Bloom Your Mind

Ep 134: Blood Sugar Magic

• Marie McDonald

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After six months of an injury that was dramatically lowering the quality of my life, I gave up on doctors as the solution to my problem, and took matters into my own hands. 

I started on a deep dive of research and exploration into blood sugar and inflammation, energy levels and functional movement. I read books, did interviews, and took courses with experts. I wore continuous glucose monitors and started tracking my sleep cycles. 

The things that I learned from this deep dive into my body has changed my life. My pain has reduced by 90%, my inflammation is gone, mobility is up, and my energy feels stable and vibrant all day long. The Blood Sugar Magic episode is the second in a two part series sharing the best of what I’ve learned with you. 

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

  • How hydration after waking supports the body 
  • Three things to include in every meal 
  • Why meal spacing supports health 
  • How the order that we eat impacts glucose levels 
  • Three ways to lower inflammation 
  • The supplements that make the biggest difference 
  • How functional movement and blood sugar management can change your life 
  • The ten+ habit changes that have made the biggest difference for myself and my family 

Mentioned in this episode: 

  • Brooke Castillo 
  • Sarah Wragge 
  • Alkalize- morning supplement (with 10% off) 
  • Restore- evening supplement (with 10% off) (I love these products so much they gave me a discount code to share with you- if you order them just use MARIE10 when you check out.) 

How to connect with Marie:

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Bloom your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified Coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Well, hello everyone and welcome to episode number 134 of the Bloom your Mind podcast. In this episode, I'm following up with the second of my two-part series.

Speaker 1:

Last week's episode was all about fitness for longevity and movement and functional fitness, and that was an interview with Ashley Adam, who is incredible and has really changed my own life and the life of my husband. We've learned so much and recovered from injury and pain and are in incredible shape because of the work that we've done with her. Now I'm following that with a companion piece today because, in addition to those changes to our physical movement practices, I've made significant changes to health habits, because I did a deep dive into researching. I took a course with someone I'll talk about a little bit later. I read a lot, I did a bunch of online research and then, the most, I did a bunch of online research. And then the most important thing because all of us are living in different bodies and have different needs and are unique in so many ways is that I've used trial and error to figure out what works for me, and so today I'm going to follow up that last episode with the most important habitual changes and habits that have come out of this last six months. Now, some of these are things I've been doing for years, some of them I learned about a long time ago, and again I've done so much research online that I'm going to just preface this by saying that sort of like two or three people that have been most influential in these things that I've learned.

Speaker 1:

Number one Brooke Castillo. Long ago, I got my first introduction to intermittent fasting from her, and now I understand how to make it work in a really simple, easy way for myself as well as other. She has a whole system around how we treat our bodies and nutrition that I learned a lot from years ago. More recently, in the last couple of months, I learned from someone named Sarah Raggy, who has some courses that really focus on blood sugar regulation, so that has been incredible and instrumental. She also has a couple of supplements that I use every day that I love in the morning and the night, and so I am going to put both of those people the links to their thought leadership in the show notes for this episode, and I also have worked with hormone specialists for myself, have studied sleep with a couple of specialists, and have also been using a continuous glucose monitor, and so all of those things, in addition to understanding, doing some sleep tracking, all of this altogether has been the source for the information that I'm giving to you and, of course, like any other idea that we want to make real, it's all about iteration, it's all about trial and error, and so with each one of these things, I learned concepts and then applied them and then tweaked them to make them fit my life and myself. So what I'm going to do is a rundown of like I don't know, it's like 15 takeaways that have really changed my life, have changed my family's health routines and have increased the quality of my life to an incredible degree. And before I do that, I just want to tell this story from the bloom room.

Speaker 1:

On Tuesday, one of the people in the bloom room we were doing a retro, and if you want to know what a retro is, you can go to the episode. Retros are everything, and a retro is basically a way of evaluating what's working, not working, and what we want to do differently. And what do we know about a thing Using our prefrontal cortex and our more creative, innovative mind to analyze our last iteration redesign before we go on to our next iteration of anything and I do this all the time and it's definitely something that applies to any kind of health habit that you want to change and any kind of psychological habit that you want to change as well Relationship habit. We always want to not expect perfection from ourselves, but try things, see what works and doesn't work, make changes based on that, fail, make changes based on what we learned from the failure and try again. And so one of the members of the Bloom Room has been over the last six months working on her sleep quality and sleep duration and through the changes she's made she has dramatically increased from like four and a half hours average a night to like seven and a half, and the quality of her sleep is so great. She's celebrating that so much.

Speaker 1:

And then in our last bloom room she came and she said you know I took it on the road. And she said you know she referenced my podcast episode on home and away games. She said I was really great with my sleep quality and then I took it on this month long travel. She's like a very influential leader that has lots of speaking events and leadership opportunities and she had like a month of traveling and speaking events and retreats. She was leading and things. And she said, when I took it on the road, I lost all of that progress or a lot of it.

Speaker 1:

And we were laughing about this and I said now listen, when you're playing a home game, when you're sleeping at home with all the things that you love the dark room, the way that you're used to sounds, the sleep mask, the coffee cup, the people around you or not around you that you're in the home turf and things are going to be easier there. When you start taking your show on the road and you're playing away games, you're going to be on somebody else's turf. You're going to be sleeping in hotels. You're going to be in Airbnbs. Who knows who's around you, what sounds are around you that's an away game. Right, it's going to be a lot more challenging and that's how it should be and that's how it is with any skill that we develop, because, as we get really good at something in a less challenging environment, even if that's like communication, when you're communicating with colleagues or friends. Then you take it to a more challenging environment which might be communicating with your partner, your primary partner or your family of origin. It's going to get a lot harder. So in this sleep example, when we're taking our literal show on the road, right like our body on the road, sleep's going to get a lot more challenging.

Speaker 1:

And I said you got to bring, if you're going from your home turf with a home field advantage to an away game, you got to bring your lucky jockstrap. And I looked up and everyone was laughing so hard. They really liked this example and they said it was very memorable to help stick in their head. So I thought I'd share it with you. What is going to help you when you go from a home turf to an away game? What's going to help you keep your mojo? What's your lucky jockstrap right For me when I'm going on the road? I'm about to go on the road and we're about to talk about kind of health habits and blood sugar magic. I have my protein packets, I have a weighted vest for walking. I have my electrolyte packets, I have my Sarah Raggy minerals for the morning and the afternoon. I have so many things that are already prepared to help keep me feeling amazing. So I don't get dehydrated, so I don't eat a bunch of junk on the road, so I keep moving. That's my lucky jockstrap. And so what is the way that you can bring whatever it is with you to make you as successful on a foreign turf that's not your home field as when you are at home? Lucky jockstrap, all right.

Speaker 1:

Here are the 15 or so things that are the hallmarks of the health changes that I've made, and I'm going to reference Ashley Adam in here, which the prime the previous episode was about, um, along with all these other things. Okay, so the first one one is hydration, and I I used to drink like 60 ounces of water in the morning first thing when I woke up, and that made my belly feel like too much. So I just drink a giant Mason jar full of water before anything else touches my system. I drink 33 ounces a liter of water and it flushes out my system, it helps me stay hydrated, I get some water right away, it supports healthy aging, cognitive function, digestion and it reduces chronic disease risk. And so having, you know, somewhere around 20 ounces first thing to jumpstart your metabolism is an incredible practice that really works for me, and then I like to drink up to like 120 ounces of water, starting then in the full day, and that really helps flush my system, keep me hydrated. And then Sarah Raggy teaches to alkalize right after that, which I love doing. I don't know much about, that's all hers and I will put the link to her supplements in the show notes, but I do love to make sure to drink water before any caffeine.

Speaker 1:

The second thing is to fast and again I first learned about this from Brooke Castillo for 12 to 16 hours. That really improves our metabolic health, our insulin sensitivity and longevity, in both humans and animal studies. What it requires is that when we finish our last meal in the evening, we don't intake anything else between then and our first meal of the next day, anything except for like water and tea, basically nothing with any caloric content, and that allows our body a break from digestion and it allows our glucose to level out so that then our body can repair itself. And I like to fast between 12 and 16 hours and really vary that time day to day so it's not stressful. Then the next thing is to space meals every three to five hours. Again, I first learned about this a long time ago. Sarah Raggy also talks about it a lot, with regular meal spacing.

Speaker 1:

That helps stabilize our blood sugar, supports our digestion and our cardio metabolic health. So what I have found is that it helps me not snack in between meals. It gives my system a break and because my blood sugar is super stable and I'm seeing this on my blood sugar monitor my energy is super stable throughout the day too. It feels amazing and so good. But it's also because of the way that I'm consuming my meals and this is pretty much common knowledge.

Speaker 1:

But lots of the programs that I mentioned also talk about this eating fiber, healthy fat and protein at each meal and that just creates this amazing like. It satiates us, it preserves our muscle, reduces inflammation and then when we save our complex carbs that we're eating in a day, we don't. We stay away from simple carbs because they spike our blood sugar and wreak havoc on our inflammation in our body. So when we have high quality carbs in smaller amounts at late meals, that aligns if we had a dinner, for instance that aligns with our circadian rhythm and helps us control our glucose again. So that has really helped me to really have fiber, healthy fat and protein at every single meal, combined with two other parts of this. The first one is that that protein at every meal I'm getting between 20 and 30 grams per meal. Again, sarah Raggy talks about this, but it's all over the current longevity research and Sarah Raggy talks about this, but it's all over the current longevity research especially for women who are in their mid-life, basically mid-middle decades, and so really, when I'm consuming 100 grams of protein a day, it's supporting my metabolism and, again, my insulin Right sensitivity.

Speaker 1:

So, along with that protein, I'm going to the next idea, which is that we have our fiber first and then our protein and fat, which blunts glucose spikes. It's amazing. I've been doing it every meal and it has helped my glucose stay so steady. When we eat fiber that like salad or vegetables first, and then our protein and fat and very last is our carbohydrates, if we're going to have them at a meal because the fiber is harder to digest, we're sort of creating a little security system so that we don't spike our blood sugar with the carbs, and that has been a game changer for me the carbs, and that has been a game changer for me. I also love walking after meals and I learned this when I had gestational diabetes with my second child, with my son, because it lowers my blood sugar right after a meal and it helps with digestion. It's also so nice and can help with circadian rhythms when we're getting out in the evening, at dinner or even out in the morning and getting the sun in our eyeballs at the right time of day to match whatever time of day it is right, like we're getting ourself exposed to the time of day that it is. It really helps us with sleep.

Speaker 1:

Speaking of sleep, I love to reduce noise and light at sleep with a sleep mask and earplugs, which I really avoided for years and years because I wanted to feel free and like wiggle around in bed and not worry about it. A few months ago, I started using them and my life has changed. I sleep so much better and I can see it in my data All right. The last two things I want to mention are I love supplements. I love my electrolytes, I love my nighttime supplements that have magnesium for sleep and L-theanine that helps relaxation. But I also love collagen, which I recently started taking, because I understand that not only is it skin elasticity and skin health, but it also supports our joint health and that's what I need for the injury that I had. So I've really been loving high quality collagen. And then the last things are just that with our exercise routines, it's so important to keep them varied and keep a mobility focused. So go back and listen to that one with Ashley Adams. So we're not just like running every day, which is hard on our joints and spiking our cortisol levels, but instead we're doing a lot of relaxing exercise that strengthens us and keeps our heart rate right in that sweet spot where we want it.

Speaker 1:

And the last thing that I want to say is you know there's all these other ideas around not eating sugar, eating whole foods, you know, looking at ingredients and things to make sure that they're all ingredients that you recognize. The most important habit, I think, is the habit of sustainability. So, rather than trying to go for perfection in any of these things, really have making little tweaks, little 1% shifts to make one change, or to do all of these shifts but not require perfection, like, do them most of the time, but allowing yourself days off really is the way that creates long-term changes. So, to wrap up, all of these things that I've been doing are from classes, I've taken research, I've done books, I've read thought leaders, and each one of these habits that I've tried on over the past few years and honed in on in the past six months is tied to real, measurable metabolic, cognitive or longevity benefits, or all of them. And the emphasis I love is on like being a normal human in a body, eating foods that grow out of the ground, maintaining consistency and moving on the regular. It's no wild rules, right, it's just what your body likes in terms of what to eat and when and keeping moving, really important to stay sustainable through not focusing on perfectionism and making it fun for yourself, sharing it with other people. I know that was a lot of information, but I'm not a big health expert for physical health. I have just experienced so much benefit from this that I wanted to share.

Speaker 1:

And, last but not least, if you are interested in learning more about all of this, I am running the Art of Self-Loving with Becca Salazar. We were going to run this program earlier this year and ended up shifting things due to personal needs, and we are running this in the fall and that's going to include gua sha, facial care, gut health, movement, psychological self-love and then daily sort of ritual and practices, and we'll do some of this blood sugar information then too. So if you're interested in that, keep your eye out for the art of self-loving and check out the thought leaders in the show notes. If you want to go deep dive, all right, my friends, that's what I've got for you this week and I will see you next week.

Speaker 1:

If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life, in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. Community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real, one idea at a time. I'll see you in the bloom room, thank you.