I'm Prediabetic. What do I do?

Learn how you can reclaim your longterm health.  Prediabetes does not need to be permanent—it is a reversible metabolic condition.  Unfortunately, there is not enough guidance on how to do this.  Listen to discover 5 easy tools to reverse prediabetes and help address Type 2 diabetes. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to the Jolie Life Podcast. Today's podcast is central to your metabolic health, and we are going to talk about what happens when you are diagnosed as pre-diabetic and how to reverse that, how not to go down the road to diabetes. And this podcast will be good for you if you have high A1C. If you've been tagged as pre-diabetic, you're approaching pre-diabetes. And if you've been diagnosed with type two diabetes, we will talk about how to restore metabolic flexibility, how to normalize blood sugar, and how to reclaim your future health. And a little story from my childhood, I remember hearing about diabetes as like, oh, she has sugar, or she has that sugar disease. And it was something, and I grew up in the Midwest in Missouri, and it was something that people really didn't take seriously. It was just an inevitability of getting older and oh, you just had a sugar problem.
(01:23)
And so I really never thought about diabetes as a serious disease growing up. And then at some point I read a book entitled Sugar Nation, which was part kind of deep dive into the politics and the disease of diabetes and the interface between medicine, politics, research, as well as the author's personal story of his journey through diabetes with his father. And it was only in that book, and I think I must have been in my early thirties, that I realized how serious diabetes was, that it wasn't this disease that was just like, oh, I have to take insulin and I can't eat sweet things, that it was really a debilitating disease that progressively got worse. And so it awakened me basically, and I was like, wow, I need to learn about this because this is something that I never want. This is a road I don't want to go down, and this is a road that I don't want to see other people go down.
(02:38)
And eventually this led to a lot of the work that I do. But I say that because summer times we don't think about diabetes as a serious disease. We don't think about diabetes as something we can reverse and we don't get the information from our doctors that being pre-diabetic is a big problem and it's a problem that is 100% fixable. And so today we're going to talk about how does it get fixed? So I want to reframe being pre-diabetic from inevitable and fear, I don't know what to do so that you feel empowered around it and that I can do something about this. I am not being given this and I just have to suffer through it. So pre-diabetes is generally flagged when fasting glucose is between 100 to 1 25 when your A1C is above 5.7. And when elevated insulin often precedes elevated glucose. And I want to say that elevated insulin precedes elevated glucose because what happens in pre-diabetes is that our body tries to catch up by producing more and more insulin.
(04:08)
So that's why elevated insulin levels are sort of the canary in the coal mine that something is going wrong. Metabolically diabetes is a very progressive disease in the sense that there are, you don't just wake up one day and have diabetes. There's many things that happen, many processes that happen, many diseases that happen prior to you being diagnosed. So I would like to highlight some of the red flags, yellow flags that you're heading in that direction. And one of those yellow flags is when you have elevated insulin levels because the elevated insulin levels over time, your body becomes less able to produce as much insulin and or your cells become less sensitive to insulin. And when either one of those things happen, you end up with more glucose in your blood for longer period of time. And so that's why we have elevated insulin prior to elevated glucose.
(05:23)
But pre-diabetes is reversible because it's easier to reverse pre-diabetes than it is to reverse diabetes. However, at any point you are in this journey, there is something that you can do. The diagnosis of pre-diabetes, I want you to think of this as your body giving you really valuable information because it gives you the time to reverse your health before there's irreversible damage. And when you get that diagnosis of pre-diabetes or if you're newly diagnosed as diabetic, you can restore your insulin sensitivity. Your pancreas is still functional. When you are pre-diabetic, farther down the road, the pancreas becomes less functional and we have a bigger problem. But when we're just beginning this journey, your pancreas is working. Your pancreas is the organ that releases insulin. And so when you get the diagnosis of pre-diabetes, I want you to think of it as, oh my gosh, my body is giving me valuable information that I can act on, I can act on it, and I can restore my pancreas to health.
(06:49)
I can restore insulin sensitivity and I can restore my overall health. The danger comes when you get the diagnosis of pre-diabetes and you do nothing. That's when it's dangerous. When you get the diagnosis of oh, and you just kind of like do hope health and you just hope that nothing happens, that it doesn't progress, ignoring it most likely is going to lead to the progression to type two diabetes, which will be harder for us to reverse ignoring. It will accelerate your aging. Ignoring pre-diabetic information, ignoring that health status will increase your risk of Alzheimer's disease frequently called type three diabetes. It will increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and it will lead to increased fat gain and muscle loss. So we don't ignore a diagnosis of pre-diabetic. Instead, we see that as when you're about to go into a race and they say get ready, get set, start, we see that as our signal to really dive in and reverse our health situation.
(08:17)
And so we don't ignore it. Instead we act. So what is prediabetes? I want you to understand what's happening in your body and sometimes understanding what's happening helps us when we get to what do we do about this? So we begin down the road. Pre-diabetes, when we have frequent glucose elevation, glucose is sugar. So let's say we have a diet where we have a high carb breakfast, we have carbs for lunch, we have carbs for dinner, and we might have some other things in there like protein and fat and all those things. And we tend to have lots of snacks. And when we talk about frequent glucose elevation, one thing that's important here is you're more likely to have frequent glucose elevations when you're having more than three meals a day. So when you're having breakfast, a snack lunch, a snack dinner, a snack, you're going to have more consistent glucose elevation because you're continually feeding your body glucose.
(09:34)
When we have that frequent glucose elevation or sugar elevation in our blood, because our food comes into our mouth, it gets broken down, it gets turned into glucose, it goes out into our blood, then our insulin rises to compensate. So every time we eat something that isn't a protein or fat, it quickly becomes glucose. It eventually becomes a glucose. When glucose enters the bloodstream, insulin rises to compensate because we want basically one teaspoon of sugar circulating at all time. Any more than that, it's going to trigger insulin. Insulin rises to compensate. Insulin is like someone knocking on the door of a cell to say, let the energy in. If insulin knocks too often, too frequently, too consistently, guess what happens? The cells start to ignore it. And when the cells start to ignore the signaling of insulin, we call that insulin resistance, the cells are resistant to insulin.
(10:45)
And so what does the body do? Since it's knocking and no one's answering on the cellular level, it starts knocking harder. And when that happens, it means that our insulin is rising higher. So here we see we had higher glucose levels and next we have high insulin levels because our cells are becoming insulin resistance. When this happens, we end up storing more fat. This is our fat around our belly. This is the fat stored in our liver. This is the fat stored in between our abdominal organs called visceral fat. This is our fat that actually also gets stored in the pancreas. So fat storage increases and glucose begins to rise chronically where glucose levels are continually to go up. Part of the reason why glucose levels continue to go up is that your body is becoming insensitive to the signal to store. The glucose and fat storage areas are beginning to top off.
(11:57)
So your liver is saying, I don't want any more fat. Your pancreas is saying, I don't want any more fat. Your organs are saying we can't have any more fat in between us. Your muscles are saying, Nope, we're full. And so we begin to have higher and higher glucose levels because it takes longer and longer for glucose to be cleared. So prediabetes is primarily a problem of insulin resistance, not insulin deficiency. And this is really important because it is that it is a problem of resistance that makes it so easy for us to reverse pre-diabetes. And I really want you to understand that this makes it so much easier because it's insulin resistance for us to reverse pre-diabetes. And how do we do it? We do it by eating and having a lifestyle that allows for our metabolism to switch in between burning glucose and burning fat, burning glucose and burning fat that is healthy metabolism.
(13:15)
When we are metabolically flexible, we can burn glucose and we can burn fat. When we burn fat, we burn our stored energy, we burn the energy that's in our fat cells that could be stored in our liver. We burn that pre-diabetic metabolism becomes trapped in glucose dependence. So you're only burning glucose, which means all the extra energy gets stored as fat and your energy actually decreases while your hunger increases and your muscles decrease. So that's kind of like the catch 22 of being pre-diabetic is that not only does your fat storage increase, you become hungrier because you're having frequent energy crashes, you have less energy because you have energy crashes and your muscles decrease because you're in a high sugar environment and the muscles do not have stimulus to build and they often get cannibalized. They often get eaten because the body, despite so much glucose is starving for energy.
(14:37)
We want to switch our metabolism to a flexible state so that we can burn glucose and fat, and this is how we turn back insulin resistance. So let's talk about the root causes of pre-diabetes because that will tell you what you need to do to reverse a pre-diabetic state. So root cause number one is excessive refined carbohydrates and sugar. If you have been diagnosed pre-diabetic, your body is telling you that you have too many carbs and too much sugar in your diet regardless of what you think your body is telling you. My philosophy is your body is king, your body is queen, your body is the final authority. So if I look at my diet and I say, oh, hey, I have a healthy diet. I eat well, I don't have a sweet tooth, I'm pretty healthy, but my body is giving me pre-diabetic numbers, I know that while I might think I'm healthy, I'm actually not because my body is telling me it's having constant glucose spikes and it's having frequent insulin release.
(16:00)
Those are two signs that my body is struggling, that my metabolism is struggling. So cause one, and sometimes we have to just rip the bandaid off is excessive carbohydrates and too much sugar in our diet. Cause two is the loss of muscle mass. And why is muscle so important? Muscle is important because it is the first place where glucose can get stored. So let's say you take an embody, which I encourage you all to come to Jolie and take embody. Let's say you take an embody and you have 60 pounds of muscle. So you have 60 pounds of material on your body where glucose can be stored easily. Muscle actually likes to store glucose because that way when it has to move, when you have to go upstairs, when you go for a run, when you exercise, the muscle has the energy already present now.
(17:00)
And so when you eat something, your muscles are the first ones that are super hungry to take up that glucose. Now let's say you start working out and you have now 70 pounds of muscle. So you have 10 more pounds of sugar hungry material in your body. So when we have more muscle, we have better metabolism and we soak up glucose faster and we need less insulin. So when we lose muscle mass, say we have a sedentary job, let's say we're stressed out and we haven't been working out. Let's say we have an illness where we don't get to go out as much, we don't get to move around, we have higher blood sugar. So that's cause number two. Cause number excess body fat, especially abdominal fat. Fat tissue releases inflammatory cytokines which worsens insulin resistance. I always say, and it is true, it's proven that the worst, worst fat is belly fat.
(18:08)
You may not like having a big butt or you may not like having large thighs, but if you do consider it a blessing versus a big belly because storing excess weight in your hips, your butt, your thighs is so much healthier for you than storing the excess weight in your belly. That is the worst place to store fat because it increases insulin resistance. A cause four is what we touched on before, constant eating with no fasting window. So when you approach your day, I want you to think about having eating windows and non eating windows, eating windows and non eating windows, times where you eat, times where you don't eat. And those times maybe you're drinking water, maybe you're drinking coffee, maybe you're drinking tea, but you have times when you're not eating and times when you're eating. For diabetes reversal, we want to keep our eating windows to a maximum of three per day.
(19:22)
We want a breakfast, a lunch and a dinner. In the transition you get a pass or you get a snack in there, or if you're working out, you get another pass where you get a snack in there. But we want three distinct eating windows and we want non eating windows of preferably three to four hours at a time. So if it's easier for you, focus on eating and then having a good four hours before you put anything else in your mouth. Doesn't matter if it's a cracker, doesn't matter if it's a pretzel, doesn't matter if it's a bite of something. You have four hours where you put nothing in your mouth, but water, coffee or tea. And this does not include a latte. So that is our non eating window. When we consistently eat eat, that's one of the causes of pre-diabetes and we teach our body to be dependent upon glucose.
(20:25)
So we're training ourselves to be metabolically inflexible. And the fifth cause is physical inactivity movement. If you do nothing else, movement will improve your insulin sensitivity and your baseline movement is 20 minutes a day. This is baseline, this is like the bare minimum, and you work yourself up to an hour per day, an hour of intentional movement. This does not have to be huffing and puffing, this doesn't have to be a sprint, a run, anything like that. It can be a walk. It can be a walk where you can be on the phone and you can talk to a friend. It could be a walk where you can listen to a book. It can be a walk where you can say hi to all your neighbors, but your physical inactivity is one of the causes of insulin insensitivity. So we reverse that by doing that.
(21:28)
So now let's build our exact protocol for reversing diabetes, and we're going to break it down into five pillars or five keys as I call them, because the jolly symbol is a key and this is the most important segment. This is the most important segment for you. So pillar one, you're going to build muscle to restore glucose disposal. You're going to build muscle. So we have more places to store glucose when we eat muscle is your most powerful glucose lowering tool outside of changing your diet because you cannot change your diet and build muscle and you will see improvement because you have more places to store glucose. And how do you build muscle? You do it with resistance training. And this can be, you can start with baby steps, a minimum of three sessions per week. You don't have to be so sore afterwards that you can't walk up your stairs or you can't sit on the toilet.
(22:38)
I don't want you to do that because I want you to keep resistance training. I want you to not put yourself out of the game. I want you to not injure yourself. So we're going to start with three sessions. You're going to take it slow. You're going to work up to four to five sessions of resistance training. And what this is going to do is it's going to improve your glucose sensitivity or your insulin sensitivity rather, it's going to lower your fasting glucose, it's going to lower your A1C and it's going to increase glute four transporters. Those are the transporters inside the cell that swim up to the cell surface. Take the glucose out of your blood and bring it back into the cell to create energy. So we want to build more muscle so that our muscle will be a glucose reservoir, so it doesn't need to be in our blood and it doesn't need to be in our fat cells.
(23:36)
For example, two people who eat the same meal and one has 60 pounds of muscle and one has 70 pounds of muscle. The person with more muscle will have a lower glucose spike. I see this in myself. I have like 82 pounds of muscle on my body. I can eat a lot more and I can eat an occasional sweet and not see a glucose spike. Whereas when I had 70 pounds of muscle in my body, I saw a much larger glucose spike. And this is using a continuous glucose monitor so I can see it, but also the science supports that the more muscle you have, the more glucose you can keep in reserve so you can suck out of your blood. Key two, eliminate frequent glucose spikes through strategic nutrition. Strategic nutrition means that you prioritize vegetables first. When you eat, particularly lunch and dinner, the first thing you should eat is vegetables, whether that's a little salad before dinner, whether that's a little soup before dinner, whether that is the vegetables that are on your plate.
(24:54)
One thing we do at Jolie is we frequently have Jo daily greens. It's a little side salad that goes with your meal. This you eat first. We oftentimes have a little soup. It's a small soup like eight ounces that goes with a meal. The soup you drink first. Why? Because it is strategic it lowering your glucose. If there there's no soup, no side salad, then you start with the vegetables on your plate. You eat your vegetables first, you eat your protein, you eat your healthy fats. After that, then you eat your carb. And this does two things. One, it's slows down the absorption of glucose from your food into your blood. And two, by the time you eat your vegetables, your fat, your protein, you are not that hungry for your carbs. So imagine you have meatballs and spaghetti, you have a side salad to begin with, you eat your meatballs, you're not going to want as much of the pasta.
(26:01)
If you instead dove into the pasta, you would probably get to the meatballs and you wouldn't have time for your salad. You wouldn't have space for it. So this is killing two birds with one stone. So we're helping to lower your calorie intake, therefore get rid of excess body fat and we're helping to slow the absorption of glucose. So remember, vegetables, protein, fat, and then your carbs in your diet. We minimize sugar, refined carbohydrates and sugary drinks. If you are reversing prediabetes, stop drinking your sugar. It is better to eat your sugar than to drink your sugar. Stop. Write this instant and processed foods, kick those out too, partly because they tend to be filled with refined carbohydrates and they tend to have hidden sugars, even things you don't expect to have sugar. Recently I bought something like maybe it was something that I completely did not expect to have sugar in it.
(27:15)
It might've been some tomato sauce or it might've been some coconut milk. And I got it and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is sweet. And I look and guess what? It has sugar in it. So processed foods, no liquid sugar, drinking your sugar, no adding extra sugar to your food. No, when I was a kid, we'd eat grapefruit and then we'd sprinkle sugar on top. That's a no-no. And refined carbohydrates, white bread, all things white. We're going to minimize those and we're going to hit our protein targets. One of the things why when we're reversing diabetes, we want higher protein than we would usually have is because protein improves insulin sensitivity and helps you to build that muscle that we're working on from key number one, we have two tactics, two tools in our toolbox. We're going to build muscle and we're going to have strategic nutrition, IE Jolie, like nutrition where we prioritize veggies, first side salad soup, our protein, our healthy fat, other vegetables.
(28:29)
And then our carb key number three, we are going to create daily fasting windows. This is not intermittent fasting. This is having times when we eat and times when we don't eat. And remember, every time you eat your insulin rises. So just remember that every time I eat my insulin rises. Fasting allows insulin to fall and this falling of insulin, these slow insulin levels, low insulin levels are what restores insulin sensitivity. And you can think about it as if say your phone is blowing up and you're not answering any calls and then say no one calls you for a good four or five hours. That next person that calls you, you're likely to pick it up. Why? Because you've restored your sensitivity to your phone. This is the same with your cells. So in between meals we're going to have three to four hours, and then between dinner and breakfast, we're going to have hours.
(29:42)
And this is just like the old days. You ate dinner, the olden days, like what was that show like? Father knows best, that type of stuff. You're going to eat dinner, you're going to not eat until you wake up in the morning and you have breakfast. This will improve your metabolic flexibility, it will improve your insulin sensitivity and it will encourage your body to burn your store fat. Key number four, tool number four, daily movement. And we talked about this before because movement, it lowers blood sugar because it uses energy. So when you move, you're using energy, therefore you're lowering your blood sugar. And the best time while we're in this reversing diabetes program to exercise is after your meal. So you're going to eat your meal and then you're going to go for a 20 minute walk, you're going to go for a 30 minute walk, you're going to go for a 10 minute walk if that's all you have.
(30:43)
But movement lowers your blood sugar if you cannot walk after your meal, walk whenever you can. So super, super duper best is having the exercise after your meal, but best is still making sure the exercise happens. And key number five is reduce excess body fat while preserving muscle. And here is kind of a free pass for you. If you follow the other four keys of resistance training of having strategic nutrition and how you're eating and having those fasting windows and moving daily, guess what? You've already started the process of reducing your body fat. And by moving and resistance training, you're sure not to lose your muscle. So key number five is a free pass. As long as you're doing the first four things, you don't even need to worry about that because you're getting that done. You're going to see your body fat decrease. So you have five keys to reversing diabetes.
(31:59)
One is a freebie. As long as you do the first four, you're all good. And when you do this, you're going to see your diabetes, your pre-diabetic state begin to retreat. And in the first week, one to two weeks of this, you're going to see hopefully you are using a continuous glucose monitor. If not, ask your doctor for one. They are very helpful. In the first two weeks, you're going to see less variability in your glucose levels. You will experience less hunger. You'll be surprised because you're not snacking, you are not going to be hungry. When people join Jolie, one of the things they're concerned about, particularly on the weight loss programs is am I going to be hungry? And zero people are hungry, no one is hungry because of how we eat and because we are fixing our metabolism. When our metabolism is broken, we're frequently hungry because we're getting energy crashes that are causing hunger hormones to get released when we're eating properly to encourage metabolic flexibility, those hormones don't get released because we're not having energy crashes.
(33:19)
So in the first two weeks, you are going to feel less hungry and you're going to have more energy. So it is a win-win. On the third week up until the sixth week, you're going to see improved fasting glucose. That's the number we talked about at the beginning. That should be between one hundred and one twenty five. You're going to have improved insulin sensitivity. By the second to fourth month, you're going to have your A1C retested. The third month is the sweet spot for doing this. And your A1C is going to be lower. You're following the four keys. The A1C is going to be lower. And by month three to six, many individuals see that their pre-diabetic state has reversed. And this depends on how far you were into the disease. But within a year, you're going to be there. So you're going to follow this, and within a year you're going to be there.
(34:21)
If you're just sort of tiptoeing into the pre-diabetic state, give yourself three to six months. If you're well into that pre-diabetic state or you've been just diagnosed as a diabetic, give yourself six to 12 months. So now you know what to do. Now you know how to reverse diabetes or pre-diabetic states, you know that it is not permanent. And do this whether you're pre-diabetic or type two diabetic, a newly diagnosed. If you are a type two and you are on insulin, you need to talk to your doctor, of course about this. It is going to help you. So take control of your health, take action because your metabolism responds directly to your actions. And diabetes. Pre-diabetes is a metabolic disease. And remember, through your nutrition, through your fasting, through your movement, through your building muscle, you will restore insulin sensitivity that you are in power here, you are in power. Here you can act to really change your health outcome.
(35:38)
By changing this, you change the trajectory of your wellness for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years until your natural passing in your sleep. So we want to get on board with reversing diabetes as soon as we get those pre-diabetic numbers, because we can make it go away, we can reverse it, we can make it so much better. So if you need any more information, please contact me. Please share this because this is information that a lot of people don't have. This is information that doctors do not have time to tell you. Do not have time to go through with you. And listen to this again, write it down. Make yourself a plan. Contact us because diabetes is a horrible disease. You do not want it. You do not want to stay diabetic. A type two, two diabetic, which is very different than a type one. And so that's it, and I will talk to you later.
(36:35)
I hope you enjoyed this podcast, the Jolie Life Podcast. And if this podcast helped you in any way, I invite you to share it with your friends and your family and whoever you come across that you think might be helped by this podcast, I would love to hear your comments. And you can contact me at julia@thejolife.com and please follow us on Instagram, the Jo Life. Our website is the jo life.com. And it would be lovely if you would subscribe and if you would rate this podcast and go back and share this with someone. Let the ripple effect happen. Let the joly life be the beautiful life that keeps on giving my beauty. Lots of love.