Blood Sugar 101

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Hey it's jj and welcome to the jj virgin lifestyle show where i talk nutrition exercise mindset and lifestyle with some of the coolest people in the world plus i give you tips that can put you into fast action to uplevel your health so that you can go out there and live the big life you're meant to live now today's show is all about blood sugar balancing but you're going to hear things if you've said oh i know about blood sugar well i have got some information that's going to literally blow your mind and help you make some big shifts i have my buddy doctor marie loscalzo and she is going to share with you this is a gal who is in great shape eats well you know she's a doc she does everything everything right and she had elevated blood sugar she's going to tell you the story it's crazy what happened and she's also going to share with you that if you are walking around with elevated blood sugar which you might not even know about by the way she didn't know and i found out the same thing a similar story with myself i share that it can put you at risk for dementia for peripheral neuropathy for all sorts of things so this is a podcast number you are going to really want to pay close attention to and again in it she's going to share really how to do this at home how to use blood sugar monitoring as functional testing to design a lifestyle that will be perfect for you and creating the health that you want so let me tell you a little bit about doctor rita marie i've known her for a couple of years she's a chiropractor and nutritionist and she combines the healing wisdom of raw foods and herbs with modern research to help people recharge their energy and reclaim their lives her website is doctor ritamarie dot com what she does she works through a series of she's really into what's called functional endocrinology which is looking at hormones but looking at them as you live your life and not only does she work with patients she also has a lot of different online programs and she also trains practitioners she is amazing she's been there and done that and she has some amazing insider info that's going to blow your mind we're going to pull back that curtain today so i am excited to welcome doctor rita marie to the show let's do it so let's do it doctor rita marie welcome to the show i am sorry so happy to have you with us.

Today well i am so thrilled to be here today jj and talk about a topic that's near and dear to.

Both of our hearts well yeah as you know i mean first of all i believe that when you balance blood sugar you fix a whole lot of stuff fast but what i really want to start with is how this became so near and dear to you do you have some personal journey with blood.

Sugar balance yeah yeah i do and i'd been dealing with blood sugar balance with my patients for years and i always get people to get a meter and figure out what the right foods were for them and i decided i was going to do this big time and do a large scale course on it so i had one hundred ten people signed up and i wanted to make a video of me testing my blood sugar so i could show them how to do this and so i test my blood sugar and i'm like oh it looks a little low let me eat something see what happens to my own blood sugar so i ate a bowl of pineapple right i made a bowl of pineapple and just a little bowl of pineapple and i ate it and i tested my blood sugar about fifteen minutes later because i'm impatient i wasn't going to wait and i was my blood sugar went up to one hundred and thirty that's ridiculous that must be a mistake so i did it again my blood sugar went up to one hundred forty that must be a mistake and it kept going up until it peaked at one hundred sixty seven and i remember that number specifically and i'm like am i diabetic what the heck is going on i have this problem i'm trying to help people get rid of right so i discovered that i actually have insulin resistance but it wasn't manifesting i didn't have the belly fat the brain fog it wasn't low energy or any of that stuff but i was manifesting it in these spikes of blood sugar then it come back down to normal so all my blood work looked good nobody'd ever pick it up but i'm like i have this problem that i'm teaching about oh my god why like what am i doing wrong cause i'm teaching these five pillars of balancing blood sugar and i realized my biggest problem was i wasn't.

Sleeping oopsies yeah and this is what's so key that people need to understand is you can be normal weight i mean anyone who would have looked at you back then i'm sure you haven't changed dramatically since i've met you is you're fit you're healthy you look awesome you eat well you exercise it's like okay but you could be doing most.

Everything right most everything right but you.

Don'T know and this is a great great thing is you don't know unless you test so you know testing blood sugar because this is such a simple one how do you teach people to test their blood sugar what do you.

Tell them to look for yeah so i they get this little meter you can go to any walgreens or cvs store you can get it for ten to fifteen bucks what's it called what's it called a glucose meter there you particular one was like true to go or something like that glucose meter and i chose that because the replacement strips are very inexpensive and some of them are really high because the insurance companies pay for them for diabetics and you don't want to get caught in that so anyway i get this blood sugar meter and basically you want to know what is your body doing in response to food it's one thing for you or i to give somebody a list and say these are the foods that you should avoid and these are the foods you can eat but even within that food food list there's some things that certain people can't eat and there's other things that affect your blood sugar like lack of sleep or like over exercising under exercising and guess what getting stressed out oh boy yes yelling and screaming at your right.

So someone gets the blood the glucose meter and what do you teach them to do and what are the ranges you're looking for and what are the like what's good.

And what's oh yeah so there's fasting blood sugar and there's what's in medical terms called postprandial which means basically after you eat and your blood sugar should be at this really nice low level first thing in the morning when you get up so i teach them to take your blood sugar when you first get up and just see that's not going to give us a whole lot of information it just will tell us if you're already what number are we.

Looking like what's good at first thing.

In the morning i think seventy five to eighty five is really good okay right it could go a little lower it could a little higher starts to get into that hairy zone where you increase risk of cardiovascular disease and all that so i like seventy five to.

Eighty five yes and just for full disclosure here for everybody because you just shared that story you know i like i've figured out my food intolerances i have low sugar impact you know i exercise if i cut my carbs too low or i don't get good sleep or i'm stressed out my fasting blood sugar will go to ninety ninety five yep yep you know and i see it and i'm like ah there it.

Goes what did i do right great because it empowers you to go okay what did i screw up yesterday oh yeah that was that yeah i stayed up till three am getting that last book chapter finished or whatever and it impacts dramatically the studies because i was like it can't be that much four out of five ain't bad i'm doing all this other stuff and i look and start doing the research and the research bears it out that even one night of bad sleep can create insulin resistance in a healthy person for the next twenty four hours thereafter well put that together with like you know three years of bad sleep and you got some issues here going on right so one of the things that does empower you to do to know that is that when you have bad night of sleep be extra uber careful about what you're eating the next day yeah which.

Is so hard because as you know that when you have that bad night of sleep what do you want to have the next morning because it's really not salmon no it's not going to.

Be vegetables and yeah and salmon right no not at all it's going to be like oh give me those all those chocolate chips look really good right.

Yeah awesome now so you tested your blood sugar in the morning now then you talked about doing it after you eat so let's talk through when you do it after you eat what numbers you're looking for there yes because that's.

The critical piece and that's the piece that most western doctors it's the functional.

Piece well how functional how do they do it they either have you do your fasting or they go in and you do that glucose and hopefully it's a glucose and insulin tolerance test but how normal is that most people don't sit down and chug a bunch of sugar water and you know so it is it's totally non functional not functional.

So what i do is i teach them to do that right before they eat a meal you test it again because something could have happened between waking up and eating even if it's your first meal and if you test it first thing in the morning and then you test it right before you eat and it's up you're like okay what did i do did i get stressed out did i over exercise did i yell at my partner whatever so you go ahead and you test it right before the meal i like to teach people when they're first testing it to do it every fifteen minutes just to catch the peak but the peak usually happens between a half an hour and an hour why is it important to catch the peak because that's going to tell us how good your glucose management mechanisms are the docs will say oh yeah just tested it two hours after a meal and if it's under one hundred forty you're fine and i'm like it should never even get close to one hundred forty let alone two hours later it should be back down at eighty five so i teach them to look for their peak so in the first days of charting they're testing more frequently because you don't want to miss.

The peak okay so again let's look at those peaks what's the what's ideal.

And what's scary okay ideal is one hundred and ten or less at peak right and when they do studies with people even when they put them on a glucose tolerance test with the seventy five grams of sugar water of carbohydrates and water they basically don't go above one hundred to one hundred ten so one hundred ten is really nice above one hundred twenty studies show the peripheral neuropathies that diabetics get you know when they can't feel their feet and then they get all those infections the damage starts when the blood sugar's above one hundred twenty the retinal damage to the eyes starts when the blood sugar gets.

Above this is such a big deal because there's so many people walking around and again they look normal they're eating healthy and that's the big question because we also know that this elevated blood sugar increases your risk of dementia i mean this is so big so big and i love that you're talking about the fact that it's not just about what you eat here i mean that's critical but you know as we know stress plays a big role i know we're going to talk a little bit about exercise because it can actually make.

Things worse too it can exactly exactly yeah so you're looking for it to be no more than one hundred ten at peak and then it should be back down to your baseline at two hours and a lot of people are shocked like i was to find that my sugar went up to one hundred sixty seven but here's the thing that.

I found it still blows my mind.

Add pineapple and people say oh well it should go up for pineapple no if my body was doing what it was supposed to it would have produced insulin insulin would have gotten the sugar in my cells it would have come up and down and no big deal but the point is that when it gets up that high there's a lot of damage that's happening and i have my both parents died really young my mother died suddenly of a heart attack at fifty six years old my dad at sixty two years old suddenly dropped dead that's it and i'm like oh we didn't know that we look back at them and say maybe they have a little extra belly fat and maybe they did have insulin resistance but i'm thinking every time my sugar's going up like that my art are stiffening they're getting stiff and brittle and so i'm putting myself at risk the same risk as they are even though i'm eating a whole lot better and i'm yeah.

And some of this damage you can't undo and that's the other part so you get this results they're not where you want them to be like what's your checklist of what you do then.

Yeah so i have this five things you're going to look at we look at what's the diet and the supplements and the nutrient balance we look at the fitness are they doing the right are they over exercising or under exercising we look at the sleep patterns and really the seven to nine hours has been shown to be what you really need and in a repair state closer to nine hours and then we look at the stress levels and how that is managed throughout the day not do you meditate once a day that doesn't matter because you can be a basket case the rest of the day and then the last piece i look at is how are you timing all of these things because timing is critical this.

Is so here's one that i would love to pull out of there is i'd love to pull out the exercises exercise piece of it because what i've seen and what i like to say is exercise is like a drug so that means it can be therapeutic or destructive it's all about the dose but people don't look at that it's one of those things that we look at and people go more is better and it's like no no no more is not better here so like let's share some stuff on exercise because i think people don't realize that you can absolutely impact your blood sugar and create poor health with the wrong type and over.

Exercising absolutely absolutely and i know you're a big proponent of burst training and so there's some scientific studies with graphs and everything that show that thirty seconds of all out burst can elevate your growth hormone which is a real protective hormone and opposite of insulin which is the problem here and it can do that for up to forty five minutes late oh yeah ninety minutes later sorry ninety minutes later and they compared it and you can look at the graph next to thirty minutes of aerobics and you get a higher peak of growth hormone which is growth and repair fat burning put the lean muscle on better in thirty seconds of bursts than thirty minutes of aerobics well and let's just.

Talk like reality here the reason people don't exercise is because it takes too much time right so i mean i've heard from some people i'm working out one to two hours a day i'm not losing weight blah blah blah blah well what if i told you you could do it a couple times a week for you know if you're doing a couple bursts it really is something you can do in twelve to fifteen minutes so it's it's awesome and even.

Better than that the twelve to fifteen minutes is awesome right and i keep my little exciser right by my desk and i'm alternating oh you're using the.

Exciser too i love that thing so much it's so much my stand up.

Desk but the thing is about it is that you can do it and these are the studies show it's the repetitive bouts that keep your growth hormone up higher but it's like too quickly so i know we do it's great to do those exercise bursts where you're doing twelve minutes and you're alternating with the you know one to two minutes three minutes off and then thirty seconds on those are great but even for people who don't have the twelve minutes if you were to spread those bursts out like four to eight bursts spread out throughout the day you can actually elevate your growth hormone just as much and sometimes higher than doing that all out intensity and who can't find thirty seconds like four to eight times a.

Day well and you don't even sweat in that time you know it was interesting ages ago i helped someone on abc's extreme makeover getting ready for like a ridiculous amount of plastic surgery but she had to lose some extra weight before she did all of this stuff and so i had her bursting all throughout the day i had the exciser and i'm like you know we just had her because she had such a crappy metabolism we just had her burst and so you don't think about that but it's great to put that exciser right while you're fall over it exactly.

I can trip over this as i'm going to go down to get exactly.

That'S so awesome it's such a perfect thing okay let's go grab one more because i know we're up against the time here but you did mention meal spacing and i would love to hear your and i have no idea what you're going to say here because i know i have definite ideas here yours might be completely opposite of mine which is fine i'd love to hear what you've seen clinically and what you recommend.

Yes so this whole thing i have several blog articles on the myth of meal spacing what do they call it frequent meals i'm not a fan of small frequent meals i think what happens when you do small frequent meals is that you're elevating your insulin all day long all day long i'm jumping up.

And down over here because i literally rita maria i didn't know if you were going to say well to keep your blood sugar stable you should eat every couple and to me it's like well if you do that you keep your blood sugar up and if you keep your blood sugar up you keep your insulin up so i'm so i'm so beyond excited to hear this okay so now i will pipe down again and let you keep going yeah so.

If you're eating all the time now insulin people maybe don't realize what insulin is it helps get your sugar out of your blood and into your cells but it's an anabolic hormone which means it puts fat in the system it builds i mean it can build protein too but basically its job is not to break down so you cannot you actually cannot fat burn when there's insulin in your system above the baseline so as soon as insulin goes above baseline like after eating that's it fat burning stops if you want to be fat burning in between meals if you want to be fat burning while you're sleeping you create a level situation where there's low growth hormone i mean low insulin and high growth hormone and how do you do that you space your meals yay four to six hours between meals.

Yay yay yay yay i'm so excited and that was such a poetic way to describe it because it makes me i'm i'm looking at my bookshelf right now i'm looking at some of these books out there that say eat every two to three hours have a snack right before bed and it makes me just want to tear my hair out so with that i'm going to leave on that high note and i'm just going to let everybody know about where they can learn more from you because i mean obviously you want to get more of this information i know you have a lot of great resources at your website which is dr ritamarie dot com doctor ritamarie dot com and thank you so this was an awesome interview thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me here and for like being so excited and enthusiastic about the topic because this topic is like it turns me on.

Oh it turns me on too we're two total geeks here we've just geeked out officially in front of everybody all right so after the break i'm going to be answering a listener's questions so be sure to stick with me.

Jj'S favorite type of exercising is burst training because it helps you stay younger burns more fat and best of all it only takes four minutes a day and the simplest way to get your workout in is with exciser the built to last stepper that can give you a killer workout in just minutes a day you can even take this compact training unit on the road with you because it's easily portable and super lightweight visit www dot exciser dot com and take a look at the machine jj personally uses and recommends to her vip clients visit www dot excer dot com today.

Welcome back this is the time where i answer a listener's question and today's question comes from christy in alabama hey.

There my name is christy kaiser and i just want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to jj virgin and just the stand that she's taking with just health and nutrition i so love her and just so appreciate just the knowledge that i've gained from her i'm just so crazy about her if i could sit down and have a quick question with her i would want it to be about you know portion control and i know she talks about eating by the plate which is really great but and i try to do that getting off sugar and eating clean is not an issue for me like i feel like i eat so well and i exercise but i feel like when i get off track is when i'm eating a little too much of the almond butter and some of the other good fats like avocado and i just wanted her to talk a little bit about that and i love the idea of not counting calories and i don't want to be bound by that but anyway i know she talks about trigger foods and how she loves almond butter and doesn't even buy it and keep it in the house but but anyway i probably just would love to come to some more balance in that area thank you so much bye bye.

So i get this question all the time because i think we've been so trained to look at calories rather than look at where those calories come from and what i found is that when you start to really eat by the plate which means that you're eating optimal amounts for you of clean lean protein you're getting in five to ten servings of non starchy vegetables a day so that's two to three servings at each meal and a small amount of slow low carbs and some a good amount of healthy fats when you start to eat that way and really get in touch with your body you can tell if you're where you need to be in fact you can tell if you didn't get enough protein in or you overdid it on carbs so but at first you really need to focus on looking at each meal and looking at how much of each of those areas that you've got so that you optimize it and because what those things do and it's really about getting fat fiber and protein to optimize blood sugar so you got a nice steady supply of energy to your body and you can start to utilize stored fat for fuel so ideally you are getting in and you did bring up one thing in here and the big areas christy that i see people need to watch are carbohydrates specifically fruit and grains if you are eating grains make sure they're gluten free at least but ideally if you're eating grains you're sticking with things like wild rice and quinoa only which are really grasses and seeds not grains and things like squash and sweet potatoes and yams if you are eating when you are eating carbs like those you need to really watch the amounts and also you need to watch things which you brought up that are trigger foods for you because yes dark chocolate's great but not if you're going to eat the whole bar and yes nut butter is great but not if you're going to eat the whole jar i didn't even mean to rhyme and i did so those are the things you want to watch for number one watch if you have a trigger food i know my trigger foods i've proven them over and over and over again and they are definitely nut butter and dark chocolate so i keep keep those ones away from me in places i can't handle them so that's number one number two get really clear by using a food journal on your portions you want to have optimal amounts of clean lean protein each meal that really for most i'm going to say the average sized woman that's about twenty five grams twenty to twenty five grams of protein at each meal you want to keep your starchy carbohydrates low that's probably at your breakfast and lunch no more than twenty five grams dinner twenty five to fifty grams and then lots of non starchy vegetables pump those up that's not what i'm worried about i'm not worried about you overdosing on asparagus or brussels sprouts and then get in two to even four servings of healthy fats because one of the things that happens is if you pig out on fat like almond butter like avocado you're going to feel so full that you are not going to want to eat for a while so that would be to give an example of this that would be like using my protein shake two scoops of my protein powder a scoop of my extra fiber and then adding in a half of a small avocado and some coconut milk would give you and then if you do do any fruit maybe half a cup of berries that will get you in the carbs the protein the fiber and the fat that i'm talking about another example lunch would be a serving of chicken breasts over a bunch of greens with some sauteed peppers and onions and then add in a third to a half a cup of black beans and add that in some guacamole and you can also use some little olive oil vinaigrette on that and there you go with your healthy fat like if you had a half a cup of guacamole in there and then you had your peppers and onions and salsa and your little bit of black beans and chicken you're getting an ideal amount of each of those so get that feel and again this is where we're cording it down in a food journal so you can look at how much protein did you have make sure you don't overload it on the carbs way less in the morning a little bit more in the evening to help with sleep and help with men boosting testosterone production remember you don't want to go no carb because over time this can actually stress out your adrenals and cause a rise in fasting blood sugar and carbohydrates can help you with sleep and help you with boosting your testosterone in the evening but the biggest thing is to follow the plate which i talk about and i have resources on my website jjvirgin dot com and record this in your journal because if you're checking your food journal and you gosh you know i had lunch and i'm starving a couple hours later look back and say did i get enough healthy fats at that meal if i had a salad did i have a good clean dressing like an extra virgin olive oil maybe i added some avocado or some nuts or i used wild salmon so i got my healthy fat there so did you get enough healthy fat did you get enough slow low carbs did you get did you load it up with veggies and did you get some clean lean protein when you do that you'll be able to start to get really in touch with how much you truly need and that's what's so important is the ability to go through this own personal discovery process so you can connect the dots between what you're eating and how you feel alrighty now if you'd like to submit a question just go to jjvirgin dot com ask and you can leave a voicemail for me i can't wait to hear from you and one more way i'd love to hear from you i would hugely appreciate it if you could jump on stitcher or itunes and leave a review for me it helps a bunch and be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends this is jj virgin signing off and reminding you that you are worthy dare to live a life that.

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