E178: Blood Sugar Balance Mistakes You're Making as a Mom That Wreck Hormones & Energy

Do you ever wonder why your energy crashes at 3 PM or your mood feels like a rollercoaster?

It’s not just in your head—it could be your blood sugar. Whether you’ve noticed brain fog, stubborn fatigue, or hormone imbalances, blood sugar plays a bigger role than you might think.

In this episode, we’re breaking it all down:

• Why keeping your blood sugar balanced is crucial for your energy, focus, and hormone health.
• Some sneaky habits, like skipping meals or grabbing “healthy” snacks, that might be sabotaging your progress.
• How blood sugar and hormones are connected, especially for women.

Listen in to learn simple tips to balance your blood sugar so you can feel energized and focused all day—without giving up the foods you love!


Restored podcast mini-course - $20 off with code E178

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PRIVATE PODCAST MINI-COURSE
Leave a 5-star rating on the podcast and DM me the word RATING on IG @leishadrews for $20 off the Restored mini-course on blood sugar balance. Blood sugar balance is one of the first things we work on to balance hormones!

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Disclaimer: Nothing in this podcast is to be taken as medical advice, please take informed accountability and speak to your provider before making changes to your health routine.

This podcast is for women and moms to learn how to balance hormones naturally in motherhood, to have pain-free periods, increased fertility, to decrease PMS mood swings, and to increase energy without restrictive diet plans. You'll learn how to balance blood sugar, increase progesterone naturally, understand the root cause of estrogen dominance, irregular periods, PCOS, insulin resistance, hormonal acne, post birth-control syndrome, and conceive naturally. We use a pro-metabolic, whole food, root cause approach to functional women's health and focus on truly holistic health and mind-body connection.

If you listen to any of the following shows, we're sure you'll like ours too!
Pursuit of Wellness with Mari Llewellyn, Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, Found My Fitness with Rhonda Patrick, Just Ingredients Podcast, Wellness Mama, The Dr Josh Axe Show, Are You Menstrual Podcast, The Model Health Show, Grounded Wellness By Primally Pure, Be Well By Kelly Leveque, The Freely Rooted Podcast with Kori Meloy, Simple Farmhouse Life with Lisa Bass

Transcript

Hey friend, I know you know that blood sugar balance is important, but I am curious if you actually know what it means to have. Blood sugar, if you understand how to tell if you do or don't have balance, blood sugar and if you know why and how it affects your hormones. If you're curious about any of these in this episode is going to be perfect for you. I can't wait to see. In there. OK, blood sugar balance is such a huge topic for. You've heard me mention blood sugar balance. If you are not new to the podcast. If you are new here. This is a perfect place for you to join us because blood sugar balance, in my opinion, is one of the true core foundations to having happy hormones, which means having periods that are not painful, which means having a mood that stays Throughout the month where you're not a hot mess one minute and then perfectly fine the next. And it's also completely foundational when it comes to having energy that lasts all day long. And that's not just like a nice term. It truly is something that you can have as a Mom, as a busy woman, you can have energy that when you wake up in the morning, you've got the energy to get out of bed and do the things. And then in the middle of the afternoon, you're not crashing. And in the evening you're not just like dying To go to bed like you can have energy all day long and blood sugar balance is a huge foundation of this, so I wanted to get a little more granular into blood sugar balance today and talk about what blood Sug. Actually is why it matters to you. Even if you are not diabetic. If you don't have diabetes in your family. If that's not even on your radar. But if you just want to feel. If you want to have a clear brain, if you want to have good energy, if you want to have good creativity and capacity and not just be like crashing all day long like I talked about the blood sugar balance is incredibly important. What does that actually? Like what is blood sugar balance? Our blood sugar. Is meant to stay within a certain range throughout the day, and when we're fasting it's a little bit of a lower range and that just means like in between meals, not necessarily long term fasting. Are you know when we've eaten? And then we have those couple of hours after meals. Another range that your blood sugar should be in. And you can check your blood sugar to see what ranges you're in, but that's not even really what I'm talking about today. I'm really just talking about being able to have essentially these like kind of gentle spikes with meals. Are supposed to have spikes with. Your blood sugar is not supposed to stay totally flat all the time, just like your heart rate is not going to be totally flat. The time. It is normal to have. In blood sugar after your meals, but we just need to see if your blood sugar, the way that you are taking care of your body is working for you. So some of the things that we look at are, are you feeling good when you're eating, like after your? So for example, within the 5 minutes after your meals, but also within a couple of hours after your meals, do you have good energy? You feel satiated. Is your brain working well? And do you have a lot of time throughout the day or week that you get hungry? I know hangry is like a funny term now, but being hangry is actually a sign of a blood sugar crash. And when you have a blood sugar crash, that is a true emergency in your body. So when you have a crash in blood sugar, so say your blood sugar goes below, usually people will feel it between 60 and 70 or a little below 60. And if you have a blood sugar that goes below that, your body is going to send signals to your. Very, very quickly and say this is an emergency. We need to raise this sugar so that your brain can keep functioning so that your heart can keep beating so that there's energy that continues to go to the cells. We don't just shut down. And when your blood sugar goes to that range, you start to feel shaky and cranky and irritable. Maybe a little brain foggy maybe. Little tired. Almost like a sinking. All of those things can happen. When your blood sugar drops and your body is telling your brain like Red alert 911 emergency send stress hormone. Bones to the body right now so that we can spike that blood sugar back up and we can feel OK again. And that's great. Truly can save your life and when that is happening all the time because you're not managing your blood sugar well, this is where it becomes a problem because you're having these spikes in your stress hormones like cortisol. And these spikes in cortisol tell your body red alert emergency. Something's wrong. And the more times we're having these throughout the day. The worst we don't want to be having this happen all the time, even if it's several times a week or several times a day. Would be way too. And so if you are not eating really balanced meals and you're not eating consistently enough. This is going to happen now. I just want to call out the moms for a second because. I'm a. I love you all. Here we are together doing the mom thing. Moms are really bad about balancing their blood sugar, typically because we're taking care of all the people. We're doing all the things we're running around, taking everybody to their parties and to their dance and to their all the things right and so. It is so easy to overlook our own blood sugar balance in our own nourishment when we're doing those things. I am going to call you out even. This is also you if you're eating healthy and you're exercising just because you're eating healthy foods doesn't mean you're balancing your blood sugar. Another big misconception that I see, especially in the space where you are looking at blood sugar and you're looking at weight loss, is that you need to be no carb or extremely low carb or no sugar, and only. Fake sugars to balance your blood sugar. That is absolutely not the case as well. For many of us, it really is about the balance of what you're eating in the consistency that you're eating that makes such a difference for blood sugar. So I actually have a mini course for you on blood sugar balance because it is a little bit of a. Process, but it also does not have to be hard and so I've created a podcast mini course. It takes lesson 2 hours to get through and you can listen to this on your own time. Just because I'm talking about this in this episode, I have a $20 off coupon that you can use. So you can get this podcast mini course for only $7.00 and really understand. Trigger on a deeper level, if you're like, OK, yes, this is. This is something that I need to work on so $17.00 you can use the code E 178 and the link for that will be in the show notes. If that's for you, I'd love to see you in there and really help you balance your. Sugar. And let's talk about why balanced blood sugar is so important for the liver, and why the liver is so important for hormones. Because this is going to help kind of bring things together. You can see okay, so it's not just a safety in the Body Issue. Although safety in the body is incredibly important for. Hormone balance. But when we have an issue with safety in the body and your body is saying a red alert 9/11 we have a problem here really often and spiking your cortisol that is going to directly tell your brain this is not a safe time to focus on H. You do not need to have a baby right now, so you don't need to have balance hormones. You don't need to make the right amount of estrogen. You don't need to make the right amount. So that is one way that blood sugar balance just directly effects. Another way is when the blood sugar is imbalanced in the body, the liver has to work harder to save you all the time and to produce or to have stores of Glucagon which is your backup form of blood sugar. But when the liver is being signaled to SP. Your blood sugar and to use those stores. Really consistently. You are really running into an issue of your liver being overworked and your liver has so many functions in the body, over 500 functions in the body and it cannot do them all at once. And so if your liver is constantly working. To keep your blood sugar balance, you're not giving it what it needs consistently to keep your blood sugar balance. Then it's not going to be detoxifying as well as you would like it to either, so this can show up as general issues with detoxification, or this can show up as specific issues with detoxification for estrogen. And when we have estrogen detox issues, we have PMS mood SW. We have clotty periods. We have painful periods. We have breast tenderness, we. Of, you know, heavy cramping, heavy bleeding, all of these issues come from estrogen not being able to be. Well, and it can be directly linked to your blood sugar being imbalanced in your body having to chase your blood sugar around all the time so your liver can't necessarily. Keep focused on doing its other functions, like detoxing your estrogen. So this is incredibly important and so much of the time. I feel like it's so easily overlooked as a root cause of hormone imbalance. And so when we look at. Blood sugar balance in. Some of the specific things that I see moms doing wrong are. One skipping a lot of meals, not paying attention to your balances of carbs and protein and fats. Not even knowing like what is right for your body or what's not. A lot of times I see moms eating carbs only for snacks or for breakfast. Those are huge red flags in my opinion when it comes to blood sugar balance. And we also really just see that like when we're eating foods that are more convenient. It typically is going to be things that are just not balanced well for blood sugar and so it could be too many carbs or too heavy of a carb ratio. But sometimes we're eating only protein and veggies when we're trying to eat healthy and we're not eating any. And then we're having these. Moments of not feeling satiated and not being able to stick to the plan because we're not getting that. Not only nutrient density, but that. Density in general with those meals, and then we have those cravings and we have, you know, we're snacking, we're starving, we're grumpy. We're all the things. It can be either end of the spectrum and oftentimes there's a little bit of. And so This is why I love to be able to go in and audit this for my clients and for my students. And I do this all the time. Side of nourish your. I'm always doing food audits for my clients and my students and it's so eye opening to have someone else look at your food. And say you know up here it is. Like, here's the reason that you're crashing mid. Here's the reason that you're crashing mid afternoon, even for, you know. For example, I was talking to a client today who is very savvy. Been working on things for a. She was already taking really good care of herself and we noticed that she was talking about, you know, it's a busy season. Got all the things going. She's been out and about a lot more. She's been packing her lunch and she was like, yeah, today I just packed a PB and J and it's like, OK, great. Like she and she was like, it's on my homemade bread. Perfect love that. And we did the ratio like how much carbs to protein are you getting here? Probably getting like 5 grams of protein to like 30 grams of carbs. Let me know how that works out for you this afternoon. If you have a crash or not. Her blood sugar is pretty stable because we've been working on things for a while. She may do fine with that here and there, but if that's happening all the time, that's a red flag and you are going to have blood sugar issues because you're going to have a big spike in blood sugar with an imbalance meal like that, and then you're going. To have a dip in blood sugar, and typically that. Low. Energy and snackiness and needing some coffee and needing some sugar and needing like those type of things and just wondering like what's going on like you know, I had organic peanut butter. Had organic Jelly. I made my own bread. What's happening here? Right? And so it's easy to make those swaps in real time. And that's kind of a basic example, but also being realistic, like even if you know that are you doing, it is always going to be my question whether you're listening to the podcast here or I'm working with you. It's like, OK. May know the things, but are you doing them? That's where coming having someone come. Alongside you and hold your hand. Like oops red flag. It. And we didn't even notice it because we were looking at something else, right? And that is really what makes a big difference. I think long term is being able to see what those specific changes are that need to happen in your food so that you can have. Balanced blood sugar, which leads to safety in the body which leads to happier hormones and better detoxification and less period pain and less PMS. So when? Look at it as a big picture. That is why I just think that blood sugar is such a big topic that needs to be spoken about more and the beauty of it again is that blood sugar balance can be simple. You just need to start to figure out the formula for yourself what ratios you need, how those work for you, how they feel, and then from there. You can start to just plug those ratios into your food and check in with them on a daily basis and you're feeling better. Energy's better. Your mood's better. Parents are. All the things are better just with something as simple as. Sugar balance. So if you want all of the deep dive on blood sugar, come join us and nurse your hormones. We go deep into. You have access to me to be able to check in with your food logs and to be able to see you know how your tracking is going and to have the full lessons that I have laid out there as well as not only just the macro nutrients that. Need for blood sugar balance. But what does that actually look like on a whole food level? And how do you make that work in your busy life? Is what nourish your hormones teaches you? Step one. Is nourishing your body to make hormones well in Step 2 is how to detox hormones well, and those are the two steps that I see needed again and again in the hundreds of women that I've worked with. Join us. Nourish your hormones.