Fix Your Blood Sugar and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes and Prediabetes

If you don't know whether or not you have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, this is your episode. Look, there are a lot of things that could contribute or be signs for you, like belly fat, but there are some things that you would never suspect. And we actually open this episode with those. So stay tuned because if not you, someone somebody you love. You're gonna love this episode, at least I think I do, for the education potentially more than anything. We're talking about a topic that may not be intrinsically attractive to you, but we do need to know more about it. And we have a lively guest and we make it fun. And I think that you will love our returning guest who is Dr. Beverly Yates. She's on a mission to help 3 million people heal from type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. She's helped thousands of people reverse type 2 and prediabetes and now has a telehealth practice. Dr. Yates is an MIT engineer. You heard that right. A naturopathic physician and the author of a brand new book whose pub date is January 20th. Notice the date now when you're listening, because there's some special things you want to stay till the end. There's a secret chapter to this book that you can get your hands on if you're purchasing at the right moment. That, that secret chapter does disappear, but the book will be well worth it. The title of the book is The Yates Protocol: 5 Simple Steps to Fix Your Blood Sugar and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes. Subtitle is Make Peace with Food. This is going to interest all of us. And never feel deprived again. The book is in the pre-order phase while Well, I'm releasing this and it's been published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Dr. Beverly Yates, I've already expressed, is such an interesting bird. An engineer and a naturopathic doctor. Hello, who does that? Well, her career as an MIT engineer helps her use health data and people's specific health goals to create practical, sustainable habits that help people heal from metabolic damage and reverse type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. And why is this important to you? Because midlife women are a little bit more prone to prediabetes than they might know about. Let's figure it out. So I would love for all of our listeners to know what their options are. You know, will the first suggestion be pharmaceuticals or medication, or what are other options?

So there's plenty of options depending on how a doctor or other health practitioner practices. Medication will probably be the first stop. And I think there's two reasons for that. One, it's perceived as being easier. And I think underneath that is a belief that the typical person who is needing help with their blood sugar will not really take it seriously and do the lifestyle thing. So there's just a lack of faith in that person on following through on the lifestyle side, right? The second reason I think medication is often the first thing offered is that it's what people are taught to do. So unless you are someone who, you know, like myself as a licensed naturopathic physician, others of that stripe, where our primary response is, unless you are in a dangerously high blood sugar level situation, we're going to start with lifestyle side, right? Because we know that that's really going to be the through line. So either one is a fine place to start depending on who you are. Now, if you have an A1C that starts at like an 11 or 12, 13, heaven forbid, I mean, those are high numbers. Medication needs to be your first stop along with immediate lifestyle changes. We need to get your undivided attention if it's that high. If your A1C is lower, let's say it's like 5.9, 6.3 in the prediabetes range, you absolutely can start with the lifestyle side. You may or may not be put on a medication like, as an example, metformin, which is absolutely the basic starter med for blood sugar concerns. And you need to put the effort in to focus on the lifestyle side. The good news is, is that it doesn't have to be overwhelming. You know, one of the things that I say here is that we can have nice things. And one of them is clarity around which of those 5 steps in the Yates Protocol—nutrition, meal timing, stress, sleep, strength, along exercise, along with its twin strength training, which one is the one to start with? So some of the examples that are in the book are from real-life people, one being that one woman that I worked with, Sonia, you know, she was in her 50s and she was caring for her adult child who had a sleep disorder. So her adult child didn't sleep and it wasn't sleep apnea, but this particular child would wake up screaming and just had just difficulties her entire lifetime. And her mother was very worried for her adult child. And meanwhile, it was disrupting her own sleep. And her type 2 diabetes came from her constantly disrupted sleep. And so we really had to work hard on what it would take to make sure she got a good night's rest because it was so disruptive to her blood sugar. And the good news is, as we work together over a few months, it really came into focus for her what she could change around and how she could still make sure her daughter was okay and she was okay. And she could actually get her sleep. And that was a huge help for her blood sugar. It also meant now that as her own blood sugar came to heal during the night and she came back to the healthy blood sugar range in the morning, her fasting numbers improved, her A1C improved, her energy improved, which meant then she had the oomph, if you will, to get up and go exercise, right? To make those healthy food choices because now the comfort food and the junky foods didn't look so appealing. So sometimes you gotta find one thing to win at, so to speak, and then you can go to the others. I have yet to work with anyone who's needed to pay serious attention to all 5 things at the same time. So it doesn't need to be overwhelming, but you do have to take action.

Yeah, I absolutely love that. Giving it a hierarchy. Here's, based on what you've said and done and your information, here's where you start. And let's just do that. Love it. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about CGM use, continuous blood glucose monitor. Are you a fan? Do you believe that's a good starting point? Is it just a nice extra?

What is that for you? I think it's essential and I am a huge fan of continuous glucose monitors because without that data, how do you know what your blood sugar is doing? You might be denying yourself something. You know, culturally, here in the US, we often have these health crazes that come through that are very restrictive. And that I think set people up for rebound problems, whether it's rebound weight gain or it's rebound disordered eating or just feeling bad about yourself because you weren't able to sustain something that was completely impossible to begin with, right? Like, talk about not winning. This is losing, right? Not good. You know, losing your sanity and losing your peace. You know, the subtitle of the book is Make Peace with Food, right? Like, you know, literally make peace with food and never feel deprived again. Because I'm, as you know, you know me, I'm not an extremist. I'm looking for balance. And I want you to have something that's sustainable and enjoyable, where if you have cultural foods, great, you can still eat them. Maybe it's portions. Maybe we do a few strategic food swaps. But I think it's just so extreme to expect someone to basically eat less and move more, assuming that that's the problem. And in addition to that, also, they have no data. Like, if you think somebody is getting sick and they may or may not have a fever, wouldn't you use a thermometer? Of course, why? Because you're getting precious bio data to find out whether or not they have an infectious process that's active. Well, why wouldn't we get CGMs, continuous glucose monitors, so we could easily tell if our blood sugar was starting to go a little bonkers? We need to know. You can't fix what you haven't measured.

I absolutely love that. And I want to ask you this because I do think probably we're going to see when somebody has the data, they just have the hard evidence that, oh my gosh, this. Are we— are you seeing people more compliant to making changes because they see the data, or do we humans still resist some things that we don't— we just, I don't want to change that, I can't give that habit up?

I think that most of the people that I work with are quite motivated and they get excited because they see the data and now it either makes sense to them. It's like these big insights, these aha, like, I didn't know my blood sugar was going crazy in the middle of the night, but now I know. So I realize my day probably needs to look different so my night can be better, right? Or they find out that there's something that they thought was healthy for their blood sugar. They were told by someone else that it's healthy, but their body does not think it's healthy, you know? And then they find out, oh, that, you know, something like, say, quinoa or I've rarely seen that with broccoli. I've definitely seen it with quinoa, with cauliflower, blueberries, some other things that are usually fine for people to eat. It's a big response for them and they need to know that. Similarly, they may have taken out of their diet, you know, something like, say, anything whatsoever to do with a grain, like maybe they've completely removed wheat or oatmeal or rice for that matter. And it might be that portion sizes for them are the key. Like, I have any number of patients I've worked with where they can have rice, they just can't have a lot of rice. And getting that dialed in makes the difference. Gravy, sauces, curries, these details matter.

And so much for, like you've said, you know, not feeling deprived, feeling satiety, satisfied, kind of letting food maybe lose its power over you. Well said, I agree. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so talk about genetics, family history. How much do we blame on that versus the epigenetics, our own habits and environment, what we've created, the swimming pool, and we're in ourselves? This episode is sponsored by the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. It is the framework that we designed our entire membership and program based on. Since 2013, I've been developing that after 30 years of working with women in midlife, that was born. And in 2018, we rolled out the Menopause Fitness Specialist to train other fitness and health pros on how to actually prescribe exercise. Here's where we're going next, in case you wanna get started now, that we're actually training physicians on exercise prescription, knowing they get very little of it in medical school and hoping that it also bridges the gap for you who may be a a fitness or health professional, or want to be, who works with women in menopause, because there is so much demand and so much room for you right now. If you are working with women in menopause but not getting all the results, don't have a reliable, predictable framework that gets you results over and over that people know, like, and trust, come and talk to us. We'll put the link in the show notes for today. That's the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. And if you wanna head on over to fitnessmarketingacademy.com, to where we have all of the content dedicated to you, health and fitness pros.

So far, it appears that about 30% of our health is directly a reflection from our genetic base, our genomics, and 70% comes from how we live our life or how life happens to us, depending on who we are, because some people definitely aren't in charge of the catastrophes that come their way, whereas some people actively make their own messes. So it depends on who we're talking about, right? Right. So with that, that's the good news. We only can control what we can control. And that's why in the protocol it is an outline, a template, and it's personalized. You can decide which of these things are relevant for you. Like some people have great sleep and it doesn't matter what's happening, their sleep is solid. For those folks, I say, yay, that's a blessing. Great. That's one less thing we need to worry with. For some people, they're very resilient and they can withstand or tolerate more stress than others. Some people definitely have more flexibility there, right? The same for meal timing. Some people can get away with what I would call outrageous meal timing. Let me give you an example. Someone who eats breakfast habitually skips lunch. They get busy. They didn't have a plan for it. Just whatever. And by the time dinner rolls around, they are ravenous. They want to eat the bear, the tiger, and the lion. They are so hungry. And as a result, they make strange food choices because they're so hungry. So they just start shoveling food in. Like some people years ago when I had my first book told me, Dr. Yates, I'm on the seafood diet. And I was like, seafood diet? Because I thought they meant like seafood. Like, no, when I see food, I eat it. Okay, really? Okay. All right. You got me. So, you know, if you find you're on the seafood diet, it has nothing to do with creatures in the ocean, then you really have to look at You know, what got you there? Why won't you do any meal planning? You know, like, what's possible for you, right? And I understand sometimes people have really strict budget constraints and I'm like, great, then meal planning will be your friend because you can shop the sales, you can get frozen foods. There's so many ways to solve for this. You can buy things in bulk and make it so it's budget friendly. You don't need to be a celebrity who has a personal chef. That is absolutely not a requirement here.

Yeah, and so many times, I don't know about you, but I feel like there is— there's almost this need to— we should get our hands in it. We need to have our hands in our food.

Yeah, I agree. I think the, the seeking that people do, you know, I was talking with another friend about this, and, you know, we're talking about the brain reward chemistry system, dopamine and serotonin and neurotransmitters in the gut and all that stuff. And for some people, that seeking that pleasure fulfillment, it's so profound when you do the work for something, whether it's going and shopping, it's cooking a meal, it's preparing for it, it's sharing it, it's whatever it is. When you take all of that away and then we just go to the fast food drive-thru, wow, that's a void. Of course we have a problem feeling full. Yeah. Oh yeah.

Totally agree. Okay, I want to bring you back to the book, this new book, and I know this is you telling the story and sharing your case studies and, and evidence, talking about some of the success that people have had with the Yates Protocol. Was there an aha moment? Because sometimes when you, you're living it, you're teaching it, then when you go to write it in a book, did something strike you as this is really an important point to get across? Anything that, that really like, I'm so glad I went through this process because here's what happened.

Yeah, I think, um, for me that moment occurred twice, particularly with cataloging the patient and client examples, the stories. Of what they— because I knew much more of the backstory. And for the purpose of the book, obviously we can't spend 40 pages per person. We don't have that kind of space. But to be able to, you know, distill it down to what were the essential bits, right? One has to do with Maria, the restaurant owner who had access to all the fresh foods you could possibly want, but her own eating habits were really terrible. They were also driven by other disease processes that she had and helping her free herself from this. You know, we started with meal timing, probably the least well-known of the 5 steps of the ACE Protocol, right? Because how many people get taught about meal timing? And her case, she was eating really heavy meal right before bed. So she'd go to bed within a half hour, an hour of eating something like, say, fettuccine Alfredo. She owns an Italian restaurant. And Italian cuisine can have wonderful foods, but she went for the super heavy, you know, something you don't eat right before bedtime and certainly not all the time. So she was making a very classic mistake. Not surprisingly, when she came, she had a number of serious health problems. She had high blood pressure. She'd had type 2 diabetes for over a decade. She'd had obstructive sleep apnea for over a decade. She had GERD, gastroesophageal reflux disease, right? Heartburn for over a decade. She had a very unfriendly health cholesterol profile. And in addition to that, she was seriously obese. She was maybe about 5'1". Almost as wide as she was tall. She did not have the height to even remotely get away with all the rest of this. And so, you know, her situation was really concerning because she was just really on a path towards heart attacks, strokes, vision loss, dialysis, like all the things that happen if you don't get a hold of your blood sugar. And the good news is her daughter had brought her in and we were able to plant a flag with one place to start, not 5. You don't overwhelm people. So if you read the book, Start with one. And I say it very clearly, pick one, make that your North Star. And for her, it was meal timing. So getting her to move dinner up to 6:00 instead of 11:00 PM midnight was a win. As a result of that, her blood sugar started to improve immediately. Her blood pressure within a month was much better. She found that now she was willing to try again to get a CPAP that worked for her. Because she wouldn't wear CPAP. She didn't like it with the sleep apnea, but she was snoring and not breathing. You know, it was a difficult time for her and her husband as her bed partner because, you know, somebody is making that much roaring noise, then nobody's sleeping. The other thing that happened was I felt like it freed her, like her spirit got a little lighter because she felt like I'm doing something really simple for myself. It was that whole idea of self-care is not selfish. She didn't have to worry about the restaurant and the employees and the staff. She just needed to take care of herself and make sure she had dinner 4 to 5 hours before she went to bed. By her doing that, it meant that really heavy meal was not sitting in her stomach. And yeah, we did change what she ate, but one thing at a time. It wasn't sitting in her stomach at midnight, right? Like, you know, half hour, hour after eating fettuccine Alfredo, you go from upright to horizontal. Most of the food is still in your stomach. You probably haven't processed that. It hasn't gotten to the small intestine. No wonder then she had a problem with heartburn, because all that pressure against that upper sphincter into the esophagus, into the throat, means all that stomach acid now is coming back. Not even north, just sideways. Of course her body is screaming because that stomach acid is where it doesn't belong. Yeah, you're going to have heartburn in that situation. So that resolved, you know what I'm saying? So we just start to untangle No, even with that kind of complexity. So I just want to give people a clear message that whatever situation you've got, there's probably something you can do to make this better. You're not, you're not doomed, whether it's amazing or not. You're not doomed.

Yeah, so amazing. And yeah, and, and then I think we're talking about numbers, and I, I think we do need to come back to— it's, it's also the immediate gratification in the energy and the stabilization of the energy and that the energy you can count on. You know, I love the story of now she had energy so that she could comply with exercise because you got to be sleeping before that's going to happen. Yeah. Love, love. All right. You have something very special. We're releasing this episode kind of in advance for listeners. And with the book release, they can get their hands on kind of the secret chapter. Say a little bit about that.

Yeah, so the secret chapter is one that was wonderfully packaged by the publisher. It's not in the book. So you get an exclusive preorder bonus chapter for you just as a thank you for doing a preorder. And that chapter, I talk about hypoglycemia, what happens when blood sugar bottoms out, it's too low. And that's for people who have hypoglycemia in general. Could also be helpful for someone who has type 1 diabetes, where hypoglycemia is more common phenomenon, unfortunately. I also talk about keto diets. I talk about veganism and I talk about a lot of things that are the whatabouts where people are like, well, what about this? What about that? Those are covered there because blood sugar is actually a very big topic. We, when I originally turned in the manuscript, it was over 400 pages. So we were trying to whittle it down so that people wouldn't feel like, oh my gosh, this thing's an encyclopedia. Instead, we got it down to a much more manageable, friendly size. On the beginning part of the book, I start out with what to do. We don't bury it. Many books on diabetes, it's buried. You got to read a lot to get to the what to do. I put it right up front, friends, so you're not struggling with that. So what to do is right there. In the middle is mindset, like what's the attitude, what needs to be going on between your ears. And then at the end, we go to the science, more of the details, what's been happening, what's happening here in this country, what's going on around the world. Why is this such a problem, right? Internationally, it looks like we've got about 480 million people with type 2 diabetes. We know about 20% of the people don't even know they have it. That includes right here in the US. And it's projected that by the year 2050, there will be over 1 billion, with a B, people with type 2 diabetes. We cannot afford to have humans get sick like this. We just can't. We don't deserve it. We deserve to be well, but we're going to have to know how to take care of ourselves. So I always tell people, healing journey is about progress. Please be kind to yourself. It's about progress, not perfection. Sometimes people are like, if I can't get the following 7 things lined up, I won't do anything. Please don't do that to yourself. That's not reasonable, right? And then self-care is not selfish. And we aren't really taught, especially as women, I feel, particularly in our midlife years, to prioritize ourselves. But really, who can we help if we're not well? So just putting that out there. Self-care. I love it.

Yes, you know, and so often I think I remember distinctly reading this. I believe it was in— might have been Inc. magazine or Forbes, a very business-oriented— we know that CEOs, upper-level C-suite managers are reading it. And there was, there was an article about health and fitness and this whole corporate athlete terminology. But I remember distinctly, probably 10 years ago, I've read this. I'm still talking about it. But the point was, you know, if you intend to lead, you intend to lead a group, you know, change the world, make a movement, create one, you are not going to do that without a vehicle, a physical vehicle that gives you the energy to do it. And I would say to women in midlife, you are the velvet hammer in your own family. You are the CEO, you know, who influences so many lives. So if not for you, you know, turn it around. And who does— who's watching you? I agree. Absolutely.

You are the CEO. You're the one who's in charge. You know, you might be in the age range of midlife where you're becoming the crone, the wise elder. You might be on the younger side of the midlife woman spectrum. Wherever you may be, this moment now is yours.

Amen. And with that, thank you so much. Everybody go grab that book. And just want to make sure that you know If you're listening after the fact, this little secret chapter is gone. So if you care about a friend who you know, and we all know someone, I mean, within 5 people from us, we know people who are dealing with blood sugar issues. So if not you, for someone in your immediate family or for a friend, be sure you tell them that they can only get this through January 19th. Is that true? And then that secret chapter is no longer. You could still get the book and it will be wonderful, but that secret chapter is gonna disappear. So Dr. Yates, thank you so much for being here, but also for writing the book. Debra, I so appreciate you.

Thank you for hosting me and for getting the word out and just, you know, helping to do the very practical thing to promote the book. So friends, please, now is the time. Let's link arms and make it so we can put this in the rearview window for as many people as possible.