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The 3 Steps Guide to balance blood glucose and losing weight without a restrictive diet: What You Should Know
Going on a restrictive diet, battling excessive weight can be one of the most challenging, emotional, and frustrating, and confusing experiences one can go through. Most people are in a never-ending struggle to lose weight. They are trying diet after diet. Despite, the numerous diets, miracle pills, and time-restrictive eating patterns, people continue to get gain more weight.Â
If dieting works why are so many people struggling with blood glucose issues?
When you go on a diet: (a specific way of eating for a short period), after “getting off” the diet, you will gain that weight back and more. If you have been on one or a few diets and still struggling with your blood sugar levels and weight, now is the time to throw the “I am going on dieting” idea out the window. The cycle of going on a diet, implies, that at some time shortly, you will be “off the diet”. And that’s the problem.
You were advised to lose weight to lower your blood glucose level. You’re on this diet for 6 months, one year, and still no change. High blood sugar in the blood triggers an increased amount of the hormone insulin circulating in the bloodstream.
Just as losing weight, balancing your blood glucose levels involves a total lifestyle change! Think about it, what are the habits you are currently doing that keep you where you are?
Lifestyle changes are behaviors or habit modifications that encourage a positive change in your life. Lifestyle change habits such as sleep patterns, levels of physical activity, stress management, and eating tendencies can drastically improve your health for balanced blood glucose and weight loss.
3 Habits That Make Us Hormonally Imbalanced
Imagine exercising daily, avoiding carbs, and counting your calories only to have your belly fat grow bigger. It is very frustrating that you were told that by losing weight, your blood glucose would improve. If you are not getting the results from diet and exercise, your hormones are more likely the reason for you being unsuccessful.
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Habit #1: So Much Stress
Many studies have shown time and time again that stress causes abdominal fat, even in people who slander people. The stress hormone, cortisol is elevated during times of long-term stressors.
Stress does not cause diabetes. However, high cortisol levels caused by stress impact blood glucose, eating habits, and weight gain. Stress encourages the body to accumulate fat, disrupts how insulin functions, and results in more insulin flowing in the blood. [1] The intense sugar cravings, feeling tired after eating carbs, and low blood sugar (hypoglycemia), are all symptoms of insulin sensitivity declining.
Habit #2: Poor Nutrition Uptake, Poor Digestion
The digestive system is responsible for the production of a large portion of our hormones. Taking control of your stress will improve your sleep and digestion. How’s your gut flora? Your digestive health has a significant impact on your hormonal balance. If the health of the digestive system isn’t optimal, hormones become unbalanced. For example, the gut is responsible for regulating estrogen. Poor gut health increases the risk of estrogen-dominance disorders such as insulin resistance and PCOS. In my weekly cooking classes, I share tips on how to improve your gut.
Habit #3: Yo-yo Dieting and Longterm Excessive Calorie Restriction
Yo-yo dieting also referred to as weight cycling, is a pattern of losing weight and gaining it back again.
The on-and-off excessive calorie restriction: that’s eating high amounts, then lower amounts of food, puts the body in stress mode. This eating tendency spike stresses hormones and makes you want to eat and eat….and eat some more, which is dangerous, not only for your waistline but for overall health. The cycle of losing and gaining weight is linked to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, and altered immune function.
Please note that some yo-yo dieters are likely to gain more weight than they lost because losing weight causes the body to increase appetite and cling to its energy storage.
Weight loss diets are usually low in calories that result in muscle mass loss. [2] Include exercise and quality protein to reduce your muscle mass loss.
A yo-yo dieter is likely to regain more belly fat, when off the diet. Belly fat leads to diabetes. Studies have shown that yo-yo dieting increases your chances of developing type 2 diabetes.[3]
3 Tips To Balanced Blood Glucose and Weight Loss Without Dieting That Actually Works!
Tip #1: Balancing Hormones
Imbalanced hormones don’t happen overnight. Your daily habits can set your hormones on the right or wrong path. How you handle day-to-day stress. One night of inadequate sleep can affect your eating habits, which can create imbalanced blood glucose levels that spiral into days or weeks of junk eating.
You can balance your hormones to experience stable blood sugar levels, weight loss, regular and pain-free menstrual cycles, protect your fertility, slow aging, and smooth easily into menopause.
Tip #2: Improve Your Gut Health
The foods we eat have an effect on our gut and blood glucose balance. If we eat food that our gut isn’t a fan of, it will negatively impact how the gut functions.
A recent study shows that an unhealthy gut leads to impaired glucose tolerance and can increase the likelihood of insulin resistance. Taking care of your gut is extremely important. And the same foods you eat for good gut health will also be good for balancing glucose levels.
Tip #3: Power Your Nutrition
A meal plan with whole-natural foods will help to balance glucose levels and improve gut function. Because we are living in a processed food world, people with Prediabetes and diabetes can easily fall into the trap of highly processed additives foods that negatively influence their blood glucose health. Our Caribbean natural food choices are abundant!
What foods spike blood glucose and inhibit gut health?
Highly processed foods made with simple added sugars can cause a glucose spike when eaten alone, without protein, fats, or fiber. Some of these foods are honey, sweetened beverages, and high carbohydrates foods without fiber.
What influence the spike from these types of food comes from their fiber-to-sugar ratio. Researchers recommend the 10:1 ratio of carbohydrates to fiber. For every 10 grams of carbohydrates, a food has, it should have at least 1 gram of fiber. Also, the quantity of food indicates a blood glucose spike. So portion control is important!
3 Ways to Improve Gut Health for Blood Glucose Balance
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Eat probiotics regularly. Probiotics contain living, healthy bacteria. Eating them through food or drink immediately improves the balance of friendly flora. Probiotics are found in fermented foods like yogurt, sauerkraut or a (relish made with fermented cabbage, onions, carrots, and, sometimes, vinegar or lime juice), paimi, blue draws aka dokono, kefir, kimchi, and kombucha. Or in the form of a high-quality probiotic supplement. Probiotics increase healthy bacteria and they also help prevent diseased bacteria from sticking to the intestinal wall.
In Conclusion
Be sure to get to bed early, prioritize your rest, treat your gut with love; eat prebiotics- and probiotics foods. Skip that afternoon coffee or caffeinated energy drinks. Get proper sleep, your body will thank you.
References:
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Adam TC, Hasson RE, Ventura EE, et al. Cortisol is negatively associated with insulin sensitivity in overweight Latino youth. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2010;95(10):4729-4735. doi:10.1210/jc.2010-0322
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Berentzen T, Sørensen TI. Effects of intended weight loss on morbidity and mortality: possible explanations of controversial results. Nutr Rev. 2006;64(11):502-507. doi:10.1111/j.1753-4887.2006.tb00183.x
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Mackie GM, Samocha-Bonet D, Tam CS. Does weight cycling promote obesity and metabolic risk factors?. Obes Res Clin Pract. 2017;11(2):131-139. doi:10.1016/j.orcp.2016.10.284
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