Your Blood Sugar is Important
The Title Says It All…
Your blood sugar is important, and there are easy ways that you can monitor your blood sugar just like someone who is a diabetic would. You can also measure your blood ketone levels with a similar device.
The next question is: why would you want to monitor your blood sugar or ketones? If your blood sugar gets too high or too low, then you could be in trouble or just feel really unwell, and your blood ketone levels can influence your blood sugar levels.
In this article, I will be talking about why you need to be aware of your blood sugar, how you can become aware of it, and how to stabilize it.
First Things First
How does our blood sugar spike in the first place? Your answer can be found in what’s called the glycemic index. A high glycemic food will make your blood sugar spike very quickly, and a low glycemic food will cause it to raise slowly over time.
It is generally complex carbohydrates with lots of fiber that are low glycemic, and simple carbs especially refined carbs that tend to be very high on the glycemic index. This is because these refined carbohydrates and simple sugars like flour, fruit juice, soda, and any simple carbohydrate burns up like wild fire in our bodies.
This Article from Harvard University has a list of 100 foods and their glycemic index and glycemic load.
Insulin: A Key Hormone of Metabolism
Insulin is important as we can see in people who do not manage their diabetes well. Most people don’t realize that even if you don’t have diabetes, you could have very poor control over your blood sugar levels.
When insulin levels spike quickly, our body stores the extra energy as fat.
This means that the excess sugars can turn into fat before you could use all of the energy from the food your ate. This sucks because not only will you potentially gain weight, but you will also feel even more hungry later.
If your brain does not have a constant supply of fuel, then it will not function optimally.
Leptin: Second in Command
What happens when you eat a carbohydrate? When you eat a carb, your body releases insulin 20 minutes after you eat it. The raise in insulin triggers leptin which tells your brain and body that you are satisfied.
Most people know you can become insulin resistant. Few people know about leptin resistance and what that means for our health.
If you are leptin resistant, then your brain becomes numb to leptin, and you will always feel hungry no matter how much you eat throughout the day. Can anyone relate to this?
The Impact on Your Body
Besides causing weight gain, eating a diet full of high glycemic foods can do more than just make you gain weight. It can cause inflammation and pain, high levels of oxidative stress, brain fog, and even potentially cancer.
Cancer cells have 10 times as many glucose receptors as normal cells. They cannot use ketones from fat.
Prolonged stress on your body, even at just a cellular level, can be a contributing factor in a myriad of degenerative illnesses. Sharp rises and falls where you get a sugar high, and then a blood sugar crash can also add to this trap.
The Impact on Society
We are feeding kids soda, juice, fast food, fried food and so many other highly addictive foods that cause their blood sugar to skyrocket and crash, and cause oxidative stress.
This can put excess stress on the child’s pancreas, brain, heart, or even other major organs like the kidneys. Perhaps sugar on its own might not be able to cause a major rise obesity and its many other related complications.
The Sum of The Toxins are Worse than Its Parts
However, when you combine the sugar in everything with high fructose corn syrup, fried foods, food additives, and all of the other toxic chemicals out there then you can see why this is a health crisis.
Children out there are getting type 2 diabetes, becoming obese, and even getting heart disease at levels that were unheard of in our not-so-distant past. Type 2 Diabetes used to be called “adult onset diabetes” because it only happened in older people.
Scientists are now calling Alzheimer’s Disease “type 3 diabetes” because the right amount of glucose getting into your brain directly affects cognition, and can even create lasting damage if not properly managed.
The solution is simple. We just need to monitor and be aware of what we are eating most of the time.
There are also tools that you can use to monitor your levels like a glucometer. This way you see for yourself the impact that your eating habits and even stress can have on your blood sugar first hand.
You don’t have to be perfect, but it only takes 3 days for hormone receptors to change out at a cellular level, which is important when we talk about hormone-resistance. If you are insulin or leptin resistant, then you may take a little longer to shift that resistance, but a healthy diet can take you there.
Having a hormone resistance is like having a drug tolerance. You require more of the same hormone to have the same effect or worse, it starts to lose all of it’s effect. It can take longer than 3 days for this tolerance to change.
If you shift your diet to a low glycemic or low carb way of eating with lots of fiber, then you can shift your tolerance for insulin and leptin, and then your blood sugar will be much more stable.
It may take a few weeks or months depending on how off it was. You can use a glucometer for tracking your progress.
Other Uses for Glucometer and Blood Ketone Meter
You can use a glucometer to see if your brain is undernourished or overloaded with blood glucose. Also raising ketone levels in our blood can lower our blood sugar levels and also help to stabilize them over time.
Fats that easily convert into ketones like coconut oil or MCT oil can help with this stabilization. Also, as you start to get more calories from fats, then you won’t be having as much glucose to spike your blood sugar in the first place.
The Best Ways To Build Up and Monitor Ketones
By using exogenous ketones, MCT oil, intermittent fasting, and a therapeutic ketogenic diet, we can dramatically raise our blood ketone levels, and also start to stabilize our blood sugar levels even more.
We can use the meters to track our levels and watch our progress with data.
This is The Mos Accurate Divice to Monitor Blood Sugar AND Ketones
My Favorite Glucometer
This glucometer only cost about $10. It works very well, is easy to use, and the test strips are only about 25 cents each.
Further Education & Resources
If you feel like you still need more help than this managing your blood sugar than I highly recommend checking out the course about blood sugar from functional nutritionist Andrea Nakayama called “Sweet Tooth, Bitter Truth”.
It will give you all the tips and tricks you need to gain complete mastery of your blood sugar and thus your ability to fuel your brain consistently throughout the day. Click the image below to learn more about the course.
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