#57 - Five Hidden Pitfalls That Keep Sugar High and Progress Stuck

Your blood sugar might not be “out of control” because you don’t care or don’t know enough. Many times, it’s the quiet habits that look normal on the surface but keep insulin resistance and food cravings running the show.  
 
In this episode, you’ll here five hidden blood sugar pitfalls that can stall type 2 diabetes remission progress even when you think you are doing everything right.

If you have been doing “everything right” but not seeing progress, we think this episode will have something for you. 

Ready to take control of your health and stop settling for “managed” diabetes?
   Grab your earbuds and listen in.

Brian & Cory
  Diabetes Remission Partners

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Transcript

Why Remission Is Possible

SPEAKER_01 0:02

If you have type 2 diabetes and you're tired of being told it's chronic and something you'll just have to manage forever, if your ailment seeds control but your medication that keeps growing or stays the same, and you know deep down you're capable of more than that, you're in the right place. This is the Diabetes Remission Roadmap Podcast where Brian Bitcher and Corey Jenks, two pharmacists who spent over two decades inside healthcare. And we started this show because we got tired of watching capable people stuck getting managed instead of rebuilt. Here's what most people aren't told. Type 2 diabetes isn't just a blood sugar problem, it's a muscle and energy storage problem. When your body loses strength and metabolic flexibility, blood sugar rises. And you can rebuild that. On this show, we break the script to say more meds are inevitable, you're destined to just manage, remission is impossible. And instead we teach you how to build muscle, eat in a way that keeps you full, and regain control of your health again. No extremes, no shame, just practical strategy to help you move toward remission and lead your health again.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Let's

The Five Hidden Pitfalls

SPEAKER_00 0:58

get to work. Welcome back to another edition of the Diabetes Remission Roadmap Podcast. And Brian, we're gonna hop into it here because a lot of people think their blood sugar struggles come from a lack of knowledge, but really, a lot of the biggest problems are the things people don't realize they're holding them back. And today we're talking about five hidden blood sugar pitfalls that we see all of the time. Brian, it's good to see you.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

You too, Corey.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah. Me too. Yeah, we're gonna get into those. Uh we have uh I'm personally nearing the end of Little League season. We have our last Little League game tonight. We had our second to last one last night, lost a heartbreaker, got walked off. Uh, my son got to taste the agony of defeat. We snatched defeat from the clause of victory, but it was it's it's youth baseball, and we had a big water balloon fight afterwards. So hopefully the kids will just remember the excitement of that versus uh probably what they'll remember.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

I took my little league team to a Reds game, they got demolished, and I think they'll just imagine your little league team would get demolished going to a Reds game playing against major leaguers. Hey oh, yeah, the Reds got demolished, but that's that's that's par for the course these days, so it's fine.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Yeah. All right. Well, uh the the people are clamoring after that wonderful tease at the beginning to get into the the top five pitfalls that are keeping keeping you holding you back because I think that uh we have a lot of good intentions in this world. We think we're doing the right thing, but here's the deal like your your blood sugar in your body is is keeping score. So if things aren't getting better, there might be some hidden pitfalls. So, Brian, are you ready to hop into this? Yeah, let's hop

Pitfall 1 Constant Snacking

SPEAKER_00 2:27

in. All right, so number one is constant snacking. So a lot of times people think that small snacks are harmless. Uh, and they they often have been told that you need to eat and snack throughout the day. But Brian, are these little snacks harmless?

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Sounds like a rhetorical question. I'm gonna go with no, Corey. The answer is no.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Okay. Would you like to explain why you think that might be, or shall I?

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Sometimes I don't know if you want to talk based on how much you talk, but we're gonna go with it. I would say, I mean, it depends on what you're snacking on. If you're snacking on celery all day, then yeah, that's harmless. If you're snacking on baby carrots, pretty harmless. But most people are not snacking on celery and carrots all day. So yeah, I hear this all the time. It's like you gotta keep your blood sugar stable. You gotta snack throughout the day, small meals. I I don't agree with a lot of that. I think if you're gonna because most what what are we grabbing most of the time for snacky foods? We're grabbing chips, we're grabbing convenient processed baggage foods.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

And it just it adds up. The the portion sizes add up, and you before you know it, you really don't realize how much you're eating, and it just easily I'm gonna throw it in there. I know that we we debate about this all the time, but it puts you in a caloric excess, Corey, and that's not good. Well, also keeping your insulin high.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Wow, we can both agree in our different ways of looking at it. So yeah, when you're grazing all day, you're never you're never getting truly hungry. You're constantly eating. And to me, the the problem with snacking is it's a bad habit. We when you're eating a real satiating meal, you really shouldn't feel hungry until your next meal. And so if you can get at the root of the issue, and Brian, we uh no one has reached out to us about doing a drinking game where we say protein and fiber, but if they did, here's your chance, folks. But when you have a full satiating meal that's full of protein and fiber, it's gonna fill you up and keep you full until your next meal. When we talk about having stable blood sugar, eating a food that doesn't spike it, but also doesn't let it drop is is how you keep stable blood sugar. If you're writing, if you're needing to constantly snack to keep your blood sugar stable, it means that you're not accessing your stored glucose, your stored fat stores to fuel you. And so to me, it's not only just a physiologic issue, but I think a big thing for me is the habit. Do we really want to be in the habit where we have to eat eight times a day? Um, I mean, I this is our this was 12 years ago on our honeymoon. We went to Maui and we were on some some adventure, some excursion, and we overheard someone in the back of the van like, can you believe they only fed us twice in the flight out? That was six hours and they only fed us twice. And I was just, even at the time before I was deep into the world of type 2 diabetes and and metabolic health, my wife and I were like, You're a grown man. Why do you need to eat twice in six? What is going on? And it's because people are renting that blood sugar roller coaster and not giving themselves the right fuel.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

Yeah. This reminds me of the actual the question that I Googled that got me into fasting and health in the first place, which was, why am I always hungry in the morning? I just remember clearly sitting in the ER one day and be like, just so frustrated that I was constantly hungry and going down this rabbit hole of insulin, spiking my blood sugar, and chasing like these hormones of these the hunger hormones, which you're basically training your body to be hungry all the time if you're eating all the time, because your body learns to expect food at certain times. So my dog was always looking at me with eyes like googly eyes, like at 3:30, like I'm I'm ready to eat, because her her hormones are just trained on that rhythm of timing. So if you're eating all the time, then it's going to train you to eat constantly. And so I I went down the rabbit hole though of Googling that. Turns out I was just eating a lot of things that were spiking my blood sugar up and down in the morning. You're throwing cortisol in the mix. I was working, I was trying to gain muscle, I was trying to gain weight, and it was just a it just ruined my focus at work. I couldn't focus. And so it's just not convenient to focus to snack all the time. And I'm just I'm just gonna call you out on this because we're trying to watch the language. One thing we coach our clients on Corey is to avoid using the bad, to labeling something as bad because we just want them to get curious, not have a positive or negative connotation to it. Because when you label habits as bad, you inevitably will then label yourself as bad for doing them. And we both know that that leads to a negative cascade of other choices. So let's just call it what it is positive, it's moving me in the direction of remission. Negative, it's moving me further away. So we'll call snacking a negative.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

A negative, okay. Well, I was using it in terms of good, bad, like if we used to say back in the day, bad meant good just to mess with the code.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

I'm a health coach, so I changed this up.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

Thank you, man. Well, and I think what you're talking about, and we a great book on this I just I just read, uh, is called The Hunger Code by Jason Fung. And he talks about conditioned hunger. And I think that's certainly something that I have fallen into the trap of the post-meal, post-dinner snack is a certainly conditioned thing that I've had since I was a kid, and your body just starts to expect it. But you can break that habit. It takes a lot of effort, but I'm gonna tell you it is it is a great thing to do, and it's one of that's why it's one of the hidden pitfalls because when you're grazing all the time, your your blood sugar never really gets a break. So, Brian, on on the theme of hunger, uh let's move on to pitfall number

Pitfall 2 Health Halo Foods

SPEAKER_00 7:29

two. And these are healthy air quote foods that keep you hungry. Now, we did a whole whole episode talking about health halos and and and ideas that things that are labeled healthy or put there's certain language that make it seem healthy, but actually are not great for blood sugar. And so this is things like granola, uh processed foods, snack bars, even you know, protein cookies uh are uh are a thing. There's protein everything now. There's protein foam, there's protein air. Um so health halo, can you explain why by focusing on on health halo foods you might be doing yourself a disservice for your blood sugar?

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Well, first of all, I was gonna say what is granola was the answer, Corey, uh for 300. But do the Smoothies is another one. Yeah, smoothies, smoothie bowls, which you didn't even know were a bowl. Uh so what was the question again?

SPEAKER_00 8:20

So why why do these health halo foods keep you keep your blood sugar high and keep you hungry?

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Because they're lacking fiber and they're processed and they give that appearance of being hungry, and so they're also they a lot of times will spike your blood sugar, so you get pretty high spike from the food that then drives the hunger response. And that's why they they keep you hungry. If they don't have much fiber, I'll say the snack, like the health halo foods I like that they don't have this effect. The I found like the edamame beans, like the roasted edamame beans are a great resource. Uh, one of my one of our clients was we were talking through like what like planning for graduation, and there's gonna be a lot of food there, it's gonna be crap, and it's gonna like the irony of the food that's provided at these graduations is a bunch of processed food that essentially just makes you tired and not be able to focus anyway, makes you doesn't even satisfy your hunger, like donuts and pastries. Like, there's there's nothing actually satiating there. And talking about like how can she plan? What can she bring? And we brought came up with the idea of some edamame beans and uh like beef jerky stick, and those would just be very easy to take on the go. I myself, as you know, bought a pack of those on the way out to see you. I it lasted the flight there and the flight back because it was so filling I could couldn't even finish the whole bag in one sitting. So there we go.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yeah, and I think when we say health halo, it's things with that, let's say like organic, gluten-free, keto, vegan. Despite these labels, they can be filled with all kinds of processed ingredients that don't help you with your blood sugar and keep and keep you hungry all the time. So it's it's not just foods that are overtly filled with sugar and extra energy and carbs. And just because it says it's it's healthy on the label doesn't mean it's going to be filling, because these foods just won't satisfy you. So, all right, we've we've hit two. Let's head on to number three.

Pitfall 3 Exercise Must Be Hard

SPEAKER_00 10:18

Brian, number three is thinking that exercise only counts if it's hard.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

Oh, this is a good one. I've worked through this a lot with people. They think that it doesn't count, they don't can't do it. If they don't have the time to go do like a 45-minute hour-long workout at the gym, then might as well not even do it. Yeah, the truth is exercise, it's meant to be progressive and and train your body. So I guess that the question would depend on like what how hard are they talking about? Like, what do you what do you think in someone's thinking if they think it isn't?

SPEAKER_00 10:48

I'm thinking you got to go to the gym for at least an hour, you gotta be sweaty, you better be sore the next day. There should there better be like a monster truck tire that you're flipping, uh, maybe those giant ropes that you swing back and forth. Like, I think when they think hard, they think it has to be this CrossFit type high intensity exercise. And so, and it's all relative for someone who's never been to the gym before, just simply the thought of going to the gym is too hard. And so they think they have to go to the gym, they have to do everything right. When in reality, like we're we're gonna we're gonna talk resistance training all day, but we we preach 15-minute workouts twice a week. Like that is not my textbook vision of what hard was. It wasn't what I did when I was in high school lifting with a football team or even in college when I had hours to work out. It's literally the minimum effective dose of strength training. We're talking about walking and moving throughout the day, taking little movement snacks, doing squats throughout the day, uh, post-meal movement to bring blood sugar down. This doesn't have to be, I mean, if you're a gym rat, great. But if you're not a gym rat, it doesn't mean that you have to become one because you're not going to do it. And so I think that's the one side of it is it keeps people from doing it. Now, the other flip side of this is that people think it has to be hard so they go hard. And I think we've experienced this with our patients and our clients in the past is exercise is a stressor. And if you're not sleeping well, if your cortisol's through the roof, if you're stressed, and then you're throwing high-intensity workouts in. And I see people do this like I saw this. I mean, I go to a gym once once a week, I do like a high-intensity coached workout. And there's guys there that are going like every day, and he's like, I'm tired. They're in there in their 50s, and they're just like, I just I feel tired all the time. Like, probably because you never recover. Like, you don't need to be doing this. I like I do this hour-long hard workout because I'm 39. I want to do some explosive movements that I'm just gonna not gonna make myself do on my own. I want supervision. But around those days, I'm going for a long walk or a long ruck. Uh, I I I recover. I have a day where I just move and play and shoot hoops and and walk. Like, this is there's the flip side of this is is that stress from the workout that's super hard can actually raise your blood sugar.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

Yeah, yeah, I agree. It's people don't recover enough. And if you're oftentimes you're really stressed, then throwing in this extra hard workout is not going to be uh conducive to putting diabetes in remission. So I'm on board with the steady strengthening uh method we we talk about, and gradually building up that stressor uh of the and see your muscles adapt and do get stronger while at the same time keeping up movement throughout the day, having those snacks, like you talked about.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Yeah, I think that small consistent movement is better than occasional punishing workouts. That's a great way to get injured and to be frustrated.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

Injury prevention, yeah. So essentially, like you said, it's it's a biggest barrier mentally than it is physically. People just think it has to be hard, I don't know how to do this. When in reality, like the exercises don't have to be that complicated. They can just cover the six basic movement planes. And you do those, you do them slow, you focus on the the pattern and the form, and you're gonna get that like minimum effective dose, like you talked about.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

Great.

Pitfall 4 Spouse As Coach

SPEAKER_00 13:46

All right, moving on to number four, and Brian, this one is a spicy one. Yeah, it's a little controversial, and uh for both of us, it could it could potentially hit close to home. So the number four of pitfall is turning your spouse into your coach. So a lot of times we come across people, and especially in my career, uh in the clinical side of things, is that we think that getting support from your spouse is the same as a coach. And uh I know the quickest way to get on my wife's bad side is to critique her workouts and her exercise. Um, so Brian, you you seem really like frothing for this one.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

No, I just know the best, the worst way to quick pause to check in with you.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Are any of these pitfalls resonating with you? Can you hear your own story in some of these things that get in the way of improving your blood sugar? Well, if so, we'd love to offer up a medication exit strategy phone call. This is a call where we can go through your blood sugar, go through your history, and help you find some clarity on your path to type two remission. To book your medication exit strategy call, send us an email. Our address is in the show notes, or send us a DM directly on Instagram. Again, struggling with your own blood sugar, resonating with these messages, book a free medication exit strategy call with us, either via email or DM. All right, let's get back to the show.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

For my wife, is to critique our food. And like, well, I it comes from this you want it to be coming from love, but sometimes it can come off as control or controlling, and I am I have a history of of doing that in a not in a negative way. I'll there'd be a couple future episode or past episode whenever this is released, my health journey, and you'll hear like that whole process. Like I the whole journey I went through of controlling uh our our food and becoming afraid of food. So it's definitely not a good idea. I think there's different relationships of accountability and having a coach, someone who's indifferent, someone who you're not sleeping next to at night, it definitely makes a big difference.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Yeah, it's I think it's hard to objectively coach someone that you're also emotionally invested in on a personal level. Uh and this is I mentioned earlier, going to a workout class once a week to get coached. And my wife goes twice a week. And there's been different things in our life where I mean we got a sleep coach because trying to work together on that was just it was too emotionally charged. So getting an objective third party. And we hear it all the time like, hey, my wife's gonna coach me, I'll be fine. And okay, we'll see. Uh we we we hope like I think there's having you need to have a supportive spouse who's on board with what you're trying to do, but to have them be the one that is critique, like that that's like helping you with a plan, that's a totally different level of of commitment and and path.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Yeah, I hear a lot, it's not about coaching them, it's about keeping them accountable. But honestly, keeping your accountability really comes falls back to you. When someone comes to us and all they want is accountability, to me, that's a little bit of a red flag, is because that means to me, you can't, you don't even because we're not gonna be physically there helping you. You have to, you have to do things on your own. So we obviously have ways which we help people stay more accountable to themselves, but we're not ultimately the ones like keeping them accountable, if that makes sense. That you have to stay accountable to yourself. But I think a big thing that also will then trip people up is that when it comes to having someone very close to you keep you accountable for the changes you're trying to make, the positive changes in your life, the habits, is oftentimes they can they played a big role in you developing those habits and changes. And so it can be really challenging for them to then be that same person, helps be the change maker for you to flip those habits in the other direction when they were so delicately intertwined and those habits. That's might be not the best word, but like they were they were involved in those habits, and also like the identities. You hear like uh identity, habits are attached to identity a lot. So people might seem like they change as their habits change, and that can be standoffish to people. Like, oh, we've heard it before. Sometimes spouses or of significant others don't want you to change because it can shine more of a negative light, shine a brighter light on their negative habits that they think they should change. So there's a lot of things that are, I think, potential potential red flags there with this.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Brian, we're not even married, and you're making me uncomfortable with that. Those truth bombs are hitting me. Yeah, it there's a lot of emotional uh stuff that goes underneath that. And so to entangle your spouse into your coaching on your diabetes journey, could it work? Sure. Do we recommend it? No. Have we seen it fail? Absolutely. And that's why it's number four in our list. Okay, moving

Pitfall 5 Waiting For Motivation

SPEAKER_00 18:41

on. Number five, the final one is of your pitfalls uh in diabetes remission is waiting until you feel motivated. So the the reality is that motivation follows action more often than action follows motivation. And so I think people really focus on this idea of I need to get motivated. Let me, I just need more motivation. And I don't know, Brian, about you, but when you tell someone that if you don't fix what's going on with their blood sugar, they're gonna lose their eyes, their limbs, their kidneys, their heart, their life, I don't know what more motivation you need. You tell them that people are relying on them, that their kids, their spouse, their parents, they need them around, their business, whatever it is. There's no more motivation that we can give someone to say that you will die earlier if you don't change your ways. But I think they overestimate the need for motivation and underestimate the importance of just their environment as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Yeah, we've talked about this before. Motivation is not necessarily a thing you find, it's something you do and create. It's finding that purpose, bringing that purpose is making it as relevant as possible to your situation, the why. Can't have always have some like future, future motivation, future goals, they can be great. But the more you can make it relevant to your situation now and how it's gonna be tangible in your life today, the weighing the costs of changing, because there's always cost of changing, weighing the cost of not changing, finding those pain points and really digging deep into them and getting honest with yourself. That's all part of that why and the purpose of why you're gonna make these changes, and then creating it further, moving it forward with small, simple changes, and then putting energy behind that in terms of basically energy is like you you need to be able to move, you need to be able to do things. So I think small, simple changes and energy go hand in hand. As you're making small, simple changes, your energy will improve and you carry the momentum forward by uh by continuing to make the small small changes and building those skills.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Yeah, I I I think the it just has to come down to you have to just get sick of feeling sick and and as you say, the small changes. And I think for me, a big piece of this is improving your your systems and environment. So it you're you're not gonna there's no amount of motivation that will overcome being stressed and tired at the end of the day with a big pile of warm brownies that people have to the house. Yeah, you have something to say.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Well, yeah, something to say is this is this one always says to me is you're not gonna so if you're so let's say you have a you have a person in your life you care deeply about, could be a child, could be a spouse, could be whoever, best friend. Let's say they get kidnapped and they are and they end up somewhere, and you are you gonna need to make create motivation? Do you do you need motivation to go get them? No, the reason because your desire is through the roof to go save them. So it's really more about desire than it is motivation, Corey. It's you just need to have a desire to change, the desire for the outcome. And so that's what people are actually looking for. Is I a lot of times people come to us, they'll say they need the motivation, but it's actually desire, not motivation.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

Wow. All right,

Recap And What Hit Home

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Brian. Well, thank you for for bringing that home and just to re- Recap in case you in case you want to recap. So the five five pitfalls we talked about today that keep people stuck and away from their type two remission. Number one, constant snacking. Number two, healthy foods that keep you hungry and your blood sugar high. Number three, taking exercise only counts if it's hard. Number four, turning your spouse into your coach, one of Brian's favorite things to talk about. And number five, waiting until you feel motivated. And so which of these resonated with you the most? Let us know. Send us an email, send us a DM on the instant on Instagram. Because the truth is, Brian, most people don't fail because they don't care. They often fail because they don't recognize the hidden things that are quietly working against them. And once you see them, you can start changing them. So we hope that it's helped you see some things working against you. If if there's another pitfall that we missed but you figured out, let us know too. Like we can do five more pitfalls. Uh we're we're not short of pitfalls and experience. So, Brian, thanks for chiming in today. This was an especially fun one, especially because we were both wearing red shirts. So go to YouTube and watch us match our shirt. Uh so thanks for listening.

Share And Leave A Review

SPEAKER_00 23:03

If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Uh rate, review, share it with, share it with, share it in a group text, share it in an email thread. And uh until next time, keep it simple and do what works.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

If this episode gave you clarity or hope, share it with one friend who's been stuck in the diabetes trap. That's how this mission grows. One person, one family, one story at a time. And if you haven't yet, leaving a quick review helps more people find the show and realize they're not stuck with meds forever. It takes less than a minute and it means the world to us. Thanks for being here and thanks for being part of this movement toward freedom. Thanks for listening to the Diabetes Remission

Medical Disclaimer

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Roadmap. The ideas discussed here are for general informational purposes only and do not constitute medical or nutritional advice. We are pharmacists, but we're not your personal healthcare providers. Always consult your own physician or qualified clinician before changing medications, exercise routines, or nutrition plans. Results vary, and what works for one person may not work for another.