E225: The First Step to Control Blood Sugar and Boost Energy + Stop PMS

Ever wonder why you crash in the afternoon or feel extra moody before your period? I used to blame it on being a mom and hormones, but after working with lots of clients, I found a common thread: blood sugar imbalance. 

Blood sugar isn’t just a diabetic thing, it affects everyone’s mood, PMS, and energy.

In this episode, I share how blood sugar affects your hormones and what you can do about it. Spoiler: you don’t need a total life overhaul, sometimes it just takes one simple change.

You’ll learn:

• [04:41] How to tell if blood sugar is behind your low energy or PMS
• [10:38] Why minerals matter, and why random supplements can backfire
• [18:30] The one thing to do tomorrow morning to change your day

Balancing your blood sugar isn’t a trend, it’s how you get back to feeling like yourself. So, press play, try the one step I share, and see what changes. 

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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

Chapters

• 4:41 How to tell if blood sugar is behind your low energy or PMS
• 10:38 Why minerals matter, and why random supplements can backfire
• 19:32 The one thing to do tomorrow morning to change your day

Transcript

[00:00:00] If you are still struggling with low energy and PMS, mood swings, blood sugar imbalance, could be the hidden culprit, and I'm gonna show you why.

Leisha: [00:00:00] I am honestly blown away by how often blood sugar balance is a huge piece of the puzzle and a big root cause for hormone imbalance, whether that's painful periods, PMS mood swings, low energy. The whole spectrum of things for hormone balance, and so I am going to go into blood sugar balance today, but specifically I'm going to focus on these three things.

I wanna help you understand how blood sugar balance affects hormones. I'm going to help you understand if it is a root cause for you, and I want. To give you an action step so you can start small by doing this one thing that makes a huge difference in blood sugar, balance, and energy. And when I say it makes a huge difference, this is a thing that I come back to again and again with my clients and they come back to me after a week of starting and doing this one thing and they're like, I can't believe that I wasn't doing that, and that I feel this much better by [00:01:00] just changing this around.

 I'm gonna give you a place to get started today so that you can start to feel better. ASAP. Let's just talk about blood sugar balance. I have done episodes on this before. Absolutely, but it is so important and such a topic that I think is overlooked so much of the time. When we're looking at hormones, because we look at hormones as if they're their own thing.

Like, Oh, my hormones are just a mess. And so I need to focus on estrogen. I need to focus on estrogen detox, and I need to focus on, taking a progesterone supplement or increasing my progesterone, which I talked about last week. And while those things are all very true, you can be doing those things until you're literally blue in the face.

And. They're not going to fix your problem if your blood sugar is a hot mess. They're just not they might help take the edge off a little bit, but if your blood sugar is a mess, you are going to struggle to find that safety in your body and that balance that you need to be able [00:02:00] to really balance your hormones this is why we look at things as such a big picture. When I'm working with my clients in nourish your hormones coaching, we are always looking at the big picture. So we are doing the things for hormone detox and making hormones well, but part of making hormones well is the foundations of safety in the body that come from having balanced blood sugar.

And so this is something that is best done with help, to be honest, because we can look at that for you. We have seen this thousands of times at this point, and we can say, these are the key things that you are missing for blood sugar balance. Because I have so many clients come to me who are doing a great job taking care of themselves.

They know nutrition. They're not, out eating fast food, like they have so much of it together, but this piece is just not on point. And it can make a huge difference when we start to see a shift. Being able to have someone look at your tracking, look at what's happening in your body, [00:03:00] your energy, your cycles, that outside view where you're just looking at yourself and you're like, I can't even see anything because I'm so close.

We're not as close and we can back up a little bit and see the big picture. And that's. Why coaching is so powerful. So you not only have the steps, the action steps, but you have encouragement and support. And accountability to implement them. And you have experts who do this every single day for other women and themselves to tell you, Hey, you're almost doing it, but you're not quite there.

 that is why coaching is so important. And I have some fall spots available. You can go to the link in the show notes. It's right at the top. Book a call with me. You and I will talk one-on-one, and we'll decide if it's right for you. There's no pressure, no craziness. I just would love to invite you to do that if you're like, yeah, I've been listening to the podcast for a while and.

 I've implemented some things, but I'm not seeing full result. It's because you don't have the big picture altogether and you haven't had that support and accountability. So I'd love to invite you to that. Okay, so back to blood sugar and why it's so incredibly important [00:04:00] and why it's such a foundational piece of my coaching program.

 Blood sugar balance is important for those of us who are not diabetic for sure, because I think so many. Of us might think that blood sugar balance is not necessary if you're not diabetic, if you don't have true blood sugar issues like your blood sugar's not 200, your blood sugar's not 50, like you're somewhere in the middle and you don't know that your symptoms are related to blood sugar.

So the reason that blood sugar. Actually matters is because it is one of the foundations of energy for the body. We're talking about literally the glucose level in your blood that goes into your cells to give you energy and you need to have that glucose level balanced to be able to have steady energy throughout the day.

To be able to sleep well, to be able to make enough progesterone to be able to make enough thyroid hormone. It is literally the fuel for your cells when you have [00:05:00] energy crashes. Throughout the day because you're not potentially eating consistently, you're not eating balanced macronutrients. We're gonna talk about the how tos, the whys a little bit later.

But when you have those blood sugar crashes throughout the day, it is a true emergency in your body because you do not have the energy to stay alive in your bloodstream. That is why it's such a big deal. And the more this happens, the more your body sets off these red flag alarms. And it says danger, danger.

Mayday Mayday spike that cortisol to fix this right now so she doesn't die. I'm not kidding. Like in the hospital, someone's blood sugar drops super low, it's an actual emergency and your body knows how to fix that. And it does fix it because our bodies are incredible and it has a cost. It's an expensive fix.

So let's say you are driving your car and you run over a nail and you're like, this is. The literal worst, like why did this happen? Okay, but [00:06:00] you go to the tire shop, they patch it, it costs, let's pretend I know how much it is, $50, because apparently that's 2000 pricing probably Anyway, it costs $50 to patch this tire, but you get the nail in the tire, it's not letting out that much air drive fast.

Go over a big pothole, don't get it fixed, and the tire blows. Now you have to get a whole new tire, and that's gonna cost you $300 instead of $50. That's how this blood sugar thing looks in your body. If you. Have your blood sugar imbalanced and you're seeing that you're having these little dips here and there, it's like, okay, that's the little hole in the tire, right?

But if you keep letting this happen again and again, it's expensive for your body to keep fixing this problem over and over, and that stress on your body adds up as well as whatever's causing your blood sugar to be dropping low in the first place is not being fixed. So it's just happening [00:07:00] again and again.

 And so when your body keeps getting those. Red flags and it's like, Hey, alert, something's really wrong here. 

over time. That just really builds up the impression in your brain and the more signals in your brain that things are not safe. And the biggest thing that helps balance your hormones is having your brain say. Hey, it's safe to make these hormones. that's the super basic level of why blood sugar directly impacts hormones, because it directly affects your cortisol levels and your stress levels in the body and those cortisol levels directly affect your estrogen and progesterone.

 So that's how that works. Another piece with blood sugar balance is that when the liver is overburdened by hormones, toxins, X, y, Z, that it probably is if you're having hormone issues, and then you're also having blood sugar balance issues and your liver is having to dump glycogen into your bloodstream as an emergency response again and again.

You are also overburdening your [00:08:00] liver because it is chasing around your blood sugar all day long instead of detoxing. So then this can just lead to more buildup of toxins, estrogens and other hormones where you're just worsening the problem of hormone imbalance. So how do we know if this is an issue for you?

The main symptoms that I see when blood sugar balance is an issue is that your energy does not stay stable. That you have clear crashes throughout the day, week, or month. It doesn't have to be every day. It doesn't even have to be every week. But if you're like, I am seeing these crashes a 3:00 PM energy crash is a big one.

A middle of the morning energy crash is a big one. Feeling tired but wired at night can be a sign of blood sugar imbalance or just cortisol imbalance in general. Feeling really like sluggish after meals can be a factor. The really clear signs are feeling shaky, clammy, hangry, anxious when you have gone too long without eating or just feeling those things often.

In [00:09:00] general, those can all be signs that you're having blood sugar balance issues, and if that is happening, then you are likely also having hormone balance issues because your body is working so hard to keep blood sugar balanced when that's the case, there are multiple different organ systems that are not going to be able to do their jobs as well because they're helping prop up your blood sugar consistently.

Now, insulin is a really important factor as well, and so I'm gonna get into insulin and minerals a little bit. And maybe this is something we, that I'll do more of a deep dive in a future episode like minerals, specifically how to balance those to make your blood sugar more balanced. If that's an episode that you want, just send a text to the show.

There's a link in the show notes, or send me an email and just tell me that you'd like that episode soon. Because I think that would be a fun one to put together. But I'm gonna give you just a little preview right now. There are different minerals. That will influence your blood sugar balance.

And when I do HTMA [00:10:00] mineral tests on my clients, a pattern that I see really often is higher calcium on the test. It doesn't mean high calcium in the body necessarily. It just means that your body is using. Calcium as a calming mechanism, and it's moving that calcium from your bones and your teeth into your hair tissue and into your soft tissue as a calming mechanism for the body.

We call that when it gets to a certain number, we call it a calcium shell, and it can actually impact your blood sugar balance because the cells and the tissues are a little bit more impermeable if you think of there being like a little bit of a shell around these tissues, and so it's a little bit harder for insulin to get into the cell.

Another piece of that pattern is often. Low potassium. And when we have low potassium and high calcium, potassium is a catalyst to help insulin get into the cell. It's like a buddy for insulin, so they go together into the cell, and so if your potassium is low and you're not able to get as much insulin into the cells [00:11:00] to regulate that glucose, you need insulin to use your glucose and bring it into the cells, then it's almost like these little cell doors are closed and you're not able to get as much.

Glucose into the cell where it's needed for energy, and then you have more glucose in the blood because all the glucose is running around in your blood looking for a door to go through and the doors are closed. They're not opening like they should be because there's not enough potassium and insulin.

 Now this can be on a small scale or a large scale. A large scale would definitely look more like actually high blood sugars and more like diabetic symptoms, but. It can be happening at a low level in fairly normal blood sugar ranges as well. It's important to understand that minerals are a piece of the puzzle for blood sugar.

Food is the biggest thing in my opinion. And then we start to look at minerals as well. So there is an important layer. Of minerals and just understanding too that minerals are [00:12:00] so often dysregulated and depleted in women because not only do we probably start out our lives dysregulated and depleted because our moms are, but we also often will see that we are losing a lot of minerals when we have babies and when we breastfeed those babies.

So we might start at. Hopefully 75, 80% of what we should have. And then we, just with stress and with babies and with X, Y, Z, we get more depleted over time if we're not constantly focused on replenishing and I say constantly, what I just mean is intentionally focused on replenishing those minerals, and that can be a really big factor for blood sugar as well.

Magnesium is also important for a blood sugar balance, and I just wanna caution you, I'm not saying go start taking calcium, magnesium, and potassium just like willy-nilly because you might need it for your blood sugar. Please don't do that. Actually, it's really important to be taking it. In a way that your body can actually use versus just taking it because you think that it's low.

Especially calcium is not something that I [00:13:00] typically recommend taking as a supplement. For most people, we really like to do a food-based source, and then magnesium and potassium need to be taken judiciously. If you're just taking magnesium on its own and your sodium potassium are low, you can actually not be using it very well, not absorbing it very well, and making your sodium and potassium lower.

I do see that almost, most people will be taking magnesium 'cause they've just heard that it's good, but they may not have the co-factors including boron or including sodium potassium to be able to use that well. And they could be throwing other minerals out of balance too. So again, this is obviously a bigger conversation that I can go into more in depth in the future, but the big piece that I want you to understand is.

Your liver needs your blood sugar to be balanced so that you can detox hormones. You. Need to be focused on balancing your nutrients well, to be able to have balanced blood sugar and your minerals are a really big part too. Again, this is why, all of these factors are working together to cause hormone [00:14:00] imbalance.

And it's not just a, Hey, it's just my blood sugar, so all I have to do is like focus on that. Yes, focusing on your blood sugar is super important, but also we need to be looking at the other pieces of the puzzle and that's why I try to. Take such a big picture approach and look at things as a whole, and then focus on those simple action steps because That's just what I've seen work again and again to really improve energy and mood and periods let's talk about what you can do to make your blood sugar more balanced.

 So to balance blood sugar, the very first thing that we have to start with is awareness, and that goes deep. Honestly, it does take some time to create this awareness, but I'd like for you to just think about right now. If you are intentional about balancing meals with macronutrients, like if you're thinking about protein, carbs, and fat, and what ratios you're eating now, this is personalized and this is something that we track with you and coach you [00:15:00] through for your specific needs.

So there is. More to it, but just at a very basic level, like where we start, are you relatively intentional about making sure that you're getting protein and carbs and sometimes fat together at your meals, or are you just eating. To eat. Basically what I see a lot and what I used to do was I was so focused on the quality of food and just not eating bad foods.

That I wasn't balancing my food at all really. I wasn't paying attention to that. there wasn't really a lot of context. In my brain for, oh, I just ate a lunch that has no carbs. Or I just ate a lunch that has no protein, or none of my snacks ever have protein, or My breakfast is heavier carb than protein.

And that messes me up when that happens and I don't feel as good. I really had no context for any of that. So the first thing to self-assess is just do you have any awareness of what you're eating, how you're combining foods, and [00:16:00] how it makes you feel? That is. Really, you can do so much of this.

If you are really intentional and aware of that and you notice 

like, 

Leisha: I have a breakfast that looks like this. This is how I feel. I have a lunch that looks like this. This is how I feel. And you start to know that so that you can either make tweaks yourself or you can bring that realization and that information to someone like us to be able to help us coach you through it.

So that is number one. The other piece of this. Is, are you eating consistently throughout the day? It's huge. It is often missing. I talk to so many moms, especially moms who have, I was gonna say, young kids, really, to be honest. I think that we start a lot of these bad habits when we have babies because the babies need so much, and then the toddlers get crazy and then we're eating their leftovers and we're chasing them around and we're not paying attention to what we need, which is such a beautiful.

Thing that God has given us the ability to be so self-sacrificial as mothers, and [00:17:00] sometimes it is so necessary and so beautiful and sometimes we get carried away with it and we go too far with it and we forget that we actually are humans with needs as well. And this is where I see blood sugar imbalance really come to ahead, to be honest.

Those are the two things that I want you to self-assess. Are you eating consistently throughout the day no matter what you're eating? And then are you somewhat aware of macronutrients when you're eating? Are you trying to get, all three macronutrients in your meals? Are you eating. A pretty good amount of protein throughout the day.

These are all things that, giving numbers in general is a little bit hard to do because it's based on, it's based on different things for different people, but those are things that you need to be aware of. And then the other really big one, this is the one that I teased. This is the one.

That makes a really big difference long term, is actually getting a balanced breakfast first thing in the morning. This is where so many of my clients come to me the week later and they're like, [00:18:00] oh, like I feel so much better already. So what that looks like is within an hour of waking up in the morning, I believe that we have a couple episodes on this too, that we will link in the show notes of how to create a balanced breakfast, but within an hour of waking up in the morning, you need to be eating something solid.

That has at least 20 grams of protein. And then keeping your carbs between one to one and a half of that ratio. So 20 to 30 grams of carbs is what I typically like to recommend for breakfast. Or say you're getting 25, 30 grams of protein, change those numbers a little bit depending on how big of a breakfast you're having.

But I do not want a tiny breakfast. I do not want a breakfast that's just an egg. Like an egg cup. I do not want a breakfast that's just a granola bar. I don't want a breakfast. That's just coffee with your collagen in it. I know you have good intentions, but it is not doing you any favors when it comes to your blood sugar balance or your hormones.

 even if you're putting protein in your coffee, that is not breakfast. I'm sorry to tell you, you need real food, eggs, sausage, bacon, [00:19:00] potatoes, something like that. You can make it ahead. It can be yogurt. Yogurt or a smoothie will not last you as long as a more solid breakfast. But what we're looking for with that is that over time you start to build hunger for it, and over time you start to notice that you feel 10 times better mid-morning, and that you can make it to lunch without having an energy crash that you could potentially not even drink coffee and stay alive and happy and surviving.

Those would be really key. Measures that your blood sugar is starting to be more balanced, that you're starting to be more stable, your cells are starting to have more of what they need. Those are the things that I'm giving you, 

kind of 

Leisha: like high level that you can start to assess for yourself.

And to be honest, I promise you, if you just implement what I'm giving you in this episode, you will start feeling better. If you have trouble implementing, if you need more guidance, come to us and we'll be happy to help. But there is a lot that you can do on your own just from what I've given you today.

So I just wanna encourage you that if this is not something that you have focused on consistently over [00:20:00] time, like over at least I think you should see difference, a difference in how you feel in just a couple weeks, but truly consistently over a few months. If you know what you're doing, if you're clear on your numbers, if you're clear on what you're shooting for and you're doing it, you should see.

Honestly, big changes long-term with blood sugar balance, make sure that you are clear on whether or not you're doing this and not just thinking, oh, this is just, another thing like this is not a magic pill, but it is a foundational need for humans to get consistent nourishment throughout the day, and that is why it's .

Such an important part of hormone balance. If you are pregnant, if you are breastfeeding, this is crazy important for you as well. So make sure that you take this to heart and think about like, how could I make this better, even if it's not perfect in this season? And if you are in perimenopause or menopause, this applies to you two because you are human and humans need nourishment and blood sugar balance.

If you want [00:21:00] even more practical action steps, make sure that you sign up for my new private podcast. It is still free for the wait list as of now, and I am going to walk you through even more in depth. The steps that you need to do to make hormones well and make more progesterone so that you can start to feel more balanced.

Sign up for that at the link in the show notes, and I will see you next week.