Lessons from the Ketoverse

Breaking the Stress-Cortisol-Diabetes Cycle: From Military Service to Metabolic Health

• Graham • Season 1 • Episode 8

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The hidden link between chronic stress and metabolic dysfunction takes center stage as Veteran Stephen shares his remarkable journey from PTSD-induced type 2 diabetes to restored health without medication. This raw, science-backed conversation reveals how our bodies' natural stress response can become our greatest metabolic enemy when chronically activated.

Stephen's story begins with his military service, where training and operational theaters conditioned his body for constant high-alert status. As he details the neurological and hormonal cascade that followed, we witness how elevated cortisol levels flood the bloodstream with glucose, creating a vicious cycle of insulin resistance, belly fat accumulation, and eventually full-blown diabetes. The most striking aspect? Despite maintaining regular exercise and what appeared to be a healthy lifestyle, his internal stress response was silently sabotaging his metabolism from within.

What makes this episode particularly valuable is the practical, evidence-based approach to breaking this cycle. Beyond the expected advice of dietary changes, Stephen reveals how mindfulness practice, trauma-informed therapy, and lifestyle modifications dramatically reversed his condition. The transformation goes beyond numbers on a glucose monitor – though his now-normal A1C levels are impressive. The elimination of debilitating IBS, improved sleep quality, and renewed energy represent a complete reclamation of quality of life that medication alone could never achieve.

Whether you're battling unexplained weight gain, blood sugar issues, or simply looking to optimize your metabolic health, this episode provides a crucial piece of the puzzle that conventional medicine often overlooks. The stress-diabetes connection isn't just theory – it's a lived reality for millions, and understanding it could be your first step toward metabolic freedom. Listen, learn, and discover how addressing both mind and metabolism creates the foundation for genuine healing.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Lessons from the Keto-Verse. Join Stephen and Graham as they explore the keto lifestyle with tips, science and stories to boost your health. This podcast isn't medical advice. Consult your healthcare advisor for any health-related issues. Get ready to fuel your primal power.

Graham:

Welcome everybody to this episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse. I'm with my friend, Stephen, and today we are talking about the role of stress and cortisol in weight gain, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, and how eliminating an ultra-processed heavy diet can help regulate and eventually reverse type 2 diabetes. Before I go into the role of cortisol, Stephen, welcome to the podcast.

Stephen:

Thank you.

Graham:

All right. So I asked my AI friend to give me an answer to the question what is cortisol and how does chronic stress affect weight and blood sugar? And then we're going to hand it over to Stephen, who has a very interesting story of his personal journey around PTSD, stress, the impact it has had on him and some great detail on the chain of events that Stephen found himself in a number of years ago. So let's answer this question first what is cortisol and how does chronic stress affect weight and blood sugar? So cortisol is your stress hormone, made by your adrenal glands. It's like an emergency button, Great for quick bursts, like dodging danger, as it boosts energy and focus.

Graham:

But chronic stress and that means, you know, ongoing stress from work life or lack of sleep keeps cortisol high for too long and that's where the trouble starts. For weight, high cortisol signals your body to store fat, especially around your belly. I know Stephen's going to talk about that. It also ramps up cravings for sugary processed foods. Hello, stress, eating those foods spike blood sugar, making things worse and I know we'll go into a little detail about that as well.

Graham:

For blood sugar, cortisol dumps glucose into your blood for fast energy. Think of, you know, thousands of years ago, when we were hungry and we needed to hunt for an animal, we needed that extra fast energy to be able to find that animal or hunt for that food, and that could be a good thing because it allowed us to survive. But constantly high levels of overworked insulin leading to insulin resistance is a major step towards type 2 diabetes. It's a cycle Stress, fat gain, blood sugar, chaos. A ketogenic diet helps by cutting ultra-processed carbs that fuel this mess. It stabilizes blood sugar and lowers insulin stress, while stress management, like good sleep or walks, dials down cortisol. You can break this cycle All right. So now that we've got that definition from our AI friends out of the way, Stephen, maybe you can go into some detail about your very interesting journey through your military experience, the PTSD, the cortisol and the type 2 diabetes that you found yourself, that journey that you found yourself going down, and then we'll get into some discussions on details.

Stephen:

Yeah, thank you for that, Graham. I think the synopsis you provided was actually quite helpful, because people will see from my discussion that's exactly the progression or regression, if you want to call it that, that I experienced. There were events where I was sent in places that were hostile towards us and others in uniform, and we were there to do a job. So my body learned through my training, as well as being exposed to operational theaters, to environments that were essentially considered hostile. And for the survival mechanism which you highlighted, it is both necessary and entirely normal in instances like that for you to have an elevated amount of cortisol in your system. That's perfectly fine, as long as that it's not elevated every day. Score.

Stephen:

It was well proven back when dealing with Vietnam veterans that they suffered under the environment that was so hostile that they developed a mental illness known now as post-traumatic stress disorder. I am a strong example of that. I have severe PTSD, and so I would also remind listeners that I also wear a CGM, so a constant glucose monitor, and so I can monitor almost in near real time my sugar all the time. So, because I'm mindful, because in that list of things that you indicated with the raising cortisol, I feel that in my body, I'm delving well enough into my body that I know. Plus, I can relate to my external environment in pragmatic terms and go okay, what is triggering me right now? Why is my voice being raised? Why do I feel the strain and stress of being able to speak my words? And I'm struggling in an argument right now and managing my anger or my rage, or I'm hyper vigilant? All of those factors that I experienced and many other veterans do that have PTSD, cause an elevation in cortisol.

Stephen:

You made an excellent point when you said that the rise in cortisol will cause an increase in insulin Because, as you said, the mechanism in a state of heightened cortisol is for cortisol to signal to the body to release more sugar into the bloodstream. So it's no longer sitting in fat form and fat that's accumulated in the body, it's being converted back into sugar and the adrenal glands will elevate to a point where that sugar gets pushed into the muscles. But it's not required, there's no need for it. So, as a consequence, it bounces back into the bloodstream and I'm oversimplifying the metabolic process, but it bounces back into the bloodstream and then you have really elevated sugar. So then what happens is think of cortisol as a hormone. You can think of insulin as a hormone, and growth hormone is a hormone.

Stephen:

So in the presence of insulin elevated insulin as a consequence of the cortisol what ends up happening is your insulin is also in a constant state of being highly elevated to a point until the system itself fails and cortisol, ironically enough, the one thing that's designed to, in short bursts, as you said, save you over time will actually kill you, because that heightened, constant elevated state from stress or cortisol eventually beats insulin and then what happens is your insulin resistance increases. Because what is insulin doing? It's trying to take that sugar that the bully called cortisol has just flooded systemically into your system, perennially, meaning that it's constantly happening and going. Okay, I can only jam so much sugar into these cells before these cells burst and reflood. So there's nowhere to put it where these cells burst and reflood, so there's nowhere to put it. So, as the sugar cycle continues, you're never in a state of ketosis, you're never in a state of balanced homeostasis, you're always in an elevated state.

Stephen:

That'll creep right into your sleep cycle because, consequently, with the heightened cortisol, your body is in an inflammatory state. It's harder to sleep, it's harder to calm down and especially for those of us that suffer from PTSD, one of the areas that it creeps in is in the subconscious, in the dream state. So if you are stressed during the day, there's a very high likelihood and I know other veterans out there will relate may have absolutely nothing to do with what you did during the day, but all of a sudden you'll get a rewind of the Lucasfilm in your head that will replay some of the original traumas, with slight deviations. For most of us. Sometimes it's very visceral and almost verbatim what you experienced in theater and in environments that were hostile, but most of the time, at least for me, it's usually a repeat of where the offenses occurred that caused the mental illness. And so now there is no break because in your sleep state you're suffering with elevated cortisol and worse.

Stephen:

Your body's now in a more relaxed status where there's no exercise that's occurring to help minimize the impact negative impact of that sugar being in the bloodstream, because you're just lying there.

Stephen:

You're asleep. So often, with those of us who wear CGM, if you wake up in the middle of the night, usually because your sugar is elevated, it'll force you to wake up and try to get rid of the sugar, so hence you end up visiting the washroom. If you check your sugar, it'll be really high and you think well, it's because I just had a nightmare and I was stressed out. Reality is, it could be a combination of factors, but if we just focus our lens for a moment on what's going on metabolically, the rise in insulin resistance means you have less of a capacity to deal with this hormonal imbalance of cortisol, which means that the impact of cortisol when it's elevated is even more severe and, as you said, that's when you get into the cycle that ultimately results in type 2 diabetes being a bit of a vicious cycle where you have the PTSD that you are trying to address.

Graham:

The PTSD is contributing to less healthy sleep, let's say, as well as increased cortisol levels. The increased cortisol levels are putting stress on the body by increasing the sugar in the blood. The blood is trying to battle this by increasing the amount of insulin in order to get that glucose into the cells, which causes insulin resistance, which I'm guessing could have actually a negative impact on the PTSD and your ability to Does that sort of sum up the and I don't want to simplify it, but sum up the experience of why this is so difficult for you having to address this. As you indicated, it is a vicious cycle because if you're getting less sleep.

Stephen:

Uh, you're less patient, you're more easily aggravated, which is just bringing more matches to a fire that's already lit right and you're throwing another log on that fire. So perhaps we we shift the conversation slightly to say, okay, that's all well and good. We understand the pathology of how you arrive at a state when you ultimately end up with this insulin resistance, where certainly cortisol is an important, if not the most significant factor, because in my particular case, I wasn't especially overweight, although I was beginning to add weight as a consequence of the cortisol. Because, as you said, when cortisol is present and elevated, instead of having a better ability to metabolize the food that you're eating where you're processing it.

Stephen:

Some of it's going into the waste system in the body and the rest is being stored as energy. That energy is excessive in the form of your body just going no, no, let's turn everything into sugar and get it into the bloodstream, because it perceives some, some short threat. But that short threat is just on repeat, on loop. If you're listening to Spotify, it's the same song over and over and over again. And so, as that begins to beat your system down, you sleep less, you become more irritable, you have less capacity to be able to cope, which makes your cortisol even higher, which makes your insulin resistance even higher. And it's interesting in the US they recognize this cycle as being a consequence of or causality from PTSD. In Canada they do not. They haven't made that correlation. In fact, just today I was denied recognition for it as a Canadian veteran, whereas that would not have been the case if I was in the US. They rely in the US on people indicating that they self-observe. My self-observation is more scientific because I'm wearing a CGM, so I monitor to perhaps even an obsessive level how my mind and my body is feeling at any point in time, graham, like if I've just eaten something. Even sometimes when I watch something that's particularly violent on TV, I'll find myself getting triggered and I'll watch my sugar increase, and it's not during a period where I've just had a meal. There'll be a marked increase in that trend. So the same with and some individuals may notice this naturally if they were wearing cgm. Sometimes, when you're really focused on something mentally, you'll get. You know, they call it a bump and because you are actually using your brain more and requiring more from your, your brain processing, which which will naturally increase the amount of sugar, which is normal. That's a normal pathology. It's the same as your sugar will rise when you weight train, because you're sending a signal to the body when you're lifting heavy weights to say, hey, my muscles need more sugar because I'm processing it. Those things are all perfectly normal. What we're talking about is a rise in cortisol. When it's not. There's a pathological stress that's related to weight training and that's ultimately going to provide a benefit. Why? Because you're creating metabolic resiliency, whereas when you're constantly under a state of duress, you're bending the same piece of metal, which is your health in general, so many times that eventually it breaks and you end up with what we now call type 2 diabetes or depressive disorders in association with type 2 diabetes, and diabetes just happens to be one of those ways it manifests, and you also covered an important aspect to that. So, okay, great. So you have ptsd or you've been in the military, you're having issues.

Stephen:

Name of Dr Cavan had put out a study where they indicated that starches are sugar. Sugar is starches. So if you are consuming pasta, you can look at a bowl of pasta essentially being like a bowl of sugar. So, as a diabetic, regardless of whether you had PTSD and you've arrived at the point where you have type 2 diabetes, any additional sugar starts doing additional damage. It's a different kind of lot, but it's being thrown on the fire as well when it comes to burning up your health and your life expectancies. So what's interesting with that study, and which you and I have spoken to before, is it's actually corroborating what you and I have been saying from the very beginning.

Stephen:

It's cut out ultra-processed foods, and that includes some meats that are overly ultra-processed with the nitrites and other things that are in it. I try to stick to meat that is organic, grass-fed, grain-finished, good, high-quality meats. Try to stay away from organizations that are grocery chains that are perhaps not the healthiest in terms of how they're processing the meats, or at least the purveyors are not maybe as inclined towards organic, or making sure that the animals are humanely treated, et cetera, et cetera, because, don't forget, animals have cortisol as a hormone as well. So if they're under constant arrest, they can't move, they're trapped and then they're slaughtered. All that stress, all that cortisol is in the meat, now that cortisol is not going to add to your cortisol.

Stephen:

But the point is that you're not eating something that could be described as a medicine to the same extent, but far more severely, as ultra-prosphous foods are, like you and I have discussed.

Stephen:

If you're consuming ice cream, if you're consuming things that are full of sugar, it's going to make matters far worse.

Stephen:

So you have to be conscientious in what it is you consume and try to minimize those things, as this particular study said, that are essentially sugar, and obviously starches include potatoes, they include pastas, they include all of those things, both of which I completely have cut out of my diet, and I've seen likely a complete elimination of visceral fat, non-fatty alcohol, liver.

Stephen:

So the fatty liver consequence, which actually can be a symptom of, or sometimes increase the likelihood of, type 2 diabetes, is also something that I address is to have the non-alcoholic fatty liver process reduced by using and consuming lemon water, which is obviously quite acidic, and then the body has a basic reaction to it, an alkaline reaction to it, and that helps dissolve or get rid of from several studies, get rid of fatty liver, and that's really important. Your liver is critical, not just your kidneys, when it comes to to fatty liver. And I know when, at the peak period in which my my diabetes was his highest and I was in the 15s, I was starting to get kidney stones, I was having trouble just walking because of neuropathic pain and by following what we're saying. So looking at the solution which is practicing mindfulness, ensuring that you're eating a healthy diet, ensuring that you go to bed at the same time that you've shut down electronics an hour or so before you try to eat earlier in the evenings to give your body at least three hours before going to bed.

Graham:

So I want to get into that a lot more in detail. I wonder if you can help the audience understand your journey from that, and I think the audience should understand that. I've known Stephen for over a decade and the picture I have of Stephen is of a very healthy, adult male who takes care of himself, works out, does the things that we all are told we should do in order to be the healthiest self that we can be and still, you know, because of factors that are outside of his control, still ended up getting a diagnosis. So I wonder if you could talk about you know, just describe your experience from that awful and stressful day in the doctor's office when you heard that you had type 2 diabetes. You know what went through your mind, what advice were you given from the doctor and potentially others around you, and which direction did you take yourself down in order to right the ship as best as you possibly can, and what were the results of that journey.

Stephen:

Yeah, it's a really interesting journey. I was diagnosed by phone. I was told my results while I was literally training at the gym and the nurse that reports to my doctor at the time said Stephen, I'm very good news for you, but you have type two diabetes. And she proceeded, rather than saying anything else, saying you're going to have to go on medication for the rest of your life. That was the first thing, and the second thing is to get more exercise. And I said my response was oh, did they add an extra day during the week? Are there eight days during the week right now?

Stephen:

Because, as you said, I was always in the gym and always doing weight training, and walking was natural for where you and I work together. It was a good haul from where the transit system dropped us off to where we had to walk to work. So I did that every day, typically on the occasions where you and I would grab lunch. We would walk a good ways away to have lunch and then walk back. So we probably weren't cognizant at the time that we were doing that, but that probably postponed the eventual diagnosis. So I'm sitting in the doctor's office and I'm hearing all of this and that it's out of control and the first word that comes out of their mouths is you need to on metformin. And so initially, when I was addressing the shock and probably had a little bit of white coat syndrome, I knew nothing about the illness. I, in parallel, reached to them and they said you know, because of your military background and how focused you are on optimizing pretty much everything, you'll figure it out. And that was actually the brother of one of the top medical people in our country that said if anybody can figure out a way to do this, you'll figure it out. So I was encouraged by that and um. And of course, the protocol was for me to eat six meals a day, which runs completely contrary to dr feng in toronto, who talks about intermittent fasting and treating people with kidney disease, which, by extension, is one of the directions that your type 2 diabetes can take you. You can have complete renal failure, you can lose limbs, you can lose your eyesight, you can lose all of the above. So, as a physician, I had read his book and discovered that intermittent fasting was something that I could look into.

Stephen:

So in the very beginning of this journey, graham, I took metformin and I was so sick from it because, as I've indicated before, I have PTSD. I had severe IBS which in part was caused by the elevated sugar, and the IBS is like a constant reminder that you have no control. So my body was in a constant state of stress. I had to figure out where every washroom was. It didn't matter where I was. I had to worry about when you and I were in meetings or throughout my corporate life. I'm making sure that I didn't have maybe anything in my stomach before a meeting, because if the meeting didn't go well and I was triggered and of course in those days I didn't know I had PTSD I just reacted to the consequences of whatever my body did without necessarily understanding it. So as I began to do more and more research and looked at it holistically much the same as you did although you didn't have type 2, we had a similar journey, as I was unsatisfied with being on metformin At least it felt like after I ate a meal that I had consumed glass. The pain in my stomach was almost unbearable. I probably could have bought shares in Tums because I was consuming so many of them, and I don't think I even knew how to spell Tums. Prior to that I'd never bought a roll of Tums in my life and I was having and of course that's just a very small band-aid on a burning furnace right Like you're in trouble. You have metabolic syndrome at that point. So that was the state that I was in.

Stephen:

So I first started with intermittent fasting. The doctor said I'll see you in six months. Um, about two, two months in, without telling them, I stopped taking metformin because I had done my research and determined that there was a possibility that I could improve my blood markers by practicing intermittent fasting. At that time I was eating the typical American diet, standard American diet, and I hadn't yet dialed in on the fact that starches and other things like that were making it worse. And I also didn't have a CGM, because there was no such thing at that point. Seven, eight years ago. They weren't readily available.

Stephen:

So when I returned for my first blood results, my dietician said you're doing great, your numbers are down. They're not perfect but they're down. We're going to up the dosage maybe of the metformin a little bit, get those numbers a little bit lower. But you're no longer diabetic, you're pre-diabetic. Just keep doing what you're doing. And my response was well, I'm doing exactly the opposite of everything you told me to do. I'm not eating six meals a day, I'm eating two. I practice fasting, a prolonged fast of 24 hours once every couple of weeks. And again, as I said, I hadn't dialed into the diet, so I was still eating the way I normally ate, but I was getting results independently from that intermittent fasting.

Stephen:

So I was described as being medically defiant and most recently, when I shared this story with a geneticist, she described me as an outlier, which I think is a much better description, a much more favorable description, because what it means is that if you take a perspective of this and take your health in your own hands and I say health in your own hands in an informed way I'm not anti-doctor. What I am is proactive in my approach to my care, such that I want to talk to a metabolic specialist to increase my knowledge. I'm not going to go to a plumber when I have an issue with my wiring in my home, for instance. I want to focus on the experts. So Dr Fung is an expert nephrologist who's practiced with lots of patients on the applications of intermittent fasting. There are progressives out there, like Dr Ken Berry, who's done an enormous amount of good in his work around to keto, keto verse, as as we call it, both keto and carnivore diets and the benefits.

Stephen:

And that came many years later because, as you and I discussed before, I dabbled in being vegetarian because I was trying to get rid of my ibs. I was trying to figure out well, why, why am I reacting so badly to tell food? And I would remind the listeners, and we're talking about years now I'd be 53, 54 by that time. So, years after diagnosis, and my blood results went kind of up and down a little bit and I thought, well, you know, maybe I just wasn't being as careful, but I still hadn't dialed into the food thing. So you would have caught me as a diabetic, you know, occasionally, maybe twice in the summer, eating an ice cream that was almost as big as my head and because that's how they serve them here and I wasn't going to waste it. And probably my sugar, because I wasn't wearing a cgm was probably in the 20s, extremely high and extremely dangerous. So once, once, I started not getting the same results and I started noticing my eyesight was being affected and I went to see an ophthalmologist and or, sorry, actually it was an ophthalmologist first, but later an optometrist, and she looked at my eyes and she said I won't change your prescription because your eyes are clearly under enormous pressure right now because you don't have your blood sugar under control. And she was actually originally a physician in Africa, and so the way in which they deal with this kind of scenario and she is a specialist, she's a very well-trained doctor, she was licensed in Canada. She said get your sugar under control. And she pointed to she was adjacent to the grocery store. She said stay away from that stuff that's over there.

Stephen:

I had already started to do that research, as you had, and discovered that one of the big problems was I was showing up with cans of gasoline, which is synonymous with food that's full of sugar, and trying to combat my diabetes strictly on doing intermittent fasting. And it started to not be enough Because my body was regressing. My insulin resistance would have been higher and consequently, the methods that I was using in the past my body had adapted to in a negative way that weren't as impactful as they were initially. I wasn't overweight by then. By then I had lost 52 pounds in totality Now, not all of it by design because my IBS was so severe.

Stephen:

There were times where I'd be triggered for two or three days and I barely could eat anything. So I ended up doing a prolonged fast and I would yo-yo a bit on my weight. I would go down I'm 6'2". I would go down to 185 and then back up to 193 and then down to 182 and then 188, you know. So I was all over the map because I also wasn't getting the proper nutrition.

Stephen:

So that's when I introduced a naturopath into the equation and I started paying a lot more attention to what I consumed, because she was a newly minted naturopath. I have exceptional respect for her and her knowledge and her approach towards this illness, and even to a point where I was starting to think, oh, I'm going to have to go one meal a day to control my sugar gram. And she was saying no, and this is where this all wraps around to being something that's very insightful. She said listen, you do one meal a day. Sure, you're cutting your caloric intake, but you don't have a lot of fat left. Because I was still weight training and walking and everything else. She said you're going to cause a cortisol trigger. I said no, no, no. See, you don't understand. That's what I'm trying to avoid here. Maybe we're having a failure to communicate. And she said you're putting your body. When you take it too far with the intermittent fasting, you're causing a cortisol reaction because your body's now going hmm, I'm not sure when our next meal is going to be. Now, of course, there's people out there that are going to say well, hang on.

Stephen:

You mentioned Dr Fung earlier and he had plenty of examples in his books about people going literally weeks and months on a very restrictive diet in order to lose weight. I wasn't in that category. I didn't need to lose 150 pounds. I wasn't morbidly obese, like you said. I was going to the gym and all the rest of it Did. I have a dad belly Sure, and that's dangerous. That's visceral fat, that suggests you have fat on your liver. Obviously, those things were signals of what I was experiencing.

Stephen:

But here's the crazy part as I engaged with my naturopath, as I started to get control for my fellow veterans out there, control of my PTSD, by practicing a host of things, including mindfulness. Start my day with a meditation. I end my day with a meditation. I dump the trash can of all the information that's gone in there that might have caused some form of physiological exasperation, where my body's heightened and elevated, and I'm not necessarily recognizing it because I'm so used to it, right with my personality.

Stephen:

So I make sure I'm in a you know, an alpha to delta state. I'm calming myself down and then I sleep much better. I can tell you categorically I don't take any medication. I don't have IBS anymore, thanks to a combination of my therapist and some of the other modalities that I use, which includes Paul McKenna's self-hypnosis for veterans, which helps us. As my psychologist described, it's tooth floss for the brain. It helps deal with the trauma areas in the brain and so, consequently, I'm no longer having to worry when I go out for simple groceries, about whether or not I'm going to need to use a washer before I get there.

Graham:

Yeah, an amazing turnaround and so many different things to have to address at the same time. Um, you had mentioned high starch foods and, and some may not um know what those are. Um, why? Why are high starch foods bad? Because starch? Um turns into glucose. Um, very, very quickly, and the it's that turning into glucose in the body, the more ultra processed the food is, the faster it turns into glucose and the faster the body needs to deal with it. So if you have a very large meal of very high starchy foods or very high ultra processed foods, it can overwhelm the body with too much glucose. Glucose is poison to body. We need very little in order to survive. We certainly do need it, but we don't need to overwhelm the body in order to thrive and survive.

Graham:

High starch foods can include things like potatoes, and that includes fries. Anything made from potatoes can include white rice. Pasta can include bread, bagels. Of course, corn A lot of people don't think about it. Corn on the cob is, you know, tastes great because it, you know, there's a high amount of glucose in there. In there, high fructose corn syrup actually comes from corn and has a higher ratio than sugar does, but it's still having the same impact on the body. It can be breakfast cereals, it can be crackers, snacks, pretzels I'm just giving some examples Oatmeal even root veggies, can be high in starch.

Graham:

So these are things that, if you are going through what Stephen talked about, you know high cortisol, ptsd, lack of sleep. You know high insulin or high blood glucose levels in the body. If you are a type 2 diabetic or even a type 1 diabetic, the body, if you are a type 2 diabetic or even a type 1 diabetic those are going to have a major impact on the amount of glucose in your system and your body is going to be under stress to try and deal with it. And I think that's a really important point that you made there. You mentioned a few things, but I wondered when you were going through this journey, did you find yourself trying to deal with the PTSD separate from dealing with the sleep or lack thereof, and separately dealing with the type 2 diabetes diagnosis? Did you find yourself having to chase down rabbit holes to deal with each of these and did you find eventually that actually, if I do these things, it's going to help with all of those?

Stephen:

I think in my case it was. Whatever was the most loud in my body is what I responded to. So if I was having an IBS reaction and all of a sudden I find myself in a strange gas station banging on the door, hoping the person will get out in time for me to get in there, I think that that had my invited attention. I wasn't worried about my last meal. I wasn't worried about what else I could potentially do with my day or what have you. It becomes all very consuming and it's the same with PTSD. The way PTSD works is that you'll start to get tunnel vision, you'll start getting a sense of disassociation where you don't really feel like yourself, and you start to feel like you're outside of yourself. So that's one of the consequences of it and that will really spike my sugar, because I again wear a CGM and I'll sometimes check it. I know it sounds a little bit morbid or odd that I'm my own science experiment, but it's the best way for me to do exactly what you just described. So you know we used to. We used to say the best way to find a solution is to reverse engineer from the problem. So I looked at the problem set and said okay, you know, they say that I have high sugar, but that's not really the problem. The problem is I have insulin resistance. So one of the first things that I did with my naturopath was to learn how to reverse my insulin resistance. So that included all the things we talked about diet, and I actually eventually got checked and had my insulin resistance checked and it was actually normal actually normal. Now my sugar was still higher, but I was no longer considered a diabetic based on my A1C, ha1c, but I was still not in my opinion. I still didn't hit where I wanted, which, if someone asked, I would say I want to be five and I may not ever be five. I'm 58 years old, but I have around five, eight, uh to six, depending on on the period, on average for my a1c, and that's again by simply managing what I eat. I walk after every meal, which is very important, so I consume all that sugar. I sleep better that way, so I have a routine. So, yeah, you're right, there was there's, there was a singularity where essentially, I looked at all the different parameters the PTSD, the IBS, the diagnosis and drew kind of like a in my head, a Venn diagram. I went okay. So I've got all these clouds of things going on. What's the central piece for me that is causing the greatest problem? Because I've addressed diets. I'm not eating poorly anymore. I have a lifestyle where I have access to nature. So I'm grounding, I'm going out and doing nature, I'm practicing mindfulness at the beginning of my day, graham, and at the end of the day, I'm able now to engage in situations where my body might see it as being potentially hostile, but I have the wherewithal and the tools now to look at it and go, okay, this is definitely more about them than it is me. So I've learned how to de-escalate and, rather than react, is to reflect. So this has taken years. This has taken me eight years to find the right modalities that resonate with me, the right practices and also the ability to say, okay, well, you know what? Let's celebrate our successes.

Stephen:

I did not have a single cold or flu the entire winter. Nothing, zero, nada. Why? Because I take supplements. I made sure I was still getting my vitamin D in pill form, because we live in a part of the country where it's dark. I did further research and found out more about what the starches were doing, so I cut those out all the ultra processed foods. Like you, I don't consume sodas or what we call here pop or chips or any of that kind of stuff at all. They don't come into the house and they're far too addictive. I walk after meals, so essentially what happened was my rewards in that are my blood markers where my A1C is. But for me, in terms of quality of life, I would say the most important thing and let's talk about quality of life because not only by reversing it am I increasing the likelihood that I'll live longer, but I'll'll live better. I don't have these IBS situations anymore.

Stephen:

So imagine when you have the stomach flu and you're in a state where you can't even leave your bed and only go from your bed to the washroom as you need it. That was my every day for years and but I still. I got out of bed and went to work and worked with you and everyone else, but I never knew when it was going to hit. So imagine instantaneously having the flu, uh, for the entire day because of one incident or one event that you don't understand. That's exacerbated is by the food that you're consuming and the way in which you're consuming it. So simple example you know you're driving to work. You're drinking your coffee. You're eating your bagel. That's a big giant sugar shake, right, because the that bagel's got more, more sugar in it than four pieces of white bread. So, by density and by weight, so you're eating that. You're consuming coffee.

Stephen:

That it is triggering, for most people is triggering the bowel anyway and um, and you're in traffic making your way downtown or on transit where people are miserable and angry and probably sick as well. So you're in a highly, highly compromised physiological state because of what you're consuming. The environment you're in is hostile. You're going directly into a stress at work because you and I both had significant responsibility in the organization that we work, hence it came with all the problems. It didn't take very long before you sat down and you found out whatever was going to be wrong that day. So I don't have that now and I'm still engaged and productive, but I do it remotely, which allows me to plan into my life those periods of peace and quiet where I can go and walk my dogs in the woods.

Stephen:

I live a privileged life. I truly do, but it's by design, because I learned to reverse engineer from the problem and decided this is what I need to do. I need to be out of situations that trigger my PTSD, which is crowds. I need to ensure I eat a proper, wholesome diet. I live in a town where I have access to an excellent butcher. I can buy local produce. I can grow my own produce. I have a greenhouse. So I've learned to do like, and some people would view it as extremes and this is why my geneticist called me an outlier.

Stephen:

I have decided that in my particular case not to get overly personal it was safer and healthier for me to sleep in my own room because of my PTSD, and I've been happily married for 17 years. So you do what you have to do If your objective is to be as healthy in your mind and in your body. You do what you have to do because the information is available and what is proof. For me is proof is in math, right, you can't argue with the numbers by wearing a CGM, and I know they're expensive folks. 120 bucks every two weeks is a lot of money. But what's your health worth to you and what you really? What it is is it's insurance, because I'm able to see where I'm trending at a specific moment.

Stephen:

I could get up from this taping and look at my sugar and if it's elevated, I'm going on the elliptical. It's dark out now I can't go out in the woods and walk Because maybe my cortisol get triggered, because there's bears and wolves and other things in there and then they tend to come out at night, so it's probably not the best time for me to go in there. So, especially if I'm hyper vigilant and aware that that's the case, you know. So I've learned to do these things for me and I try to share it with other people, which is part of the principle of why you and I are dedicated to this podcast, and that is to let to share a story and let other people know that there's hope.

Stephen:

You know, because when I sat with that doctor that first time, I didn't touch on this yet, graham, but she said to me well, you know, there's only two diagnoses that I don't like to give. One is cancer and the other one is diabetes, because your life expectancy, obviously in the case of cancer, could be very, very short, and usually with uncontrolled diabetes and, as she said and I've read this elsewhere by the time they catch it because they're not measuring insulin resistance, they're measuring the amount of glucose. Over the last 90 days that was in your bloodstream, which, candidly, is a bit of a hammer when you think about it, when they really need a pair of pliers. If they looked at insulin resistance, they would have noted 10 years prior to that, plus or minus, that I already had a metabolic problem and it should have been addressed back then through education and understanding your wrong diets, your stressors and so forth.

Stephen:

What I've listened to it, what I've been able to change it? Certainly the food, but you and I worked in a stressful environment. We're both executives. We had to do what we had to do, but then you start making better choices. As you get to your age, of my age, you and I are far more discretionary. Now We've raised our families and so forth, so we definitely have more latitude and now the focus is on us. But being a hero in your own story and putting your health in jeopardy results in, as you get to be an older man or woman, that your body's no longer as resistant as you think it is and you're in a cycle now of systemic unwellness. So what are you measuring in terms of success? Success as being on the corporate wheel or success in that you have quality of life? You have health expectancy, not just life expectancy right, but that's really where I think I've arrived.

Graham:

Yeah, I think that's such a good point. We focus on, you know, wanting to live longer, which is, of course, a noble goal, but I think what we need to be focusing on is living as long as we can with a healthy lifestyle, feeling good about ourselves, feeling good every day, not having to worry about where the next bathroom is. I wanted to touch on your military background, Stephen, and you talked about changing your certain elements of your lifestyle around mindfulness. I think you've always worked out, certainly in the military. You not only worked out, but were likely forced to work out, and that is a highly stressful profession to get into, as is any first responder type profession as well. I wonder if you can talk about the fact that you changed your diet and it actually changed your body and your mind, as Georgia Eden, her wonderful book Change your Diet, Change your Mind, points out so eloquently. What is it about food in the military?

Stephen:

that contributes to this, not only for yourself. Yeah, thank you. Sorry, uh, you just cut it for a sec, I apologize. So, uh, you know, one of the interesting things like in my own own sort of way, without, uh, the science and stuff, because it was a number of years um, since I served, one of the things I did as a young officer is I participated in martial arts. So I did several hours of martial arts training.

Stephen:

We had an exceptional teacher at the time at one of the major air bases and he was almost like a surrogate father for me because he was so exceptional in martial arts. He was in the Martial Arts Hall of Fame and just an amazing guy. But the reason I share that is because he was so self-aware. He was in his 40s, I was in my mid-20s and he had taught hundreds and hundreds of students across our province and was very well known and recognized and so forth. And I was practicing arts that were similar to what we call UFC today, because I had studied jujitsu and previously taekwondo, and I was doing karate and kung fu and tai chi and he used to watch me come into class. I was the club president for it because I needed an officer to serve that role and he said I look at your lips right now and I can tell how tight they are and I know you had a bad day. And so I literally wore my stress on my face. At the time I had over 100 people reporting to me and I was just a young junior officer. My boss at the time had MS and he was away a lot because of his illness, so a lot of the responsibilities that fell upon me would have been challenging for a 40-year-old, let alone a 26-year-old. So I brought a lot of that stress into the class and I walked out of the class sometimes after four hours of training, completely exhausted, and I weighed 168 pounds back then and I was six foot two. So there was no room for visceral fat because arguably I was overtraining Now. So there was no room for visceral fat because arguably I was overtraining. Now my body could take that at 25, 28. Now I train smarter, but I credit the martial arts because one of the components of it was actually meditation.

Stephen:

The interesting thing is is that when you and I touched on this before, both online and offline, is when you're doing something that you may or may not necessarily understand its benefits because the science wasn't there and you weren't doing it. For that reason I wasn't my own science project. I was simply going to do martial arts because I loved it and I did feel better after I did it, even though you know I was doing laundry six days a week because I had to wash my gi all the time. So it was, you know, in it for four hours. So what was amazing about that is I used to teach meditation as part of the evolution as I moved up in belts in the system.

Stephen:

But it was an academic exercise. It was training, like in the training in the military Hand your weapon this way, point down range, focus. Here's your scope, here's your. So all of that sort of thing. I looked at it the same way.

Stephen:

There was nothing existential about it for me per se.

Stephen:

I wasn't there as a ninja turtle and I was certainly more self-aware, as my teacher at the time said, but I was by no means as aware as you and I are now. You know it's hard to put an old head on young shoulders, right? So I didn't know what I didn't know, but I managed to eke it through because I was working a routine of 16, 17 hours of martial arts and weight training. I trained at lunch, I trained in the evenings, basically four or five times a week. So I was almost essentially moonlighting. You know, I put in my 40 hours with the military and 20 hours in the gym every week and so obviously I didn't have a problem. I was young enough and all the rest of it. But that stress is cumulative, you know. Yeah, sure, I was clearing the ledger, so to speak, in those four hours, but if in the morning I was getting up at six o'clock and going back to the office, that ledger was moving on the deficit side, not on the asset side, very quickly.

Graham:

Yeah, so well put. And I wonder if we can go back to put and I wonder if we can go back to the. You know what you're fed when you're in the military, because I don't have experience with this. I'm very interested in what. Would you know, a couple of meal, typical meals, that you would experience in the military? And you know, I'm sure it makes a difference whether you're deployed and it makes. And you know, I'm sure it makes a difference whether you're deployed and it makes a difference. You know what you're actually participating in and what you can eat. But the first question is what would a typical set of meals look like in the military and what would happen to you today if you were forced to eat that way? And what would happen to you?

Stephen:

today if you were forced to eat that way? Yeah, that's a really good question. So keep in mind, we only recently updated the Canada Food Guide, just a couple of years ago. Its previous update was done in the 1940s, when we were putting uniforms on men and women that were engaged and involved in the Second World War. So think about that. So why is that important is because that's your baseline, for which the Canadian military determined what the diets were going to be. They have dietitians. They had, you know, people that were well educated and accredited.

Stephen:

But, as I've often said, you can have a degree in something and that degree is entirely dependent on what is known at the time. Or, as one of my military mentors said, don't confuse brains with education. So sometimes what we think we know and how it affects people isn't learned too much later. Like you, think about it just as a simple example. I used this on another podcast and it was great. You said you know they used to tell you to relax and have a cigarette when you came home. That was how you relaxed. You didn't go for a walk. You relax and have a cigarette when you came home. That was how you relaxed. You didn't go for a walk, you know, have a cigarette. Your doctor was on TV on ads and having a cigarette while he was doing your diagnosis right, probably for type 2 diabetes, who knows.

Stephen:

So it seems a bit ridiculous to expect that a food guide that's, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old, is going to be appropriate. So if you bend your question slightly in favor of saying, well, based on the canada food guide guide, at that time, did you have fruits, vegetables, meats, you know? Did you have variety? Absolutely everything that was in. And because of my trade, I knew a lot of the, the officers that were in charge of food services and stuff, and they were well trained and you know, and they did their absolute, very best. And even when we were deployed in the field if you're in field operations, particularly in the army they tried to ensure that you got good meals.

Stephen:

But there were instances where, you know, you practiced the art of war and you ate what the Americans call MREs, which are meals ready to eat or IMPs. They are replete with carbs and salt and sugar because they're designed to provide you a caloric intake of X and the focus is small, c caloric and x is, whatever they happen decide to to give you. So you would have cherries jubilee at breakfast, which is basically cherries with syrup in it. That's the only difference from the stuff that you know mom and dad bought when I was a kid. That was was the cut up fruit in a can. It was basically the same stuff, just just even more ultra-processed. And you'd have eggs that we'd open the pouch and you could shake them back and forth and they would move like your tongue in your mouth. They'd go back and forth. They were that rubbery and you know so.

Stephen:

When you're eating those and of course it's not like I lived on those for 10 years, I was in the forces but when you did eat, eat them there was an interesting correlation to how often you needed to use the washroom because you didn't eat it. You rented it and that was pretty standard. And interestingly and retrospectively, you look at that and go well, yeah, probably also because you're under stress, your body won't. Your body won't process those foods because they're not particularly great for you. We know that.

Stephen:

Uh, and then add in the stressful situation doesn't matter if you're having caviar and steak, if your body's in an inflamed state, under stress at a point your body's going to go oh, we're under threat.

Stephen:

This goes back again to the body keeps the score and you will dump everything that's in your intestinal system, uh and uh, and you know it's pretty obvious. So you take 100 folk that are in the woods doing an exercise and it can be pretty unpleasant in the latrines with that number of people eating such poor food under stress and duress, and that's part of the training, that's part of being in the military. But ultimately, is it good for you? No, and that's why there's such a high recognition now in the US military for the occurrences and correlation of diet, what they consume, when they consumed it, how long they consumed it for and the stress that they experience, and then added PTSD, and then you can understand why at least the Americans recognize the type 2 diabetes could have a correlation, if not causality, from a combination of the food they consume and the stressful environment they are in.

Graham:

I think it's such an important point and a theme throughout this podcast is you know when you're feeling and I'll wrap it up with this when we are getting older, and I think you know things like type 2 diabetes. Even though younger people are being diagnosed with it now, which is a new phenomenon, it can affect people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s more often. And that's just because you know, over time, if you're constantly bombarding your body with stress and we talked about a couple of sources of that stress eventually your body is going to not be able to handle that stress anymore and you, you know, a type two diabetes diagnosis is a possible uh, you know end point to your body not being able to deal with that stress anymore. And I think what Steven's story um is in why it's so inspiring is uh, you didn't simply blame your situation. Uh, you didn't blame your body. You didn't, uh, you know, and and leave it at that you didn't, uh, you know, just chalk up the type two diabetes, uh, to just getting old. What you did is you, you took control. And and I think that's a a great message for for all of us is you know, yes, you could be feeling old. You can blame. You can easily blame your health on age. You can easily, you know, take that medicine that the doctor and certainly we recommend listening to your doctor about your health you can easily chalk it up to things that are, you know, the cause of something other than what you're eating.

Graham:

However, as Stephen so eloquently talked about, there is an option for you to take some control and try a different way of eating. Try, you know, a sincere attempt at mindfulness. Try going for a walk. That's something that many can do, not everybody, um, but uh, it could. It could be a swim, it could be a walk, it could be getting on the elliptical. It doesn't have to be, you know, um, training for a triathlon, but maybe the biggest impact can be taking control of what you eat. And if you do take control of what you eat and you do try a ketogenic or a carnivore diet, you may find after four to six weeks that having taken that control results in you feeling younger, feeling better.

Graham:

Some things that you otherwise blamed on age may actually disappear other arthritis and other stresses on the body that I was just blaming on getting older.

Graham:

Or, you know, injuries from sports actually started to subside and, in some case totally disappear, that it was a real eye-opener to you know the connection between how good I felt on a daily basis and the food that I was eating, and we've talked in past podcasts, and we will in the future, about what some of those options look like, and we always recommend having professional guidance in order to go down that path. But there is an opportunity to take control, and the worst case scenario is at the end of it, you feel the same. Best case scenario is you can feel significantly better. The only way to find out is to go down that path, and so, stephen, I want to thank you today for being so transparent about your experiences. One of the things I like about you is you wear your heart on your sleeve and you're always willing to share a story if you think that it can help others, and that's something that I really admire about you. I appreciate your time and I appreciate you, my friend.

Stephen:

Thank you very much, graham, I really appreciate that.

Graham:

All right, Thank you everybody. Another episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse. We hope you enjoyed this episode and look forward to bringing you more in the future. Thank you, Stephen.

Speaker 1:

Thank you. Thanks for tuning into Lessons from the Keto-Verse. Join Stephen and Graham next time for more keto tips and stories to fuel your health. Subscribe, share and let's keep the keto vibes going.