Why You’re Gaining Weight in Perimenopause (It’s Not What You Think)

If you’ve been feeling like your body is changing overnight… weight gain that doesn’t make sense, energy crashes, or constant hunger, you are not imagining it.

In today’s episode, I’m breaking down one of the most misunderstood (and overlooked) drivers of midlife weight gain.

Whether you’re approaching perimenopause, currently in it, or already in menopause, this is information you need to understand what’s actually happening inside your body and more importantly, what you can do about it

Tune in to hear:

•  What insulin resistance actually is (and why it exists on a spectrum) 
•  Why perimenopause and menopause increase your risk 
•  The connection between blood sugar, fat storage, and weight gain 
•  How high-carb eating patterns over time impact your metabolism 
•  The surprising role stress plays in blood sugar and insulin levels 
•  Key signs of insulin resistance most women overlook 
•  The difference between fasting glucose vs. fasting insulin (and why it matters) 
•  How muscle mass directly impacts your ability to process carbs 
•  Why strength training is non-negotiable in midlife 
•  Simple lifestyle shifts to start reversing insulin resistance 

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Website: https://energeticallyefficient.com/ 

Transcript

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I always say one of the best ways to reverse insulin resistance in the body, one of the best ways to become more insulin sensitive, is to build that gorgeous lean muscle tissue on your body, to strength train, to strength train intensely, to strength train in a way that allows you to do progressive overload. So you're actually building lean muscle tissue, especially for those of you ladies in perimenopause, about to be in perimenopause or in menopause. Strength training is critical. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Energetically Efficient Show. I am your host, Kristen Rowell, and I am excited about today's topic because it is something that I get asked about all of the time. And that topic is the intersection, I'm going to call it, between the time of perimenopause, menopause and a concept called insulin resistance. So when I say I get asked about it all the time, what I get asked about actually is insulin resistance. I more so even get asked about why at this time of perimenopause or menopause do I seem to just be gaining all of this weight that's coming on out of nowhere? Or hey, Kristen, I heard someone talk about the fact that in perimenopause or menopause, there's this thing that I need to understand called insulin resistance. Can you tell me more about that? So today that's what we're going to talk about. And I promise you that if you are before perimenopause, if you're in perimenopause, or if you are in menopause, you are not going to want to miss this episode because this information is so important. And just for a quick plug before we get started, if you're interested in going a lot deeper into this topic that I'm about to share with you today, make sure you click the link below to get on my wait list for Hot and Fit AF over 40. I launch that course only twice per year. So we create a wait list for it. And you can get on the wait list at the link below. And if you want to go even deeper with me, I take limited spots per year for my private one-on-one coaching. And so I'm going to put a link below this video for that as well. Okay, now let's get into the episode. The first thing that I want to tell you about insulin resistance is that really this concept of insulin resistance is a spectrum. So I'm hoping you're watching this on video because I'm using my hands to show you the spectrum. And what I mean by that is let's say in this hand over here, we have what's called being insulin sensitive. Okay, that is the goal. We want to be insulin sensitive. And then way at this hand over here, we have full-blown type 2 diabetes. And type 2 diabetes is caused by lifestyle. Type 2 diabetes is not autoimmune. That's type 1 diabetes. So when I say type 2 diabetes, I mean the kind of diabetes that shows up as a result of your lifestyle choices that you have made up until the point of your type 2 diabetes diagnosis. So in between my hand, that is the line for insulin sensitivity and the line that is here for type 2 diabetes, this is a spectrum of insulin resistance, meaning you get more and more and more and more and more insulin resistance as you get closer to type 2 diabetes until you're fully at type 2 diabetes. So you are the most insulin resistant right before you hit the type 2 diabetes marker, and you are the least insulin resistant right before you become insulin sensitive. And so I want you to think of insulin resistance as a spectrum. For example, in your 20s, depending on your lifestyle, you may be fully insulin sensitive. You may not have any insulin resistance at all. Or depending on your lifestyle, you may have a fair amount of insulin resistance. And then as you get older, again, depending on your lifestyle choices, you might become more and more and more insulin resistant. And you might hover before type 2 diabetes for many years. And then all of a sudden, one year, here you are with type 2 diabetes. So what I want to help you understand, I really, really desire to help people learn that you can reverse this. You don't have to be insulin resistant. You don't have to let type 2 diabetes become your fate. You truly can reverse insulin resistance and get more over to the insulin sensitivity side. So before I tell you all about how you're going to reverse it, I want to first talk about what actually is it and what's happening in your body when you become insulin resistant. So just as a reminder, and I've talked about this in other podcast episodes, you have organs behind your rib cage. And I'm just putting my hands here to show you behind your left rib cage is an organ called your pancreas. And this is really the organ that we think about when it comes to insulin resistance. I want to also mention, however, that your liver is involved and your liver is behind your right rib cage. So think about your pancreas and your liver, behind your left rib cage and your right rib cage, constantly talking to each other. They really are communicating a lot in your body and they're communicating throughout the day. So depending on what you eat, depending on how you move, depending on how you slept, what was your workout, what are you drinking, what are you not drinking? Like I said, what are you eating? What are you not eating? All of those things are going to impact how much your pancreas and your liver have to talk to each other and what sort of molecules are secreted from them, stored in them, et cetera, as you go about your day. So for the typical pattern of insulin resistance, we see someone whose pancreas, frankly, is just exhausted having to pump insulin out all day long, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. And the longer and more tired that the pancreas gets of doing this, and the longer and more tired that all of the cells in the body get from having to receive and respond to the input of insulin, the more frustrated they become. So what do I mean when I say receive and respond to the input of insulin? Well, when you eat a meal and let's just take a really carbohydrate-laden meal. Let's take a big bowl of pasta and you're drinking. No, not that anyone would do this, but who knows? Maybe you would. No, actually, let's not do pasta. Let's do cereal. Okay. Let's do a big bowl of cereal with a big glass of orange juice and a couple pieces of toast. For many of you who are of my vintage, we were sold that this was like a healthy American breakfast. You have this image on the commercials, you were programmed with the TV. You would sit in front of that TV, receive your programming, and you would be believe that having some sort of bowl of cereal, glass of orange juice, and toast was a healthy breakfast. And if you were in my generation, you also knew that on that toast, you would never, of course, put butter, which is I'm just laughing about this. You would do something really sinister, like put, I can't believe it's not butter on your toast because that's so much healthier than butter. I'm kidding. I hope you can sense my sarcasm there. Butter is actually a really, really good food for you, and especially grass-fed. Butter, in case you weren't aware of this, has essentially like a perfect balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids. So your body understands what to do with it. It's a really, really great source of healthy fat. I love grass-fed butter, and I would like you to consider loving grass-fed butter too. So back to our carbohydrate laden breakfast. So if you have a bowl of cereal, picture like a regular size cereal bowl. Typically a regular size cereal bowl will fit somewhere between three, just wait for it. This is just so insane. I spent a lot of time looking at food labels. So I can tell you that this is true. A regular size quote unquote cereal bowl will fit about three or four servings of cereal. Okay. Depending on the cereal, it is either three-fourths of a cup for a serving or one cup for a serving. Have you ever tried to just pour out three-fourths of a cup of cereal? It is like a measly amount in the bottom of a bowl. And most people fill their bowl up entirely before they put milk in it to have their cereal with their orange juice. Okay. So let's say we have some sort of cereal like a honey nut Cheerio or a honey bunches of oats or a raisin bran or something that we think is quote unquote healthy. Now, obviously, none of these cereals are healthy for you, but I'm using this as an example so you can understand what's happening in your body in response to a meal like that. So if you eat the big bowl of cereal, which has 40, 50 grams of carbohydrates in it, undoubtedly, maybe 60, depending on how much cereal you had. And then you drink that glass of orange juice, which by the way, a glass of orange juice, if you drink eight ounces of orange juice, you are getting more sugar into your body than wait for it. Drinking eight ounces of Coca-Cola. I know it's insane. People think orange juice is healthy. And I'm not saying oranges aren't healthy. I think citrus fruits are fantastic. But when you remove all the fiber out of it and you drink the juice, it really does act like a sugar bomb in your system. Okay. So if you have this cereal and you have the orange juice and you have your toast, you may be having, let's call it 100 grams of carbohydrates in that meal, which is a lot. Let me tell you, that is a lot. So in response to that meal, which has let's call it 100 grams of carbohydrates, it has many, many, many teaspoons of sugar. So those carbohydrates in that meal convert into sugar in your body. They convert into like a pile. Picture just a pile of white sugar, and that's how many teaspoons of sugar is in that meal. So when you consume that many teaspoons of sugar, your pancreas has to respond by producing a hormone called insulin. And this is where we get into the topic of today, which is called insulin resistance. So let's say you have that cereal and your pancreas is like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, we have to release a bunch of insulin because now we have to clean all of that sugar out of the blood. Your body is very intelligent and your body is constantly trying to prevent you from getting so much insulin resistance that you get type 2 diabetes. In fact, your body doesn't want you to have insulin resistance at all, you guys. In a perfect world, your body would be very insulin sensitive, meaning that your body would be sensitive to the response of insulin because the insulin signal isn't coming out of your pancreas many, many times a day and in huge, huge pores of insulin coming out of your pancreas. So as your body does that time over time, think about when we were little and we were eating our cereal every single morning and our orange juice, et cetera. And then we'd go to lunch and we'd have a ton of bread on our sandwich, and then we'd have pretzels and other things for a snack, and then we'd have pasta for dinner. This was creating a condition in our body that was causing us to release a ton of insulin out of our pancreas, meal over meal over meal over meal, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And eventually, when you do that and do that and do that over and over, especially for years on end, your body gets tired of having to receive the input of insulin. It gets resistant to it. I like to describe insulin resistance as everyone's heard the story of the boy who cried wolf. It's like, oh my gosh, there's a wolf, there's a wolf, right? And after weeks and months or years of that, eventually people are like, come on, dude, this can't be really happening still. There can't be a wolf yet again. You are using this too often and we're tired of listening to you. And now we're tuning you out. Another way to think about it, for those of you who remember the peanuts cartoon, is just like the Charlie Brown teacher. It's like he would tune out the teacher. So all he would hear is that is what your body does when insulin continues to come out of your pancreas all the time. Okay. And eventually the condition that develops in the body after years of insulin resistance is a condition called type 2 diabetes. So that is really what insulin resistance is in a nutshell. Now, I'm not going into a really detailed scientific explanation of it, but I just want you to think about that every time you have a heavy carbohydrate meal, that you are releasing a ton of insulin into the body that the body then has to deal with. And most importantly, what insulin's job is, because it's trying to clean the sugar out of your blood or it is cleaning the sugar out of your blood, it has to put that sugar somewhere. Okay. I say all of the time in every single program I create, in every single teaching that I give when I talk about this, I say, my, I wish that insulin was so magical that when it came out of the body, it could just evaporate all of that sugar into thin air. Wouldn't that be so cool if insulin was that powerful? But it can't do that. It actually has to store that sugar somewhere. So the first place that that sugar gets stored is in the liver, but the liver doesn't have a huge capacity for storage. And remember when I said that pancreas and liver are always talking to each other? This is the primary reason why. It's because the pancreas secretes insulin. The insulin has to talk to the liver and say, I'm gonna put a bunch of this sugar in here so that the person can get that sugar out of the liver for later storage. When it goes into the liver for storage, it gets stored, glucose gets stored as something called glycogen. So once the liver gets full, which by the way, you guys, the storage capacity for the liver for sugar or for stored sugar, which is glycogen, is not that high. Then the next place is in our skeletal muscle. So I always say one of the best ways to reverse insulin resistance in the body, one of the best ways to become more insulin sensitive is to build that gorgeous lean muscle tissue on your body, to strength train, to strength train intensely, to strength train in a way that allows you to do progressive overload. So you're actually building lean muscle tissue, especially for those of you ladies in perimenopause, about to be in perimenopause or in menopause. Strength training is critical. And it lest you think that you can't build muscle after you're in menopause, I challenge that assumption. I challenge that belief that you have because it's simply not true. I could give you example after example of women building muscle in their 70s, in their 60s, even in their 80s. You can continue to build muscle as you age, but the primary way that you do that is that you have to be in a strength training program. So, quick sidebar plug because you guys know that strength training is one of my favorite pastimes. Discover Strength is finally opening in the Nashville area. It will be open on May 16th of 2026. So, at the time of this recording, we are not open yet. We are almost open. It's going to be in the Wedgewood Houston neighborhood. And over the next several years, my business partner and I in the Discover Strength business are going to open a lot of different locations around the Nashville area. And if you don't live in Nashville, and if you're somewhere else in the United States of America, there are Discover Strength locations popping up all over. There are locations in Colorado, in Arizona, in Texas, in Georgia, in Kansas, in Illinois, Minnesota, of course, where it started. There's Discover Strength coming to Boston. They just opened in Washington, DC. There are so many different places that you can get one of these workouts around the country. So if you are lucky enough to have a Discover Strength location near you, I want you to consider going in and trying your free introductory workout. I will put a link below this video to do that. And by the way, even if you don't have a Discover Strength location near you, we offer virtual training sessions. So regardless of where you live, you guys, I have clients in Mexico, in Sweden, in Hawaii, in California, in places all over the world who strength train with Discover Strength. So consider scheduling your free introductory workout by clicking the link below. Okay, back to the topic of insulin resistance. So what would be a way that we could prevent that insulin from coming out of the pancreas all the time that causes us to develop insulin resistance? And before I get to that, I just want to mention because I failed to do this when I got on my little sidebar about strength training, which you know I love, the first place that that glucose gets stored is in the liver. I already told you that that gets stored in the form of glycogen. The second place the glucose gets stored is in the muscle that also gets form stored in the form of glycogen. But once the liver is full, and again, the liver cannot take that much glucose, and once the skeletal muscle is full, and that skeletal muscle storage capacity for glucose, the storage form again is glycogen, is entirely dependent on how much muscle you have. So if you're a woman that only has 80, 85, 90, 95 pounds of lean tissue on her body, I can tell you that you don't have that much storage capacity for carbohydrate. You are more insulin resistant because you don't have enough muscle on your body. I want your muscle to get over that 100 pound mark, 105 pound mark, maybe even 110 pound mark. I, depending on my bod pod, my dexascan, et cetera, my lean muscle tissue is somewhere typically between 105 pounds and 115 pounds of the muscle tissue on my body. And if I recall correctly, I'm quoting numbers for my bod pod, which may mean it would include some of the water weight and bone and everything else. But you can get your DEXA scan, which tells you your lean mass, your skeletal fat-free mass versus your visceral fat versus your body fat. And I can't impart upon you enough how important it is to get those metrics, especially if you're a woman about to enter perimenopause in perimenopause or in menopause. Okay, so get your DEXA scan. So after the glucose gets stored as glycogen in the liver or glycogen in the skeletal muscle, then once those two storage containers are full, guess what, ladies? This is how we put on body fat. So all of that excess cereal and orange juice and pasta and sweet potato and quinoa and rice and banana and all of the things, whether it's good, bad, or otherwise, and I don't even like the terms good and bad, things just are, but all of the different foods that we eat that are so carbohydrate laden come onto our body in a storage capacity. And that goes into our fat cells. And while glucose is called glycogen in the liver and it's called glycogen in the skeletal muscle, once it comes into our fat cells, the storage form of glucose in our fat cells turns into something called a triglyceride. And everyone has seen triglycerides on their blood work. My goal is for you to have triglycerides that are 75 or less. Western medicine would tell you 150. That's still too high. In the functional holistic medicine space, we say 75 or less. And that requires you to be very intentional about how you eat and how you move your body. And again, one of the best ways to reverse insulin resistance is to strength train. It will bring your triglycerides number down, obviously, in accordance with different lifestyle factors like what you consume. So going back to our insulin resistance picture, if we put on all of this excess body fat and all of that glucose gets stored as a triglyceride, it's almost, I don't want to say inaccessible to our body, but we can get into a state of extreme metabolic dysfunction where our body becomes really ignorant to the fact that we have all of this excess calories on our body in the form of body fat. Let's say you're someone who's 40% body fat or 45% body fat or 38% body fat or 35% body fat or over 50% body fat. And I work with clients like this all the time. What we need to do is we need to retrain the body to remember, and I say remember intentionally, to remember that it has all of this stored energy in the fat cells so that we can mobilize it and use it for fuel instead of just continuing to be this storage machine. And as we mobilize that stored triglyceride in the fat cells to be utilized for a substrate for fuel, the body starts to metabolically heal. The body becomes more metabolically healthy. The body reverses the insulin resistance and truly allows the body to become more insulin sensitive, which is of course the goal. So, how are we gonna do that? How are we gonna take a body that is very insulin resistant because, and this would be some of the things that you could look for in terms of if you're insulin resistant, it's things like, oh, I have blood sugar dysregulation, which means I have to go, I can't go rather more than two or three hours without even eating a snack. Like I have to eat something because I feel lightheaded or I feel dizzy or I feel like I'm gonna faint or I just feel hangry or I feel irritable. I need to at least have something. That tells me you're on a blood sugar roller coaster, and that's a really good indication that you probably have some amount of insulin resistance. If you're someone who has eaten a lot of excess carbohydrate over your lifetime, chances are that when you get into your 30s and 40s, unless you've been engaged in really intense activity, unless you are very fit because of strength training or running or other high activity, then chances are you have a fair amount of insulin resistance. If you're someone who has developed high blood pressure, high blood pressure is a fantastic sign or consequence of insulin resistance. If you're someone who has, when you get your cholesterol panel, okay, and you have low HDL, HDL is our good cholesterol. If your HDL is low, that is a sign that you could potentially have insulin resistance. So that's something else that you would look for. Of course, just like I already mentioned, if your triglycerides are high, chances are that you're insulin resistant because you have been storing all of that excess sugar in your fat tissue, in addition to your liver and in addition to your skeletal muscle. Other signs that people wouldn't think about, in addition to the fact, of course, that elevated blood sugar would be something, is if you have chronic constipation, that can be a sign of insulin resistance, which is wild. And I think one of the most interesting signs that shows up on the body is changes in your skin. So when you get pretty insulin resistant, you it will show up. And I'm purposely like putting my fingers on my neck here because you will get discoloration in your neck. A lot of people talk about with women like this condition called melasma, which you could get from, you know, being on the birth control pill. Some people get melasma from that or other things, but you might get dark patches around your neck or on your face or in your armpits, dark patches there, or even more so, when you get even more insulin resistant, it shows up as skin tags. So if you get skin tags around your neck, if you get skin tags in your armpits, if you get skin tags, those are telltale signs that you have insulin resistance that it have developed in your body. And it's really, really important that you do something about it. Now, I always tell my clients, what should they look for on their blood work to make sure that they know whether it have insulin resistance? And I really want to encourage you to not only get your fasting glucose, because your glucose is always gonna be on your blood work. It comes on a standard either. I can't remember if the glucose comes on the standard CMP, which is the cardiometabolic panel. I think that's what it comes in, not on the lipid panel. I'm pretty sure the glucose is on the standard cardiometabolic panel. But regardless, glucose is always on your blood work. What is not on your blood work, unless you specifically request it, because don't get me started on my soapbox about the fact that Western medicine keeps us in sick care, not in healthcare, but you don't get fasting insulin. So really ask your doctor, say, I need to see what my fasting insulin is. And I want your fasting insulin, by the way, guys, five or less. Lots of people are in the teens. Some people are in the 20s or higher. We want your fasting insulin to be five or less. So it's really important that you look at that marker. Your glucose will sit in the 80s, sit in the low 90s, sit in the mid 90s, sit in the high 90s for years until it slowly creeps up over 100. And then the doctor looks at you and goes, Oh, your glucose has gotten so high. I think you have type 2 diabetes. And now we need to put you on some sort of medication. But if they had been tracking your fasting insulin for years leading up to that, they would have discovered, wow, you're developing some pretty serious insulin resistance, even though it's not showing up on your glucose yet. And so we really need to engage in practices like reducing the amount of carbohydrates you're consuming, engaging in a strength training program, not being so sedentary, making sure you're walk 10,000 or plus steps per day to clear that insulin out of your blood. But keep in mind that insulin, because it's being released from the pancreas, and I think I just said insulin out of your blood. What I really mean is clearing the sugar out of your blood. Keep in mind because insulin's job is to clean sugar out of the blood, that one of the ways to minimize the insulin coming out of the pancreas is to just not eat so many things that have sugar. Hello, ding, ding, ding, ding, right? We eat less carbohydrate. So I know it's annoying to hear, but ladies, when you get into perimenopause and menopause, you become more insulin resistant. And it's like the worst trick in the universe that happens to us, but we just become more insulin resistant. Now, this is because of a confluence of factors that are all happening at the same time. It's not like the diagnosis of insulin resistance comes concurrently with a you're in perimenopause, therefore you are insulin resistant. It's the fact that perimenopause happens to women around the same time in terms of their age where sarcopenia has started to develop. They are experiencing for the first time in their life age-related muscle wasting. And then if they're not strength training, it's getting even worse. And then if they're not eating low carb, the carbohydrate, their body isn't able to buffer the carbohydrate as well. And then they're also usually at a stage in life where they either have little kids or somewhat bigger kids, or their job is expanding, or they're at the height of their career and all of that is causing a lot of stress in their life. And guess what, you guys? Stress also drives your insulin to go up. So one of the craziest things that I learned in nutritional therapy school, which I was like, wait, this is just not fair, is when our cortisol goes up. So when our adrenal glands that are two little glands that sit atop your kidneys in your low back, when those glands release cortisol, which is your stress hormone, that release of cortisol causes your pancreas to release insulin. You don't even have to be eating anything. Okay. And here's what's crazy is that I've had clients test this. Now notice I'm always wearing a continuous glucose monitor. I like to show that because I think a CGM, I'm gonna put a link below this video for the one that I recommend, which is called Stello. I apologize that I don't have a discount code for you. I do need to work on that. But I like Stello because it integrates with my Aura ring. So it really shows me, not only just in the Stello app on my phone, but also with my Aura ring, sort of what other things are correlated. And one of the things I found fascinating is when I have some sort of a spike in my blood sugar per my CGM. Now it could have been because I ate something that had a lot of carbohydrate in it. It could have been that I was testing something out, like my sourdough bread experiment that I've done. And by the way, you guys, I'm just gonna tell you, I did this sourdough experiment again yesterday on purpose because I knew I was gonna be talking about this soon. And my blood sugar, this is one piece of sourdough. Okay, and I did it at the end of the meal and I walked the dogs after. It went up over 150, my blood sugar. So I am so done hearing people say sourdough is the answer. Sourdough isn't the same as regular bread. Yes, sourdough is fermented in a way, but it can still spike the living shit out of your blood sugar. I'm sorry. It can. And so we really need to be careful with the sourdough bread that we're consuming or any bread for that matter. What I recommend instead, and I've talked about this in prior podcasts, I'm gonna put a photo right here because I love it, is base culture sourdough bread. You can get your bread fix, you guys. This is frozen bread in the freezer section at the grocery store. I buy it at Whole Foods. And when you toast two pieces of that and put butter on it and Redmond's real salt, literally make sure no one is around you and bothering you because you're gonna be so happy enjoying that toast that tastes better than real sourdough, I think. So you can have that because it's a lower carbohydrate bread that's made from all real food that it's not going to spike your blood sugar. Okay. So we become more insulin resistant at this phase in this perimenopausal phase, which means we really have to dial in what we're doing. So, what do I want you to do? I want you to consume less carbohydrate. Okay. I help clients in my one-on-one coaching and in my courses with this all the time. So, again, click on the links below to work with me more specifically so I can give you direct guidance as to how to do this that supports exactly your bioindividuality. I would love to support you in that. And then also, we want to make sure we're strength training. So we really want to build up that storage capacity for glycogen in our body so that less comes on as body fat. My desire, and I do this with my clients all the time, is I want you to convert the body fat that you have in your body to lean muscle tissue. We can convert it to lean muscle tissue, which makes your body go like this. Like if you want to look really good in the pool this summer, at the beach this summer, strength training is your best friend. You've got to start a strength training program. And then also we want to make sure that we're just really mindful of, like I mentioned, lowering our carbohydrates. But that includes the things we're drinking. That includes, you know, what we're eating and not eating. That includes if we're gonna eat some carbs, I want you to have them at the end of your meal. And then I want you to take a walk after. But again, I dial in more specifically with my clients in terms of how to support them the fat. And then finally, I want to make sure you are moving more. One of the fastest ways to become insulin resistant is to be sedentary. I always like to say that sitting is the new smoking, and it is true. And insulin resistance, I would say, is almost like getting a diagnosis of like you have all sorts of problems with your lungs before you get lung cancer. I mean, I think of insulin resistance when you get a type 2 diabetes diagnosis. Yes, it's reversible. Yes, you can correct it, but you just don't want to let it get that far. You can take so many different steps with your lifestyle and behaviors prior to ever becoming a type 2 diabetic that I really want you to focus on taking care of your carb consumption, moving your body, strength training well, and make sure we're getting that excessive weight. Another thing that I didn't mention that I'll do an entire different podcast about, and I have done this in the past. So check out the links in this podcast channel, is to really engage in some fasting practices to take off that excess body fat so that we can mobilize the fat that has been stored in your fat cells, in your adipose tissue, mobilize that to be used for fuel so that you can bring that insulin resistance down. I hope that you found this podcast episode helpful, educational. I hope it's helped caused you to learn something. If no other takeaways, I want you strength training, I want you walking at least 10,000 steps a day, I want you eating fewer carbohydrates. And when you go in for that blood work, make sure you ask your doctor to get your fasting insulin so that you can be more informed as to whether or not you're insulin resistant. I will see you on the next episode of the Energetically Efficient Show. And don't forget to check out the links below. If you learned something from this episode, I would love if you would like it and share it with a friend. Bye bye.