Optimizing Sleep to Lower Fasting Glucose

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 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 we'll spend the night with each other a couple of nights a week but the majority the time we don't because she loves to sleep with the dogs then the dogs screw my sleep up and uh and zoe you could drop zoe in the 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 separate bedroom um so those are things you got to talk about is there 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 they're 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 oh yeah yeah i've heard that before actually but not in that context of of managing kind of you know high blood sugars in the morning but i like that and then there's some man there's some other things too like um you know there could be issues with 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 enough serotonin, you're not going to 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 five 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. And 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 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 jiu-jitsu low carb for me is like 500 a day right um yeah you know when you're trying to like fit 15 hours a week plus conditioning and a little bit weight training you're going to need it right but um for somebody who's really overweight there's no real inherent need for carbohydrates whatsoever other than probably fiber and some phytonutrients so if they're really overweight we'll probably take them down to a fairly low carb and put them more 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 i suppose 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