Why is My Metabolism So Slow? | Dr. Brian Mowll

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing somebody that I talked to on my summit and was just a great conversation. It's Dr. Maul. And let me tell you a little bit about him. He's the founder and medical director of Sweet Life Diabetes Health Center. Do you love that name? I mean, seriously. And serves clients worldwide as a diabetes coach. He's certified diabetes care and education specialist, master licensed diabetes educator, and is certified by the Institute of Functional Medicine. Yay. For over 20 years, Dr. Mal has been helping people around the world to optimize their health and metabolism, control blood sugar and reverse type 2 diabetes using a natural personal life lifestyle approach. In addition, he is host of the number one rated Mastering Blood Sugar podcast and author of the Pro Fast Burn Fat and reverse type 2 diabetes in just six weeks. I am so excited to have you on board because this is such an issue, Brian, for so many people. So hopefully we can get them to change your lifestyle and change your diet and get better.

Yeah. There was a study published in 2019, I believe.

It was an evaluation and analysis of the population, and they found that 88% of Americans have some sort of metabolic dysfunction. Obesity, overweight, related to metabolism, type 2 diabetes, prediabetes. Somewhere along that spectrum, just shy of 88%. So that is a lot of people talking about a lot of people and a lot of women.

So, Brian, can we start with the whole notion of why do we see it so often and why is this more of an issue with women? And here's what I'm interested in. As I hear so many people say to me, perimenopausal, menopausal. You know, I never had a problem with my blood sugar before, and all of a sudden I can't wait until my next meal and I shake in the morning. Or can we dig into that a little deeper?

Yeah, sure. I mean, there's some very real changes. And I think it's important to understand that our metabolism and.

The metabolic effects of our food and lifestyle.

Are not just dependent on what we put in our mouth. That is a big piece of it. But there are other control mechanisms, and hormones play a huge role in that. There are certain hormones that regulate how much fat we store. There are hormones that regulate where we store our fat and whether we're able to liberate or burn that fat effectively. So it's. It is about what we eat, and there's other hormones that can control our appetite and how much we eat and when we eat. But it's more than that. There's also hormones Directing traffic in how we metabolize glucose and fat for fuel. And that changes as our life changes, you know, so when we are sort of, you know, pre pubescent children, there are certain patterns, you know, and we're basically just burning everything as it comes in. Our metabolic rate is super high. You can gain weight as children and there's genetic factors, obviously, but it's, it's harder. As women go through the years of fertility, things shift and change. Even throughout the monthly cycle, things shift and change quite a bit. And then through menopause, things change a lot. And that's, you know, most of my population that I serve are postmenopausal women and then men as well, of about the same age group. But there's a big change that happens. And I'll just give sort of one classic example here is that.

As estrogen levels fall, estrogen is an important fat burning hormone. And it not only determines.

How we burn fat, but how we store fat and where we store fat. So women who have higher levels of estrogen will tend to store fat more in safer areas, so, like the buttocks and the thighs and those types of areas. And as estrogen levels drop, we tend to. Women tend to store fat more in their midsection. And that type of fat storage, particularly if it gets stored in and around the organs, can make us resistant to another hormone called insulin, which helps us to, to store more fat and to.

Store extra glucose as well from our diet. And so we become resistant to glue to insulin. Excuse me. When estrogen levels fall, women become more insulin. Insulin resistant. They tend to. And they tend to store more fat in the midsection. So everything kind of changes. And that is when a lot of women start to notice their blood sugar will, will rise or they'll again, they'll start to gain more weight in their midsection and they start to go down this path where they become less healthy metabolically. And many times, you know, don't put that together. They're not counseled on this, so they just don't know what's going on. And there are things that can be done to circumvent that, to improve conditions, to improve insulin sensitivity, improve blood sugar, and make sure that all those negative consequences happen.

I guess that's a piece that I really want to talk about, and that is that women are told many times in menopause and they come to see me with the same issues. Well, my doctor just told me I'm going to gain £5 every year. And it's just how it's going to be. And there's nothing I can really do about it. I've got a family history of diabetes and, you know, I just, you know, he said it's just. Or she said it's just going to happen. Now I know that's not true. Let me hear your side of this coin here.

Yeah, definitely not true. And I've seen a lot of, and I'm sure you have as well, our female patients are women to be able to reverse that type of situation. So instead of gaining, gaining, gaining, they start to trade some of that fat mass for lean body mass. And that's one of the keys, I think that.

Many women and many older men as well, are hesitant to want to build muscle because they feel like they, you know, they don't want to get bulky or they don't want to sort of look bigger. And the chance of that happening from doing something like resistance training is very small. I mean, you're probably not going to become.

You know, at the age of 60 plus, you're probably not going to become a, you know, like a female fitness model, although I'm sure it's possible. But you're definitely not going to become bulky unless you've got just the genetics for that and you know it by that time. So, so using some techniques to build resistance training, I think is one, or to build more muscle. Resistance training being one of those techniques, I think is one of the best ways to build more metabolic flexibility, to start to be able to lower blood sugar, to burn more fat, to help the body to, to become leaner in an important way, in a way that's going to help you to stay healthy over the long haul. Also on the flip side of that, there's some or the other big, I guess factor is dietary factors. So exercise resistance training is one of the important things to add from a dietary perspective. I think we need to be careful with carbohydrate consumption, especially the refined processed carbohydrates, A lot of sugar added and so forth, because those types of carbohydrates get processed a little bit differently than say, like a bean or even a starchy vegetable, which is mostly glucose. So glucose, interestingly.

Gets absorbed very readily through the gut and gets used by almost every cell in the body, pretty much every cell in the body.

The other sugar, the other simple sugar that's in what we call sugar, table sugar, is fructose. And fructose is, is what actually tastes sweet. So glucose isn't all that sweet of a taste, pure glucose. So when you eat a potato for example, it doesn't taste all that sweet because it's, it's almost all glucose chains of glucose called starch. Fructose is the sweet sugar. That's what they add to a lot of foods to make them taste good and taste sweet. The problem with fructose is it doesn't get absorbed into the blood and used by all the cells of the body. It actually gets taken to the liver and oftentimes gets converted to fat. And it creates this visceral fat situation. Now, I'm not talking about eating some berries or, you know, an app apple a day, that type of thing. I'm talking about these added sugars or, you know, pouring the table sugar, the white sugar into baked goods and other products. That's where we get a lot of that fructose. And that drives metabolic problems. So we've got to be careful with that as well.

So, you know, one of the things that I'm interested in also is what about intermittent fasting here? And when I see people with insulin levels that are high, especially two hours after they've eaten a high glucose meal, what I'm tending to tell people is this is exactly why you're not losing weight. It's because you're insulin resistant. What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting? And also the notion, I think keto works differently for women. But what about the notion of kind of the conceptual idea about keto?

Yeah, so, well, I'll talk about keto first and then intermittent fasting. And I think to me, a ketogenic diet.

Has sort of become synonymous now in the past few years with a low carb, high fat diet. And I think that's one way to do a ketogenic diet, but not the only way to do a ketogenic diet. Now that can be effective for many people. And one of the benefits from this ketogenic diet movement over the past few years is that I think we're realizing we don't need to be as scared of fat as we were, you know, 10, 20 years ago. And there are healthy fats and there are maybe some fats that aren't as healthy, you know, like the trans fats and hydrogenated fats, which aren't really used that much anymore. And things like, you know, the margarines. And now we're talking about these industrial seed oils like, you know, canola oil and safflower oil on these, which are more processed and can be potentially inflammatory. But it's more, it's more nuanced. Now we say, okay, is it A healthy fat or is it maybe not so healthy of a fat rather than just let's be scared of fat as a whole. So I think that that's positive. I do think people can push that a little too far though sometimes, especially if you're already over fat. So, you know, if you're already over fat, if you already have a lot of extra fat on your frame, then you may not need the high fat piece of that. You might just want to do low carb and then maybe moderate protein, moderate fat and, and then burn your own body fat for, for extra energy. So there are, I mentioned there are other ways to do a ketogenic diet. Ketogenic diet just means that your, you know, whatever you're eating is producing ketones. One of, one of the ways to do that is with fasting. So intermittent fasting oftentimes is ketogenic. So you know, when you do an extended overnight fast, your ketone blood ketone levels may rise to the level that they would on a nutritional ketogenic diet. So you're producing ketones and we're producing those ketones to give our brain and our heart and our muscles and other organs an extra fuel source to burn when we're not eating. So those ketones can be really healthy, they're anti inflammatory, they cause release of BDNF in the brain, which improves brain regeneration and brain health. So there's a whole variety of benefits from having ketones in the blood. I just don't know that we need to try to add lots and lots of extra fat to the diet for no reason other than just to eat a high fat diet. So I think the ketogenic can be helpful. I think intermittent fasting, which you mentioned first, can be really, really helpful to increase fat burning. And that's oftentimes what we want to do. We want to burn more fat, we want to become more lean, we want to, as I say, trade some fat mass for lean mass so we become metabolically healthier. And so intermittent fasting is a great way to do that. And that could be done over a, you know, within a 24 hour period, which is called time restricted eating. So instead of eating breakfast at 8, maybe you have your first meal at 10 or 11 or 12 and then you're done eating by 6 or 7pm so that's a restricted eating window. And then you're fasting 16, 18 hours within that 24 hour period. So you're depleting your glycogen in the liver and a little bit in the muscles. Which is stored sugar. So your liver becomes like a glucose sponge. It's going to soak sugar out of your bloodstream and you're burning more fat. So hopefully losing fat weight, which is what we, most of us want to do.

Absolutely. So what I'm finding also is very similar to what you're suggesting, Brian, is that I think a lot of women in particular don't do well with high, high fat. And I find that being mindful of the quality of the fat, how much you have every day, and also the intermittent fasting for some doesn't work for everybody, works incredibly well. Can you speak also a little bit about what we know about longevity, you know, and intermittent fasting? There's a ton of research now in terms of increasing telomere length and things like that. Can you speak to that?

Yeah, I think that's one of the great benefits from fasting. And that could be. So the word intermittent fasting just refers to, you know, fasting on some sort of repetitive basis. So we're sort of fasting and then eating and then fasting again. Technically, we're all doing that every day, right? I mean, we don't eat for maybe 10 to 12 hours a day and then we eat the other part of the day. So intermittent fasting infers some sort of strategy there. So we're saying, okay, we're going to purposefully go a little bit longer than we usually would without food. So that could be within a 24 hour period like I described. That's called time restricted eating. Or we can do something like once a month, we go a full 24 hours without food or once a week. Some people will do that. I'm cautious to go any longer than that unless you're pretty sure that you can do it. Maybe you have some supervision. You're working with a coach or a good clinician, somebody trained in functional medicine or fasting strategies that can help you. But you certainly can if, you know, given the right situation, you can go much longer than 24 hours. People will sometimes go 10 days, two weeks or longer fasting. But again, I think that's a totally different situation. So intermittent fasting, usually we're looking at up to maybe 24 hours and doing that on some sort of recurring basis. And there are a lot of benefits to that. I mentioned the fat burning benefits. It also upregulates something called autophagy, which is basically the word means self eating. So what our body does is it'll prioritize old damaged cells and will recycle amino acids from Proteins it usually will target like our skin cells and endothelium of vessels and things like that that are damaged. And it'll start to break the, down the damaged tissue and lay down new healthy tissue. So it's a, it's, it's kind of a recycling and a recreation of our body tissues. So there's autophagy, there's breakdown and then there's, there's a rebuilding. And when we fast that's upregulated, it's kind of always happening to some degree. But after somewhere around 14 to 16 hours of fasting it really starts to increase and then it'll peak at about 48 hours and then start to decline a bit. So it's. So we can use that period to basically renew our bodies, to rejuvenate our bodies. And that's going to increase longevity, it's going to help our DNA heal. Telomere length, like you said, all of those things improve in relationship to that type of fasting. And again, it doesn't have to be a 10 day, 30 day fast. You know, anything extreme 24 hours will get most of those benefits. And then if you really wanted to do significant benefits, you could go 24 to 36 hours. Then the benefits really all start to decline. They continue, but they, that they, it's sort of diminishing returns. I'll say one other thing about that. Valter Longo has done a lot of research. He created something called fasting mimicking diet where he found that you don't actually even need a full fast to get many of these benefits. He found if you just cut your energy consumption or calories down to like 5 to 700 calories a day for maybe a four or five day period. Do that once a month, you're going to get much of the same benefits. You'll get increased autophagy.

He's shown cancer prevention and lots of other benefits from that reduced calorie period. And you do it cyclically, like, you know, not just continuously, but you would do it for maybe four or five days, once a month. Sometimes we have our clients do that twice a month to really speed the benefits there. But that, that can be a healthy longevity strategy as well.

Can you talk a little bit about the profast diet that you have in your book that you detailed? Is it similar to this?

It is similar to that actually. And we use what I just mentioned there from Valter Longo was sort of a way to sort of dip your toes in the water to do something like this.

So there are some key Differences though. So Valter Longo's program.

Is lower in protein and you will lose some lean body mass during that period. But that's sort of part of the purpose. So you're trying to lower growth factors like MTOR and IGF1 to help the body get into sort of a cancer prevention state or even a tumor reduction state potentially. So there's a specific purpose for that and limiting protein. So it's more of a plant oriented lower protein four or five days. And I do recommend doing that.

Maybe once a month. I think it can be helpful to purposefully drop those growth factors to really help increase that autophagy. But for most people with metabolic health issues, we don't want to do that long term because we really want to maintain lean body mass. So there were some researchers at Harvard in the 70s, Drs. Blackburn and Bistrian who were researching protein sparing diets. They had critically ill patients who were kind of withering away in the hospital and they were testing out different forms of parental nutrition, which is basically liquid nutrition when people aren't eating. And they were finding that these patients were losing a lot of lean body mass. So they tested putting amino acids into those, so basically protein building blocks, and found that they could prevent the loss of lean body mass. Then they started testing this using real food on people for weight loss. So it'd be a low calorie eating approach, but high in protein. And they found that those people would lose weight without losing lean body mass. So they're burning almost exclusively fat with some water loss as well, obviously. And so they created this program called Protein Sparing Modified Fast. And it's been used, it's still used in a lot of.

Bariatric clinics pre weight loss surgery. It's used by the Cleveland Clinic to help people with type 2 diabetes and obesity. And so what I did is took this and I've been using it for five, 10 years with my patients and clients and created an adaptation of it that was based on real food and that was realistic and doable for just about anybody. And so we turned this into the Profast diet. And I've used it with hundreds of my clients really successfully. What happens basically is you do go into nutritional ketosis. So it is a very version of a ketogenic diet.

Mimics fasting. So you do get increases in autophagy, not as much as you would on a low protein diet, but you still, you still will see increases in autophagy. And most importantly, you don't lose any lean body mass. So you maintain all Your lean body mass, you burn almost exclusively fat. It's, it is a fairly aggressive approach. So for people really want to drop their blood sugar or lose a significant amount of fat in a rel. Relatively short period of time. But there's a case to be made for fast weight loss. A lot of people don't like to hear that or talk about it, and it's not the healthiest way to lose weight for everyone. But what we found is that people seem to have a window of time when they're the most motivated to make lifestyle changes. And so let's say that's three months. And they can either lose, you know, eight pounds in that three months, or they can lose, I don't know, 15 pounds in that three months. And.

The.

The compliance on the backside of that doesn't seem to change much. So once they get to the end of that period of time, they start to lose that motivation. Not everybody, of course, I'm generalizing, but a lot of people will start to lose that motivation and want to shift into maintenance anyway. So I found that no matter how you lose weight or burn fat, you've got to maintain it anyway if you want to have long term benefits. So my feeling is why not lose as much fat as you possibly can, done in a healthy way during that highly motivated period. And there's actually been a half dozen studies that have shown that people do just as well with weight loss maintenance on rapid fat loss that they do with sort of the slow, steady, you know, pound a week type of fat loss. So anyway, I found it to be very successful. We wrote a book about it. It's due out here in just a little bit and excited to share it because I think it can help a lot of people to become much more metabolically healthy.

Absolutely. Well, I find the same thing, Brian. I have a weight loss program as well, and my people lose very quickly 20 pounds in six weeks and certainly 35 to 50 pounds in 12 weeks. But I've been doing it long enough now that my success is 75% keep it off. So once you've got enough support for them, you know, 48 encounters over the 12 weeks with a health coach or someone else that they can do it and they get so motivated, they're so excited because finally something's working for them and they can see the changes. I completely agree with you.

Yeah, very motivating to see those changes. And let's be honest, you have to see some sort of change to stay motivated. I mean, people only have so much patience when it comes to following a program like that.

I agree. So how do people really understand where their metabolic health is? You know, we have some people that are listening to this podcast going, so am I one of those 88%? How do I know?

Right? Yeah, it's a really good question. So there are some numbers that you can test, like glucose. So fasting glucose is sort of an easy one to look at. And it should be in the 80s, fasting. I will say also that one of the things we do with our clients is we have them check their baseline glucose.

In a couple different times during the day. Many people have this dawn effect or dawn phenomenon where their morning glucose will be a little bit higher, sometimes significantly higher. And they think, oh, my gosh, my baseline glucose, my fasting glucose is really high. But in reality, it's the effect of these hormones like adrenaline and cortisol and glucagon in the morning that are pushing it up, and it's still a problem. It indicates usually some insulin resistance in the liver. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But that may not be a true baseline. So oftentimes we'll have people check right before dinner. And you wait four or five hours after lunch. You check right before dinner. So you're in a, in a fasted state. You're not in the fed state anymore, what's called post absorptive state. And you check right before dinner. And then oftentimes that is lower. So sometimes people will say, okay, before dinner. It's like 85, 90. That's actually true baseline. So it's important to know that. It's important to know what your, your body is resetting your glucose to when you're not eating or you're in a fasted state. So you can check your baseline. If your baseline is above, really above 90, but certainly above 100, that's a sign of some metabolic distress or what's called dysglycemia, blood sugar imbalances.

Other than that, again, we use something that's very simple to measure called a waist to height ratio. You measure your waist around your midsection, halfway between your last palpable rib, your lowest rib, and your iliac crest. So the little bump that you feel on the side of your hip there, it ends up being about an inch above your belly button, maybe a half an inch to an inch above your belly button. Take a, you know, a flexible fabric tape, go around there, and then compare that to your height, if that is more than half your height. So greater than 0.5 that's a sign of.

Insulin resistance. It's a sign of some sort of metabolic dysfunction. So if your midsection is more than half the, the girth is more than half your height, that's, that's a problem. So waist to height ratio, and research shows that that tracks way better than bmi, for example, with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. So that's, that's a real good, easy one to do if you want to get more, a little bit more, I don't want to say complicated, but maybe a little bit more into lab testing. Fasting insulin is really important and most conventional doctors don't do that. Most functional medicine doctors do. And a fasting insulin test is important because it'll, it'll tell us long before your glucose goes up that there's a problem. So usually we'll see even decades before glucose starts to really rise, we'll see insulin levels rising, which means that you're becoming more and more insulin resistant. And, and so if you can change things, then, you know, early start to turn things around, become more insulin sensitive, start to drop your insulin levels back to normal, then you can prevent your glucose from ever going up in the first place. High blood pressure is another thing. Fluid retention, sugar cravings, especially if you get hungry within an hour, hour and a half after you ate, that's not a good sign. That's telling you that there's, you know, something metabolically off your hunger hormones aren't working. Usually that's due to leptin, some sort of leptin resistance, you know, where you're not getting full after your meals and usually insulin resistance as well. So that's another clue that you can look for.

So what about hemoglobin A1C?

Yeah, so, you know, that's a, that's a good way to track, I think, I think hemoglobin A1c is an important test to do, and I recommend that everybody gets it. A lot of people, you know, we sort of say it's a three to four month average of our glucose. And that's not exactly true. It's kind of a surrogate glucose marker, but it is, it's an important marker. Either way, it tells us how much damage is being done to the oxygen carrying component of the red blood cells. And we can sort of extrapolate that. And research shows that this is a reliable way to assess damage to the body. If there's damage to these red blood cells, there's likely damage being done to the brain and the kidneys and the endothelium. The vascular system and other parts of the body. So there's been several studies that have shown for every 1 point increase, 1 percentage point increase in a 1C from normal. So normals less than 5.7, and so about 4 and a half to 5 and a half somewhere in that range. So once it goes up a point from that, it's about an 18 to 20% greater chance of complications associated with diabetes. So things like eye damage, peripheral neuropathy, numbness, tingling, pain in the extremities in the feet, toes, kidney disease, dementia, sexual dysfunction in men, you know, and a wide variety of other, you know, issues related to high blood sugar. So it's essentially what happens is the higher the blood sugar, the more blood, more sugar floating around in your bloodstream. It, like, caramelizes our cells, basically. And one of those cells is our red blood cells. So there's a hemoglobin A1C receptor. It gets sugar coated. And then the A1C increases from that, you know, 5.7 mark to, you know, 6 and above. Diabetes is diagnosed at six and a half or higher. So once it gets up to that level, that's an indication that, you know, now you've kind of lost control of your blood sugar and it's becoming very, very serious.

So we've talked a lot about all the issues. Can we now spend some time talking about we can change this and how many people are actually able to reverse this? This is not a death sentence. And also, perhaps even put in a little bit about stress in here, because stress also contributes to this as well, unfortunately.

Yeah, no doubt. So out of that 88% that we talked about, I would say like 85%.

Or 90% of those can absolutely reverse the problem. So that's really good news. And, you know, we have to. We have to make changes, of course, but. But the good news is that a lot of this is reverse. The body's amazing. It can heal itself from. From really devastating conditions. And one of the keys to doing that is to address the root cause. And stress can be. So, yeah, stress can be. Can be a big driver for that. So we kind of look at it like there's diabetes, so type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, metabolic syndrome, that. That spectrum of problems underlying that really is this insulin resistance. So the body becomes resistant to insulin, insulin levels rise. So we become both insulin resistant and hyperinsulinemic, means we could be too much insulin in our blood. So those two together are disastrous cardiovascular issues. They alone, even without high blood sugar, can cause peripheral neuropathy eye problems, that is really the main source of Alzheimer's and dementia. So you know, that's what we call the foundational root cause. But then under that there are, or the foundational cause under that there are root causes like the deep roots of the tree. And those are the things like high stress, poor sleep, micronutrient deficiencies, gut dysbiosis, chronic inflammation, chronic infections, thyroid imbalance, low thyroid function, adrenal dysregulation. So all of these other factors can then drive that insulin resistance syndrome, which then leads to diabetes. But yes, the good news is that when you identify those root causes and you address them and you become more insulin sensitive and you actually treat the cause rather than trying to just lower the blood sugar with a medication or a supplement or something else, then, then you can actually reverse the condition and get much healthier.

So one of the things that I see so often, Brian, is well, I'll do this for a little while and I'll get my sugars down. And it's like, no, no, no, this is about changing your life, it's about changing your stress, it's about changing your diet kind of long term. What I love about what you say and how you say it is that it is so easy in some ways to treat and reverse and you don't have to go down this, I've got diabetes and this is just how it's going to have to be the rest of my life.

Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Because it can be very, you can get into a self defeat, you know, self defeating type of mental pattern with it. And you know, people become very.

Almost depressed. I mean, depression is correlates with diabetes very closely because, and distress, because diabetes can lead to those. Especially if you feel like there's no hope and there's no way out or if you make, you try a few things and you're not successful and then you just sort of give up on it. People get tired of pricking their finger, they get tired of taking medications, they get tired of worrying about what they're going to eat if they haven't made that mental shift into, into real lifestyle change. And so, you know, we always talk about, you can, you can make a decision once or you can make a decision over and over and over and over again. You know, if I'm a, if I'm a gambling addict and I have to decide every time I drive past a casino if I want to drive in and go test my luck or not, I'm going to be in trouble because there's going to Be some times where I'm going to feel weak or tired or angry or frustrated, and I'm just going to want to go in and play.

Or I can make a decision once and I can say, you know what, I don't gamble anymore. And that's it now. Easier said than done, right? I mean, you've got to reinforce that with support and coaching is helpful and, you know, maybe. Maybe even some counseling or what have you. I mean, there's, there's ways to reinforce that. But it starts with a decision. And, you know, the word decide means to cut off from other options. So it's, you know, when I make that decision, I'm making that decision. Maybe it's a little bit harder with food, but you start with one food at a time. So if you're drinking soda, for example, okay, I decide I'm not going to drink soda anymore. I'm going to replace that with something else. Most people listening to this probably aren't drinking soda, but I'm just using as an example, what's the next thing in line that you can say? Okay, I'm going to decide not to do that anymore. And then, yes, there are some foods where maybe, you know, they are okay in moderation. You know, a sweet fruit, for example, pineapple. We don't want to do pineapple every day. Doing it once in a while, summer picnic or something, totally fine. But we've got to be careful with the rule of moderation because, you know, certain foods, in moderation, you know, it doesn't work. Right. And especially if there is more of an addiction to a food, some people like, I'm. I'm a recovering pizza holic. I grew up eating pizza. I love pizza. My family had pizza night once a week and it was like my favorite day of the week. And so when I got off to college and could eat anything I want, I ate pizza probably every day for six months. And so now I don't eat it anymore because I know that if I do eat it, I'm going to want it really bad the next day and I'm going to send myself into this spiral. So I've just made a decision that, okay, I don't do that food anymore. There's lots of other good foods to choose from, and I'm totally fine with it. I don't feel deprived. But if I played this game with myself where every day or every time I walked past a pizza, for this example, am I going to have it? Well, I probably shouldn't. Maybe I will. I've been really good for the last money. So we play these games with ourselves and you're torturing yourself if you keep forcing yourself to make that decision. So yeah, I think lifestyle change is important and if you're willing to do that, get some coaching, get some support, find an accountability partner. But if you're willing to do that, then you can absolutely reverse this, turn this around. And it really, the longer you do it, the less work it requires. You know, it really becomes just a habit. And that's ultimately what, you know, what we all want to create is healthy habits that are going to lead to a healthy body.

So I got one final question for you. It's probably one you've never heard before. I have a lot of people that are doing the gummies or, you know, apple cider vinegar or for, you know, their biotin, for their nails or even supplements. What are your thoughts on that?

All right, so I'll answer this two different ways. Yeah, two different ways. One is you do have to look at what's in the gummy. All right, so some gummies are sweetened with glycerin, which doesn't raise our blood sugar appreciably. And you know, from a blood sugar perspective is probably fine.

If it's sweetened with sugar, glucose, dextrose, even if it's three or four grams, which is usually what you'll find in a serving of gummies, doesn't sound like that much teaspoon of sugar, but it's a lot and you just don't need to add extra sugar. So certainly if it's sweetened with any type of corn syrup, rice syrup, glucose, dextrose, anything like that, that there's way better ways to get those nutrients. The gummies aren't particularly concentrated in these nutrients anyway, so you're getting really low levels of them. You're much better getting a professional grade concentrated formula. So if it's like a fish oil, get a good quality fish oil capsule. If it's a multi, get a good quality multi from, you know, from a professional grade company, through a clinician like you or I, that is, you know, is going to be, is going to give you really the amount of nutrients you need. One other thing I'll say though is even if it is sort of sweetened with something that doesn't raise blood sugar or won't necessarily cause an immediate metabolic problem, there's still the cephalic response, which is the mouth response. And there are some studies that show that you can have cephalic based insulin release. So you eat something that tastes sweet even if it doesn't have any calories or doesn't raise your blood sugar, it can cause an insulin surge, which can then make you hungry for the real thing. Right. So then you might get hungry for some carbs or sugar or sweets. So, you know, you have to. That doesn't seem to affect everyone. So you've got to sort of know yourself there. And, you know, I would, I would extend that out to other sweetened foods that might be sweetened with something like stevia or monk fruit or sugar. Alcohols like erythritol, they can be allowable and fine if it doesn't seem to trigger those problems for you. But check your blood sugar after, especially if you're dysglycemic or pre diabetic or diabetic, and also check in with yourself.

Does this sort of seem to make me want to eat more? There's been studies, for example, on diet soda consumption and how that leads to increased appetite. So the gummies could do that as well, even if there's no sugar in them.

So, Brian, if people want to learn more about you and some of the things that you have coming up, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, for sure. So just my website is drmol.com we have an event going on right now which I interviewed you for live. I think probably the last live conference I was at, which was about a year and a half ago. But we did a great live interview and included that. That's called Diabetes Essentials. And I think you're. I think your team has a link there for that event here under the video. I hope so. Check out Diabetes Essentials. It's going on right now. And then if you're interested in the Profast diet, you can go to profastdiet.com or profastbook.com I think just go to profastdiet.Com I'm not sure if that website's actually up yet, but maybe jot it down. It should be up within a couple of weeks because the book comes out on June 15th.

Awesome. Well, I can't thank you enough for all the work that you do. I mean, you're helping so, so many people. And my job is to get the word out as much as I can. So I very much appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Well, you're an amazing practitioner and you've been an inspiration to me for years.

I remember reading your adrenal book several years ago and really helped me help my patients with adrenal dysregulation. So thank you for sharing all the information you do and having me on here today.

Thanks, Brian.