Optimizing Sleep for Metabolic Health

The second thing is to stay away from glucose disposal agents, because a lot of people will take glucose disposal agents because what they're doing is they're just trying to lower the number on their glucometer. What they're not understanding is, yes, initially that will lower the number on the glucometer. If you're waking up and you're at eight millimoles on your glucometer and you take a glucose disposal agent, yeah, it might drop down to 6.5 in a few weeks. The problem that you're not understanding is you're shoving glucose into a cell that doesn't want it for some specific reason. It makes more sense to build more mitochondria first. Then if you need a glucose disposal agent, knock yourself out. If you're going to take anything, especially with high fasting blood sugar, you're probably going to want to take something like berberine. Okay. Because one of the, one of the main things that berberine does is it, it dampens down your liver's ability to manufacture glucose. And that, because that's really where you're getting the glucose from is high adrenaline is going to crank up gluconeogenesis. Your liver is going to start making a lot of glucose. Now you wake up, you've got really high levels of glucose. There's one point where you need to get that into the cell, but there's another point where you need to get the liver to stop making so much of it. And that's why doctors will put people on metformin because one of the main actions, other than just making you more insulin sensitive, it also pushes down the liver's ability to make glucose. So then it makes your glucose look a lot better but again that stuff for those are band-aids those aren't long-term solutions right we still have to take care of the getting more fit and getting more healthy on the side too so you touched on it but the same another question from the the same uh chap was um he's been having high waking um blood sugars but pre and post prandial generally now are after starting to input some aerobic conditioning and it's like calorie deficit bringing carbohydrates down and a lot of the things that are being recommended the daytime readings tend to be okay but the morning reading is always pretty much over where it should be yeah so some of the stuff some of the tactics we'll use with that is we might give somebody 500 to a thousand milligrams of berberine before bed okay so we might do that we also might we also might do a sleep assessment and say okay Are you waking up a lot? Are you waking up to pee a lot at night? Typically they'll say yes. Okay. So just so that we have the foundational fundamental stuff down, how are your sleeping arrangements? Do you, is it completely dark in your room? Is it cold enough in your room? Does your partner sleep with you and they have weird sleeping habits and that's keeping up? Do you sleep with dogs? Like that's like, like I, my, my wife and I actually have separate, separate bedrooms and the reason we have separate bedrooms and and we'll spend the night with each other a couple of nights a week but the majority of the time we don't because she loves to sleep with the dogs then the dogs screw my sleep up and and Zoe you could drop Zoe in a middle of a war zone bombs going off and she could sleep but I can't yeah so I want her to be able to sleep with the dogs because she enjoys that but I also want to get good sleep so I sleep in a separate bedroom. So those are things you got to talk about it. Is there any light coming in from a street lamp or something like that? Maybe we get you some blackout curtains. Maybe are you in the middle of town? There's a lot of noise. Maybe get a white noise machine or play white noise stuff on your cell phone. You want to make sure that there's taking care of the sleep. Because like I said earlier, if you're not sleeping well and sleeping soundly, your blood sugar is going to be artificially raised. So if we correct the sleeping habits, then we can take some berberine and then we might actually have a meal a couple hours before bed to make sure we have ample amounts of liver glycogen So we might do something like a little bit of honey with a little bit of sodium So that will quickly replenish liver glycogen. The sodium will help keep you from having to wake up to pee at night. And then we'll also mix that in with maybe a little bit of Greek yogurt, because there's been some pretty good studies showing that casein protein before bed creates an environment for you to be anti catabolic while you sleep so that makes a really nice yummy treat for people if they have like a bowl like a cup of berries with some Greek yogurt maybe drizzle some honey on top and throw a little bit of sea salt on that mix it up and have that at the end of the day before you go to bed and then there's some men there's some other things too like you know there could be issues of serotonin and melatonin when people are very stressed out and anxious when you're very stressed out and your body's breaking energy down rapidly it consumes a lot of activated b3 so there's a system that creates more of that activated b3 where you still trip the fan away from the brain to make that if you can't get tripped the fan into the brain you're not making enough serotonin you don't make it of serotonin you're not gonna make melatonin so in a lot of cases too we'll give someone a small amount of melatonin to see if that helps and if it does then we'll probably do is work on if they're not on an SSRI or not on to any type of antidepressant we might give them a little bit of b6 and 5-htp and see if that helps and then that usually takes care of a lot of things there's a lot of different angles you can go on to to get somebody to sleep better which almost always is going to lower their fasting glucose if it doesn't in a lot of cases I find a lower carb diet a lower carb approach works pretty well too as long as they're not in a massive calorie deficit sure so actually not coupling the two calorie deficit and low carb maybe having one or the other yeah so maybe beefing up the protein quite a bit um beef up the protein quite a bit making sure you're having adequate amounts of uh of good good quality fatty acids and then when i say low carb i'm not talking like going straight keto right um i'm talking like low carb for you and your activity so like low carb for me is 125 grams a day when I'm doing jitsu low-carb for me is like 500 a day right you know when you're trying to like 15 hours a week plus conditioning and a little bit weight training you're gonna need it right but for somebody who's really overweight there's no real inherent need for carbohydrates whatsoever other than probably fiber and some fiber nutrients so if they're really overweight we'll probably take them down to a fairly low carb and put more on a ketogenic style diet for a small period of time because that way they don't get those reactive hypoglycemia issues and then we're looking back at that kind of metabolic flexibility and improving people's use of different substrates especially exactly and once they lose a good amount of weight they lose a good amount of inflammation from that fat loss then eventually their carbs start to go up because they're going to need those because the performance goes up and their body wants more carbs okay look that we've we've covered so much different stuff it's gonna be so such i knew it was going to be like this from the course but we've just covered so much stuff it's so interesting i don't want to take up too much of your time so i'm sure you've got stuff stuff planned but i'll ask you a couple more questions just to finish off so we've actually already covered this in massive detail but just as probably a little bit of a summary for the whole podcast really is I tend to ask people what are their three best tips for people for improving or optimizing their health and performance so we've obviously already covered a lot of it but just as a little soundbite what are your three best tips for improving health and performance I think one thing is that to not put all your eggs in one basket like don't don't be married to a method or an idea and don't don't you know don't be married to your passion either because passion can really mess you up and there's a book i highly recommend people um if you if you know if you if you like to read and if you like to read especially fantasy i'm a big fantasy and sci-fi fans like dude and other books and i i tend to read what i find is a lot of sci-fi and fantasy it tells a story but there's also lessons that you could learn from the characters and things and so there's a book called wizards first rule um and in it there's 13 wizards rules that every wizard kind of lives by and one of them is the rule is passion rules reason so if i get and the whole the whole concept of the book is that reason should always be the cornerstone of all your decisions like it either makes sense or it doesn't and don't allow your passion to override your sense of reason that way you don't do dumb shit so you know i love to lift heavy i love

squat but right now I've got lower lumbar herniations I can't squat I have to do step ups and split squats I have to work around it as much as I want to doing too much squatting and and ignoring the niggles is what got me to a point where now I can't squat so or I'm having to like relearn how to squat so never tip number one is never let your passion destroy your performance and health. Point number two is make sure that you're getting information from multiple places. Like don't just sit in an echo chamber and get your information from just the people who you think are the experts. Don't appeal to authority. You see that a lot, especially in the evidence based crowd is just because somebody's name is on a bunch of research articles, it doesn't mean they have a good grasp on reality because what happens in a lab is usually very, very different than what happens in real life. Um, especially when you put like, when you put humans brains and what they're going to do and what, you know, how they're going to, um, act outside of a lab. So making sure that you're learning and getting information from as many places as you can on how to control your health and making sure that the shit makes sense. Right. It's just, it's like we say with the NHS, you know, God bless the NHS. But, you know, sometimes doctors, doctors don't do what we do. And we don't do what doctors do. So sometimes they're not the best people to get advice on nutrition and lifting and conditioning and training on because they're not taught that stuff. Right? So you don't want to just because a doctor says something doesn't mean that that's the way it needs to be. And you got to put everything else in context, just like if I've got an overweight diabetic losing weight losing that first 10% and then every 10% they lose is gonna massively increase their health but what do I tell the guy who not at that level yet he just got type 2 diabetes and he really skinny because he lost all his muscle mass like I can tell him to lose weight so I want to make sure I got multiple inputs of where I'm getting my information from so that I can I can give both of those people their their independent prescription that's gonna be based for them specifically the third one is just just fucking move more man Jesus like if you come in and you train with a trainer three days a week that is not your only exercise like don't don't go train with your trainer for three sessions a week and give yourself a good pat on the back and be like okay I'm done for the week well there's another 165 hours a week right you need to be getting a good quality sleep you need to make sure you're moving more if you sit at a desk like I do all day get up get up every hour and a half two hours and go for a 20-minute walk like and think about doing taking care of the simple shit before you think about taking care of the complex shit you know if you don't know how to eat you're you're you don't know how to diet then stick to what we know works eat a lot of veggies garnish it with meat you know make sure you drink a lot of fluids that's pretty much as basic as it gets right so don't don't get confused and razzle dazzle take care of the fundamental things before you decide to get crazy and do the hoodoo voodoo complex things great advice yeah brilliant advice you know you can't can't beat that really isn't it it's just taking them back to basics for people you know so that they're not um trying to like go down that wormhole of finding a specific nutrient that's going to cure all my ills and it's like well let's just do what you need to do first you know hit those basic like kind of things that we need to be hitting and then we can think about those more kind of in-depth aspects of kind of health and nutrition