Dawn Phenomenon: High Fasting Blood Sugar Levels On Keto & IF

Dawn phenomenon also known as the dawn effect is when your blood sugar rises in the morning but why does it do that and what's the mechanism we're going to talk about that and we're also going to explain why diabetics and people with insulin resistance tend to have a greater response and what that means we're also going to cover what everyone is asking about why does it seem to act really crazy and inexplicable and super stubborn when I do a keto or a fasting diet if you look this up on the internet you try to get answers there won't really be any good answers because they'll explain what it is and show you that it happens but they won't explain why or why it seems to act strange so in this video we're gonna make it absolutely crystal clear so that you know when you're doing a low carb diet why it's doing what it's doing coming right up I probably had a hundred people ask me why is my glucose so high in the morning why is my fasting glucose higher than my after-meal glucose I'm eating a low-carb diet I've been on keto for such-and-such a period of time why isn't it coming down and some people have heard about the dawn effect but they don't understand it and some people just know that their blood sugar is high even though it's supposed to be lower so we're gonna talk about that and make it totally clear for you dawn phenomenon is also known as WHGMS and that stands for worry about my high glucose in the morning syndrome no sorry that's not really a thing I just made that up but based on the number of people asking it's it's a real thing and everything seems to be a syndrome these days right well what's going on here when you're sleeping you don't need a whole lot of energy cuz you're just kind of chillin there in bed but during the night your blood sugar drops because you're not eating anything and then there is a counter mechanism from various hormones and they're basically cortisol glucagon adrenaline and human growth hormone that they slowly rise through the night to compensate for the fact that you're not eating so you can maintain stable blood sugar levels and then what happens is right before you're about to wake up your body says hey better get you ready for the day better get you a little jolt so that you can wake up and be bright-eyed and bushy tail and and ready to go about things so your blood sugar goes kind of steady and then the cortisol rises and then you have a spike right before you're about to wake up so your blood sugar is gonna rise a few points and this is called the dawn effect and in the normal person this rises a few points it's not a strange thing it happens it's supposed to happen it happens in every one in the world but in some people it may not be large enough to be really noticeable unless you just really measure carefully many many times but most people aren't going to measure the blood sugar while they're sleeping so they don't notice very much of this so just realize that it's normal the second thing is that if your insulin resistant now whenever you have a cortisol response and whenever you have any blood glucose increase whether it's from a hormonal effect or whether it's because you ate something your cells are resistant so you tend to have greater blood sugar responses okay blood sugar tends to go up more in the people who are insulin resistance whether it's a hormone or whether it's a meal so that's just as simple as that it's gonna be the normal response but it's going to look like it's a little bit larger because you are insulin resistant so the cells aren't going to soak up that increase as fast as if you were insulin sensitive we want to contrast this then with something called a Somogyi effect and that's different this happens to type 1 diabetics and why is it only type 1 diabetics because they can't produce any insulin on their own so they take their insulin they eat the day before they have a certain blood sugar level when when they go to bed and they have a certain amount of insulin and maybe they take a shot and maybe they have a pump but through the night very often the inn's that the glucose starts going down and if they didn't match their insulin and their food perfectly they can often get a very very low drop they can get very hypoglycemic in the middle of the night so then when when this natural, normal hormonal boost comes in to raise blood sugar again then there is no insulin to counteract it so they get this huge swing but it's because they first had insulin and then they ran out of insulin so now when the body starts producing glucose there is nothing to counteract that glucose spike and they wake up with a huge spike of glucose so this is a different thing you can improve it by stabilizing blood sugar and becoming more reliant on fat and ketones but that's a different story but I just wanted to mention it so that you know about it because some people they throw out the dawn effect and the Somogyi effect as if it's the same thing but it's not So Somogyi is a type 1 diabetes thing and the dawn effect is something that happens to everybody people so far a lot of people are with me they say okay I get it it's called the dawn effect there's some hormones and yes I'm insulin resistant so the effect is going to be a little bit larger but I've done this now for 3-4 months and might wake up with a glucose of 120 and the weirdest thing is that it stays the same until I eat something it's like what's up with that it makes no sense and as a matter of fact it does but we really need to dig into the picture when you keep it simple but we're going to make it very clear so let's say that this is the normal non insulin resistant person and they do what most people do they eat bread and cereal and toast and orange juice and they do this and they get away with it for 20-30 years before they break their carbohydrate tolerance so the red line here is their nighttime glucose so the body is healthy it's balanced it's maintaining a glucose and then right before they're about to wake up they have their cortisol spiked and then the blood sugar rises a few points so let's say the green line here is about 80 and then the orange line is about a hundred and the blue line is about 120 so we start about 85 90 and then we wake up and it might be 95 or a hundred or something and then we eat a breakfast and we've listened to the official guidelines of what's healthy for you you should eat many meals you should eat 300 grams of carbs per day and breakfast is the most important meal because you got to really load up on the blood sugar so that you make it through till almost to lunch or at least till the morning snack we follow the guidelines then we have some toast with a jam and we have some milk with cereal and we have orange juice and some sugar in the coffee so we get about a hundred and twenty grams of carbs in in our systems at that point but let's think about what's happening and when people think about blood sugar they very often they have no idea how much blood sugar is we talk about the levels but realize that a hundred milligrams of blood sugar for the per deciliter for the average person is only five grams it is a flat little teaspoon of sugar that's all the sugar that you have in your system so you're sleeping all the way through the night and you have one teaspoon of sugar circulating and as you burn up a few little grains of sugar so to speak then your liver makes a few more grains and you maintain this level so when you wake up and your blood sugar went from ninety to a hundred what really happened this cortisol put one half a gram of sugar into your blood you didn't eat anything yet there is no load of food or carbohydrate in your system your liver just made a half a gram of sugar and it put it directly into the bloodstream so now instead of four and a half grams you have five grams of sugar no big deal but then you just ate 120 grams of carbs that is going to be turn some of its already sugar it's going to start spiking it very very quickly here and some of it is starch and that's going to take another 10 15 20 minutes to break down and turn into sugar and the entire thing is going to be absorbed in a couple of hours so two hours is a hundred and twenty minutes 120 grams means one gram per minute or sixty grams per hour is going to get into a system into the bloodstream in a system that can hold five to six grams all right so that means that this is an emergency we got a handle one gram a minute for the next two hours in a system that uses sugar much much slower and that can only hold four five six grams at a time ideally in diabetics when it rises up to 200 well now they have 10 grams of sugar okay so the insulin produced is in response to the threat to the load to the anticipation because your body knows how much car you ate even when it's sitting in the stomach your body is really really smart and intelligent because when you put something in your mouth and you taste it your body knows what's in that food and it starts preparing the digestive response and the insulin responses and so forth so it knows we got an emergency we got a big job ahead of us and we got a process through a hundred and twenty grams of carbs in a system that can hold about five that takes a lot of insulin and the body is so amazing that it takes decades to break the system even when we abuse it to that degree for another visual illustration so this is roughly how much this is representing how much glucose was in your bloodstream and this is how much has to pass through the bloodstream in the next two hours that's a big deal okay so your body can handle it as long as it has some reserves as long as it's healthy as long as the cells haven't been totally clogged up then you can process through this but after 20 years you're increasing for every time you do this you increase your insulin resistance and you build up and eventually when your body can't keep up anymore when you broke it then you got type 2 diabetes after doing that whether you have diabetes or insulin resistance you're somewhere on that on that gradient now you decide hey I've learned a lot from these great YouTube videos so now I'm gonna do something about it so you go low carb high fat lchf you go keto you start doing intermittent fasting you do 18 6 you do 24 you do 6 36 and all eight 36 whatever all that good stuff but you're doing the low carb and the intermittent fasting and now you notice that you're waking up with blood glucose of a hundred and twenty and you have noticed that your a1c used to be 10 and now it's like 5.6 so it looks like you're making progress and you might have lost 30 50 pounds which is what a lot of people tell me so it seems like it's working that you're getting your a1c down you're getting your your weight down but you also heard that the fasting glucose for low carb diet is supposed to be around 80 or even 75 so what's up you've done it for three months and and you're wondering there's some wrong with me no there isn't so let's go back to this example and let's contrast it and talk this through through the night I don't know what your blood sugar is but let's assume that it's somewhere in the middle of this range it's sitting around a hundred and then you have these hormonal effect you get this dawn effect and now your blood sugar jumps 20 points so what does that mean again during the night you might have had four or five grams of blood sugar grams of sugar in the blood and then the hormones kick out another one to two grams so this is what we have to realize this is not a big deal it is two grams of sugar this is not an emergency this is not a big deal for the body it doesn't have to turn on all the alarms and ring the bells and start making a bunch of insulin because you made one or two grams of sugar so then you wake up and you have six grams of sugar in the blood and you don't have breakfast because you've learned about intermittent fasting so you add zero grams of sugar and you're thinking hey I didn't eat anything my blood sugar is supposed to come down but your body says hey no big deal I'm chilling I I have this totally under control if if it goes high or if you eat something I'll do something about it but this is not a big deal I'm backing off on the insulin because there's nothing really here to process all that happened was you added one to two grams of sugar all right so then you're fasting and then comes time for your meal and now you're doing the right thing you're eating a low-carb diet maybe keto let's say you're eating twice a day and you're keeping it at 20 grams of net carbs per day so this meal has 10 grams of carbs alright the body says hey I got something I've got a little bit of protein that's going to need a little insulin I got carbs I got lots of good fat to fuel me but there's no emergency but the body senses I got something the time to do something about this time to increase a little bit of insulin and now because you made some insulin your blood sugar comes down because you ate so this is a totally different animal than this guy because we're trained to think that blood sugar is always supposed to come up when we eat well if you understand this now then you'll see why that's not necessarily the case that the body behaves differently but it always behaves intelligent contrast this this these 10 grams because you eat protein and fat and vegetables and foods that are high in fiber high in fat they absorb very slowly so these 10 grams they have 3 4 5 hours to get out in the bloodstream so now we're talking two to three grams per hour and the body's is alright I'll make a little bit of insulin but it's not going to take much and that's why the blood sugar comes down and it it levels out again in this case it's an emergency because we go from this much glucose and we have to process through this much glucose in this case we had a little bit of more but it's no big deal and it's still no big deal when we eat because we just add that much more and we got basically all day to take care of it so why worry about it so this is why it's so important to understand the big picture everyone is freaking out about blood sugar the only treatment for insulin resistance and diabetes are drugs to lower blood sugar but that's not the problem look at all the other videos so that you understand what insulin resistance is and what treatments and metformin and insulin what that does that it doesn't solve the problem it perpetuates the problem and it pushes it further in the wrong direction if you do in the low carb and you're in this situation that stubborn blood sugar around 120 is a good thing that means you're doing the right thing your body is not in an alarm state it's chilling it doesn't have to work so hard so the big picture includes a1c and insulin you want to calculate your home iír and you want to understand that what you're after is not glucose don't worry about it what you're after is the long term insulin resistance you want to become insulin sensitive meaning that the cell gets into a place of balance where it starts wanting some food instead of being force-fed all the time if you like this we have lots of good videos on related topics you can learn everything that you need to know about how to lose weight get rid of diabetes and insulin resistance and get as healthy as possible and if you're new to the channel make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you can keep getting these nuggets of information and about how the body works so you can keep getting healthier and healthier and focus on the big picture not just the details thanks for watching see you next time

Channel: Dr. Sten Ekberg

Views: 279,100

Rating: 4.9450531 out of 5

Keywords: dawn phenomenon, dawn effect, what is dawn phenomenon, Fasting Blood Sugar, high blood sugar levels, fasting blood sugar levels, fasting blood sugar level, blood sugar is high in the morning, fasting blood sugar how many hours, morning blood sugar, how to lower morning blood sugar, somogyi effect vs dawn phenomenon, how to lower morning blood sugar without medication, morning blood sugar level chart, high blood sugar in the morning, blood sugar, diabetes, insulin resistance

Id: 2l80su1zCLc

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2019