278. [Listener Question] Carb Tracking to Lower Blood Sugar

Struggling to lower your blood sugar and manage weight? You’re not alone, and the solution might be simpler than you think—once you understand your data. In this episode, I dive into why tracking your food and blood sugar is important for managing insulin resistance and preventing type 2 diabetes. But how do you get started? I answer a listener’s question on the best apps for carb tracking, like Carb Manager and MyFitnessPal, and share insights on setting up your app for success.

The key to sustainable change? Understanding your numbers, from fasting glucose to hemoglobin A1C, and adjusting your diet accordingly. I explain how to build a personalized nutrition plan for three key goals: maintaining, preventing, or reversing insulin resistance—especially if you're over 50. I also discuss why simply eating less and moving more isn’t enough, and why embracing your health data is a game-changer.

If you’re tired of conflicting diet advice and want a step-by-step plan to optimize your health, this episode is for you. Tune in and take control of your blood sugar with clarity and confidence! Have questions? 

Send them in—we’ll answer them in a future episode! Tune in now!

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Resources From This Episode

>> Insulin Resistance Diet Blueprint - https://www.zivli.com/blueprint?el=podcast

>> Free Low Insulin Food Guide - https://www.zivli.com/ultimatefoodguide?el=podcast

>> Join the Zivli Program Waitlist - https://www.zivli.com/join?el=podcast

>> Test Your Insulin at Home - https://www.zivli.com/testing?el=podcast

Have a question? Email us at: support@zivli.com

Transcript

Morgan (00:18.062)
Hi, I'm Dr. Morgan Nolte, founder of Zivli. As a geriatric physical therapist, I saw the heartbreaking effects of insulin resistance. At Zivli, our mission is to help you prevent and reverse insulin resistance for long-term weight loss and disease prevention through a low insulin and inflammation lifestyle. Each week on this podcast, you'll learn simple, actionable tips to lose weight, keep it off, and get healthy. If you're ready to create a body and life you love,

you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Morgan (00:55.214)
Well, hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Reshape Your Health podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Morgan Nolte, and I'm excited that you're here with me today. I know that you have a lot of listening options and I'm really grateful that you choose to tune in to this podcast. Now today's gonna be a little bit different of an episode. I don't know if you have ever felt this way, like I just need to ask a question. I just need somebody who has been where I want to be.

or somebody with expertise that I don't have to answer my question. And we're really excited to be able to offer you that opportunity for free. So maybe you didn't know this or notice this yet, that our podcast hosting platform enabled the option to be able to receive questions from our listeners. So if you go into the description of each podcast episode, at least at the time of this recording, you're going to be able to see this little

have a question you want answered on the podcast, send us a text. And if you click on that, it is gonna open up a text and it comes directly to our email so that we can see what questions you want answered on the show. And this is, it's almost like a taste of being a Zivli member because Zivli members get access to our coaches portal so they can ask our team of coaches questions anytime. And I know personally that community is really important for change.

You need someone to ask questions to, you need people rooting you on. Change, you know, you have to do it for yourself, but you don't have to do it alone. So we would love to be there with you to support you as you work to change your lifestyle. And it's a really exciting time in Zivli right now, just because at the time of this recording, our new members just got access to the fuel module. So in the fuel module, we cover hydration and micronutrients and

carbohydrates and proteins and fats in depth. And we also encourage our members to track their food in some way, or form, right? Because some people, especially if they have a history of an eating disorder or they feel like they're not tech savvy at all or they're perfectionists and it just stresses them out too much to use like a food tracking app, then we at least like to see them use a food journal. And there's a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost is

Morgan (03:20.81)
Self-reflection and learning about yourself, learning about your behaviors is so important for your progress and your change. I think that there's a lot of people out there who are almost like afraid of food and they have a lot of apprehension about what to eat because they don't have the data to back up. Okay, yeah, eating this does not make me gain weight or eating this does not raise my blood sugar.

So when you have either data from a food log and a scale or a continuous glucose monitor, think it can actually take a lot of fear out of eating because you have good data to back up your choices. And you're not just like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping the scale goes down or hoping your blood sugar goes down at the next check. So from a mindset standpoint, cause I do like to coach on mindset in these little shorty episodes, don't be afraid of the data.

If you've been shying away from looking at the scale or from checking your blood work, or for even just like getting blood work done, I would really encourage you to embrace the data, recognize that understanding your nutrition, especially that gives you power. That really empowers you to continue to make healthy choices. So with that being said, submit your questions so that I can answer them on this podcast. And I'm going to answer my first one today.

This question is from Terry from Indiana. And she said, I need to lower my blood sugar and have started logging my food on an app to track my carbs. Is there any suggestions for carb tracking apps? I usually do better with more simple formats. Thank you. All right, Terry, thank you first for submitting this question. The app that we teach our Zivli members how to use is called Carb Manager. And...

The reason that I like this app is I believe it's pretty intuitive, simple to use, but for people who are not tech savvy, they might disagree with that. We also have members using MyFitnessPal, Chronometer. There's another one that I forget the name of, but like the Weight Watchers app would not be a good one because it doesn't track net carbs. It typically just does like points and calories.

Morgan (05:37.858)
So if you're gonna be tracking your carbohydrates, I would recommend CarbManager or MyFitnessPal. Those would be the two most popular that our members are using. The second thing to understand is that the app is only as good as what you put into the app, all right? So you're gonna get out of it what you put into it. And the first thing to think about is your setup. How are you setting up your app? And we've recently hosted a blood sugar bootcamp.

It was the third time that we've hosted a blood sugar bootcamp and every single time we revamped the content, we refined the content. And this last one was really, really good. So we decided to package up the three training videos and make them available to you. So there is a link in the description that is called the insulin resistance diet blueprint. This is perfect if you have excess weight to lose, if your blood sugars are running higher than you want.

And especially if you're over the age of 50, because the truth is that your hormones do change as you age, and especially after menopause, right? Everybody knows that. Everybody who has been through menopause can attest, yes, my hormones are changing. Yes, it is harder to lose weight. Yes, I have more belly fat. And the reason is because when you go through menopause, your estrogen declines, your inflammation, cortisol, and insulin levels rise.

A couple other hormones also go down like testosterone and human growth hormone. And this really creates the perfect storm for a decline in muscle mass and an increase in insulin resistance. And it's this insulin resistance that is the underlying cause of rising blood sugar levels and of stubborn weight and of belly fat. And so if you want to get rid of those things, you have to fix the insulin resistance. Just eating less and moving more won't work.

So it takes a very specific strategy for this stage in life. What worked in your 30s and 40s is not gonna work anymore. So I would highly encourage anybody listening who can resonate with that to go get the blueprint so that you can just get this step-by-step system to start optimizing your nutrition. But we also cover some mindset stuff in there as well. So it's a really great training series. I'd highly recommend it.

Morgan (07:51.98)
Now in that training series, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a taste. We talk about understanding your data because my nutrition recommendations for Terry would be different than somebody else writing in who maybe had normal blood sugar levels, but just wanted to lose some fat. I want you to understand your fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C. Your fasting glucose is just your blood sugar at one point in time.

And your hemoglobin A1C is kind of an average of your blood sugar over the last three months. Now, if either of those are elevated in the pre-diabetic range or the diabetic range, that's technically a diagnostic criteria to say you have pre-diabetes or type two diabetes. I'm gonna go over those ranges. And if you have your paperwork or blood work, or you just have the numbers in your brain, this is the first step to determining what macronutrient ratio is best for you.

An optimal fasting glucose is going to be between 72 and 85 milligrams per deciliter. A normal fasting glucose is between 70 and 99. The pre-diabetic range is 100 to 125. And then diabetic range is 126 or higher for fasting glucose. I like to say eating nothing for at least eight hours, preferably closer to 12.

Now for hemoglobin A1C, the optimal range is actually 4.0 to 5.5%. The normal range allows for 4.0 up to 5.6%. The pre-diabetic range is 5.7 to 6.4%. And then the diabetic range is 6.5 % or higher. Once you know where you're at on this blood sugar scale, then you can understand what macronutrient ratios are going to be recommended for you.

Once you know your fasting glucose and or hemoglobin A1C level, you can place yourself in one of three camps. Camp number one is maintain. This is where I am. So for maintain, you're gonna want to get 30 % of your calories from protein, about 20 % of your calories from carbohydrates and 50 % of your calories from fats. So that's how I would recommend setting up that carb manager.

Morgan (10:11.008)
macros section because automatically it's going to be a keto preset. And a lot of people just don't want to be that tight with their carbohydrate consumption. The caveat here is if you're very active. So if you're regularly exercising, maybe you're doing some regular strength training or high intensity interval training, you can slightly adjust that carbohydrate intake higher and the fat intake lower. That way you have more carbohydrates to fuel those higher intensity workouts because

That's the fuel that your muscles need to perform at a high level at a high intensity. Otherwise, you're just going to feel like drained and exhausted and you're not going to perform very well in your workouts. So the next camp is prevent. So this would be for people with pre-diabetic blood sugar ranges and they're trying to prevent type two diabetes. For them, the protein amount is going to stay the same, 30 % of calories from protein.

And then 15 % of calories from carbohydrates and 55 % of calories from fat. So you can see, we're just gradually increasing the fat, reducing the carbs. And the reason is because fats have the lowest blood sugar and insulin response out of all three of those macronutrients and carbohydrates have the highest, right? So it makes sense. If you have high blood sugar, why would we add fuel to the fire by eating more carbohydrates? That's the problem with a lot of plant-based diets is

Yeah, it's whole food, but it's still a lot of carbohydrates. And unfortunately, a lot of times it's low in protein. So people are trying to eat healthy because they're eating all these plants and they're unknowingly eating a lot of carbohydrates, keeping their blood sugar high, keeping their insulin high and making weight loss harder. The third camp is reverse. And this is for people who already have type two diabetes or are taking blood sugar lowering medication. So if you're hemoglobin A1C,

is in the pre-diabetic range or the healthy range, but you're taking a blood sugar medication to manipulate it into that range, I would still consider you in the reverse camp. And so reverse is going to be more of a ketogenic approach with 30 % of calories from protein, 10 % of calories from carbohydrates, and 60 % of calories from that. So I hope that that helps answer Terri's question on

Morgan (12:34.508)
what we would recommend for tracking carbohydrates, not just from the app standpoint, but also really recognizing it's important how you set up the app and then obviously being accountable with using the app to see the results. And we didn't talk about calories and everything today because, know, one step at a time, we do cover caloric needs in that insulin resistance diet blueprint.

and I would highly suggest that you get that. It's a really good use of your time. You can get through all three videos in less than 90 minutes. It's a really high value use of your time. And I promise it's gonna save you tons of hours Googling and trying to piecemeal all of this conflicting and confusing information together. Now, if you're already a Zivli member, everything that you need to know is already in the course material, but I know that people love supplemental or bonus information. So we have linked up those training videos

in the resources part of your Zivli library. So if you go to the resources product or the resources tab, you're going to be able to see those training videos ready for you if you ever do want to watch them. But again, we already do cover all of that information inside the Zivli course. So my action item for you today is to not fear the data and whether that is tracking your food on Carb Manager or MyFitnessPal.

or keeping a food diary, even if it's just for one day or three days or one week, I promise if you reflect on that data, you will gain new insight into your health habits that you didn't have before. And be sure to submit your questions by clicking that link in the description of the podcast episode to send us a text, and I'll talk with you at the same time, same place next week. Bye for now.

Morgan (14:37.806)
Thanks for listening to the Reshape Your Health podcast today. To learn more about Zibli, our online course and coaching program to reverse insulin resistance for long-term weight loss and disease prevention, check out our website at www.zibli.com. That's z-i-v-l-i.com. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a rating and review on your listening platform and share it with a friend.

I'll talk with you at the same time, same place next week. Bye for now.