 4.8 to 5.2 on your hemoglobin A1C is going to be a much better place then if it's definitely, you don't want it to go above 5.7, but if it's creeping up to 5.5, 5.6, we definitely want to get it back down toward the 5.0, because that's where you're going to have the most ability to prevent health issues, including high risk HPV virus and so many more health issues that I mentioned earlier. So the thing about, you know, this connection between high risk HPV virus is because there's actually research that shows that when women have variability in their blood sugar, and this is to say whether the blood sugar's too high or too low, and that it doesn't even require that you have diabetes. Certainly if you have diabetes and that and therefore higher glucose levels, your blood sugar much more at risk of high risk HPV virus and abnormal cells on a Pap smear. So diabetes increases your risk of HPV and HPV related cancer. However, you don't have to have diabetes to have that increased risk. Even if you have slightly elevated blood sugar or high hemoglobin A1C or fasting insulin, all of those even slightly elevated can increase your risk. So this is why it's so important, even if you're not all the way to the point of diabetes, that you're still paying attention to this. And again, it could even be if you're noticing low blood sugar, if your blood sugar is fluctuating and dipping to hypoglycemia or low blood sugar levels, that also increases your risk with hpv. So this is why it's important to address your blood sugar even if you don't have diabetes. And that's why I encourage you, if you haven't had these blood tests done, to ask your doctor to run them now. You could on your own if you. Because sometimes you get these results back and you're still thinking, well, maybe it still looks like it's pretty much in the normal. But I'm concerned that maybe I'm missing something. Maybe there are times that my blood sugar is a little high or maybe my hemoglobin A1C is like A4, 5.4 or 5.5, and I'm wondering, when is it high? Then I recommend getting a continuous glucose monitor so that you can measure your blood sugar all day, every day for a couple weeks and figure out when is it going too high. So a continuous glucose monitor, or cgm, is a device you stick usually on the back of your arm, and it continually monitors your glucose and it communicates with an app, so it will show you, minute to minute what your blood sugar levels are doing and you can write down what you're eating so you can match up what did I eat? And how did my blood sugar respond. Now, yes, you could just keep poking your finger so you can do your own glucose levels, fasting before you eat and two to three hours after you eat. But it's really tricky to poke your finger that many times and be able to figure it out on your own. Whereas a continuous glucose monitor makes it so much easier to figure out what your blood sugar is doing. So it to me, it's worth the expense. You can. If you are diagnosed with diabetes, you can. Your insurance is likely to cover a continuous glucose monitor for you. But if you are not diagnosed with diabetes, you can order continuous glucose monitor out of pocket online or you can contact my office and I guide patients to do this all the time. And this way you can get the continuous glucose monitor even for two weeks and track in the app what you're eating and when is your blood sugar spiking or when is your blood sugar dipping. So you can figure it out. Because sometimes or a lot of times people say to Me, hey, I already avoid sugar. I'm already thinking my blood sugar is okay. I have no idea what's spiking my blood sugar. And then, lo and behold, they do the continuous glucose monitor and they figure it out. Usually even within days to a week, they go, oh, it's when I ate this or when I drank this that my blood sugar spikes. And they wouldn't have known otherwise. And so it really can make a difference, because otherwise you're just guessing. And a lot of times it's hard to figure out. And I can't tell you how many times with using a monitor that patients were finally able to solve the mystery of their blood sugar and get their blood sugar levels back down again. So let's go into what you can do already to start balancing your blood sugar levels. Even if you haven't used a continuous glucose monitor. Maybe you have a sense that it's out of balance, or maybe you just want to optimize your blood sugar no matter what the level list. Let's talk about some starting steps of what you can do, because this way you can start in with this, and then if you need more help, you know how to reach me and I can guide you because there's also supplements you can take, and there's always so much more we can do. I do not give up easily. So I've worked with very difficult cases, and we've been able to figure out how to optimize blood sugar levels time and time again. So the place that I start is to start with small, regular meals. What I mean by that is, first of all, small, because the more carbohydrates you consume at once, the more work it is for your insulin. Right. Like I said, if you have more glucose, if you have carbs, it gets broken down to glucose. That means your body's going to need more insulin. And the more you raise your insulin, the more likely your cells are not going to be able to handle it. So. So we want to try to minimize the workload on your insulin and your cells. And so we can reduce the quantity of carbs at one sitting. That doesn't mean that you even necessarily have to reduce your carbs all day, but you want to spread it out strategically through the day. So the best way to spread it out is to have a small quantity and then have meals at consistent intervals through the day. I find between three to four hours between meals is pretty perfect for most people. Some people, if your blood sugar is very irregular, you might have to be eating every two hours at first and then as your body is able to regulate better, then you can work your way to three every three hours. And if your body's recovering from stress, you can work to every four hours. If you go longer between meals, it's more stress on your body because your body has an automatic signaling that's going to want to correct for that. If your blood sugar starts to drop and you're not eating, your body's going to have to come in and do something to get that blood sugar back up again. So if your blood sugar is dropping and you're delaying eating too long, you're going to trigger a compensation and a stress response in your body to correct it. What if you tested positive for high risk HPV virus and you don't want to wait around and start see if it's going to go away on its own? For many women, high risk HPV can linger for years, taking a toll on their health and their peace of mind. I'm Dr. Donni Wilson, HPV expert and I've been helping women for over 24 years to clear HPV to negative. I created the HPV Kickstart program as a simple, effective way to support your body's natural ability to clear hpv. This is not about waiting and hoping. This is about taking action. In fact, thousands of women have regained control of their health by following my protocol. And you can too. You deserve to take back control of your health. Join us today. So that's why eating at consistent intervals is so important. So even if you have a super busy schedule, even if you're not used to eating on a regular basis, what I would do is set a timer on your phone so you can be reminded every three hours it's time to eat again, time to eat again. And you get into a routine, you start to get, you have to almost program yourself to be like, I'm going to eat when I wake up or within an hour of waking up and then I'm going to eat three, four hours later and I'm going to eat three, four hours later and you start to think, what am I going to eat? So you have to have some food available for this small consistent meal. If you don't have anything and you go longer than now, your body's having to compensate and your blood sugar is going to be disrupted until you can get back on this consistent feeding pattern. And the other thing is, if you're eating too often, this can throw this off. So if you're a kind of person who might be having a little snack every hour or A little bit of sugar or candy or glucose in various forms every hour. Maybe you have a drink, a beverage that you're drinking and you're getting a little bit of carbohydrates or sugar every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes. So now there's a trickle, constant trickle of calories and glucose coming in. Your body never gets to get into the pattern of I'm going to eat, I'm going to make insulin, it's going to go down, I'm going to eat again. Right. So we want to be able to create that consistency for your body. So notice if you're a snacker or you're having a little bit of glucose throughout the day. I want to see if you can try to put it into consistent intervals. Right. So make it so that you're not having little snacks all day. Make it so that you're actually sitting down for a small meal. It doesn't mean you have to have a giant meal. In fact, I want you to have a small meal. And when I say small meal, one of the ways that I have found, helps me and others to really understand this concept of a small meal is not in terms of counting calories, but what I find works really well is to think about it as what I call this 2020 rule. And the 2020 rule is when you is a, it's a quick way to assess the content of your meal and to make sure it's most likely to balance your blood sugar levels. So the 2020 stands for 20 grams of carbs, no more than 20 grams of carbs and at least 20 grams of protein. Because one of the best ways to optimize your blood sugar is to make sure you have protein every time you eat. If your meal, if your small meal has only carbs, it's way more likely it's going to disrupt your blood sugar, right? Because now it's only carbs and it's going to send your blood sugar up and the insulin is going to bring it down and you're going to be on this roller coaster, up, down, up, down all day long. As soon as you put protein in there with the carbs, it makes it so the rise in glucose is, is delayed and not as high and, and the drop is not as low. So you, you instead of having these spikes and drops, you have a much more rounded. So instead of the roller coaster ride that's going loop de loops, it's going to be the kiddie roller coaster where you have little rise and a little dip and a little rise and a little Dip just by making sure you have protein each time you eat. Now, it's good to also have healthy fats. It's just that I find that usually when you add some healthy protein, it's going to come with some healthy fats. But you can certainly also add a little bit of healthy fats like olive oil or avocado or olives. They will also help balance your blood sugar. So you really want to have a nice balance of macronutrients, carbs, protein and fat. But in order to keep it simple, one of the easiest ways to do it is to just think, I'm going to have no more than 20 grams of carbs. Because as soon as we go over 20 grams of carbs, now it's too much carbs your body's gonna have to deal with. And so there's. It's a quick way. Now, it doesn't have to be exactly 20, right? So I don't want you to get too focused on being exactly 20, but if it's, let's say between 18 and 22 or 24 or 25, but if your carb content goes closer to 30 now, you know you're gonna be pushing the limit and things are gonna be harder to manage. But if you keep it right in that 20 mark, then you're going to be, it's going to be much easier. And if you get your protein up to about 20, again, could be 18 to 22. But if you do too little protein or too much protein, it's going to start to get all wobbly again on your glucose. So try that. And it's something you can quickly look up. You can quickly search online or in a chat device and find out how many grams of carbs is in a half a cup of rice or whatever it is that you're about to eat an apple. Or you could search how many grams of protein are in 2 ounces of chicken, so you can quickly search how many grams are in there and get a sense of how do I get this balance? That's the other thing. So that the carbs and protein are in balance with each other. Instead of carbs being way up high and protein being way low, we want them in balance. So these nice, small, balanced meals at regular intervals tends to create the most balanced blood sugar. And it's not something you're probably gonna catch on to on your first try on your first day. It's a practice. I. It's something I practice all the time, every day, all the time. So it's not something you, you Forget about. It's something that you practice, get good at and little by little you, you follow it and you listen to your body to see what works best for you. So that's part of it. The other thing that can really help right from the get go is to remove what I think of as like easy sugar, simple sugar, right? This is like sugar sugar, where it's literally a spoonful of sugar or brown sugar or it's a. It says on the package it says cane sugar. Then you know it's sugar sugar. It's going to raise your blood sugar. I'm not so much referring to fruit sugar. Now there is such a thing as having too much fruit sugar because eventually fruit does have fructose, which breaks down to glucose, which if you have a lot of it, will raise your blood sugar. It's just that you, you don't. That doesn't usually raise your blood sugar as much. Although I have seen that sometimes if you're having like a whole banana, that's going to have quite a lot of carbs in it. So that could be an issue. Or if you eat a lot of, let's say dried fruit or because that can have also glucose in it, or if you have like a whole cup of fruit or say you have a sii bowl or a smoothie where you're having a lot of fruit all at once, it can put your glucose too high. So just be mindful. Even if it seems like it's healthy, it might still be having too many carbs in there. So look and see, calculate and get a quick check. Is it very far over 20 grams? In that case, we need to reduce it. Have, have maybe a quarter cup of frozen blueberries at one sitting and then you can have more fruit later. You don't need to do all of it at once. And definitely watch for that simple sugar or cane sugar. Oftentimes it's in places you wouldn't even realize. It's added to condiments, it's added to salad dressings, it's added to a lot of different packaged products from crackers and bread. And so many things have sugar added for no reason that I can figure out. It just makes us think it tastes better and so we buy more of that product. So you really have to look on the package, in the other ingredients. And if it says cane sugar, you don't need cane sugar on your corn chips or wherever it is. It just is not necessary. Right. So I would look for any unnecessary sugar or cane sugar and just find a different product because There is mustard and that doesn't have sugar in it. And you can make your own salad dressing that doesn't have sugar in it. So there's no reason to add sugar where it doesn't need to be. And even I was talking to a patient who makes her own granola and she was, she's putting honey in it and it sounds delicious. And then I said, how much honey are you putting? And she said, a cup of honey. And I was thinking, well, do you really need a whole cup of honey? Couldn't it taste just as good with a quarter cup? So just look for ways where you can reduce the honey maple syrup a little bit. Okay. Honey maple syrup are also fructose like fruit has. But it's still, if you have a lot of it, it's going to raise your blood sugar. So look for these easy sugars that you can easily decrease and eliminate. That's going to bring your blood sugar down quickly without even having to think about it and without having to change anything in your routine very much. And then once you eliminate those easy sugars and you get your consistent small meals with protein happening, I bet you're already going to see a difference in your blood sugar levels. And then, then if you're still struggling with blood sugar, that's when we start to look deeper and we say, okay, first of all, are you fasting too long? Because a lot of times I find that people are following various fasting techniques and sometimes if we're fasting too long for our body, it can actually raise your blood sugar and raise your cortisol levels. So if you've been fasting for a while and you find, oh my gosh, I'm like, say you're trying to have a longer, like you're fasting till noon, let's say, and then you're trying to eat everything between noon and 6 or 7pm That's a pretty short eating window. And that means you're having to have larger meals with larger quantities of carbs and you could actually be raising your blood sugar. And so the fasting could actually be working against you. So if you're following a fasting protocol, I really encourage you to monitor your glucose levels as well as your ketone levels and your cortisol levels for that matter, and make sure that you're not pushing your body too hard. Sometimes we really can push ourselves and by to think that this is going to help us lose weight or do something good. And actually we end up pushing ourselves so much that we end up stressing ourselves out and it backfires the whole everything gets worse instead of better. So please be really mindful and, and listen to your body. Don't just do what somebody else is saying. You gotta always listen to your body and see, hey, is this working for my body? And so you may need to modify your fasting window, especially if you've been under a lot of stress. Because what happens is when we're under a lot of stress, our cortisol level can either go too high or too low. And we had to measure that to know we can't just guess. And when I measure cortisol levels, I can actually see, is it too high at certain times of day? Is it too low at certain times of day? Because when cortisol is out of balance again, it's going to throw off your insulin function and your blood sugar levels. And if you're exercising too intensely or you're fasting for too long, these are common things that people think they're doing healthfully, but they're actually disrupting their cortisol and their blood sugar levels. So watch for that. Okay? Check in on that. Make sure you're not pushing yourself too much. Maybe you need to back off a little bit and move your eating window a little bit so you can, you're not fasting as long and have being able to have smaller meals at regular intervals to keep your blood sugar balance. And so try that. And also make sure you're checking your adrenals, which is your cortisol and your adrenaline levels, and have someone like me who's an expert in helping to optimize them, help you get your cortisol and adrenaline optimized. Because this way all the signals in your body are working together, right? We want that, we want your cortisol to be helping your blood sugar levels not working against you. So we need. And plus, when your adrenals and your cortisol are more optimized, so is your immune system, so is your digestion show, is your nervous system, so is your metabolism. Everything works better. So it's better to work with an optimal cortisol to. That's going to make it a lot easier to balance your blood sugar. And so you can also track your. Another thing you could track on your own at home would be a heart rate variability. Heart rate variability. There's a lot of different devices that show you this and it gives you a sense of how is a stress affecting your nervous system and how can you use different tools to help optimize your heart rate variability, like breath work, meditation, Time in nature. These I call recovery activities that help optimize your heart rate variability, but that also helps optimize your response to stress, which optimizes your blood sugar. Okay, so that gives you some ideas of where to begin. Then we might go into looking at supplements and there's a whole bunch of supplements out there. I have favorites that I go to because again, I've been doing this for 20, almost 26 years, so I know what works best for most people. And so I'm going to go toward acromion, which is a mineral that helps optimize insulin function. Berberine, which is an herbal based substance that helps to optimize insulin function and blood sugar levels. And then we might use alpha lipoic acid. You can also use cinnamon, like organic cinnamon on your food is going to have a mild benefit. But there's some other herbs you can use as well. But those are a couple of my favorites is chromium and berberine. Have really been able to help people to get back on track. The other thing that really helps is exercise. So if you're not moving, then it's important to start moving. Whether that means even just starting with some core strengthening at home, the more you can do some core strength and even strength training for your body. And it doesn't have to be lifting huge amounts of weights, but if you're doing even small amounts, even 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes, couple two, three, four times a week, you're going to improve your body's response to insulin, which will improve your blood sugar levels. So we want to help you to gradually get moving and exercising in a way that works for your body, both aerobic exercise and strength training, so that you can help optimize your blood sugar through movement and exercise. So really we could use my CARE acronym overall C for clean eating. Right. The clean eating is the eliminating the sugar and making sure you're getting consistent meals with protein. The A is for adequate sleep. Actually, we find that the better you sleep, the better your blood sugar levels are optimized. So if you're having sleep issues, we need to address that and help you get better sleep. To help your blood sugar and your metabolism are for recovery activities. These are the things you can do to help optimize your body's ability to recover from stress and optimize your cortisol levels. And E for exercise so that you can build some muscle mass and help your body to improve your insulin function through movement. So these are all things you can do to help improve your blood sugar levels already, no matter where you're starting from and along the way, what you're also doing is you're giving your body signals of safety when you have optimal blood sugar levels and you're eating in a consistent interval. So your body can trust that you're going to feed it some good macronutrients on a regular basis and not be pushing yourself into stress windows that that sends signals of safety to your body and your nervous system, which is what we need in order for healing to happen. So we want your body to feel safe, to feel secure, that you're going to be feeding yourself in a healthy way without a bunch of blood sugar spikes. Because then you're going to heal much faster, including from high risk HPV and abnormal Pap smear. Because the more balanced your blood sugar, the more optimal your immune system is going to be able to pay attention to viruses like hpv, let alone helping you prevent all kinds of other infections, cold and flu viruses, bladder infections, yeast infections. All of that goes down when your blood sugar is improved. So it's like a win win all around. Also, you're going to be improving your microbiome, both your gut and your vaginal microbiome. Because when we have too high blood sugar, we end up overfeeding our bacteria, which means we're more likely to have overgrowing bacteria, overgrowing yeast in the gut and in the vagina. So you end up with all these overgrowing bacteria and yeast, or yeast infections, or yeast infections on your skin. And like, what the heck? Why is all this bacteria and yeast and viruses around my body is because they're being fed by this extra sugar in your blood. So we need to get your blood sugar down to optimal, not too low, just to optimal. And this way it's feeding you in your cells and not overfeeding your microbiome. We want the microbiome fed, but we don't want it overfed. Okay, so this is an important part of it, but also your hormones, all your hormones. Cortisol responds to your blood sugar, but so does your ovaries. So if you're menstruating and you have fluctuating blood sugar, your ovaries are much more likely to go off track. This is one of the basis of PCOS is based on having imbalanced blood sugar levels, which disrupts ovary function. So the more balanced your blood sugar, the more optimal your ovaries are going to function. It helps with fertility as well. And even if you're postmenopausal, it's going to help you to stabilize your energy, your sleep, your mood, and it's going to help improve your memory and your focus. And so all around it's going to be beneficial, including. One of my favorite benefits of balancing your blood sugar is to lower your inflammation levels. When blood sugar levels are higher, so is inflammation. And how does inflammation show up? Inflammation shows up as pain. So you might have achiness pain, pain in your joints, headachiness, weight gain, skin rashes, right? And in your blood work, it could show up with an elevated C reactive protein or crp. So if you're seeing that there's inflammation in your body or you're feeling inflamed, right, you just feel puffy and everything is swollen and sore and your face feels puffy and your body feels bloated and you're just like, what the heck? This is inflammation in your tissues and it's often associated with high blood sugar levels. As soon as we get your blood sugar balanced, all of a sudden all that inflammation goes down and out. And no longer do you have all of those symptoms from inflammation. And as inflammation goes down, so does hpv, because inflammation in your body translates to inflammation in your vagina. And when there's inflammation in the vagina, HPV can thrive. So we want to reduce that inflammation in the vagina. We want to eliminate yeast and bacterial vaginosis or overgrowing bacteria. We want to make it, make it so the HPV cannot survive in your vagina either. We want to make sure you're getting the nutrients and not feeding into these other microbes and so, and not having fasting blood sugar levels that are too high, that are just overwhelming your whole system. So I hope that helps you to understand why balancing your blood sugar is so important for helping to fend off HPV as well as to help protect you from so many other health issues. So I can't wait to hear your comments and aha moments and insights and what you notice when you start implementing these tips that I just gave you, please share with me. Like Dr. Donnie, this helped me or this helped me. And you're going to see that it's unique to each and every one of you. So use these tools, listen to your body, track your levels, and now you're going to know your body better and what you need to do ongoing into the future. Even after you get HPV negative, that's only the first part of this journey. You're going to then be able to continue using these tools on into your future to prevent health issues going forward. Thanks so much for joining me here at How Humans Heal, and I welcome you to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode and the next video from me. And you can also subscribe to my weekly newsletter. So you'll get an email newsletter from me each week with the latest information and video from me. So I'll put those links down below and otherwise, thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to seeing you very soon.

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