Bloated and Stressed Out: Cortisol, Insulin Resistance and Healing with Shana Hussin, RDN

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons. Today I'll be speaking with Shanna Husson, a registered dietitian nutritionist and adrenal health expert. She's the host of the popular wellness podcast Optimal Metabolism, where she helps listeners reverse stubborn metabolic, cortisol, and blood sugar issues by helping them fix their broken food and lighting environments. Shanna uses hormone-friendly nutrition and time-dating protocols along with circadian rhythm biology and proper lighting environment as key strategies to achieve optimal metabolic and adrenal health. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. If you want to get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebooklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing, when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool test would help you get to your root cause, you can find a link in in the show notes and take that. Now onto the show. Welcome to the podcast, Shanna.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here and chat.

Yeah, I'm excited to have you.

We talked a bit about what we were gonna talk about, and one of the things that you like to focus on is insulin resistance and cortisol dysregulation. And that's something that you've gone through yourself. So can you tell me about that?

Yes. I know your story is similar. It's like you've gone through the wringer with the gut stuff, and when you've lived it yourself, I think it just becomes in your face. And something that you've struggled with your own self, it's easier to point people in the right direction. I think I'm a registered dietitian. I've been in the nutrition field for over 25 years and I taught the standard recommendations for a long time and I was classically trained. And then I discovered I had insulin resistance by following the standard nutrition guidelines and thinking I was doing everything that I should to remain as healthy as possible. You know, feeding my family in the same way. And honestly, I didn't know what insulin resistance was until about 7 or 8 years ago. Of course, I knew all about type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, but there is very, very strong genetic diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome, heart disease in my family. So I've always been really mindful about that and careful with my lifestyle. I noticed I was having a lot of cravings and food noise in my head. I would eat a meal and I'd already be thinking about what I was going to be eating for the next meal. And even though my weight has never been a huge issue for me, I was doing a lot to maintain my weight. I mean, I was exercising a ton. I've had 3 little kids. I'm like, life just shouldn't be this hard. And then I started It's kind of a long story, but my son got really sick and I went into the deep thralls of alternative therapies because the conventional system was not helpful for him and his healing. So I went a lot of alternative routes and I started to really dive deep into whole natural nutrition and going away from the standard guidelines and was blown away by what I learned. Of course, intermittent fasting came on the scene. Therapeutic carb restriction therapies that I tried on myself, and I was blown away by the results that I saw. And so that's kind of a whole nother story. I actually wrote a book on fasting and did that for a long time, and I mostly healed my insulin resistance. And again, I didn't even know what that was. And what's interesting about my story is that I always had normal blood sugars and normal cholesterol levels. My lipid panel looked great. Everything looked good on paper. I was in a healthy weight range, but once I learned about insulin resistance and how to test for it, I discovered that my fasting insulin was out of range on the high side. And at that time that I had my fasting insulin checked, I was already 2 years into this lifestyle of time-restricted eating and therapeutic carb restriction. So I have no idea what my fasting insulin actually was when I was feeling all of the symptoms. So I was able to reverse that and I teach people how to reverse their insulin resistance. But then the second thing that you mentioned was that I also teach mostly women because women are who really struggle with a lot of cortisol issues. But funny enough, when I was doing all of the things that I teach and intermittent fasting in a way that I was, I also kind of exacerbated my cortisol issues that were already there. And for the longest time, I thought cortisol was all about managing your nutrition and managing your stress, which those play a strong role, but that wasn't the biggest piece of the puzzle. Again, went down this deep dive into how to actually fix cortisol issues because I just see it rampant in my following, the people that I work with. Women my age who are kind of in that perimenopause and menopause. But even that, like, I had cortisol issues since college. I would say they started and I just didn't know, and I didn't know how to fix them. So long story short, I discovered how to fix my cortisol issues. Once I did that, once I brought my cortisol levels back into balance, I fully recovered from insulin resistance because I still had a little bit of insulin resistance hanging on until I balanced that hormone. So That's kind of how I got into the more specializing in those types of issues.

Got it. So you were mentioning your fasting insulin and being elevated, and I assume you meant according to standard reference ranges, but I have heard that for fasting insulin, below 6 is an optimal reference range. Is that something you use as well?

I do. So when I first tested mine and I was 2 years into this lifestyle, mine was 10.7. So if I had gotten that result in the conventional system, they would have been like, fabulous, that looks great. I knew that it was at least slightly elevated. Again, I'm willing to bet it was probably in the 20s prior to that when I first started working on reversing it. In the conventional system, most lab standards are up to 24.9 as being Well, which is really high. So yeah, as you mentioned, I like to see that number between 2 and 6. And when I first had mine tested, it was 10.7. And then I had it tested 2 years later and it was 7.5, and I was still like, what the heck? Like, this is like 4 or 5 years later. Not that it was extremely elevated by any means, but it was still kind of outside that normal range. And once I balanced my cortisol and kind of brought that last piece of the puzzle in, which was working on my nervous system and my lighting environment, then my level went to 2.2, and that was just this past summer. So just a couple of months ago. So I was really happy to see that.

Awesome.

So I'm curious because I have a client in this situation. So what does it mean if you have somebody who's not diabetic, but they have a lower than 2 fasting insulin?

Yeah, that can happen. You don't want to have no insulin response whatsoever. And so you do want to have some. So, so under 2. In my experience, and this isn't always true, but sometimes they can have higher than normal blood sugars because they're just not secreting enough insulin to draw the blood sugar into the cell. Sometimes, as with type 1 diabetics, they don't produce any insulin. They, it's a reason, right?

It's gone so far into insulin resistance, they don't have the insulin coming.

Exactly.

Yeah. No, I'm not sure if that's, yeah.

It's an interesting scenario. Either their pancreas is needing some help or I'd be willing to bet their blood sugars are probably a little bit high.

Yeah.

So I came into the functional medicine field when the term adrenal fatigue was coming under criticism, and I know most practitioners now call it an HPA axis dysfunction, but the same type of diagnoses and treatments are administered whether it was called adrenal fatigue or HPA axis dysfunction. So like if someone has low DHEA and lower high cortisol, no matter what it's call, do they— well, the people I train under, they're giving pregnenolone, they're giving DHEA. So I'm curious what your take is on all this and the terminology and how you deal with it.

Yeah, and HPA access dysfunction is definitely more accurate than adrenal fatigue. And in the conventional system, adrenal fatigue, adrenal dysfunction, adrenal exhaustion, all of those terms are pretty much dismissed by conventional doctors most of the time. Unless there's actually something wrong with the adrenal gland, in which case their only solution is typically medication. But as you mentioned, we know now, hopefully more and more people will be starting to know that it's more of an HPA axis dysfunction. Cortisol is produced by the adrenal gland, but it's produced in response to the signaling that it's getting through the eyes and the light environment. So the light that's coming into the eyes gives— eyes are basically an extension of our brain that is signaling to the hypothalamus what to do and what time of day it is. And basically telling the body what to do, when to secrete hormones, when to make neurotransmitters, when the organs should be doing what they're doing. The hypothalamus then tells the pituitary glands to tell the adrenal glands to then make cortisol. And so we blame the adrenal gland and say it's adrenal fatigue. The adrenal glands I was just tired, which, you know, in some circumstances that might be true on some level, but it's mainly just the communication that has been broken. The body is so confused by all of these different signals that it's getting that we were not meant to take in through our eyes, that that signaling is then broken. And so the adrenal glands just don't know what to do. They don't know when to secrete cortisol. They don't know, you know, they're secreting it at times of the day that it's not normally secreted or they're not secreting it at certain times of the day when they should be secreting it. And so that's where we do go back to that HPA axis dysfunction and being much more accurate. And in functional medicine, they're definitely starting to come around, but I know with functional medicine too, a lot of times people would go in with cortisol dysregulation or imbalance and the response was, well, let's give you adaptogens or let's give you ashwagandha. And those things can certainly help. I'm not, you know, disregarding those, but it's still not fixing the messaging along the HPA axis.

And it sounds like you're using light. So is, is this about following a circadian rhythm, getting light in the morning, low lights at night kind of thing?

Yeah, that's the main therapy and the main thing that I have my students work on when they come to me. You know, first we're looking at cortisol testing and looking what their pattern is during the day. And we can talk a little bit more about that, but what their pattern is showing is how we're going to set up their therapy. But it is primarily light-focused. So I know for me, I got to the point of adrenal exhaustion. So the testing that I like my students to do is called a 4-point cortisol saliva test. And maybe you've mentioned this on the podcast before, and the one that I have sent, I have a home kit. Sent to them. Also includes the hormone DHEA because usually that's really low when the adrenal glands are not working correctly. And so it's a salivary test. You spit into test tubes at 4 times throughout the day. But why that's helpful is that we should have a natural cortisol spike in the morning when we're getting up. It's our system saying, hey, let's get up and go. And then it should kind of peak midday and then start to fall, and it should be low by late afternoon to evening, and a lot of times I see either a flattened cortisol pattern like I had where it's just kind of low levels of cortisol all day long. And that's usually when this has been going on for a really long time and things are just very chaotic and dysregulated by that time, the signals that have been off for a really long time. Or a lot of times I'm seeing an inverse pattern. Where people are having high cortisol levels at night, and that sets us up for very disturbed sleep and not healing and feeling like absolute crap all the time. 'Cause you're not getting restorative sleep. It can lead to weight gain. And so you have these levels of cortisol going high at night, in the afternoon, and in the evening when they're supposed to be falling, and that prevents us from going to sleep. Staying asleep, people who are feeling wired but tired at night because just can't seem to fall asleep. They're wiped, but they can't fall asleep. What happens is, is so the cortisol goes high at night when it's supposed to go low, and the inverse hormone is melatonin. And melatonin is our fall asleep, stay asleep, repair hormone. And that should peak at night, but instead cortisol is high. And so we can't fall asleep, stay asleep. We have very dysregulated sleeping, and then come morning when our cortisol levels are supposed to be going high again, they're very low because of this whole inverse relationship is off with melatonin and cortisol. So that is where a lot of these issues are coming from. But like I said, I like to test my students first to see kind of what their pattern is. My therapies or the suggestions that I make are very, very similar, but knowing what we're starting from. And where we're starting from with cortisol patterns is really helpful. So then you're just doing that saliva test at 4 times throughout the day to see what your pattern is, if that cortisol level is rising, falling as it should be. And it's a really easy test to do and we can track that over time. And I know I struggled with this for decades and like I said, I got to the point of adrenal exhaustion. Once I learned how to properly incorporate and change my lighting environment and work on my nervous system, I was able to recover my pattern within a couple of months.

Imbalance.

So once you know what's causing it and how to correct it, you can do so pretty quickly. You can kind of go by symptoms, but I like to test and then test every 3 months or so to make sure that that cortisol is still well in balance.

Yeah.

And so how can you correct that dysfunction or how did you do it for yourself?

Yeah, so as I mentioned, mine was just kind of low all day long. And it's weird because a lot of times when people are to the adrenal exhaustion stage that I was at, And they're like so tired, not wanting to get out of bed. And a lot of times they're misdiagnosed with depression with really low levels of cortisol, or they're diagnosed with anxiety when cortisol is spiking at the wrong time. So it's really kind of sad because had I gone to conventional medicine, I probably would've been offered an antidepressant, or if I had high cortisol at night and anti-anxiety medication But what I did is I learned how sunlight and our lighting environment really is the trigger for cortisol, the main trigger. There are other things, I'm not gonna say it's just light, but that's the primary one. And so when sunrise comes into our environment in the morning at daybreak, so daybreak and sunrise are different. So daybreak is kind of when the light is starting to come into the environment. Sunrise is when the sun is actually coming onto the horizon. At daybreak, there's a lot of red light. Like if you go outside, it's like that warm glow. It's kind of reddish looking. It's a lot of red light there. And sunrise is where blue light comes into the environment and it's kind of in the same amounts as red light. So when blue light comes on, onto the horizon and our eyes can take that in, it's the blue light that is picked up by the eyes that tells our body to produce cortisol. What happens is people aren't going outside much anymore, right? The average American spends 7 minutes a day outside, which is astounding. We did not live like this a couple hundred years ago. Our environment has changed so drastically and our genetics have not had time. They really haven't changed at all. They haven't had time to catch up with all of this lighting change. And so going back to sunrise, if you can go and watch the sunrise, you will tell your body to produce cortisol. So mine was really low, so all I did was go outside every every single morning at sunrise. I missed some in the summer cuz I live in Wisconsin and sometimes the sun is coming up at like 5 o'clock in the morning, but I, as much as I could, I went outside to see the sunrise and that triggered cortisol production. And the cool thing about the sunrise and the natural light in the morning is that it's going to act as if your levels are too high, it's gonna bring 'em down lower. If they're too low like mine are, it's gonna stimulate that cortisol to be higher. So that was a huge part is just getting in, going out to the sunrise. And I'm not saying like, you don't have to sit out there for an hour. I set a timer for 3 minutes. If I can sit out there for longer than that, I do. Otherwise I go out for 3 minutes just to get that signaling into my eyes. Mm-hmm. What's important throughout the day, as we go throughout the day, our lighting is always changing outside. Always. The spectrum is always changing. At midday, we have very high levels of blue light. Not, and not as much red light. And then we get into sunset and there's a lot more red light than blue light. And then after nightfall, there's no blue light in our environment. And that's important to take into consideration because remember, blue light stimulates cortisol. After nightfall, as humans, we're not supposed to be getting those signals of blue light into our eyes anymore. We're supposed to be winding down and going to sleep. But what's happened in our environment is then we stare at TVs, we stare at phones, movies, Netflix, computers, we have to do homework, iPads, whatever it is. And all those things are very, very high in blue light. So this is where that inverse pattern is coming into play as people who after nightfall, after dinner, after it gets dark, they're watching TV all night or they're working all night. Sometimes we have to work, night workers, hospital workers who are under these awful, awful fluorescent lights throwing all this blue light. Your body's perceiving that at all times. And so it gets really confused. It's 9 o'clock at night and your body's like, wait, I thought the sun went down, but all this blue light's coming in. It must be midday. Oh, I better push my cortisol up. I better give Shanna some more cortisol because it's midday. She needs more energy. Cortisol levels rise and it makes it It's so hard to go to sleep.

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And the thing about cortisol too, and, and why I wasn't fully recovering from insulin resistance is it also increases blood sugar, right? Increases insulin. It's interesting. There's so many studies, even if you are not eating or you're not hungry, you start to watch TV, you put a phone in your face, and that cortisol stimulated, all of a sudden you're having cravings. You're having, I want some ice cream, whatever it is. The cortisol goes up, the blood sugar goes up, insulin goes up, and it's really tough to reverse that insulin resistance fully. That's the main thing I did to fix mine is just go out at sunrise and then I'd go out for light breaks throughout the day. And I don't wear contacts or glasses, but you wanna do this with naked eyes if at all possible.

Right. And then not through windows, right?

Not through windows. You can open the window and look through screen. That's fine. If you're driving, you can crack a window, but almost all UV light and most red light is filtered by windows, unfortunately. Yeah. Looking through the windows isn't the same. No contacts, no glasses. I did a lot of light breaks. I did a lot of other things for my nervous system, like grounding and being in nature. Another thing that I did that I had no idea that this was exacerbating my cortisol issues was I stopped wearing sunglasses. And I know that that sounds really wonky for a lot of people. I wear them, like, I live in Wisconsin, it's snowy. If I'm driving and there's glare off the snow, or if I'm boating and there's glare off the water, then of course I wear sunglasses, but for the most part, I stopped wearing sunglasses cuz that's confusing to the body too cuz it's filtering all the light signals.

Yeah. And what color are your eyes? I gotta ask.

They're green.

Okay.

Mine are too. And mine are so sensitive to light. I cannot stand to be outside without a hat and sunglasses. I live in Arizona, so mine used to be that way.

Lindsey, it's interesting because I had very high light sensitivity and that's another sign of adrenal fatigue and adrenal dysfunction. And I was a lifeguard growing up and I'm like, how am I going to stop wearing sunglasses? This is crazy. But I just did it little by little. I started with a hat and now I can go out. It's really crazy. I don't have to wear sunglasses anymore.

You aren't squinting the whole time?

Nope. In the summer at high noon, I'll put a hat on or I like to work outside and if I'm able to, I'll sit in the shade. But that light sensitivity goes away with time and it's just you're so accustomed to being indoors and to having sunglasses on. But that is another chaotic signal. All of those things within a couple of months, I tested my cortisol pattern again and it was normal. And I've never been a nighthawk, so nighttime wasn't a huge factor for me. But the other thing that's so important is blocking the blue light after the sun goes down.

Right. I also just heard, I was listening to Huberman Lab podcast and he was saying that there was a study that, you know, they were questioning the whole blue light hypothesis and saying that maybe it's not even the blue light, maybe it's actually the devices themselves and the amount of stimulation that they're giving you that's raising your cortisol, not the light coming off of them. I'm sure the jury's still out on that question. It's probably just one study, but, but yeah, I would say both for sure. Yeah. Without question, the stimulation of scrolling through social media and things like that.

Yeah. Oh, for sure. I've been wearing blue light blocking glasses for like a year and I will say if I'm watching a stimulating show, even with my blue light blocking glasses on, I have an Oura ring that tracks my stress response. My husband and I have been watching Yellowstone. And when I watch that right before bed, my stress response climb, I'm like, okay, I gotta do my glasses and I gotta do my wind down routine. Same.

I know I don't like watching scary things and that sort of thing. My son got us watching this Killing Eve and I'm like, this is brutal. I don't, I don't wanna watch this kind of stuff. Anyway, I'm wondering why cortisol seems to get imbalanced in particular with women in perimenopause, menopause. Why is that a thing?

You know, I don't have the exact answer, but I draw my conclusions. I just turned 49, so I'm in perimenopause and I work with a lot of ladies in perimenopause, but you get more insulin resistant when you go through perimenopause just because of all of the hormonal changes.

Yeah.

So we can't do the same things as we used to do. We can't eat the same way.

Our stress response and drink the same way. Can't do anything the same way after you lose that estrogen. Yeah.

Your skin changes, your hair changes. You're not as resilient. So I don't know what comes first, the chicken or the egg with cortisol or insulin resistance, or I honestly think it's a combination of all of the above. You know, you're probably the same type of person. I am type A. I raised 3 kids. I run a business. I, you know, it's like, I want my kids to eat well. We just have busy woman syndrome. And I think by the time we're in our forties, fifties, our hormones are declining. We are not as resilient as we were before. We're more apt to store body fat because of the estrogen levels falling. We don't sleep as well. We're not as like, oh, get up and go and conquer the world. Everything comes to a head and we're just at the time in our lives where my kids are older, two are in college and one is in high school, but I lost both my parents last year. We're just sandwiched into raising our kids and taking care of our parents. And going through all these hormonal changes that it's just a really hard time for women. And that mom transition too, where I was like so busy with my kids for so long and now I just have one at home and he drives.

Me too.

Like, what am I gonna do all the time?

Have fun.

And like I said, women want to eat and drink and do the same lifestyle as they did in their twenties, but now we have all of those changes coming at us and we start to show some symptoms as a result.

It's shocking how your health plummets when you start to lose that estrogen. And I'm on hormone replacement therapy and even still cholesterol's gone up, blood sugar's gone up. Admittedly, my last blood tests were after my honeymoon cuz I got remarried. I had been drinking every day because I was in France and that's what you do.

So anyway, well, their alcohol's probably completely different, you know, everything's different.

Well, I mean, whatever the quality of the alcohol, my liver enzymes were certainly above optimal by the end of that. You know, I've been waiting to correct this all and retest and hopefully get better numbers, but still just going into menopause just shot everything for me really. And I've been reading about that and what the alternatives are to even just your basic HRT, but looks like the alternatives are kind of not great. You know, if you really wanna replace your hormones back to premenopause levels, which is what the authors of book I'm reading are proposing, you actually have to have a period. And potentially even get injections of estrogen. I'm using a patch and progesterone pills, so it's not, it's not crazy, but that's the one benefit of going through menopause, right? Exactly. I'm like, I don't know, it's a tough trade-off, but I still get the hot flashes even on HRT.

Right.

It's like, I want my hormones, but I don't want that anymore.

Exactly.

So when somebody does have that spike right before bed in cortisol, other than keeping out the blue light and dimming lights, is there anything else that can be done about that?

Yeah, so the blue light is the main thing. And when I start to work with people with cortisol dysregulation and insulin resistance too, the first thing that we work on is our nighttime routine because it's really hard to fix the morning routine when you're not sleeping well. So getting that under wraps, starting with the blue light blocking. And I will say there are more and more blue light blocking glasses coming out and you can get 'em on Amazon, you can get 'em on Yeah.

Or if you wear prescriptions, you can get 'em built in like I've got.

Ah, yeah. But unless you're wearing the orange toned at night, like the clear ones aren't gonna block the blue light. They're gonna help with eye strain with like your computer and that if they're clear.

Mm-hmm.

You want the orange tone or the red tone. I don't wear red tone. I don't need those. But the orange tone, I switched out my light bulbs in my living room and my bedroom so that they're almost blue light. They're like 99% blue light.

Okay.

So what kind of light bulbs does one get?

They're called Hooga. H-O-O-G-A is the company that I order from. And incandescent lights will also have virtually no blue light. They were almost banned for a long time, but there's now an executive order signed that incandescent lights can be sold again. And I could always get 'em in Wisconsin, but there were certain states lights. I know California for sure, you couldn't get incandescent light. So the LED lights, really blight fluorescent lights are the ones that are problematic. And then of course, just having some kind of wind-down routine. I try not to look at my phone or screens at least an hour before I wanna sleep. I'm reading or I'm journaling. I know that's not for everybody, but that really, really helps. Some other things that can help if you absolutely are having trouble sleeping are magnesium. We mentioned progesterone. You might need to look into that. But people are amazed at what blocking the blue light does with sleep quality. So we start there and work on the nighttime routine, and then the daytime and morning routine become a lot less challenging because you're getting that melatonin peaking at the correct times. I tell my clients I work with, like, if you can be asleep by 10 o'clock, that is where I want you eventually, because all of these repair systems and the melatonin production peaking. Melatonin peaks about 4 hours after darkness and after you're sleeping. So if you're falling asleep around 10 o'clock, it's peaking around 2:00 AM, which is when it should be peaking. And then it's starting to fall by the time you wanna wake up. So people who don't go to sleep until midnight or they have this blue light in their eyes, they're not letting melatonin take over until 12, 1 o'clock in the morning while it's peaking then at 4:00, 5:00 AM. That's why you don't wanna get up because your melatonin is high, your cortisol is low, and you are just— and there's people who are like, I'm a night person, I'm a morning person. And there's definitely something to that, but a lot of times it's just this dysregulated light environment. And then the morning routine becomes a lot easier. You're able to get up and watch the sunrise and take in light breaks throughout the day. And that's kind of where we start, but the melatonin production is is just as important as the cortisol because if you're not healing and repairing and getting restorative sleep, it's gonna be very hard to recover from any disease.

Mm-hmm. And so what about other pattern I'll often see on these, you know, like adrenal cortex or the ZRT for spit cortisol test, adrenal test, is that someone's cortisol is particularly high around that sort of 5:00 to 7:00 PM range. But I kind of think that's probably a natural rhythm of life just because that's when we're doing all the stuff. We're finishing work, we're picking up kids, we're making dinner, we're running errands. Those are sort of naturally high cortisol things. So is that something that needs addressing or is that sort of a natural period of higher stress?

Yeah, I mean, it should be a little bit higher that kind of mid to late afternoon, but it, it should be falling. So I've seen that pattern for sure where it's outta range at that third, the third time. That they're doing the, the spit test. But what we work on then is, yeah, is just like getting wound down. And I think that this is probably, you know, this is probably me like 10 years ago where I'm like taking my kids everywhere and, and, you know, your work day ends, but then it's just beginning the, the whole nighttime routine. So yeah, I do see that pattern and a lot of times it, it, it has a bit to do with the blue light. Light stimulation again. But just, I think too, like, it's important to note, like, if you are working on getting cortisol back into balance, I, like I said, I primarily did all the lighting things, but I also had to work on my nervous system. Like, I was just in this perpetual fight or flight all the time. And some of that was like everything that happened with my parents, but it was just that, like I mentioned, that busy busy woman syndrome too, or I just had to tell myself like, you've gotta slow down. Like you don't have to be achieve, achieve, achieve all the time. And so I started things like journaling, Bible reading, just quiet time that I had never incorporated in my day before. And there's a couple of other things that I teach in my course to really work on nervous system. It sounds kind of crazy, but doing a couple of cold face plunges in the morning just takes you out of that fight or flight. You can feel feel it immediately. So there might be people who have that pattern as well. And it's probably, as long as you can get it, you know, lowered by the time you go to bed, it's not gonna be as disruptive as a, a real high cortisol at bedtime.

Hey, this is Lindsey here, just letting you know that if you're tired of dealing with digestive issues like bloating, indigestion, soft stool, diarrhea, constipation, reflux, IBS, IBD, or the numerous health conditions that come about when your gut is off, like brain fog, weight gain, UTIs, fatigue, mental health issues, or complex conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS, that's my specialty. With my 3 or 5 session gut health coaching packages, we'll discuss different stool and functional medicine tests to find out the root cause of your symptoms. I'll interpret the results and provide clear explanations, empowering you to make informed choices for your gut and overall health. And together we'll develop a customized action plan based on your test results so you can find relief and regain your health and vitality. I come from a functional medicine perspective, trying to incorporate the latest peer-reviewed research and educating you on protocols used by functional medicine practitioners, but devoting lots of time and support to my clients the way a doctor simply can't. If you're interested in a 3 or 5 session coaching package, you can sign up for complimentary 30-minute breakthrough session. Or if you can only afford one appointment at a time, you can book an initial 60-minute consultation. Links for those are in the show notes. Now back to the show.

So what is leptin and what does it have to do with blood sugar and cortisol?

Yeah, leptin is another hormone. It was only discovered in 1994. And so it's one of those hormones. I mean, it's always been there obviously, but we didn't really discover it until 1994. And not a lot of people know about leptin or what it does, but it's actually produced in the fat cells. And its primary job is to tell the body how much storage, how much energy, what's the energy status on my body. This becomes very, very important because leptin telling the brain what the energy status is of the body, it will tell, it will give it signals for hunger, satiety, how much to eat the next day. We can back off. We're not as hungry the next day. But leptin, like I said, is produced in the fat cells and it can become dysregulated. I see it mostly become dysregulated in women who have tried their entire life to lose weight and they've kind of been in this caloric deficit, gain the weight back, caloric deficit, gain the weight back. The perpetual dieter almost always has dysregulated leptin. And the other thing that really screws up leptin is snacking and eating and this perpetual, I'm just gonna eat and graze like the grazers. And so what leptin does is it docks to the brain, the hypothalamus, usually around midnight or so, and it downloads, it gives the body a download. Like Shanna has this many extra calories stored as body fat, or Shanna really has no energy stored. And what that does is it tells the body how much to eat the next day, basically. And so if there's leptin resistance where your leptin is too high, this happens usually when we have too much body fat, when we're in that kind of perpetual snacking, grazing mentality. Leptin— the fat cells are just producing too much leptin. And this is a problem because it's just a miscommunication to the brain. And then the perpetual dieters, restrictors, those who've been in doing a lot of fasting or a lot of caloric restriction, they can't seem to lose weight. A lot of times they have really low levels of leptin, and that can become problematic too, because then you might have extra body fat. Your brain is being told you don't have energy stores and to eat a lot the next day. When we're leptin resistant, we're almost always insulin resistant too. The thing that people should know about leptin is that it's docking to the hypothalamus around midnight, but the receptor, the leptin receptor competes with insulin. And so if you have higher than normal levels of insulin, it's really hard for leptin to dock at the hypothalamus where it should, and your body's not getting that communication either. So if you're insulin resistant, a lot of times we're also leptin resistant. Resistant and we're just kind of a hormonal mess. And the other thing that's really important to note about leptin is it primarily docks overnight. And so what I'm getting at is you don't wanna be eating at night and you don't wanna be insulin resistant. You're eating at night and you have high blood sugars, high insulin, your leptin is not going to dock correctly. So that's really important. So that's a whole nother thing that I work on with my insulin resistance folks is to stop snacking and stop eating at night. So your insulin can come down and your leptin can start to dop to your brain. Leptin will also download during the day about every 4 hours. And that's why when we're eating correctly and we're managing our blood sugar and our blood sugar levels are healthy, we should be able to go 4, 5, even 6 hours without eating if our leptin is signaling correctly. And you won't get a leptin download until about 4 hours after you've last less eaten. So if you're just in this perpetual snacking mode, your leptin is probably very dysregulated and you're going to have a really tough time losing weight. And just metabolically, you'll, you were, you will struggle.

So are you measuring leptin on your clients? And if so, what's an optimal level?

Yeah, I wish you can. So you can ask your doctor for leptin, but chances are they might, chances are they'll say no. If they're more progressive, yeah, they, they might. I wish— I also work with ZRT. You were, you mentioned ZRT earlier. This is the lab that I order all my home kits from too. They don't have leptin right now. I'm hoping that, you know, in the near future they will. You can order it on Own Your Lab, some of those lab websites where you can order up what you want and go to, usually it's Quest or LabCorp. That will test it. I like to see a level like 2 to 9, somewhere in there. But unless you get it checked, you don't really know. But it is important to look at your levels way over 9. It's going to be a little bit different approach than if you have really low levels. And usually, like I said, my low leptin people that I'm seeing are those who type A, over-restricting, in a caloric deficit, maybe been over-fasting for a long time. Important to have that in balance too.

Yeah.

And so the solution to that is just eating normally, not restricting your calories. Yeah.

Yeah. So how I go about fixing that, so I used to do a lot of intermittent fasting throughout the morning. So we kind of fix insulin resistance at the same time. The very first thing I have my people stop doing if they're insulin resistant is snacking. And we just go to eating 3 square meals a day. To begin with, protein-centered, having some natural fat, having strategic produce in there, getting that under wraps first, along with working with the whole lighting thing at night so that you're not hungry and wanting to snack and cortisol going crazy. It's a lot. It's a lot. People are like, oh my gosh, there's so much to do. But really, once you understand your hormones and what's the environment that is is giving your hormone signals, you can start to fix it. The main thing is 3 square meals, allowing eventually to go at least 4 hours in between meals so you can get that leptin signaling in between meals, stopping the night eating for sure. And then we do go therapeutic carb restriction at least for a while. And I'm not saying everybody's gotta go ketogenic or anything, but that does help to bring insulin levels down.

And when you say carb restriction, how much, obviously keto is you're eating maybe 20 grams of carb a day or something. I'd tell them something higher than that.

Yeah, I actually have a carb quiz on my website to help people with this. I'm generally— everybody's different. That's why I like to work with people individually, but generally I'm recommending 25 to 100 grams of carbohydrate a day, less restrictive around the 100 grams. And then somebody who's really insulin resistant, like they're requiring insulin, they're on all kinds of diabetes medications. That would be more of the, let's eventually get you to around 25 grams of carbs, 50 maybe, until your body is utilizing carbohydrates a little bit better. Because usually, you know, when you're at that point, you're very insulin resistant. You're not utilizing carbohydrates well at all. That's not forever, but for a time, bring it down. And you know, I have people carb flex in there and bring carbohydrates up, you know, maybe one day a week, couple times a month. I don't like the perpetual, let's eat low car— you know, 25 grams of carbohydrate every single day for the rest of our lives. Like, I don't think that's healthy.

Yeah. And so they're not replacing those calories necessarily with fat, right? Or is it more adding more protein typically that you're looking at?

Yeah, I have people build their meals around protein cuz it's very satiating. It's what we primarily build our body with. So in general, I'm having women eat around 100 grams of protein throughout the day. When you meet that, you start to have those hunger and satiety mechanisms come back. I definitely have seen in my practice people overdo fat and go way too high on fat, and then they're struggling to lose weight because even though they're burning ketones and they're burning fat for fuel, they're burning fat that they're eating. They're not burning fat from their body. And so that's where the time-restricted eating comes into play and the whole leptin resistance thing. Because if your leptin signaling is healthy, your body will say, oh gosh, I have 50 pounds of extra body fat here. I don't need to eat a whole lot today. And it will downregulate your appetite and all of it. It's just all in place so beautifully when it all works correctly.

Before we run outta time, I wanna bring it back to the topic of my podcast, which is gut health. So how does all this relate to your gut health?

Yeah, it's fascinating. With cortisol, what I found was really interesting and what I was struggling with, with my own gut health was a lot of bloating and a lot of food that wasn't being digested well. And this is because I was in overdrive I was in that fight or flight and my body, it was so stressed out that instead of taking all the energy for proper food digestion, it just couldn't, it couldn't digest.

You were not in rest and digest.

Exactly. I was not in rest and digest. I was in fight or flight. And so almost every meal I would be bloated. I had more food sensitivities than I do now. That's just one little thing. What really helped me, and this is in my adrenal recovery course, is I took betaine HCL and digestive enzymes for a time with every meal. And I still do that on a lot of days with bigger meals, and that helped to start to digest my food properly and stop that bloating. And another thing with digestion, with insulin resistance and eating too often is we're just not giving our digestive systems a break ever. And so that's why, again, going to 2 or 3 meals. And I think it's perfectly fine for some people to eat just 1 meal a day some of the time when they're, you know, they have a lot of weight to lose. But giving your body some rest and digest and rest and repair is so helpful for the digestive system. And if people do want to intermittent fast, and inside my courses we do have a more of a circadian approach where we're fasting late afternoon into evening. To really support the autophagy process during sleep and give that digestive system a nice long break.

As opposed to the skipping breakfast model.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The problem is nobody wants to skip dinner. Everybody likes dinner and they want to eat it with their friends or family or whatever. And so it's gotta be challenging, but it makes way more sense metabolically.

It is more socially challenging for sure. It has a lot more benefits than if people are doing the habitual, and I did that for like 5 or 6 years and then And it just dysregulated my cortisol even worse. Yeah.

No, I've heard it's not good for women, the whole skipping breakfast thing. It may be not good for anybody. I've interviewed the Prolon Fasting Mimicking Diet folks, Joseph Antuneau. He was saying that, yeah, in fact, if anything, skipping lunch, if you don't wanna skip dinner, skipping lunch would be a better choice than skipping breakfast.

Yeah. If you can be done eating by 3, 4, even 5 o'clock, that gives you a nice long break.

Yeah.

I, I skipped breakfast way too many years and it took a toll on me and I started to have high blood sugars throughout the morning because my cortisol was out of balance.

Yeah. There's no way I could skip dinner though. I have to say, cuz I'm just somebody who's got like a super fast metabolism. If I skipped dinner, I wouldn't sleep a wink because I'd be sitting there with hunger pangs all night.

Yeah.

So one last question, which is how cortisol, melatonin, and leptin interact.

Yeah. I like to call these three hormones kind of the master circadian hormones. For all of the reasons that we already discussed. So if cortisol levels are off and melatonin levels are off, your body's just in chaos and not signaling correctly. But those three hormones are kind of above a lot of the downstream hormones. So if your cortisol and melatonin are off, there's a hierarchy of hormones. And if you're filtering all your energy into that cortisol You're not gonna filter the energy into making sex hormones. It's just so intricate. And once one hormone gets off, especially if it's cortisol, melatonin, or leptin, like all of the, the downstream hormones, which I don't wanna call them more important, but reproductive hormones can be out of balance and not affect us as much. Like they're not life or death, right? It's just, okay, well our fertility body's gonna not function correctly. But if we don't have cortisol, we're in big trouble. If we don't have some of the other master hormones, we're in big trouble. When melatonin, cortisol, leptin are off, people have a lot of weight issues, a lot of chronic illness. And the nice thing is, is that fixing them, we do it all in the same way. We get a strong circadian rhythm. We dial in our nutrition, we fix our lighting environment, all the foundational things. And really when you think about it, just going back to being human, how humans are meant, like we're not meant to be. And you know, I work my, my whole business is online. So, you know, we sit inside under artificial lights staring at computers. I mean, that's so much different. And then we, we eat by our desk and we don't socialize. And I'm not saying everybody does this, but when you think about humans even 200 years ago as to now, things have evolved and changed so quickly that we just haven't caught up to it. A lot of our bodies are internally in chaos and we can't understand what's going on. But when we stop and think about how different our lifestyle is, it's no wonder that we're all sick and struggling.

Yeah, no, I think you really have hit on it with two related as it relates to gut health, how you start with these dysregulated patterns and then it has all these bad downstream effects. And a lot of people that I see have gut health issues that ultimately seem to have stemmed from stress and often a particularly stressful period in their life where clearly their cortisol starts to get dysregulated, their blood sugar gets dysregulated, then they lose their immune resilience, really. I mean, their immune system gets weakened and I can see it in their secretory IgA levels on the stool test. That their immune systems are no longer functioning. The stomach acid levels have gone down, right? And so there's no protection. So then all of a sudden these pathogenic bugs start to take over and then you start getting all these gut symptoms and it just snowballs from there. So yeah, it really does start with, with these sort of patterns that come on under stress and cortisol.

I like to tell people we need to fix the terrain. There is a reason why you are having all these imbalances and the terrain is off. And a lot of it has to do with not getting out into the sunlight, not getting proper messaging. Eating crap that doesn't belong in your body and not sleeping. Yeah.

So tell me where people can find you and I guess you do courses.

Yes. If you go to shannahustonwellness.com, all my courses are housed there. I have lots of freebies. I have a free ebook on cortisol dysregulation. I have a cortisol mini course as well. If you wanna learn the basics of how it gets dysregulated and how to start to fix it. And then I have a podcast called Optimal Metabolism.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this great knowledge.

You're very welcome.

So if you're wondering how your gut health went to pot, I think this interview was instructive.

And sometimes you need to fix this higher-level hormonal stuff in order to see lasting gut health changes and to be able to get off the supplements and the digestive support.

You can support the podcast by buying supplements at a discount from my FullScript dispensary. Ordering tests at a discount from my Rupa Health Lab store, or using my affiliate links to iHerb, which is available worldwide, or Amazon. And just a note that you can use my Amazon link to buy anything, not just supplements, and support the podcast. So I'd love it and really appreciate it if you'd bookmark my link and use it for regular Amazon purchases. If you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my Gut Healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com, as well as follow me on X, Instagram, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today. Here's wishing you all the perfect stool.