How to improve your blood sugar response.

Today I want to talk about measures you can do to improve your blood sugar response after a meal. First of all you need to have some equipment at your disposal. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. To learn how your body reacts to your lifestyle is according to me huge key for an optimal long-term health. Either you buy a device where you prick your finger and check at certain times of the day. Or you try a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and get constant feedback for 14 days.

Other factors that impact your blood sugar

Now your blood sugar will vary depending on a bunch of other factors as well such as:

• Stress
• How well you slept last night
• What you ate the meal prior to your current meal
• What you ate the night before
• Women will also experience a different response depending on where we are at in our cycle
• How hydrated you are
• Your age
• Your gender
• Your lifestyle
• How much muscle mass you have
• How fast you ate your meal
• Your gut bacteria composition
• Your metabolic health

Great “hacks”

But I will share with you great “hacks” in the list below that you can make use of:

1. The very first thing that will have the greatest impact is movement/exercise. Either you train before you have your meal or afterwards. If you chose to train afterwards then I recommend doing your training close to your meal. This in order to let the glucose have somewhere to go (into your muscles cells) instead of into your fat cells.
2. Apple cider vinegar (ACV). This is a great hack. ACV has great abilities to make your muscles absorb glucose faster from your blood stream. Take 1 – 2 tablespoons of ACV mixed with water 10 minutes before having your meal. It will improve your blood sugar response. Also, if you have eaten a bunch of carbs and have ACV afterwards (you have a time window of two hours roughly) you also blunt the effect of the spike.
3. If you want to eat carbs make sure to also include some type of fiber and eat the fiber first. Reason why is that the fiber coats your intestines. The effect is that you absorb less sugar from the carbs.
4. Protein slows down the absorption of carbs and makes it so that you do not get such a high blood sugar spike from them. So combine your carb meal with a protein source and you will minimize the impact on your blood sugar.
5. Fat is also effective at slowing down the digestion and absorption of carbs hence also blunting your blood sugar spike.

Stacking

So if you stack all of these upon each other you will probably not see a big spike at all in your blood sugars upon adding some carbs to your meal. This is how I structure my way of eating to a large extent and I think this has helped me immensely with reducing my insulin resistance! Especially since I increased my protein intake to roughly 30% of my total calories.

Also cinnamon has shown to have positive effects on the blood sugar levels. The reason why is because they increase the amount of GLUT4 receptors and thereby making it easier for the glucose to travel into the muscle cells.

Some supplements can also assist in keeping a more stable blood sugar such as magnesium, glycine, and chromium.

Three negative effects of high blood sugar spikes

Oxidative stress

If you eat too much sugar, then you will overwhelm your mitochondria. The mitochondria are the powerhouse in your body. It is what creates energy. And they like glucose to a certain extent. But if they get too much then they become stressed and then starts to create something called free radicals (molecules) in the body. Free radicals lead to oxidative stress. I usually think about this as your body is rusting on the inside. This leads to for example metabolic dysfunction, inflammation, atherosclerosis, and heart disease. So you see that there is a chain of negative reactions that happens in the body from the glucose spike which causes you great harm.

Glycation leads to faster aging

Also when you ingest too much sugar you speed up your aging. Each glucose spike can also generate something called glycation. This happens when protein or fat combine with sugar in the blood stream. High level of glycation can also render inflammation and oxidative stress.  Glycation is the reason why our organs fail and can also be a reason why we get wrinkles and bad skin.

Insulin resistance

Every time you get a blood sugar spike insulin is created by the pancreas. This is to ensure that we do not have too high blood sugar which is toxic for us. The sugar is stored in your liver and muscles. This is good but it if this happens often then over time this will lead to insulin resistance and all the negative effects of metabolic syndrome.