by Amanda Malachesky | Jul 30, 2018 | Chronic Illness, Functional Nutrition, Inflammation, Nutrition, Stress
Please note: This post contains affiliate links. Should you purchase something using these links, I get a small commission, at no increased cost to you. Affiliate links are one thing that allow me to continue to produce high quality content.
Blood sugar imbalance is one of the biggest American public health epidemics of our time. According to the CDC, approximately 10 % of Americans have Type 2, or adult onset diabetes. Even worse, 33% have pre-diabetes, and most of them aren’t aware that they are pre-diabetic.
Diabetes is caused by excess sugars or glucose in your blood. Normally, when our blood sugar is too high, our pancreas produces more insulin, which helps the sugars enter body cells.
When the body can’t produce enough insulin, or can’t use insulin as well as it should, this is called diabetes and insulin resistance. A diabetes diagnosis is made when your body can no longer control blood sugar in a normal range without intervention.
But blood sugar handling occurs on a spectrum. There is a range of normal blood sugar levels. Pre-diabetes means that your circulating blood sugar is a little higher than normal, and that your blood sugar is trending higher than normal, but that it hasn’t yet reached diabetes levels.
The excess circulating blood sugar in pre-diabetes and diabetes leads to a suite of health problems including cardiovascular disease, obesity, vision problems, peripheral nerve pain and degeneration, and kidney disease. There is also a growing correlation between blood sugar imbalance and Alzheimer’s Disease and cognitive decline.
But although Type 2 Diabetes is one of the most common chronic illnesses, it’s also one of the most possible-to-treat chronic illnesses with diet and lifestyle modifications. Though the changes can feel challenging if you’re used to eating and living a certain way, you CAN often reverse Type 2 diabetes with diet and lifestyle changes.
And even if you don’t have diabetes or pre-diabetes, it’s important for you to keep reading, too. Even if your body is handling your sugars just fine for the time being, excess sugars in the body promote more generalized inflammation. This inflammation has a role in many chronic diseases, not just diabetes.
Here is what you need to know to bring your blood sugar into balance, without medication.
How to Balance Blood Sugar
Balancing sugars is one of the first steps of getting a handle on chronic illness, no matter your diagnosis. And even if your health challenge isn’t a diagnosis, balancing your blood sugar is a foundational practice. Keeping your sugars balanced helps support the health of your adrenal glands, manages your weight, keeps your brain clear, and helps keep your moods stable.
Excess circulating blood sugar that can’t get into your cells leads to inflammation. It increases inflammatory cytokines, and also causes oxidized fats to damage your arteries. In plain speak, that means you may gain body fat (especially around your middle), and experience increased pain, declining brain function, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
There is no debate: keeping blood sugar balanced throughout the day using diet is both doable and is an effective way to promote health.
From a Functional Nutrition perspective, the first question to explore and answer is: What foods are elevating your blood sugar too high?
The common American diet is full of foods that can aggravate blood sugars. Added sugars in all manner of packaged foods are a problem, but processed carbs, starchy vegetables, and fruits can also be culprits. Even a healthy, therapeutic diet can have foods that elevate sugars inappropriately.
The key is discovering which specific foods are problematic for YOUR unique body. Tracking food intake alongside blood sugar readings taken with an at-home glucometer is the best, most specific way to identify your blood sugar triggers.
How to Track Blood Sugar
Tracking your blood sugar requires using a glucometer, or sugar meter. You can buy one online or at your local drugstore. Make sure to buy test strips along with your meter. If you are a diagnosed diabetic, insurance will usually pay for your meter and test strips, but the cost isn’t too prohibitive to buy out of pocket.
Grab a sheet of paper or an online tracking app, and take note of what you ate and when during the day.
You’ll want to take your blood sugar at several intervals through the day. Add these values onto your food log.
- Immediately after waking, first thing in the morning (functional range: 78-88 mg/dL)
- 40 minutes after breakfast (functional range: <135 mg/dL)
- 40 minutes after lunch (functional range: <135 mg/dL)
- 20 minutes before dinner (functional range, if >2 hours since last food: 78-88 mg/dL)
- Just before bed (functional range, if > 2 hours since last food: 78-88 mg/dL)
If you find values above these ranges, it’s time to evaluate what you had for your previous meal. Were there ingredients or products with added sugar? Were there foods with a high glycemic index, like breads, tortillas, pasta, crackers, or baked goods? Even white or sweet, white rice, winter squash, legumes, grains, or beets and carrots could be triggers.
Certain fruits or fruit juices could also be a problem, but will likely cause a delayed elevation of blood sugars, because the fructose must first processed in the liver before being broken down into glucose. Dried fruit can be a particularly strong trigger, as it is a concentrated food and it’s easy to overdo it.
Alcohol and caffeine can also be blood sugar destabilizers. Drinking alcohol in the afternoon and evening may contribute to elevated waking sugars. Caffeine may lead to blood sugar problems near lunchtime if you drink coffee first thing in the morning.
The triggers will likely be different for everyone. To manage your sugars well, you need to get curious and become a detective. If you feel like you’ve identified a blood sugar trigger, remove it for a week and keep tracking your sugars.
Do your numbers stabilize? Or are they still elevated? If they’re still elevated, get curious about what OTHER foods might be triggers. Do removal trials until you identify the culprit(s).
Common blood sugar triggers include:
- Bread, pasta, or tortillas
- Chips, pretzels, and other snack foods
- Baked goods, like cake, cookies, pastries, pie, etc.
- Boxed cereal
- Potatoes (plain, or French fries, potato chips, etc.)
- Fruit juice
- Dried fruit
- Even healthy foods like grains, legumes, or starchy veggies could cause a problem for some people.
Lifestyle Can Affect Blood Sugar
Lifestyle choices, including when we eat, how much we sleep, and how we manage our stress can affect our blood sugar.
Two hormones, leptin and grehlin, are responsible for signaling our appetite and turning it off. Grehlin is produced in the stomach, intestines, and kidneys, and tells us we’re hungry.
When we don’t get enough sleep, our grehlin output increases, which increases our appetite. Fructose (fruit sugar) consumption will also increase grehlin, and therefore appetite. So you can see a self-reinforcing pattern developing here: don’t sleep enough —> increased grehlin —> increased appetite —> eat not great food choices, including sweets or drinks with high fructose corn syrup —> increased grehlin —> repeat… you get the idea. This pattern increases the likelihood of overeating, reaching for quick energy foods like sodas, caffeine, and treats that elevate blood sugar.
Conversely, when our body determines we’ve eaten enough, it releases leptin, which tells us to stop eating. But your cells can become leptin resistant and stop responding to the signals.
Guess what encourages leptin resistance? Fructose, including fruit juice, corn syrup, and agave syrup.
In this indirect way, lack of quality sleep can drive us to have an increased appetite, and can encourage poor food choices. Do you ever notice you have a bottomless pit of hunger when you didn’t sleep well the night before?
One simple way to help prevent this pattern from starting is to get to bed earlier, ideally well before midnight.
Stress and Blood Sugar
When we experience stress, our body mobilizes resources to meet that threat to our well-being. The “fight or flight” response tells the body, “it’s time for action”. To allow this response, the body releases stored energy, and elevates blood sugar.
We want this to happen if we are being chased by a mountain lion. This is the reason average sized people are able to lift a car off of their trapped child, or do seemingly superhuman feats when their life is threatened.
But when our body is experiencing this pattern many times daily, in response to stressors both big and small, this can have a significant effect on blood sugar. It can lead to highs and then lows.
Successfully managing stress, whether it’s from your boss, your kids, your commute, or your financial situation, is absolutely essential for balancing blood sugar. Inviting stress relief practices, such as meditation, mindfulness, walking in nature, spending time with friends, or doing things we enjoy can help us not only feel better, but improve our actual health data and statistics.
No matter your health challenge or diagnosis, making sure your blood sugar is in balance is a key part to healing or maintaining your good health.
When you are ready for help understanding which foods are blood sugar triggers, what to do with your blood sugar readings, or how to successfully manage your blood sugar with diet and lifestyle changes, please schedule a free Assessment Session with me to find out how I can help. You can also grab your free copy of Roadmap to Recovery: How to Move Beyond Your Symptoms and Create a Personalized Plan to Restore Your Health to learn more about how I would support you. I look forward to meeting you…
by Jen Briar-Bonpane | Jan 18, 2018 | Brain Health, Digestion, Inflammation, Stress, Symptoms
Are you stressed? Chances are, your stress is affecting your digestion. When we are in very stressful or chronically stressful situations, our fight-or-flight response gets activated. In order to preserve needed energy to deal with what the body perceives as a threat (this could be a toxic boss, experiencing racism, marital conflict, financial stressors, internal stressors like infections or inflammation, etc), our wise bodies slow digestion down and sometimes even bring digestion to a complete stop. This contributes to all kinds of symptoms. Stress and anxiety also make pre-existing gastrointestinal conditions worse.
Since most of our serotonin is made in the gut, digestion that is disrupted by stress will interfere with our supply of this feel-good neurotransmitter. Bring on the depression and anxiety.
What aspects of your life create stress? Not all stress is bad, of course. The stress we feel when working hard to complete a meaningful project on time or the stress we feel when preparing for long-awaited vacation are part of the landscape of life. Stress that goes on for long periods of time or stress resulting from major dysfunction or threats to our well-being is the kind that harms our digestion (and therefore our overall physical and mental health). Usually, we can’t eliminate or decrease these major stressors over night. In the meantime, here a 5 things you bring into your diet to buffer the damage while you make your plan to downsize your stress load.
5 Tips for Healthy Stress Eating
- Eat dark, leafy green veggies. Spinach, for example, is packed with folate which promotes the production of serotonin and dopamine … neurotransmitters that support calm and positive moods. Raw greens can be hard to digest if your gut is struggling so cooking your greens first is helpful. Massaging also works.. try this Kale Salad recipe for an easy dose of mood boosting goodness.
- Tryptophan-rich foods supply the amino acid needed to make serotonin and boost your mood. Turkey, pumpkin seeds, and organic pasture raised eggs are great sources of tryptophan
- Fermented foods boost the beneficial bacteria in your gut which can improve digestion, nutrient absorption, and decrease depression and anxiety. Try fermented vegetables (unpasteurized kim chee or sauerkraut are great), kefir or yogurt that are low in sugar(non-dairy forms like almond or coconut based varieties will be less inflammatory than those made from cow’s milk), and fermented drinks like kombucha or water kefir.
- Skip the sugar! Stress often triggers sugar cravings. Then we eat that sugar and begin the chemical process that leaves us craving more and more sugar. Stress and poor digestion can create fatigue and leave us grasping for the quick energy and temporary mood boost (a brief high that puts us into an addictive cycle) that sugar can produce. Though this might feel good for a few minutes, it is creating toxicity and gut damage that will make us feel worse in the long run. Consuming refined sugar also sets us up for a blood sugar roller coaster that directly results in irritability, depression, anxiety, and disrupted sleep.
- Stabilize your blood sugar. Skipping meals is one of the worst things we can do during times of stress. Eating 3 balances meals per day with lots of whole foods is crucial to keeping our blood sugar stable. Aim for some fiber, health fats, and protein in each meal and avoid processed food to support your gut, brain, and overall well-being. Keep healthy snacks like kale chips, pumpkin seeds, pistachios, avocado slices, flax-seed crackers, hummus, or coconut chips on hand in the event you get hungry between meals or have to work through lunch.
Lots more idea, recipes, and guidance for healing your digestion are available in our upcoming Gut Restore program.
by Jen Briar-Bonpane | Jan 17, 2018 | Digestion, Inflammation, Recipes, Stress
When you are under stress, healthy eating becomes more important than ever. Eating well when times are tough can help boost your mood, decrease anxiety, improve sleep, promote digestion, and minimize the damage stress does to your gut (and your brain, hormones, immune system).
Whole foods, especially dark leafy greens are superheroes when it comes to mood and digestion.
Give this easy massaged kale and apple dish a try.
MASSAGED KALE WITH APPLE
- 4 cups kale, thinly sliced
- 1 cup parsley, chopped
- 1 large lemon, juiced
- 1 avocado, chopped
- 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
- 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
- 1 large apple, chopped
- 1/4 cup carrots, shredded
Suggested toppings: pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, dried cranberries
Add kale, lemon juice, and sea salt to a bowl and massage well with clean hands. The kale should turn bright green and become softer (1-2 minutes). Add all other ingredients and toss.
Top with pumpkin seeds for that extra protein and tryptophan (for blood sugar stability and serotonin production) and dried cranberries if desired.
What healthy foods do you eat when you’re stressed?
by Amanda Malachesky | Jun 26, 2017 | Brain Health, Functional Medicine and Coaching, Functional Nutrition, Stress, Symptoms
As a practitioner, I really like to help my clients delve into the why behind their health problems, and to explore angles they may not have considered before. The four main pillars of the programs I create for clients are diet, exercise and movement, sleep, and stress.
Stress really wreaks havoc on our health in so many different ways, and it’s one of the foundational areas I help with. Stress can impact our sleep, decrease the function of our immune system, disrupt digestion, mess up our relationships, and leave us feeling anxious, tired, worn out, frazzled, and spent.
What I’ve also noticed, however, is that it can be SO difficult to let go of our habits and patterns that allow a stressful mindset to continue. But to move forward on our healing journeys, we must dial down the stress. This includes reducing or removing hidden infections, like parasites, viruses, or bacterial infections, environmental stresses like mold or toxins, negative people in our life, or dealing with hidden nutritional deficiencies. But it can also mean retraining and reframing our brain and how we respond to our daily life.
Here are some signs that you might need to work on training your brain for calm:
- Even when you are trying to relax, your brain remains busy, thinking about a million things.
- You have difficulty falling or staying asleep, because your mind is busy, or startles easily.
- You lose your temper easily, even from small inputs.
- You are plagued by memories or dreams of scary, traumatic, or stressful events.
- You regularly have negative thinking patterns, where you assume the worst about people, the future, or your current situation.
- You struggle with phobias or non-specific anxiety.
I want to share a few resources for you to explore if you are needing to retrain your brain for calm. Especially if you are a person who is carrying the burden of trauma in your past, I want you to know that there are ways to help your brain and body release those stored memories and process the pain attached to them. You will always have the memories, but it is possible to separate the emotional charge from them, so they don’t run your life anymore.
Emotional Freedom Technique
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), also called tapping, is a method of helping the brain to discharge stressful and traumatic events, and reach a state of resolution and peace. EFT was developed by Gary Craig, a Stanford-educated engineer. It has been particularly useful for those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but has also proven useful for managing pain, phobias, anxiety, illness, and many other conditions.
To use EFT, a person explores the roots of a difficult emotion and verbally expresses the situation in a particular way. The person then taps particular points on the body in a specific sequence while verbalizing a shortened version of the statement they created. It’s not clear exactly why it works, but I suspect that this method helps the brain reconnect the emotional impact of an event with the more analytical present-time mind, which allows the brain to process the experience and move on. I have seen this technique produce remarkable results for many of my clients.
Anyone can learn to do EFT for themselves by visiting the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) website www.emofree.com, and learning the method for free with a manual and/or videos. It doesn’t take long to learn, and can create a significant reduction in difficult emotions and trauma in a very short amount of time.
Eye Movement and Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy
EMDR therapy is an evidence-based type of psychotherapy, also commonly used to help with PTSD. Bilateral visual or aural stimulation is used to help the brain access it’s built-in methods for adapting to and processing trauma. It can help the person access painful or difficult memories, and then allows them to process them within a therapeutic environment.
EMDR therapy is available by seeing a therapist trained in the modality. To find a trained clinician, you can visit the EMDR Institute website. For further reading about EMDR, check out EMDR: The Breakthrough Eye Movement Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma by the founder of EMDR, Francine Shapiro, PhD.
Self-Hypnosis Recordings
I’m a fan of techniques and methods that my clients can use and access in their own home, at a time and place of their choosing. Self-hypnosis is a way to help the brain access a relaxed and suggestible state, and can double as not only stress relief, but retraining the mindset to a positive and healing state.
People with long-term chronic and complex illness can often become discouraged to the point where they believe they may never get well. This negative thinking pattern can become quite “sticky”, and can become a source of stress in and of itself. There are hundreds of self-hypnosis recordings out there. They are inexpensive, and focus on a wide array of issues, from insomnia, stress, specific illness, headaches, and even childbirth.
I like to suggest clients start with one or two recordings that they like, and consistently listen to them, while falling asleep, or any other time it is safe to do so. It can take some time to rewire the brain, so consistency here is key. As an example, I struggled with insomnia for several years, since my kids were born. I had trained myself to wake up to every little tiny sound at night, and could no longer sleep through the night. I tried a lot of solutions, including supplements, dietary changes, routine changes, and more, and nothing worked.
Last winter, I invested in a sleep hypnosis app, called Sleep Well by Surf City Apps, and began listening to it nightly. It took about 4 months, but slowly, I began to sleep deeply, fall asleep faster, and wake up feeling more refreshed. You can do this too! Get out there and find a recording that is relevant to you, and enjoy.
Meditation
No conversation about retraining the brain would be complete without mentioning meditation. Meditation is consciously focusing on your breathing and thinking patterns with the goal of calming the mind. Here are some of the many benefits of meditation:
- lowers blood pressure
- improves depression and anxiety
- increases self-awareness
- reduces chronic pain
- increases immune function
- improves sleep disturbances and fatigue
- improves gastrointestinal problems, such as IBS
- slows aging
- increases happiness
There are many meditation traditions, and ways to explore. Books, videos, recordings, and classes are all viable ways to access meditation and to give it a try. Here is one of my favorites, The Little Book of Mindfulness by Patricia Collard.
Many people imagine that meditation is a bunch of monks chanting in colorful robes, but it really is a practice of personal awareness that can be adapted to any lifestyle or spiritual tradition. Any activity at all can be an excuse to bring the mind to a meditative state, such as taking a walk, playing music, drinking your morning tea or coffee, or anything else that allows your mind to quiet itself.
I hope that this information is helpful for anyone suffering from a troubled mind.
How do you train your brain for calm? Comment below…
by Amanda Malachesky | Apr 14, 2017 | Brain Health, Functional Nutrition, Stress
Most of the clients that come through my doors have trouble sleeping. It’s one of the things I want to work really hard to help with right away, because sleep is so very important for restoring our health. How well we sleep affects our eating habits and metabolism (anyone out there trying to lose weight?), our moods, and our brain health and memory. Here are five reasons you may be having trouble sleeping, and how you can begin to help. Which ones speak to you?
1. Caffeine Consumption
A majority of my clients enjoy coffee and tea, and there is nothing inherently wrong with these beverages. In fact, they both contain food sources of antioxidants, which have a protective effect on our health. However, excessive caffeine consumption can definitely disrupt sleep in several ways. Of course the caffeine can keep you awake if you drink it too close to bedtime. What “too close” is varies greatly for people. For some, anything after first thing in the morning will keep them awake, while others can consume caffeine right up until bedtime without any perceived effect.
The other way that caffeine can influence your sleep is by its affect on blood sugar. For some people, the jolt of coffee really stimulates the body to produce energy. But with this stimulation, your body uses up your available blood sugar and can overshoot the mark, causing you to experience an energy slump later on in the morning or day. If you repeatedly reach for a caffeinated beverage to correct this problem, I hope you can visualize the roller coaster experience your body is riding to try to equalize your energy and blood sugar levels.
I generally recommend that you consume your caffeine before noon, and limit yourself to 1-2 cups of coffee or tea per day (not espresso!). Don’t forget that chocolate also contains caffeine, so you might want to rethink that flourless chocolate torte dessert after dinner.
2. Exercising Late in the Day
Exercise is an important part of any healthy lifestyle, but as with anything, too much of a good thing at the wrong time can cause trouble. Vigorous exercise, such as a cardio-type workout, is perceived by the body as a form of stress. In spite of the important cardiovascular effects, this stress elevates your levels of the hormone cortisol, which typically begins to decline after mid to late morning. If you exercise in the afternoon or evening, you may find that you have a difficult time falling asleep.
Aim to complete your exercise during the morning hours. The best for weight loss is on an empty stomach first thing in the morning, before you eat breakfast. An even better addition is to do your morning exercise outside in the daylight, as this helps reset your circadian rhythm, and can doubly help you feel more like sleeping when it’s time to go to bed.
3. Low Melatonin/Gut Infections
You may not be thinking about your melatonin levels, but being infected by hidden pathogens such as parasites, bacteria, or yeasts may have an impact on your ability to sleep well. There are several reasons this is so. Melatonin is a hormone that helps us feel sleepy. Some is produced by the pineal gland in the brain, but 70% of it is produced in the gastrointestinal system. When we have a pathogenic infection in the gut, one of the side effects of the infection can be a low level of melatonin. This can translate to more difficulty sleeping.
Gut infections also create elevated levels of cortisol, our stress hormone, which can also affect blood sugar levels. Cortisol is responsible for our circadian rhythm, and therefore has a lot to do with our wakefulness. Cortisol should be low at night when we are trying to sleep, but pathogenic infectious agents tend to create a rise in nighttime cortisol levels over normal, impacting our ability to go to sleep and stay asleep. If you suspect you may have a pathogenic infection, reach out to me or another practitioner who can help you explore this.
4. Staying Up Late (Even if We Sleep Longer in the Morning) and Not Getting Enough Sleep
Don’t lie, I know many of you burn your candle at both ends, and regularly stay up late. I used to be one of you! It’s not uncommon for people to go to bed at 11, 12 or even 1-2 am. I was guilty of this when my kids were little because I wanted just a little time to myself, and to catch up on things I couldn’t do while my kids were awake. I couldn’t have been more misguided about this.
Our brain needs to restore and repair itself while we sleep. For the best restorative effects, we need to spend time in REM sleep, dreaming. Because our sleep cycle is partially regulated by our cortisol rhythm, we naturally become sleepy in the middle evening, around 9 or 10 PM, and reach the point of lowest cortisol production in the middle of the night. We naturally begin to become progressively more wakeful later during the night.
When we push ourselves to stay up past that natural decline of cortisol in the evening, we get a second wind. Have you noticed this? Then we’re ready to stay up for a few more hours. But because of our cortisol rhythm, our deepest, most restorative REM sleep is available to us in the early hours of our sleep cycle, before midnight. Regularly going to bed before midnight generally leads to better overall sleep quality, and also helps increase the hours we are asleep.
You don’t have to look far for the benefits of getting enough quality sleep. People who sleep less than 6 hours per night are at an increased risk of infection, insulin resistance, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, and mood disorders. Particularly interesting is the connection between sleep and blood sugar, insulin regulation, and obesity. Short sleep is associated with increased levels of the hormone ghrelin, and decreased levels of the hormone leptin. These two changes together are associated with increased appetite, and decreased satiety. Have you noticed that when you don’t sleep well, you are more hungry the following day?
This all adds up to the following recommendations: aim for about 8 hours of sleep, with a bedtime before midnight, ideally around 10:00 pm.
5. Blue Light and Screen Time
Finally, I want to discuss the effect of blue light screens, for example televisions and computer or tablet monitors, on our sleep. So many of us watch shows and movies at night, or surf the web to wind down at the end of the day. The blue light coming out of the screen suppresses your sleep hormone, melatonin. The easiest way to prevent this effect is to put away the tablet, and turn off the TV 2 hours before you go to bed. Use that time to unwind in a deeper way and prepare your body for sleep, by connecting with your family, reading a book, stretching, taking a bath, or some other calming ritual to help you settle down for the night.
If you can’t prevent screen time before bed, there are a few workarounds to reduce the impact of the blue light. There are several apps available that shift your screen to a more orange hue. This one, called f.lux is free. Some iPads have a function in the settings called Night Shift, which does the same thing. You can also purchase orange glasses, to wear while you work.
I do hope these tips can help get you sleeping longer and more deeply, so you are feeling happy, well-rested, and ready for your day. Let us know in the comments below if any of these tips has helped you.
