Use These FOOD HACKS To Boost Energy, END CRAVINGS & Reduce Inflammation | Jessie Inchauspé

a lot of us when thinking about improving our health we are thinking about what foods we should be eating or avoiding very few of us are paying attention to how we should be eating and I know one of the hacks that you recommend to people is to think about the order in which you eat certain foods I wonder if you could explain to us why is food order so important absolutely and this is probably the easiest hack to start with because it doesn't require people to change as you said what they're eating so when you're faced with a meal the meal will have a very different impact on your blood sugar level also called your glucose level depending on the order in which you eat the constituents of that meal and the studies show that you can reduce the glucose Spike of your meal by up to 75 by just changing the order of the foods in it which means fewer Cravings less inflammation less inching towards diabetes Etc the correct order is vegetables first proteins and fats second and starches and sugars last and the main reason this is so effective is because vegetables contain fiber and fiber when it arrives first in your digestive system it has time to do something amazing to do sort of like Transformers Vibe fiber deploys itself onto the wall of your upper intestine forming a protective gooey mesh that stays there for a few hours that mesh then prevents your body from absorbing too much glucose too quickly from any of the food coming down afterwards so very simple place to start and for anybody listening at your next meal try this veggies first carbs last and see how you feel you might have a completely different experience of the rest of your day it's a it's a very simple tip and what I love about it is that it doesn't require anyone to change what they eat that's a tip that you can utilize whatever diet you follow whether you're a vegan whether you're a Paleo whatever you are you can use that yeah yeah it's really interesting I've been a father now for uh 12 12 and a half years and for several years one of the things I do with my kids if I'm feeding them dinner is I will actually do that right I will I remember with my daughter a few years ago I figured out that if I give her let's say the broccoli first yeah then the salmon and then the sweet potato wedges actually often she's so full she doesn't even eat that many of the sweet potato wedges but if you sow them all together the kids will automatically finish off those sweet potato wedges first and sometimes they'll leave the salmon often people will say that they'll say oh if I start with my veggies I actually end up eating fewer of the carbs at the end but while that's often a consequence that's not the goal yeah and that's not needed even if you eat the exact same meal same quantity same amount just by switching the order the food will have a vastly different impact on your body you know and you'll help your body process the meal in an easier fashion yeah very very practical now one of the things that's really drawn me to your work Jessie is the approach so that's a medical doctor what I've always tried to do with patients is to figure out or help them figure out what is the root cause of your symptoms don't get too sidetracked with the symptoms they're important but really trying to understand what's behind this what's driving this and I think one of the reasons I think you've blown up so quickly you have hit on something that is very very important by focusing on one metric blood sugar you're able to help people with all kinds of things yes weight loss their immune system function their hormones their energy their fatigue their sleep the skin their aging right all these kind of Downstream consequences simply from focusing on one thing yes right so so tell us a story how did that come about and when did you figure out that actually blood sugar and a stable blood sugar matters to all of us not just for those of us with type 2 diabetes yes yes or did when I was 19. before that I had a very you know healthy happy childhood no big issues physical or mental 19 years old I go on vacation I decide to jump off a waterfall with my friends spoiler alert it was not a good idea I break my back one of my vertebraes explodes I have intense surgery and I have a bunch of metal in my spine and physically I recover quite quickly because I was rather young but then mental health issues start popping up for me so anxiety depression feelings of being dissociated for myself not feeling in my body anymore just a lot of suffering and I remember so clearly I told my mom one day I was like Mom nothing matters more than health if you don't have your health it doesn't matter what job you have it doesn't matter what you're studying in school like you just can't live your life fully if your health is not okay and I was so broken I was just I didn't even want to live anymore I mean I was really not okay so I decided sort of out of this anguish to go figure out how my body worked and how to reconnect with it and how to heal and how to feel good and happy in the morning when I woke up so I went on a quest I put my big girl pants on and I went after the end of my undergrad in London at Kings I was studying mathematics I moved to the U.S to go study biochemistry in grad school did that was very interesting but still I had not figured out how to talk with my body I still felt a bit lost I felt like I didn't understand what to do to feel good then I moved to Silicon Valley to work in the field of genetics again fascinating topic but I learned that your DNA is actually not that predictive and you can't ask your DNA what you need to do in order to feel good in the morning it can tell you your risk of you know long-term disease but it's not great if you're trying to figure out today how do I feel better how do I avoid this fatigue this mental health problem but what happened was amazing while I was there in Silicon Valley I had the opportunity to try on a continuous glucose monitor which I know you're wearing one on your arm right now and doing that completely transformed things for me so that little device is measuring in real time your blood sugar level your glucose level and sending that data to your phone and it's a device that was made for people with diabetes who need it it's a matter of Life of death basically but for me as a non-diabetic I didn't think I would really learn anything from it but actually continue to change my life I was finally able to communicate with my body that had become such a black box since my accident I was able to see oh wow when I eat this there's a big spike that happens underneath my skin and actually the days where I feel my best are when my glucose levels are steady and then something else that was amazing happened one day I felt one of these mental health episodes coming on of like the sort of dissociation anxiety depression thing that I had been dealing with since my accident and I scanned my glucose monitor and I see one of the biggest spikes I had ever seen and I started linking the two I was like oh these glucose spikes could be one of the triggers for these really challenging episodes happening in my brain all this to say that I became fascinated with the topic and as a scientist my first inspiration was to go on Google Scholar and try to read everything I could all the scientific studies I could so I was sitting on my couch and I had like a thousand tabs open on my computer just like learning everything I could and I discovered some very key important things first that I wasn't alone that even if you don't have diabetes you can still be experiencing these big glucose spikes on a daily basis second that these Spikes have consequences and it kind of depends on your health history your body who you are but these consequences can range from cravings and fatigue to infertility to mental health getting worse Etc so I was like okay I gotta avoid these spikes right the problem is I love sugar and I love pasta and I did not want to give those up at all so I had to figure out how do I still eat all these glucose containing foods yeah in a way that doesn't create the spikes and then by looking at even more research done by amazing scientists across the world I synthesized all the research into these hacks that I started applying to myself that I started sharing with my friends and my family and that I ended up putting on Instagram and now they've helped millions of people across the world and I'm so freaking proud of that because this information this science it needs to be common knowledge people need to know this because you can really transform your life and avoid a lot of suffering yeah appreciate you sharing that and going through your story there's so many little bits there um for me just to pick up on one was how you you could see the correlation between your blood sugar level and how you were feeling I think it's a bit in your book actually um yeah early on in the book I wrote it down I you know this is what you say early on in my journey I had the profound realization that how I feel right now is intimately linked to the spikes and dips off your glucose yeah right now I think let's just pause on that for a minute because unless someone has been paying attention to their blood sugar people listening now people watching now it is likely that they are having or have had blood sugar spikes right so let's maybe because you're so good at communicating maybe let's just go back to you know what is glucose what goes on in the body and what is a blood glucose Spike yes so glucose is a wonderful molecule it is your body's favorite source of energy yeah so every single cell in your body uses glucose for energy so you know our heart cells use glucose to pump blood my finger cells right now are using glucose to contract my muscles my liver cells use glucose to perform other functions anyway it's very very very important and as human beings the main way that we give glucose to our body is through eating Foods specifically through eating starchy Foods so that's pasta bread potatoes Etc or sweet Foods so anything that tastes sweet from chocolate ice cream to a banana okay and you might think if glucose is my body's favorite source of energy and I want to have a lot of energy maybe I should eat as many starchy and sweet Foods as I possibly can and that's actually where the logic breaks down so your body needs some glucose but if you give it too much glucose symptoms start happening I like to take the image of the houseplant so if I went on vacation and I gave you my house plans and I asked you to take care of it you would know to give the plant some water but if you gave the plant too much water the plant would die and I would come back from vacation and be like what the heck my plant's dead so your body is the same you need some glucose but too much glucose causes problems and specifically so this idea of glucose spikes if during a meal you deliver to your body too much glucose too quickly that creates what we call a glucose Spike now if you're wearing a glucose monitor you can see that on the graph but you don't need to wear a glucose monitor to be able to understand you're having a spike the most common symptoms of glucose spikes are number one unsteady energy levels so maybe it's 10 a.m and you're just tired or it's 3 P.M and you need a third coffee because your energy is completely unsteady second most common symptom Cravings so scientists at Yale found out that during the drop that happens after a spike the craving Center in your brain activates and tells you find some cookies find something sweet so if you're having cravings during the day it's very possible that they are due to being on this glucose roller coaster and as I mentioned the majority of the population is on this roller coaster yeah how many people do you think across Society let's say Western Society how many people do you think are having unhelpful spikes on a daily basis well we know that one billion people in the world have either pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes so you know that's the condition that is the most commonly associated with glucose levels those people are having spikes on a daily basis for everybody else the studies seem to point to the fact that 60 to 80 percent of people without diabetes are still probably having glucose bikes so it's very common it's very very common essentially if you think that you could feel better than you currently do it's going to be helpful for you to start balancing your glucose levels to start reducing any symptoms you might be experiencing it's kind of like the foundation of Health you know if you have unsteady glucose levels like your body is going to have a hard time functioning yeah yeah I think you know one of the approaches I've been taking with patients for many years now is helping them to see how impactful changing their diet can be and what I mean by that is really for most chronic conditions that I've seen for a number of years one of the things I'll help patients do is change their diets because until someone has gone two or three weeks with a whole food based diet a diet where actually their blood sugar is staying relatively stable number one they don't know how good they could feel and number two they don't know yet and I don't know as a doctor how many of their symptoms I can put down to the food and the blood sugar yeah so instead of dancing around what I call Downstream trying to manage this symptom oh you're getting Cravings oh you've got a skin problem right and trying to think about medications and solutions there it's like hold on a minute why don't we just go back to basics first if we can get that foundational pillar right with your food intake what kind of goes away right yes because symptoms I discovered this symptoms are messages right your breakouts your infertility your you know tiredness they're actually symptoms your body speaking to you and potentially telling you hey there's glucose spikes happening within so I completely agree with you often for example if people have cravings one off one common reaction to having a craving is a feeling of guilt or shame or like feeling like you don't have enough willpower like I'm having cravings again like I'm so weak I need to fight it when it actually if you learn to study your glucose levels those Cravings might just go away you know if you fix the root cause everything changes and then one thing that really is important to me is you mentioned it's important for people to change their diet and go to Whole Foods and I also want to acknowledge that it's quite hard to change food habits and so why I think my Approach has been so powerful is because it doesn't ask you to change that much stuff yeah it's very incremental and for people starting out in their Journey this is a really nice space to start yeah I completely agree I think it's a really good point my bias is obviously if someone's coming in to see me by that stage they're usually quite sick and they're you know the symptoms are effects in their quality of life so at that point I'm trying to do what I can with my knowledge to help them and I appreciate that not everyone is going to radically overhaul things unless things get to a really bad point and I do think frankly I think your approach is going to work for that patient who is really sick but it's also going to work for that person who just feels tired just feels tired yeah right now your first book glucose Revolution was a was a big worldwide Smash Hit the new one I think is is probably going to do the same right it's really good and you do this trial you know this is it 2 700 people right well I'd love you to talk to us a little bit about that but I seem to recall that was it 70 of people report better energy yep right so this is this is really big and really important because I would say over the past 20 years I would say low energy is one of the commonest reasons why people go to see their doctor yet you're showing right if people follow your plan the plan of the new book that the majority of people are going to improve their energy within just a few weeks yes so the new book is called the glucose goddess method and I wrote it because after the first book people started dming me and they were like Jesse can you please move in with me and help me actually do the hacks so people wanted a plan to put all this science into action so the glucose goddess method is a four-week plan to turn the most important glucose hacks into habits and we look at breakfast we look at vinegar we look at veggie starters and we look at some movement and as a scientist I couldn't resist the idea of actually you know running an experiment a pilot experiment on people to actually measure their results so in October uh 2022 I recruited 2 000 people off my Instagram which is a huge amount of people I thought I would get 50 or 100 people anyway shows the power of that community and they went through the method and they reported back all of their improvements to me so we have 90 of people reduce their cravings okay we have 70 percent of people have more energy we have 40 percent of people with diabetes improved their diabetes markers in four weeks okay and I think my favorite set of all 99 of people said they're going to continue doing this for Life they've picked up these really really easy habits that are not restrictive don't ask you to give up any foods or count calories but are now part of their lives and are going to help them Thrive and feel amazing and be connected to their bodies yeah just just incredible because all this is being done without them having to see a doctor yeah without them having to um you know take time out of their days to go and try and find Solutions you're giving them some that you know as we've mentioned you've really mentioned one hack so far the kind of order of food yes but I agree with you that these things that you're teaching people they need to be commonplace they need to just be like brush your teeth or drink water exactly and I think as a father I think these are great things that we could teach our kids right we could teach parents when their kids want to snack after school right imagine if all the children grew up knowing that I could change the way this food impacts my body simply by you know changing the order or because complaining or doing some I completely agree with you and what's important to also note is that this these hacks I didn't invent them right they're all just based on these scientific studies that I translated into easy tips right so you can look in my books I have over 300 scientific studies that I mentioned but this is all science-based and what's even cooler is that a lot of these hacks you find parallels between them and things that we've been doing culturally for Generations yeah I mean that I definitely want to talk about because I am incredibly fascinated by modern science and how it fits alongside ancient practices completely and I've been thinking about this for a number of years but I I remember um Jesse just thought my first book was published in in the end of 2017. my mom was reading a copy and she said I wish she'd met my granddad because a lot of the things that you're writing about is how he actually lived right which I found really fascinating and I've I've come to the conclusion but a lot of us a lot of modern humans I think that's a better Fair is arrogance too harsh a term there's there's a real feeling that oh we now know things for the first time on how to look after ourselves but actually if you go to a lot of these cultures the practices that we're now finding science to support they've kind of been there in a lot of cultures for thousands of years yeah I think what happened is that we knew these things you know we had the wisdom but then industrialization happened the food industry happened and so we lost touch and actually if those things hadn't happened you and I would not have jobs because people would just know exactly and we're not living in communities anymore so there's a lot of factors I think that explain why we don't know these things anymore but they are ancestral wisdom and that's why I think these hacks for example they just stick so well with people because once you implement it you're like oh of course it makes sense yeah like of course I'm gonna do this no problem but yeah I agree with you yeah now let's talk about blood sugar for a minute okay because I think this is really important point to get across as we've said most people when they think of that think about type 2 diabetes unless I have tattoo diabetes I don't need to worry about it but you're beautifully explaining why it's relevant for all of us now if we're taking in the same volume of food right so our meal or snack is not changing the same amount of let's say sugar is coming into our body you're saying to us that actually by doing various things we can stabilize the sugar so instead of it going rapidly up and rapidly down it can be stable for for a lot longer yes you can have maximum pleasure from the sugar with minimal impact on your health so someone's going to be thinking okay Jesse but if the same volume of sugar is coming into my body does it matter if it's coming in slowly or it's coming in rapidly yes Bingo that's a wonderful question yes we know from the studies that it's the increase in your blood sugar levels the rapid increase in the variability which is more damaging to your cells than a sort of steadier more stable glucose level so yes it does matter yeah I guess I don't know if this analogy makes sense to you but let's say um I don't know let's say you have a roof on your house with a you know very very tiny hole right and if it rains a little bit every day not too hard you know for a week or so you're probably gonna manage you know you're probably gonna be able to keep a bucket under the player so you're gonna have to catch it dispose of it get rid of it but actually if you have that same volume of water suddenly coming in at the downpourer one day you're probably gonna have a flood within your house yep does that analogy work when we think of the human body I think it does another one I like is the analogy of Tetris so imagine you're playing Tetris and I give you two ways of playing Tetris as either everything all the little blocks come down super quickly or the same amount of blocks come down but over like five times the time which one do you think you're going to be able to manage better the second one same amount of blocks but you have more time to organize them put them away deal with them if everything comes down too quickly you're overwhelmed and you lose the level you know it's kind of that idea it's the same stuff but your body has a much better time dealing with glucose when it arrives more slowly so blood sugar spikes are related to all kinds of different problems and in both of your butts actually I think the abusively outlined why this approach is relevant for everyone and I mean everyone now I know your approach is not focused on weight loss yet I think what's going to happen with most people is if they stabilize their blood sugar excess weight is going to start coming off as a side effect rather than as the primary focus and the reason I bring weight loss up is because I know that's not what you're I know your approach is not about weight loss but of course many people do want to lose weight of course and so I think it's important to address that I guess what I'm trying to get you Jesse because I really want people to hear this conversation and start making changes in their life right and we can talk about risk of type 2 diabetes in the future risk of cancer risk of dementia but you know for many of us that's a doesn't land we want something that's going to make us feel good we want to have more energy if you're Cravings feel good sleep better have better skin and what's cool about the glucose hacks is that they affect you both right now and they help you feel good today and they prevent long-term disease they're the same thing but listen I completely agree if you tell somebody do this to prevent type 2 diabetes nobody's going to do it I wouldn't do it that's just your human brain is not wired to comprehend that and so it's easier to think about I'm going to feel way better this afternoon if I eat my breakfast this way and on the topic of weight loss so yes you know I just want to differentiate my work from like the big diet industry telling you you know just eat cabbage for a week and lose 20 pounds what I'm talking about here is Health but as you mentioned weight loss is often a consequence because when we study our glucose levels three things happen number one our Cravings go away number two hunger reduces number three are insulin levels reduces well which allows us to be in fat burning mode more often and to give you a statistic in my pilot experiment for my second book 40 of people who wanted to lose weight did in fact lose weight in these four weeks without restricting anything just because of the natural consequence of studying your glucose levels yeah you mentioned insulin there and I know when you explained why this matters to people you often talk about mitochondria glycation and Insulin yeah and I think just getting that scientific understanding for people I think would really help ground them and really help them understand why this is important so could you explain how these three things get affected I particularly like glycation because I think when people hear that they get in fact maybe let's start with glycation what is this because this is going to move the needle for people straight away for sure so I explained what glucose is and what a glucose spike is which is a rapid increase in blood sugar after eating and the Spikes have three main consequences that then lead to symptoms so consequence one glycation glycation is a process that happens in your body from the moment you are born and it's kind of like cooking so when you put a chicken in the oven and it goes from being pink to being cooked it has glycated a human being Cooks from the moment they're born until they die and in fact when they're fully cooked that's when they die so you're cooking okay and this cooking is also leading to aging cooking is like aging glycation is like aging you can't stop aging but you can slow it down or speed it up now the more glucose spikes you have in your body especially if they come from sweet Foods the faster glycation happens the faster you age and this shows externally like the more wrinkles you get but also internally your organs are slowly going to start to deteriorate and become less healthy so glycation is so connected to glucose that is actually a very well known test among people with type today disease called the hba1c test which actually measures the glycation of your red blood cells so glucose causes glycation glycation is aging glucose spikes increase well speed up this process that's one of the one of the yeah this is a really important one because we get it when you talk about chicken Browning or I don't know making a creme brulee right you know we we know what that looks like but that's kind of what's happening it actually happens us inside so when scientists look at the cartilage of babies like on the inside of their body it's white and by the time you're 90 years old the cartilage is brown like you're actually cooking I know that sounds a bit crazy but scientifically it's completely true you're glycating yeah and this whole glycation piece is that we could be going on our life with a bit of low grade fatigue having a bit of sugar at 11 and at 3 P.M to get us through a bit more caffeine not realizing but actually those are likely to be symptoms of blood sugar dysregulation and by doing that by having that blood sugar dysregulation we're probably aging inside or we feel like it's normal I used to think it's it was totally normal to be famished at 11 30 a.m and exhausted at 3 P.M I just thought you know because everybody around us feels that way so you just have in your psyche that it's normal to not feel great but in most of us those symptoms can be linked back to these glucose spikes and when you flatten your curves like it really feels like you're having a completely new experience of your life and of your days it's it's transformative and those symptoms you don't have to live with them yeah that's you know I know a lot about a good healthy diet but wearing one for me and and tweaking a few things and using a lot of the hacks that you're talking about and you write about on those days where your blood sugar is stable you have a different experience of Life yes you can have a Clarity like a almost like a steady supply of energy Eagle Energy yeah yeah it's quite incredible really and you go wow I was eating so-called healthy foods two weeks ago my sugar was going up and down and I thought I was doing okay and for me I think this is a key point you explain your story and how when you started wearing a CGM you started to connect the dots between how you were feeling and what your blood sugar is doing I think that's really really powerful yes and to be clear like I did that and it was incredibly informative and allowed me to become fascinated with the science I think you can very easily see all the impacts of the hacks on your life without needing a word to where I see Jam you know you know yourself you know if you used to be tired all the time and now you're not tired anymore you know if resisting a cookie was like you know the bane of your existence and now you don't even want the cookie anymore you know if you sleep better you know if your period is back you know if like your mental health is better like you don't need to wear this UGM that's also the beauty of it all you can reconnect with yourself without a device you've done a lot of the testing and yeah and so what I do with my CGM data is that I illustrate the scientific studies so for example if I find a study that says oh we found at scale that one tablespoon of vinegar before a meal reduces the glucose Spike of the meal my work as a science educator because I know I'm not a doctor you know I'm really just here to teach and communicate and vulgarize the science I think okay I want people to know about this scientific paper but I need to illustrate it in a way that is approachable and understandable so I create my glucose graphs just to show and then if you swipe on my Instagram post for example you see this study that I reference I think the way you illustrate that data is so clever and you know when someone like yourself starts an Instagram account and blows up that quickly you know you're really hitting on something you're you're able to articulate an idea in a very simple way that connects immediately with a lot of people and I and I think that skill is very much undervalued I you know I want to sort of say it's very much appreciated how well you do that there's a layer missing between the scientific studies and the public and I mean you're part of that layer of course but we need more people who are here to communicate the science make it understandable to teach and I'm so happy to be able to bring these Amazing Discoveries done by amazing research teams across the world to my readers and my audience back to the three things right so we had glycation and we also have no one wants to be glycating and cooking their internal organs yeah we don't want the wrinkles and again that's like a very short-term benefits but it's hey it's a benefit that a lot of us want right whether whether we whether we are willing to accept our vanity publicly or not yeah most of us will probably say yeah I want less wrinkles I would like to age more slowly than I currently am but the good news is the hacks will help with that and also long-term exact profession so there are three things that happen in our body when we have a glucose bike the first one is glycation the cooking like the chicken in the oven the second one is your mitochondria gets stressed out and the third one is insulin so I'll explain the two the two the two last ones the second and third one so your mitochondria they are these little machines inside of your cells that are in charge of turning glucose into energy so they're amazing and we need them and the better they function the more energy we have your mitochondria when you're giving them a steady supply of glucose they're quite happy they're like okay I can deal with this I'm making energy no problem when you deliver a glucose Spike to them they stress out they freak out like in the tetris example like the blocks are coming down too quickly they just quit um and they don't function well anymore and as a result that can lead to chronic fatigue because your mitochondria are just not working as well as they could be your mitochondria are becoming stressed out also leads to what's called oxidative stress and inflammation and inflammation in our body is one of the biggest Killers we know that three out of five people in the world will die of an inflammation-based disease and even if you have things like psoriasis eczema which are inflammation-based diseases the more glucose spikes you have the worse those symptoms are going to get so that's mitochondria you get tired you get cooked and you get tired can I just pause you that because it was so fascinating that and I just want to draw a connection there just to make sure people have got that you were talking about fatigue so most people are running the impression that if I want to increase my energy having more sugar is going to help me do that yet you're saying glucose spikes oh harming your body's long-term ability to make energy yeah so just let's can we just make that super clear so when you eat something sweet what's happening is you're getting a dopamine release in your brain there's a pleasure hormone molecule that gets released in your brain and that pleasure can feel like energy you feel perked up you feel like whoa I feel awake that's not energy that's dopamine on the inside in your mitochondria the ability for your body to make energy is getting reduced you're getting less and less good at making energy yet you might think oh my God I need more and more sugar to wake myself up more and more caffeine and so you have this impression of like the dopamine rush and then on the inside things are breaking down if you actually want to allow your body to make energy like it was always supposed to make it which is efficiently beautifully easily you have to reduce the glucose bikes and you have to work with your mitochondria your mitochondria I just want you to have a great time they just want to give you all the energy in the world so we need to work with them because they're so powerful and when you study your glucose levels you give them back that power to give you the energy that you really want and what's cool about the hacks as well is that I'm not asking you to never eat sugar ever again I'm teaching you how to eat it in a way that gives you all the pleasure all the dopamine but with less impact on your glycation on your mitochondria and on your health that's why it's so powerful information is not enough to make change in your life you have to take action so to help you take action after watching this video I've created a free nutrition guide for you this contains the five most important practices I've seen in over two decades of seeing patients they work for you no matter what your dietary preference there's a step-by-step action plan to help you implement those changes in your life if you want to receive that free guide right now just click on the link in the description box below we're gonna get to some of those really really shortly okay so super clear on mitochondria uh insulin yeah so your body knows that glucose bikes are not good for it and it's trying to reduce the glycation and the matter mitochondrial overload and it has one little tool that it uses your pancreas releases insulin into your body when a glucose spike is happening and insulin is amazing her job is to take excess glucose out of the circulation and to store it away in places where it could no longer do harm and Insulin stores glucose away in your muscles in your liver and also in your fat cells and that's one of the ways that we gain weight or fat on our body is by our body putting glucose away into our fat cells now the problem is too much insulin over time also has consequences the most common one being insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes but also something that's becoming more and more common in females which is polycystic ovarian syndrome or fertility problems the more insulin you have in a female body the more your body is going to produce testosterone that means in a female body you're going to have this excess of male hormone this leads to consequence is missed periods cystic ovaries infertility acne balding hair growth on the on the face Etc yeah and often and I'll just do a little PCOS sidebar here often the way that PCOS is treated is by giving females the birth control pill because the pill contains female hormones and so when you ingest female hormones with the pill you're kind of bringing back the balance between female and male hormones but then when you stop the pill if you haven't addressed the underlying issue the problem is still there and so you see many people who go off the pill because they want to have a baby and then they stop the pill and they're like oh my God I don't have my period yeah what's happening I'm not ovulating and that's often a sign of this excess insulin and so that's why one of the most common things that I see in my readers is getting their period back and in my pilot experiment for the glucose goddess method three women who had been told there would never gonna be able to have babies naturally got pregnant in those four weeks wow it's really really powerful that because again it speaks to this idea are we treating symptoms [Music] or dealing with the root cause and I've seen the picture you just Illustrated that play out with so many women with PCOS in practice in the past I really have I've seen it so many times and you know those symptoms I can think back to certain patients they are so distressing for women you know yes not being able to get pregnant sure that that is clearly a massive thing but you know if you're a woman and you've got facial hair or you become or you're getting bored or really thinning hair yeah and one of my big frustrations in medicine is that we are not really taught to go for that root cause and I think again broadening out the lens on blood sugar if I think about and you you do this in both books actually really well at the start about really clearly demonstrating why this book in this approach is relevant to all of us you mentioned infertility you mentioned PCOS you mentioned menopause or symptoms right the menopause is something that is talked about a lot these days it's one of the Hot Topics in health and I understand why because for many years um nobody was talking about a lot of women don't feel it was taken seriously a lot of women feel as though they were ignored by their doctors perhaps but you're also showing how stabilizing your blood sugar can lead to an improvement in menopausal symptoms listen the scientific studies are very clear the more glucose spikes you have the more insulin you have the worse your menopause symptoms whether it's hot flashes insomnia Etc like your hormonal system cannot function properly if your glucose and your insulin are out of whack it's just the hormonal axis is not going to work if you're on a glucose roller coaster and this is true for menopause symptoms for PCOS for PMS so you know the premenstrual syndrome endometriosis fibroids everything that's hormonally linked will get better when you study your glucose and insulin levels it is truly the foundation of hormonal health is to have steady balanced blood sugar yeah it's um it's pretty incredible and I think I don't know how you view this Jesse when I would talk to patients about blood sugar roller cases and I'd often draw them a graph yeah you know in a 10-minute consultation I'd sit there and say look like I just grab a piece of paper you know and I'd literally draw it out and I explain it this time you're having this food right this is what happens to your blood sugar and then maybe two hours later after it's high it's coming down it's crashing and sometimes if you've been doing this while it will overshoots and one thing I would often say is that this is not just a blood sugar problem at that point it's also a hunger problem it's also a stress on the body yep what if you speak to that because I think that for me at least that really landed with patience your blood sugar falling rapidly is a stressor absolutely so I actually just did it live with an amazing um woman Aviva Ram who's really specialized in this in glucose and stress adrenal steroids and she taught me a lot she explained that when your body is going through this glucose roller coaster there is a certain amount of biological stress that happens as a consequence and that then impacts your your hormonal axis your thyroid axis your adrenal axis and that stress in and of itself can then lead to other problems in your body whether it's mental health disturbances whether it's inflammation whether it's hormonal problems because your body like if you're stressed out adrenals are stressed out you're on our glucose roller coaster your body doesn't think it's safe to conceive so you have all these side effects of that stress that biological stress that lead to Downstream symptoms and we need to look back at the fact that yeah that glucose roller coaster is causing stress on top of the inflammation and the glycation in the insulin release truly I don't think there's a better place to start for your health like it is truly the foundation you cannot have a healthy body if you're on a glucose roller coaster it's just not possible you can manage maybe you can be a high functioning glucose roller coaster but it's just it's just not gonna work you you need that Baseline I love that there is there's a lot of people at the moment who are high functioning glucose roller coasters right I love it I love it yeah but you walk around you will see that and it it kind of will correlate with the 11 o'clock snack yes the extra coffee that's needed the bit of chocolate to keep you going but after dinner sugar you know the just scrolling on Instagram to reduce your stress like there's so many of our habits that could be linked to trying to function on a glucose roller coaster and also most people don't know they're on a glucose roller coaster so it's not their fault they're trying their best yeah they're trying to survive with all these symptoms thinking the symptoms are normal that if they can't handle them they're weak or they don't have enough willpower or feeling ashamed or guilty I want people to know that you can actually reduce those symptoms and they will go away the first place to start is to study your glucose levels yeah and you'll have such a different experience of your life instead of feeling controlled by these impulses and these symptoms that you can't do anything about you can become reconnected with your body with yourself and you know you can partner with your mitochondria I mean it's just a much more it's a much nicer place to be this stress response often leads to sweats as well I've seen with patients and I know you write a little bit about this actually as well that because if your body's under stress you know that is one thing that may happen depending on who you are or what's going on in your life you may get sweats or you know one of the common reasons I've seen that people struggle with sleep is that wake up like three hours or so after going to bed because they've had a sweet snack before they go to bed and the sugar goes up yeah and the crash and you wake up with a pounding heart exactly and you're you know sweating like whoa what's going on and that could be just because of a glucose crash in the middle of the night yeah the solution to that is not the aura ring or it's not a sleeping pill the solutions of that is stabilize your blood sugar because then if you're not getting that up and down at night Your Sleep Quality is going to be improved right much better yeah some recent studies are actually showing us that you know the steer your glucose levels are the more restful your sleep is going to be the deeper your sleep is going to be glucose and sleep are like two peas in a pod they're very connected and then if you haven't slept well you're more likely to think I need sugar for energy though for creating another glucose roller coaster so it can either be a virtuous cycle or it can be a vicious cycle yeah and this is something again I think certainly my own experience of wearing a CGM has taught me really speaks to what you just said which is you can think you've had a good night's sleep but someday you know you think I slept but I'm waking up I don't feel rested but I don't think I was up that much and of course there's a million possible reasons yeah confounding facts is right this is not me talking about this is not a scientific study right you've just mentioned the scientific study I'm just mentioning my n of one experience but I have seen a strong correlation between my sugar is stable in the evening and at night I have more energy than that state even if I think I set for the same amount of time absolutely I've become sort of a sleeper I'm really interested in sleep these days and I have everything I have like the cool room and the dark thing and the no noise and the pillow and everything I just love sleeping yeah you love stable blood sugars yes I'm sleeping I I love sleeping yeah I do do you like sleeping I love sleeping is the best I love early nights I love waking up feeling fresh and full of energy it's beautiful you know it's so nice yeah let's talk about some more hacks okay so at the start of the conversation you mentioned food order and I really hope people put that into practice straight away because the it can be transformative just switching a few things around yeah vinegar you want to talk about vinaigrettes let's talk about vinegar I'd also love you to just drop in as well how certain cultures have had this within them as well so I think give us some modern science but give us the ancient wisdom as well let's talk about the ancient wisdom first so for centuries there are countries around the world where vinegar has been consumed I mean I'm French right in France we have vinegaret on everything or in Iran we're making apple cider vinegar is sort of a tradition that people do in their home and they drink it every day and in the 18th century vinegar was even given as a tea to people with type 1 diabetes and so we've known culturally for a while that this is a good thing to eat but only recently we've discovered actually how it works and to be perfectly transparent when I was like first came across the vinegar stuff I was like this must be a fad like I just I just didn't believe it I was like this is another Instagram thing I don't but then I looked at the studies and they're actually incredible clinical trials showing the impact of vinegar on our glucose levels so now I'm a big vinegar fan so let me explain who funded that study was it was it bigger than vinegar no actually legit scientists across the world in Brazil and they there was this one one study that was incredible um it's all linked on my website in book if you want to check it out but the science showed that one tablespoon of vinegar before a meal so either as a dressing or in a drink it can be water it can be tea reduces the glucose Spike of that meal by up to 30 percent and reduces the insulin Spike of that meal by up to 20 without changing what you're eating afterwards simply by adding this vinegar at the beginning of your meal you can see an impact on your glucose levels now of course you know I don't want people to think oh it's a magic pill I'm just going to change nothing and just do the vinegar the vinegar is one of several tools that become very useful in your day-to-day life what I recommend and in the glucose goddess method in week two we go over vinegar and it has a whole week I saw it the new book and there's all these beautiful recipes and I made it really fun and gorgeous because people are like oh vinegar like what and drink vinegar that sounds gross don't worry I have a lot of delicious mocktails well actually in the book that was there was this um the photography is gorgeous in the new book it really is and there was one image I can't remember what it was it was in the vinegar section where it almost looks as though you're in a bar having a cocktail but actually it's vinegar right yes and I have I made all these really gorgeous delicious vinegar mocktails because why not create a little you know special occasion a little ritual around having your vinegar once a day why not um yeah there's one one of my favorite mocktails in the book is the mother Apple spritzer and I thought apple cider vinegar is the most commonly used vinegar where you can use any of them and I thought hey you know we don't often think about Apple Cider vinegar's mother which are apples so I wanted to make a mocktail that really you know helped Apple shine so anyway that's a sidebar you'll find it in the book it's gorgeous vinegar before a meal beautiful simple impact on your glucose levels there are even some pilot studies showing that by adding vinegar once a day females with PCOS are able to reduce their testosterone without changing anything else about their diets yeah I mean this is profound I mean but isn't it crazy it is it's crazy well what's crazy is that I mean those numbers are frankly incredible right and what's also crazy is that this has been in cultures for a long time for thousands of years there's a lot of Natural Health proponents naturopaths um nutritional therapists you know who for many years will have been recommending apple cider vinegar they would have said you know if you have some you know have that to blunt your blood sugar response so I think there's been a lot of wisdom that's been out there perhaps you know the modern scientific method has only just kind of explained and given the credibility to some people who need that I actually really appreciate knowing how it works yeah and seeing the data um it's easier for me to adopt a new habit if I'm able to see the scientific studies showing like hey this worked but there's also other things that we can't do a scientific study about that I'm still going to do you know I'm not going to wait for people to say I don't know having friends is important for your blood sugar for me to do it I mean it makes sense that if you're happy relaxed emotionally connected your blood sugar is going to be better but I'm not going to wait for that study let's talk about vinegar then so what does that practically look like so let's say someone's gonna have their lunch right and they're it's a work do right so they can't really change too much about the content of what's in that lunch but they're concerned based on what they've heard that it may Spike their blood sugar and it may cause them a 3 pm crash needing more sugar and more coffee right so they've now heard about vinegar so let's say their lunch meal is at 1pm yeah right let's you know talk us through what you want them to do or at least consider doing with vinegar to blunt their sugar response before I will say I I'm often caught saying that you should only do the hacks when it's easy so if it's too stressful to organize a vinegar drink don't do it it's okay but if you have vinegar accessible let's say your lunch is at 1 pm I want you at 12 45 to go grab a tall glass of water I could demonstrate even have sparking water here a tall glass of water sparkling water any water tea whatever one tablespoon of vinegar roof in it it can be apple cider vinegar it can be white wine vinegar it can be Cherry vinegar whatever just avoid the very syrupy balsamic glaze vinegar because that's more sugar than it is vinegar and then um you just drink it so you can have it with a straw if you want to be extra cautious of protecting your teeth's enamel but once it's diluted it's usually fine and then you just go have your lunch that's about it the ideal timing is to have this 10 minutes before you start eating but you can also have it during or after the meal and it will also have an impact yeah I look I love the way you just make it so practical that ideally it's 10 minutes yeah right but hey if it's 15 minutes before or five minutes before or during or after you're still gonna get exactly and I think that's so important because one thing I've experienced from trying to write books or trying to give uh information to people to try and improve their lives is that sometimes it's it's it's taken very literally or you said 15 minutes and then that could create a stress that absolutely man is 12 46 she told me to have at 12 45 I've missed it but it's not that and I think that wider Point as well is really really important that Hey listen if you don't have a video around don't worry about it exactly it's when you can do them some Sundays I wake up and I want chocolate ice cream for breakfast and I'll just have it no vinegar before no veggies before whatever I'll just eat the ice cream that I want to eat like what I want people to take away from all this is the science of the glucose hacks but then doing the hacks and also not doing the hacks or both parts of this new Revolution you're using on your body and you're helping your health with so it's not a diet it's not restrictive just use it use the hacks when you can and the rest of the time live your life just by using one hack for you know once in a month is already better than not using it yeah how often do you have chocolate ice cream on a Sunday morning last time I think it was probably six months ago six months ago yeah yeah it doesn't really happen very often but you know it has happened and I want people to know that when I want to I do yeah no I love that I never thought I'd be talking to the glucose goddess talking about having chocolate ice cream on a Sunday morning but I love that I think people are gonna really love that image people have a misconception about me they think that I never eat sugar and I never eat starches I'm actually a huge sugar fan I love sugar I love pasta I probably eat sugar every single day so I'm not here to tell you to never eat eat it again I'm not here to demonize it I'm here to tell you let's eat it maximum pleasure minimal impact on our body because I don't want people to suffer I don't want people to get diabetes I want people to put diabetes into remission I want people to get their period back I want their mental health to be better their skin to be clear to sleep better Etc but also the cool thing about this science is that it allows us to do all that without giving up any of the foods that we love and that's so beautiful and that's why in the glucose goddess method the new book I teach you every week to put a hack in place in your life like a gentle giant and the rest of the time you do whatever you want there's no restrictions at all and it's incredibly powerful as you see from the results well I think so clever about it is that by making it feel achievable it becomes very inclusive people want to follow you people want to do it and they're going to feel so much better so quickly that it will lead to what I call a ripple effect that that one change is going to lead to a barrage of other positive changes right so let's say I know we can and we're going to talk about movement in relation to blood sugar but let's say just generalized Movement we know that moving more is typically a good thing and many of us are not moving enough right but a lot of the time people are not moving enough is because they feel rubbish and they're tired and they're sluggish they've got no energy so they're like I can't be bothered going to the gym I can't be bothered going for a walk stabilize your blood sugars with these very gentle hacks you're going to have more energy your memory is going to be better your brain is going to function more clearly and then you're naturally going to actually move your body more right so you must I'm sure you've had that experience from people in your community absolutely and I think the the issue you described where somebody is just sluggish and doesn't want to do stuff they're often met with the advice of just eat better and exercise more and unfortunately for a lot of people that advice is too vague to even you know sort of start doing anything about it it becomes overwhelming it's like daunting what do you mean eat better more vegetables exercise more like I don't know what I've solved I believe is a very important motivation issue I've distilled the science down into these very simple things that are additive to your life and as a result you know you put your foot in the what's it called in English the thing on the horse you know you put your foot in the Stirrup yes you put your foot in the Stirrup and then you know you ride the horse and that first step is so freaking difficult but with the hacks it becomes very very very easy don't eat your carbs naked okay right let's talk about that because I think this is a really really good hack and maybe I'll share with you what I did a few weeks ago with my kids well okay this is this is not a common right so um I guess like your Sunday morning uh chocolate ice cream this is not very common but a few weeks ago I cannot remember the exact ins and outs of what was going on but I think it was just before dinner or at dinner time there wasn't that much in the house and there was some white rice and I thought I can't just have this white rice by itself so I open the cupboards and there was some little butter so I scooped him exactly this is not common this is what my kids were seeing at the same time and I wasn't tracking anything right but I I also know about stable blood sugars and I thought actually come on so I put in um two or three big scoops of nut butter I have so many questions right okay my kids do and they still tease me about it and I had it I wasn't tracking anything but the reason I did it a is because I know actually adding that to it is likely to slow down the sugar relief you put clothes on your clothes and I happen to enjoy that right I haven't had it much but I did enjoy it so my question is is it good I I can have some quite unusual taste from Thai style I enjoyed it I like white rice I like Nut Butter it's like Joey and friends you know did you see that episode where they make like a pie but it has meat in it so it's sweet and meat and he's like I like meat I like pie meat and Pie together yeah well listen I I haven't done it since and the kids keep saying Daddy why did you do that it's disgusting I said listen taste is a subjective experience daddy actually really liked that so they said you're gonna put that in one of your books I said look I don't know I'm not sure it's going to take off yet but the principle I think relates very much absolutely I'm gonna guess one of your most popular hats I don't know if it is but you know that term naked carbs is quite provocative right what does it mean and why should you put clothes on your calves so let me ask you a question back why did you feel like you didn't want to eat the white rice on itself by itself yeah you know the truth is I'm taking one isolated incident right and I don't want to put too much on it because I don't really do it I as a general rule at the moment I'm trying to um I have been probably since I put my CGM on about three months ago for two weeks and I saw the impacts of certain things I've not been wearing it but I've just been making subtle tweaks you know like movement after exercise movement after eating things like that which we're going to talk about to stabilize blood sugar now I was hungry as well I was really hungry and I thought this white rice is going to go into my stomach and about an hour later I'm going to be starving again yes right so that's why I did it I'm not promoting it to be able to be really close but that was my experience so if I were in this situation and I was also faced with the white rice I would think okay so starches right so rice pasta potatoes things that are starchy if I eat them on their own because they're basically glucose molecules attached they're going to create a big glucose pack so if you eat pasta on its own rice on its own Bread on its own it's going to create a spike in your body and then inflammation glycation aging insulin and then the crash so Cravings hunger Etc so I would think I need to put some clothing on them and that's exactly what you did so putting clothes on your carbs means that when you eat carbs so starches or sugars you add protein fat or Fiber to them so you did exactly that you put clothing on your carbs as a result you reduce yeah of that food and so it didn't change the fact that you were eating the food and I'm glad that the nut butter plus rice even tasted delicious yeah you can borrow that recipe cancel everything you need to add a recipe into the new book but by putting clothes on your carbs you're able to steady the blood sugar and reduce the glucose Spike of the meal so let me give you some like common examples so if you're gonna have some pasta for example instead of having the pasta plain maybe you throw in like a little bit of chicken in there maybe a little bit of cheese some olive oil a few I don't know salad leaves like arugula or whatever just to put some clothes on that pasta if you're having rice I think my I would not go for the nut butter I think I would go for like maybe some roasted cauliflower broccoli and some tahini and I would just make a little to be fat if if there was some roasted broccoli or probably if I've seen you around perfect I think I would have gone for that I don't think this was um First Choice let's put it like that I feel you and then when it comes to Sweet Foods so if I'm at a birthday party or I don't know I want to have a cookie I'll think okay are there any clothes I can add to it so maybe with the slice of chocolate cake I'll have a Greek yogurt and actually that's one of my all-time favorite goes on carbs combinations chocolate cake and Greek yogurt together super super good well let's just go on that one because that's quite an interesting one so you've tried this on yourself right so what happens when you have the chocolate cake on an empty stomach by itself versus when you have the chocolate cake with Greek yogurt so when your stomach is empty and actually breakfast is also a good topic we should cover but when your stomach is empty and you have sugar starches so if I had the chocolate cake on an empty stomach the molecules in the cake would arrive in my stomach quickly and then make their way quickly to my bloodstream because it'd be nothing there to sort of slow them down or anything so I would see a big glucose spike in my body and that would lead to some consequences notably kicking off egg Cravings roller coaster so quick kicking off a glucose roller coaster all day that will lead to Cravings fatigue craving fatigue craving fatigue so I don't really want to do that I want to eat the cake but I don't want the Cravings roller coaster so what I did is I added some Greek yogurt which is proteins and fats and I ate it at the same time as the chocolate cake you can if you want have the yogurt before which is more ideal for your glucose levels based on that food order thing but to be honest like sometimes I don't want to do the food order specifically with the chocolate cake situation I want to have it with the yogurt and as a result combine assigned to the glucose molecules in the cake I'm also adding proteins and fats and so when that little mixture arrives into my stomach the glucose molecules are slowed down because there's other stuff going on there there's the proteins and the fats and so I'm eating the same cake but the speed at which the glucose in the cake is arriving in my bloodstream is much slower as a result not a big spike but rather sort of a moderate Spike and with that moderate Spike fewer consequences on glycation mitochondria insulin and then less creation of that Cravings roller coaster and I want to touch on this part a bit more because we need to learn to eat sugar in a way that doesn't create that Cravings roller coaster which is also a lot of people call sugar addiction yeah you will hear a lot of people say I'm addicted to sugar and actually if you look at it it's very possible that they're creating that addiction by having for example on an empty stomach in the morning first thing something sweet or something starchy and then if your breakfast is just starches and sugars your entire day is going to be one big roller coaster and you're going to be controlled by these Cravings all the time yeah we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible Whole Foods that's why I'm a big fan of good quality Whole Food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 Whole Food Source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy focused digestion and our immune system athletic greens are giving my audience a fantastic offer one year's free supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first store there you can see all the details at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more or simply click on the link below now back to the conversation so so important I think we'll get to breakfast in just a second so I do agree with you that it's one of the most important meals to get right and you know whether you have breakfast in the morning or you have it at lunchtime whatever it is that first meal yes is a is a crucial one to try and stabilize your blood sugar otherwise you end up fighting it for much of the day right but for any parents right who you know I think this has real relevance to pet well to all of us but let's say their kids are coming back after school and they are hungry and they want a snack a lot of the snacks that are given are carb based right so what advice would you give to parents in this situation I guess you've given it with the clothes on your carbs but it's such a common thing that I think it's such a simple way that parents can immediately impact their kids I have so many ideas one is if your kid is open to it what if you gave them some leftovers from lunch if your kid really wants to eat something sweet then you have a few options you can give them the sweet thing but give them something else at the same time so you know give the cookie with some almonds give the Pop-Tarts with a yogurt you know never let those starches and sugars arrive into the body naked because then it's going to create a big roller coaster and in kids you know that roller coaster also has consequences not to be on mood on energy and irritability you know Tantrums Etc so it's just as important um and all the hacks in the book you can use also you know in your family yeah no for sure and I think that that that's a key Point Jesse that's a lot of parents may not be aware that let's say they're kids playing up at 5 30 6 p.m 6 30. may not just be to do with fatigue it may be to do with the snack you gave them after school absolutely and I say that with with with all my heart full of compassion to say listen I I just want to really shine a light on that for people to go oh wait a minute there'll be someone who just heard that and and thought wait a minute maybe that's why my son is playing up every night two hours after their sweet snack at school do you know what I mean that's absolutely I think it's really important and it's hard to know we're not trained to understand how to how to connect the dots between the food and the symptoms because the few reasons first of all like if you ate something sweet and immediately you had a panic attack and you fell asleep on your ball like you would know you'd be like oh wow it was that cereal bowl but since it takes hours to see the impact and things compound over time there's other stuff happening in your life it's not always easy to play detective and be like oh this tantrum is because of the snack two hours ago but it's quite an easy thing to test and it can't hurt right it can't hurt for sure um now one thing I really wanted to talk to you about is the relationship between blood sugar and our moods and of course there's this whole idea that blood sugar you know initially people think about it with tattoo diabetes then they may broaden it out a little bit to think about other things to do with their physical health but I think very few people across Society are drawing a link between sugar ups and downs in their blood and their moods and I want to go back to your story when you were 19. it's uncanny how many people who sit opposite me in the studio have had some major life experience at some point which has meant that they've done something in some way which means that they end up on a podcast talking about it it's the suffering you know when you're suffering so much you have no choice but to go and figure out um excuse my French but it's just out of that pain you just really often just wanna just find answers I think that might be why there's such a link yeah now I want to talk about the link between blood sugar and the way you felt before we do that as I was reading your first book there was a really powerful section towards the start you are explaining that experience okay and you were explaining the moments before you had to go into surgery and I wrote it down um you wrote if I could wake up on the other side of this I knew I would be filled with gratitude for the rest of my life do you remember that moment oh yeah I was so scared of dying I was so scared so I had broken my back four weeks ago I had been transported in a medical situation all the way back to Switzerland for this operation in this clinic and I had just been immobilized for you know four weeks and they the doctors came in and they were telling me what they were gonna do they were like okay and Trigger warning it's a bit graphic they said okay we're gonna open your body from the side take out all your organs then find the pieces of the broken vertebrae take them out close the side open the back and then put this cage in put the metal rods drill some stuff into your spine put the pieces back and then we'll close you up by the way we might perforate your you know lung envelope or something so you might wake up with a perforated lung but hey we'll try not to do it everything will be cool you're ready and I'm like what and I was so scared and my body was in such a state of stress and there was nothing I could do you know I could feel just this fear of dying that was so intense but yes I remember very well what's interesting to me first of all thank you for sharing that and that does sound you know we should be describing that I mean that is huge yeah you're 19 years old you're being told in graphic detail what's about to happen that of course is incredibly scary that part if I if I get through this I will be filled with grass here for the rest of my life why that really fascinates me Jesse is Big Life Experiences often happen to us and in that moment we think you know if we get through this I'm going to look at the world differently and then we get through something and for a few days for a few weeks for a few months right the memory is still there and we're feeding that intense gratitude given that that was over a decade ago do you still feel that gratitude and and where I'm really fascist by this is obviously we had a coffee before we started in my kitchen we were chatting you seem to be someone to me who despite an extraordinary amount of success in a short period of time you strike me as someone who is really grounded who's not let that attention go to their heads right and I'm always fascinated what's going on in people who are able to do that is your accident is that gratitude part of the story I absolutely think it is and that gratitude from surviving the surgery actually it only lasted a few days but the one gratitude that lasts lasted forever and still a carry with me today is the Gratitude of waking up in the morning and having my mental health be good because after the accident after all the mental health struggles I went through having my mental health became even more powerful in me feeling grateful so let me give you an example you know I'm in London right now and I'm staying in an Airbnb for 10 days by myself and for years I could never be alone I could not sleep in a house by myself I really couldn't be alone for more than 30 minutes because my mental health was so broken that I would get so anxious and scared of just existing so to me when I wake up in the morning I'm like wow I'm actually okay I'm alone and I'm okay that drives me every single day much more than this arriving the accident that to me if I had a day my mental health was good I didn't want to die I didn't feel terrified about being alive that's an amazing day and to me that is the biggest success biggest wealth I could ever ever ever ever have do you have a set practice to make yourself consciously aware of that each day yes every evening and I've been doing this for four years I use an app called dailyo which is like a very sort of basic like journaling app and every evening before I go to bed at 10 pm I rate my mental health on a scale of one to five in that app and then I put a little entry about how that day went and so I can show you my phone afterwards I have um four years worth of daily and little color per day showing my mental health and no matter what happens maybe I'll have like a difficult day at work maybe somebody will say I'm stupid on the internet like it doesn't matter because if my mental health was okay that little rating in the app will be a 5 out of 5. you know they're different completely different things like the the work thing and the success and that's amazing but ultimately I go to bed every single night and what matters the most to me is my health and my brain and if I feel okay because I don't I think it's hard to understand like the depth of The Angst and suffering that I was going through being alive had become the most terrifying thing I could ever imagine ever so it's like if you're really scared of spiders I'll get like a living tarantula from Australia and glue it to your forehead and tell you you can't touch it it's alive it's moving you can't do anything I felt that way about life just being alive was the scariest thing being in a body was the scariest thing ever like it went really far the pain and the suffering so today the fact that I'm you know I took the train for two hours by myself I felt happy I didn't feel dissociated didn't feel anxious depressed scared of being alive that's just going to be the best feeling ever for the rest of my life when do you think that starts to change for you that that fear of being alone that fear of being alive when did that start to shift to I'm okay being alone I have gratitude now for being alive there were a few steps I think one learning about glucose was a very important first step in me reconnecting with my body and feeling and knowing that I could trigger those episodes of immense existence existential fear with glucose bikes I was like whoa let's just pause that a minute I don't want to get in the way of your answer because I I think it's absolutely profound what you're sharing this is a point I don't think people get that you're saying that feeling of an existential crisis or let's broaden it out panicky anxious feeling stressed that can sometimes be because your blood sugar is going up and down right it's it's a biological it's a physiological problem not necessarily a psychological problem being on a glucose roller coaster can trigger a vast range of symptoms for me it was these extreme episodes of anxiety and brain fog oh brain fog is a fascinating topic as well brain fog would become overpowering super anxious super stressed not okay and when I first discovered that glucose spikes could be one of the triggers that completely changed my life because instead of feeling powerless towards this symptom and this feeling I was like oh my God wait a minute you're saying that in the way that I'm eating I'm triggering these moments that blew my mind and I finally felt like I had some power back I was like for 10 eight years I had been a victim to this not knowing when these episodes were happening being too scared of being alone all the time and then learning about glucose it was the beginning of the rest of my life because I thought hey I can impact how I'm feeling I can change these symptoms if I learn about my glucose levels what a beautiful powerful place to be yeah it's really interesting I'm drawn to thinking about some of the trials on diet and mental health yes let's talk about the smiles trial for example you know in 2017 when they showed um depression can be influenced by a 12-week age in diets right now I I've not read the paper for a while I can't remember what's in the discussion at the end but when they're querying what's going on here I don't recall blood sugar being part of the conversation I recall things like the saying could it be the omega-3 content of the Mediterranean diet in that trial is it the impact of uh or the diversity and plant Foods on the microbiome and that's an effects in moods and of course those things can be playing a role but it could also be that you're eating a minimally processed food diet that's going to stabilize your blood sugar yes and there are studies maybe that have come out since then I think that showed that the more glucose bikes you have the worse your symptoms of anxiety and depression are so that was the first step for me being like my food is impacting how I'm feeling my mental health and then when I studied my blood sugar not only did these episodes happen way less but also so many other things fell into place that I didn't even think were a symptom or a thing I thought it was normal you know the fatigue and the cravings and the pimples and I just thought it was normal so that's changed a lot but then I layered onto that once I felt they're quite strong in that base I layered onto that just amazing therapy EMDR and the shaking and the everything and the journaling and I started bringing together all these practices and over time slowly you know I've been able to heal myself and that is to me I'm so I'm so proud of it like I'm so happy about it yeah thank you for sharing that it's funny as you say that as we record this literally a few hours ago the new episode with Bessel van dercoat just just went out and in that uh conversation he was chatting about EMDR and what a powerful therapy it can be for certain people in certain instances um it helped me so much did it yes it helped me a lot really it's quite amazing um and I you know I used it for so many things notably at the beginning for like that incident of the accident jumping off the waterfall before the surgery having my first panic attack all those moments with EMDR I was able to go back and give myself the the love and the the resources and the tools and the compassion that I didn't have in those moments and to process some of that you know traumatic stuff you strike me as someone who is very open-minded yeah you clearly are a disciple of science right you like to study likes of research you like to report on science and communicate it but I think there's another side to you as well that doesn't necessarily need to not fit alongside a scientist I I really like that because you seem to be someone who's very spiritual or that if you're very spiritual yes yeah and I think a lot of people have the view that you're not you but one is either you know scientific or they're spiritual people love boxes they love boxes yeah but you're someone who I think beautifully straddles both of those things spaces um and I'm also a musician but that's totally secret nobody knows because the boxers thing you know so right now I have my biochemist hat on but I'm also super spiritual and I also speak to my body and you know I feel connected to the universe and I get insights and things that are not from scientific studies but both can exist you know I I love that about myself the the balance the contradiction as well the contrast is really nice yeah I've heard that you like to ground I do yes I'm in love you do too I do what does it mean to you and now it's saying what it means to me um well I mean technically actually grounding is putting your feet through your hand on the Earth right so I love putting my feet on the grass and just like feeling my nervous system calm down and I started learning about the science behind it which again through my my mind like when you ground there are actual electrons from your body that go into the Earth's nervous system and you connect your body and the Earth's nervous system your nervous system the Earth nervous system connect and regulate you like hello that's insane that's so so cool and people say they're aliens don't exist like guys come on like we're doing alien stuff like how cool is that and now we even know that that has an impact on your glucose levels a study that I just shared on my Instagram a couple weeks ago um showed that if you ground and okay this is a lot it's for the study eight hours a day too much but it's for the study you can reduce your glucose levels by 50 milligrams per deciliter that's probably like three millimoles per liter that's a law it's huge in people with types of diabetes in just a week of doing eight hours of grounding a day nothing else has changed because it reduces your stress levels and it has all these wonderful side effects on your body so yeah I love grounding it's amazing yeah I mean for me it's simply you know I'm lucky enough to have a garden and pretty much every morning particularly now as you know we're recording this in February right but it does feel as though spring is in the air absolutely which means in the morning I'm out I'm Barefoot I'm on the grass I'm often drinking my coffee on the grass and we have a phrase in the family because I I always try and do it with the kids when they're up and we call it power from the earth as a family that's what we call it and to me what does it do you know really it's it's fascinating to hear the science it really is but a few years ago I thought for me I don't even need science for this right yeah I feel good when I'm Barefoot on the grass just as I feel good when I'm on a beach and I'm Barefoot on the beach right it feels good to me and I think I feel like I'm someone who has lived much of my life in my heads and so I think grounding is not only literally putting my feet on the Earth it it's also kind of metaphorically for me it's rooting myself yes it's like I really try and feel my feet yes on the ground the pressure going into my feet you know coming out of my head yes and into my body I love that I and I have a very strong um I can't remember the word is it introspection it's if the feeling of being able to feel what's going on inside your body introception thank you so much and that have that very strongly and so when I'm grounding I can feel you know the energy moving from my upper body to my lower body and I think because of my accidents in my spine and all that metal there there was a sort of blockage so it's really really helpful when I go on the ground and I just feel that energy just you know going down into my legs and connecting it feels so nice or we could go down there a huge Rabbit Hole here but I'm gonna pull us back a little bit okay um not because I'm not enjoying that but because I really I want to make this so practical for people I won't be able to get your books for sure to get all the science and all the tips but I really want some kind of maybe we could go through some common foods for example common things that people do just to explain blood sugar and maybe what people might be able to do like about it to limit the spike boats right I was gonna say oats oats right a common breakfast food all over the world which may not be the best thing in all situations talk to us about oats so oats are a grain and grains are full of starch and as I explained there's two types of food that create glucose spikes in the body starches and sugars so oats are a starch and actually if you look at starch it's just one long chain of glucose molecule attached hand to hand and when you eat starch those glucose molecules get freed and then it creates your glucose spikes so oats in the morning if you're just having oats you're just having starch which means glucose bike so if you have oats and you feel hungry two hours after eating them or if you feel tired at any moment during the day or if you have other symptoms that you want to take care of you might want to look at your oath situation you have two options one you can learn to put some clothes on those oats so maybe some Nut Butter maybe you can put some protein powder in there maybe you have a little egg you know a little soft-boiled egg in the oats make it like Savory oats you can find lots of nice little combinations to put protein fat and fiber in the oats other option you just change your breakfast completely and and you go for what I call the Savory breakfast and in the glucose goddess method lots of recipe ideas beautiful but the principle is the following a Savory breakfast that keeps your glucose levels steady and helps you feel amazing is built around protein so eggs fish nuts tofu protein powder left over from dinner leftovers from dinner one of my favorite ways to get protein I had leftover butter chicken for breakfast this morning I had Indian food last night butter chicken for breakfast perfect and then you can add some fiber or some fat to that so you know olive oil butter avocados maybe a bit of spinach if you want and then the most important thing to remember is that in a Savory breakfast you should not eat anything sweet except if you want some whole fruit for Taste no fruit juices no Jam no sweet cereal no sweet yogurts Etc you can still have sweet Foods later in the day but for breakfast if you want to set yourself up for Success it's very important to not have sweet food and then start you can as well before taste so you can have some oats before taste you know if your body really feels like them see a lot of people will feel that they don't have time in the morning to make a breakfast and they will get on the road to work and they'll stop off at a coffee shop and they'll pick up a coffee and they may get tempted with Panos chocolates or croissants or pastries get a ham croissant instead of a chocolate croissant right because at least it has some protein in it or maybe on Sundays you can make a big batch of soft boiled eggs and you can take a couple with you every day or in my book I have a recipe for egg cups which are really delicious but at the coffee shop maybe they have nuts maybe they have a toast with something Savory on it yeah but I agree it's a difficult food landscape to navigate it really is and I think you know having a savory bread first is game changing when you've never done it um you know for years like you I've been talking to patients about eat your dinner for breakfast yes you know cook too much and in the morning heat it up and there's a couple of people to mind who I won't share their story now I think I've spoken about them on the podcast before and I wrote about one of them in in uh in one of my books completely different experience of Life yes I say that sentence absolutely it's just that they're going into the world but their cognition their work performance their hunger completely different it's like stepping through the mirror you know in the movie yeah and if you think about what is the common breakfast now in the west and not only just the West um in India where I used to go every other summer spend six weeks in India because that's where all my family used to live and many of them still do and I can still remember so clearly that you know I play with my cousins but they were still at school in the summer you know different timetables and different you know year um and term times in India they would have a full-on meal before they went to school for the day they'd have um you know they'd have vegetable curries they'd have you know a whole plate full of foods and I remember this is a little while ago now but it all started to change when companies like Kellogg's got started marketing aggressively yeah and it changed to being all these quick and easy you know we can this is this is advancement right this is the This Is Us making progress we can make a quick and easy breakfast with cereal milk on top and off we go but actually through the lens of blood sugar huge difference this was invented we all used to eat breakfast that was just like any other meal yeah and then food companies were like cereal for breakfast let me think about that it's really cheap to make it's addictive people will get pleasure from it let's tell them that they should have cereal and orange juice in the morning that was invented it's a marketing thing going on the best thing for breakfast is dinner I completely agree with you or even upgrade dinner in a pan plus you crack two two eggs so you make like a a little like a breakfast version of the dinner right but completely like if you have something sweet and starchy for breakfast massive glucose by glucose roller coaster sugar addiction inflammation poor energy so breakfast is really the worst time to eat just sugars and starches but it's the time where most of us eat just sugar and starches and it's it's the common breakfast for children I know and I understand the pressure on parents you know maybe two parents working maybe not enough time you know Financial concerns I understand and not knowing but it really isn't the best breakfast to give your kids even from a school performance perspective and I wonder how many behavioral issues at school mid-morning right which get detentions and gets sanctions before in the school how many of those are actually blood sugar issues it'd be very interesting to do a study on that one day you know I grew up eating in the telegrape every morning for breakfast from the ages of I don't know five to like 16 Nutella crepe now that does sound delicious and then I was exhausted at 11. I was I felt so hungry that my stomach would hurt you know and it would definitely affected my day on a daily basis I just thought it was normal but no it was not normal what is your research shown about plant milks right A lot of people these days are humming almond milk rice milk oats milk um what is that doing to blood sugar and presumably it matters what they're having it with it matters what they're having a risk but also matters what it's from so if you look at milks that come from starches so rice and oats are starches when you make a milk out of them you're essentially making making liquid starch and that's just pure glucose when you look on a glucose monitor what happens when you drink an oat milk coffee versus a cow's milk coffee I mean it's night and day the oat milk or the rice milk will create a big glucose spike in the body and it makes sense because you're just drinking liquid starch so it's pretty obvious if you think about the source of it if you have something like almond milk at least almonds don't have that much starch in them so it's a much better situation coconut milk is also better cow's milk if you're into Dairy but oat milk unfortunately massive massive spikes in most people now I know people really love oat milk so here's here's my recommendation if you don't have many symptoms and you feel pretty great and you have good energy no Cravings whatever no problem and you love the oat milk go ahead I have nothing to teach you but if you could feel better than you currently do and if you want to help some of the symptoms you might be feeling you might want to consider switching to another type of milk or you can also do another hack I have which is if you want to eat something sweet have it at the end of a meal instead of on empty stomach so to me oat milk is like essentially sweet so you can have it after your breakfast instead of on an empty stomach before breakfast you can also go for a little walk afterwards you can use some of the hacks to reduce its impact on your glucose but really it's not it's not the vibe yeah it's not the best no movement and blood sugar [Music] this is quite an easy hack for people it's been in many cultures for years but but as you've already explained we've lost a lot of this kind of cultural wisdom yeah what is the relationship between movement and blood sugar and how can we utilize movement to mitigate the effects of what we've eaten so you know that my mitochondria I was telling you factories that make energy in our muscles we have a lot of mitochondria and they turn glucose into energy so that your muscles can contract so when you're walking when you're dancing when you're lifting weights you know playing whatever team sports your muscles are using glucose to power themselves and so we can use that to our advantage and here's the hack after a meal use your muscles for 10 minutes now this can be just walking it can be cleaning your kitchen it can be doing my new favorite thing which is calf raises so you just sit at your desk and you just like put your feet planted on the floor and you just raise your feet up on your toes so only your toes are touching and you do these calf raises or calf push-ups for like five minutes in any way you want to use your muscles it's going to be helpful because as you're Contracting your muscles the glucose from the meal as it arrives in your bloodstream is going to be soaked up by your muscles and used for energy so you're going to reduce the gluco spike of that meal without needing to change what's in the meal at all so yes we can try and eat better quality meals to stabilize our blood sugar we can change the food order but let's say we don't want to make any changes and we've had a meal that we know possibly isn't the best for us in terms of blood sugar spikes you're saying if we do 10 minutes of movement after that meal we can mitigate the effects exactly so within 90 minutes after the end of the meal use your muscles a little bit and really it can be super simple you can be sitting on the couch watching a movie after dinner grab a bottle of water and do like some bicep curls with a bottle of water anything basically anything anything and really the calf raises are a really easy place to start your calf actually has a muscle called the soleus muscle which is specifically accident at soaking up glucose from the bloodstream so the calf raises are a good option I saw this on your Instagram grid recently profound and like I always look at things through an evolutionary lens and think well what is so unique about the calf muscle we use it for walking we use it for walking exactly and then yes of course bicep curls um I get it simple easy hack but then if we think about it most movements in our evolutionary past I can't imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors would just for the sake of it pick up something heavy and and love that you know they would they're not going to be doing utilizing uh energy unless there's a good reason for it right so it kind of makes sense that the Soleus the calf muscle would be quite important here wouldn't it because it's like no to get around to get food to move anywhere to get back to safety you need to use your calf muscle so I don't know talk to me about that because it kind of makes sense a little bit doesn't it so you think that in hunter-gatherer days there the people didn't like work out for fun or like play games maybe they were playing games yeah right maybe you're like wrestling with your friends or hey to be clear I don't know right I'm not I'm not kindness okay I'm just sort of hypothesizing yeah why might the soleus muscle be so good at disposing of glucose yeah to other muscles maybe it's because right I think the fact that we use it for walking means it needs it needs really efficient at using energy and your other muscles of course they use glucose but this muscle it's very very good at taking glucose from your bloodstream so maybe it has something to do with that that after you've eaten and you need to walk or run or whatever you need to have a muscle that is going to be able to soak up that glucose immediately maybe I don't know I should look back at the study because I'm sure in the discussion they probably explain some hypotheses about why that's the case Fruit versus dried fruit oh my God I think this is one of my favorite topics okay okay so you know how people say um well it's fruit so it's natural yeah okay so I have a scoop for you the fruit that we have today in our supermarkets is not natural just like humans red gray wolves into chihuahuas for their entertainment humans have been Crossing and breeding fruit for Millennia to make them more appetizing for humans to make them sweeter to make them have fewer seeds less fiber if you look at an ancestral banana it's tiny it's full of seeds it's quite dense and it's not very sweet if you look at a banana today it's very sweet very little fiber very little seeds super easy to eat humans have been creating these fruits to be extra juicy and extra sweet and extra full of sugar so that's one thing to note the fruit you see today in the supermarkets is not natural however a piece of fruit still has fiber in it and fiber is protective as I explained at the beginning fiber helps reduce the glucose Spike of a meal because it creates that mesh in the intestine so if you want to eat something sweet eating fiber is still the best I'm sorry eating a piece of whole fruit is still the best thing to do because of that fiber blunting the spike from the sugar the problem arises when we denature that piece of fruit so maybe we're going to juice an apple as a result we're removing all the fiber from the apple and we're concentrating the sugar that was already being concentrated for Centuries by humans in that whole Apple when we dry fruits we take away all of the water so we concentrate the sugar and we eat way more pieces of dried fruit than we would of regular fruit yeah and what's I think particularly concerning about that it says quite a few companies now which are targeting children with dried fruits and I think many parents are again I'm I I always say this and I want to reiterate this point I genuinely believe that all parents are doing the best that they can in the concepts that their life situation the concepts of their knowledge but I'm not sure that those dried fruit packets are the best thing to be giving our kids particularly on an empty stomach yes although you could argue that dried fruit is better than like candy because at least it has some fiber in it but what would be even better if you really want to give dried fruit would be to pair it with some nuts for example yeah so you make a little snack with like a few like dried apricots and then some pecans or whatever that's better because you're putting some clothes on the on the carbs right I got it and that's what I love about all your suggestions they can be applied by anyone in any situation no matter what diet they're following yes little hacks little tweaks just to make things a little bit better than they would have otherwise been right exactly we're not talking like big overhaul of your life of your food habits no no small tweaks big impact yeah adding those nuts into the dried fruit you can see how could be really tasty yeah absolutely change the blood sugar response absolutely now just I had a thought there Jesse a lot of the time the cultural wisdom that's there we're now learning the modern science again that's why that works now the only place where I think your recommendations don't match up with certainly the ancient wisdom that I'm aware of is with fruits on empty stomachs because I know in ayurved at Madison for many years they have been talking about if you're having a piece of fruit have it before your meal because then it's digested uh really easily and it doesn't then sort of fester on top of your meal afterwards now first of all I welcome your thoughts on that but just a little addition there based on what you just said about the fact that the way fruit is bred now compared to have fruit is brown in the past maybe two or three thousand years ago maybe the fruits that we were getting lower in Sugar not quite as sweet maybe that work then maybe it doesn't work so well now I don't know but what's your sort of perspective on that well this is a very common question and I was fascinated about it I was like okay where does this come from like why do we think that fruit rots in the stomach if it's eaten last and through my research I found that there was a doctor in the Renaissance who said that fruit and this is a separate Branch from the ayurveda stuff but this doctor said that if you eat fruit after a meal it's going to rot and putrefy in your stomach and create all these Vapors and stuff um that doctor just said that I mean I don't know where he pulled that out of but it just is not true like nothing actually rots or putrifies in the stomach so that particular thing about the rotting is just not true nothing can rot in the stomach actually so there is this ancient wisdom about having the fruits on an empty stomach or at the beginning of a meal and to that I say well we have two opposing views right we have the glucoscience which says if you want to eat something sweet the best time for your glucose is at the end of a meal and we have ancient wisdom that could also you know have some really good sources so maybe where we land is if you don't feel any discomfort by eating fruit after a meal maybe you do that and if you're somebody and your body's like no it's not working maybe it gives you bloating or whatever then you switch it up you know it's up to you to sort of tailor these recommendations to other things going on in your life so what you're recommending is we take a pragmatic nuanced approach to our health mind blowing you know it's 2023 that's not the way it goes yeah I know I know and I think this is also why um you know my work has been so well received is that it feels fresh and nice and it's no longer an extreme diet it's not like cut out entire food groups it's like okay guys I think we're over diets like personally I would rather we never ever have any diets ever again so what about we use all this recent science and we find these principles that are easy that have a big impact on our physical and our mental health that are not very hard don't cost any money yeah and how about we do that and people seem to to be quite happy with that approach as Jesse it's almost impossible now to have the audience size which you have and not get pushed back okay I'm sure it's technically possible but I would say it's almost impossible if and when people push back against your work what is the common thing they say and how do you respond so I've experienced like multiple waves of this okay um and I sort of categorize pushback or criticism in two camps so there's like the stuff that really I can't do anything about for example um people who don't want to hear any information about food because it no but you know because maybe they had an eating disorder in the past maybe they're just like no so for those people my work is like they just they just hate it because I'm talking about food those things I don't really pay attention to because you know it's not for that exactly and then you have the useful criticism and from the beginning of the glucose goddess project I've always really listened to feedback whether it's in comments or in DMS or in real life like because my purpose here is to make science accessible to make it inclusive to make sure that I'm serving the people that I want to give this information to so I would say the biggest criticisms have been from people with type 1 diabetes maybe this was a year ago that it started happening that they didn't like that I was using a because monitor as a not as a person without diabetes and I really listened very carefully to this because um a lot of people were sharing with me how saddened made them that I was like showing my glucose monitor like hey I'm wearing a glucose monitor and for them it was a device that they need to survive and so I really took that to heart and I started thinking a lot about my glucose monitor approach and you know whether I think it's for everybody I stopped also posting photos of myself with the device being like hey glucose monitor now I really am just like I'm using it to make the illustrative graphs but I no longer um use it as like a fashion statement yeah you know so that was really really helpful I think another thing that people push back on is to close on carbs thing they say yes but if you take it to an extreme it could be harmful like as I explained in the beginning you could put two pounds of butter on a piece of bread and that would reduce the spike but you need to have more nuance and that I think I really address it in the book quite well so I think you do address it really well I think you know I've read both books and I think you're really clear that it's not to stress you out right this is not necessarily applied in every situation this is to try and help you yeah right yeah sure in an Ideal World we'd all eat an exclusively whole food diet that was naturally stabilizing our blood sugars but the reality is most people or at least many people are going to struggle with that yes and I think particularly in the second book this new book The testimonials I just love reading them you know you mentioned Eating Disorders there is a testimonial right there's a testimonial I'd Carry On which book it's in about bulimia yeah and how a young lady I think with bulimia said your method has really help them and before you answer I've quite a lot of thoughts on what you just said and you know I've been trying to communicate Health messaging to the public since maybe 2014 now through TV shows books podcasts whatever it might be right yeah and you simply cannot anymore communicate health information and not get pushback and the reality is not all information is for everyone right I try I think what you do to be as compassionate as possible when putting out that information and now I can be relatively detached when if and when pushback comes and and go yeah I can actually learn from that's a good point or I actually disagree with that or I can see that that person is being really really triggered by something this ain't about me this is about them right so I think taking a compassionate approach to that has been really helpful I understand what you're saying about the type 1 diabetics and I can understand why um certain members of that community may feel like that but technology and progress is gonna come in every form cgms are here they're here to stay they're only going to get more and more popular I do believe there can be a valuable tool for some people with the right education with the right contacts I think they can be an incredible tool for the right person yeah and to be fair there's a whole other part of the community of people at top and diabetes who are super happy that I'm wearing one because it destigmatizes it for them there you go so there's always you know pros and cons and on the Eating Disorders front um I really got very interested in this topic and I spoke to many experts on the subject because I got a few comments being like oh these rules are just an eating disorder waiting to happen and I thought that was really unfortunate that you know we need to Nuance something that's a diet and that's really unhealthy unscientific completely random and could cause some difficult behaviors but also with advice that people need because people are dying like so and that was a tough one for me to get through I was like okay how like where do I land like what's true about not wanting to encourage disordered eating and what's true about wanting to give these very important pieces of information that are life-changing and potentially life-saving so but it's an ongoing Journey you know the pushback I try to learn from every thing that happens yeah you get this I've definitely had it when we done podcasts on fasting before and I've thought long and hard about this is this irresponsible should I be doing it and where I have landed is you know I try and caveat it I try and make sure in the introduction to each podcast we say this may not be suitable for people who are recovering from or suffering with eating disorders having said that some people with eating disorders find fasting incredibly useful I know that because people are fed back and also let's just look at what's going on around us you know in America what is it 88 or 90 of people may be metabolically unhealthy right stabilizing their blood sugar is going to save their life yeah exactly right exactly so and I think we all and I know it's hard because I know sometimes it's parents of kids who are struggling they've got like a 12 year old or a 14 year old who's really struggling with eating disorder and then they get often and I can totally understand it feel very defensive and upset when they see certain posts but I'm not sure I have the solution to it apart from trying to approach these things with compassion yes I don't know because not everything is for everyone absolutely and then you know you also have to remember that of the people reading your books like listening to a podcast reading your content like 99 of people are so thrilled and happy and then there are a few people who are triggered or upset that will comments and that's what we see right but it's really it's really not representative of the reality that being said I think you know I'm on in the same boat as you which is I try to learn and be as respectful and mindful as possible and um then once you feel like you've done the right thing if somebody still doesn't like it well you know so be it Jesse it's been such a pleasure talking to you it really has I mean we've not even scratched the surface over what's in your two books and I can see why so many people follow you online so many people have been moved by your work it's making a real material difference in their lives and therefore the lives of the people around them right that's something I'm so passionate about you can change one person you don't just change them they've got more energy they're less Moody they're less cranky that impacts how they parent that impacts how they are with their Partners how they are with their work colleagues right so I think the work you're doing is so so important this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our Lives I think you would probably add when we have stable blood sugars levels we get more rounds of Our Lives absolutely for people who of feeling inspired by what they've heard and want to start making changes right now do you have any final words of wisdom for them get the glucose guidance method my new book it's going to be your partner in helping turn these hacks into lifelong habits and if you can't afford it or you don't want to buy a book just go on my Instagram and start looking at the graphs that I share Savory breakfast veggies first vinegar movement grows on carbs and there's many more things you'll discover but those can become your best friends in your daily life for someone who's saying Jesse hear you I hear what you're saying but I cannot see how my mood or my mental health has got anything to do with my blood sugar levels what would you say to them I would say look at the studies it really really does or just try the 10 minute calf push-up at your desk after your next meal and see if your moon doesn't improve see it for yourself I would say test it and um you know your body will speak for itself yeah Jesse thank you for coming to the studio thank you Ryan for having me you are changing lives keep up the good work thank you lots of gratitude if you enjoyed that conversation I think you are really going to enjoy this one on the power of foods to transform your health as we sit down every day to make a decision about what we eat or we go to the store to buy some food we need to realize whatever we put into our bodies either going to take our health down or build our health back up

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 342,638

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: RB9p4GnMg98

Length: 115min 10sec (6910 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023