Lifestyle Strategies for Glucose Sensitivity

another question i had was going back to kind of or another question that got sent to me was a couple of questions around that kind of someone who's flirting with type 2 diabetes so they've been having some high blood sugar readings um and they were looking at ways of managing that um so they were looking at potentially uh the best supplements or minerals or foods to help reduce or bring down blood sugars okay all right so let's start let's start with food because everything should be food based and supplement secondary so let's we'll talk food and training number one do it get get your aerobic work in i'm telling you man that's going to be the best thing number one is that number two is obviously resistance training. The majority of where you hold glycogen, the biggest depot is going to be in type 2X fibers. So you're going to want to lift with, you don want to lift with heavy weights but you do want to lift to technical failure So lifting in like bodybuilder rep ranges So if we looking at like hypertrophy rep ranges strength endurance rep ranges and making sure that you take it down to where you getting it like one ugly rep and you done. Like the minute you get one ugly rep, that's the end. You've pretty much fatigued everything you need to. If I can grow more type 2X fiber and type 2A fiber, I can do glycogen. right so that that will be helpful if i'm also doing some of the higher rep stuff like the hypertrophy and the strength endurance stuff and if i'm doing some aerobic training then that's going to build more mitochondria that allows me to manage that flow of energy through the cell and through the mitochondria so that's going to be helpful the third thing is sleep a lot of people that i see that are having issues especially with metabolic syndrome type 2 diabetes they are not prioritizing sleep if you don't sleep your blood sugar rises all right and then it'd be it makes you basically insulin resistant the rest of the day. Making sure you're doing simple lifestyle stuff like walking more, like not worrying about hitting like 20,000 steps a day. But, you know, if you're in London and you're one tube station away and it's a 15 minute walk to that tube station, get off early and walk the 15 minutes and just try to do simple stuff like that. Park further away from things. The easy, easy stuff. and then looking at things like, you know, if you're sitting at home and you're not doing anything and you're watching, you know, Netflix, sit on the floor and do some nice light stretching, just do some static stretching, you know. What we really need to do more of to be able to get more glucose into the cell and get it out of the bloodstream is we need more muscular contraction, okay. So that doesn't necessarily mean lifting weights more. All you need is to contract the muscle. When you contract the muscle, you become glucose sensitive. And that's, that is different than insulin sensitive. So even if I'm, if I'm like, after we get off this, I'm going to go watch the new episodes of the last dance. Um, and what I can do, I've been sitting at a desk all day working. So what I can do on there is I can just flex muscles for 20 or 30 or 40 seconds. And that's enough contraction to make your bot, your cells more glucose sensitive. That's really easy stuff. people can do at a desk when they're at work and no one even knows you're doing it. Stretching is the same thing. If I go into a deep static stretch, the muscles are contracting to protect joints. If I can hold that, that makes me more glucose sensitive. So the more stuff I can do to become glucose sensitive and to burn through energy and to build more mitochondria, the easier it's going to be to regulate my blood sugar. So is that a good thing to do before eating, doing like a body scan of contract and relax or some stretching before a meal absolutely absolutely and that's that's also the case to to train multiple times a day and when i say multiple times a day i'm not meaning like going in and you know maybe working up to one rep max in the morning and then going back in the afternoon and doing functional like perch v and then coming back in the evening and doing like giant sets what i'm saying is like wake up when you wake up in the morning okay wake up have your cup of coffee, have a pee and a poo, and then do like 10 minutes of stretching or do 10 minutes of yoga, do 10 minutes of sun salutation, do 10 minutes of sprawls, just something to get the body moving. Okay, then at lunch, maybe you're contracting all your muscles, you go out for a quick 10, brisk 10 minute walk before you eat that type of thing. When then, you know, in the evening, you go and you hit your training, and then you make sure you, you know, get a good night's sleep. I mean, it's really the, it's the simple stuff that's screwing people up. It's not the, it's not what they're doing dedicated in the gym. It's what they're not doing outside of the gym. And I had this, I had a long talk with, I've got like some herniated lumbar discs right now. And so the physiotherapist I see, he works on the nervous system, then he works on the mechanical side. And so you're going to kind of see a theme going forward in all of the industries. We got to work on the brain and the nervous system, then we can work on the muscles and the mechanics. and so we had this uh a big talk about look you know we can fix you like i can fix you with programming he can fix you with a physio but if you go home and you sit at your desk the same way you've been that's going to negate all the all the hard work you've been doing so it's the little basic everyday things that screw a lot of people up i think maybe having a little bit of knowledge some people would say so if we just say just go for a walk it's going to help your type you know borderline type two it's like well that's not going to help why is that going to help you know a little bit of knowledge around the kind of you know what's happening on a cellular level suddenly it's like oh okay i can see how that actually is going to help let's do that it's like we it's like we talked about earlier like sometimes you got to take a couple of steps back and sometimes you got to slow down before you go faster and so in order to get somebody to buy into that you have to explain you know what the benefit it all a sales process I need you to do this because it going to benefit you in a certain way Now, as far as supplements are concerned, like if you're not taking a multivitamin, multimineral, then you don't need to worry about anything else because that should be the base of everything. You know, something that has a good amount of B vitamins in it and the right forms of B vitamins. like spin if you're gonna buy a vitamin buy a very good vitamin don't buy bullshit vitamin right there's no point because then it becomes an anti-nutrient but you need a lot of b vitamins in your biochemistry you need a lot of magnesium you need a lot of zinc you need copper you need manganese there's a lot of things that you need that you're probably not going to be getting enough of in your food at least not optimal values you might be hitting the rda but hitting an optimal level is going to be a completely different story. And you're always going to be bottlenecked at what cofactors you have to drive those processes. So if I don't have enough of certain B vitamins, certain things aren't going to work as fast as they're supposed to, right? So that would be my first thing. The second thing is to stay away from glucose disposal agents, because a lot of people will take glucose disposal agents because they're 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 still you're you're shoving glucose into a cell that doesn't want it for some specific reason it 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. Because one of the main things that berberine does is it dampens down your liver's ability to manufacture glucose. 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 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