[Music] hi everyone welcome back to our training thursday edition of the cabral concept glad to have you here today where we are going to talk a little bit about nutrition a little bit about exercise a little bit about intermittent fasting but overall making sure that you understand that there are limits to how little you can eat and i think you've probably experienced that by now it's like how much can you diet how much can you reduce the calories that you eat per day how long can you go without carbohydrates how long can you go fasting on a daily basis eventually you break you give up and that's understandable because what you're doing is deprivation you're putting your body into more of a survival based mode you are hurting and suppressing thyroid-based hormones you're creating estrogen dominance for both men and women for men you're dropping testosterone levels potentially decreasing growth hormone levels when it's done chronically so my goal for you today is just to get you to just look a little bit at the equation a little bit differently you know there's more than one way to solve an equation and what i like to do is help people with short-term results yes but also a long-term plan no doubt about it because the long-term plan is what ultimately allows you to stick with it maintain your results for life and you're a whole lot happier because it's not all about deprivation so i'm not going to say that there's no work involved at all i'm not i'm not that type of hype person but i just want you to know that there's a limit to manipulating macros there's a limit to how long you can do a daily intermittent fast on a daily basis there are limits to how low you can drop your calories for a certain period of time right how many meals you can skip so what i really want to get uh the point across today is that there are often easier simpler ways to do things that can be maintained for the long run and they're dramatically helpful so let me just make sure here that you tuned into this show so it was it was just yesterday's show it was episode 2049 hopefully you're tuning in daily of course that would be helpful i would love that one of course love the support for the show but really we're trying to just teach one concept per day and they build off of each other right you can go back you can list any show independently that's not a problem all previous shows are at stephencabral.com forward slash podcasts but what i talked about yesterday was a lot of people wanting to burn some body fat a lot of people want to get rid of the bloating right the extended stomach uh a reader wrote in and wrote called it lower belly belge sorry let's try that again lower belly bulge and and i thought it was a great term i'm like okay that makes sense right you don't want to bulge in the lower belly and i gave you the different reasons that it could be well so what i want to share with you today though are the main reasons or the main ways that you can lower blood sugar which is so important i mean it's so important not to have low blood sugar but normal blood sugar i talked about it last friday on the podcast i've been talking about it a bit i mean after this week we'll pretty much we'll be done that will felt satisfied for a while that i've taught enough on blood sugar because you don't want low and you don't want high you want balanced right it's always about dynamic equilibrium i mean more people are using that word now which is great but it was there for hundreds of years for a reason and it's because the body is always in flux like if you look at your blood sugar you know it's like 83 87 85 72 and and it should always be within a normal parameter but it's dynamic it's dynamically balanced right because your body's always doing things to add a little bit more take some out right add a little bit more with glucocorticoids or food uh or take some out with insulin and your receptors and your cells so and i know that's overly simplified but it's it's the foundation right that's what you need to know you don't need to know more than that that's how it works so what we're talking about though is what happens when you either wake up and you're fasting glucose is above a 95 on the parameters of not 70 to 90 70 95 milligrams per deciliter and i would even say if it's above a 90. what do you do well we'll teach you that and then what happens if two three hours after a meal your blood sugar isn't back down to the normal 70 to 95 milligrams per deciliter so that's what i want to go over here today why does it matter if your blood sugar is more normalized you're going to have less inflammation you're going to have uh less aging you're going to create what are called less advanced glycation end products you don't need to know what that is but you can have less inflammation less free radical damage that's a good thing you'll have less of a chance for alzheimer's and dementia less of a chance for gaining body fat better chance of burning that body fat better energy more stable energy levels better brain cognition so believe me the benefits are almost endless balanced blood sugar leads to balanced health so that's what we're talking about so it's as simple as taking your fasting glucose in the morning with a glucometer or continuous glucometer if you don't know what a continuous glucometer is i spoke about it last friday on episode 2044 and i also spoke about an episode 2041. there's no pressure to get one at all you can also use a twenty dollar continuous glucose i'm sorry a twenty dollar glucometer and those are at stevencabral.com forward slash resources you can literally just prick your finger and you'll get your blood uh sugar so the one way to use uh the stephencorp.com resources page because it's about 150 of my favorite resources in this field um you can just press command f on a mac and then type in whatever word you're looking for and it will it will search that all right let's get started so the first way to lower blood sugar in a natural way is this okay let's say that you're testing your blood sugar during the day and it's basically always elevated but you're someone that likes to graze throughout the day right a little bit of snacks no big meals just kind of snacking all day long or you're someone likes to do three meals and you like in-between meal snacks maybe it's like 8 a.m 10 30 12 30 2 30 5 30. maybe those are your meals oh you're in a pretty good time frame uh but you're eating five times a day even though the other two are snacks right it might even just be a coffee with cream and some sugar well it still counts as eating right because that's still going to spike blood sugar so what i'm saying is anything between a meal that has calories in it at all counts so what i want you to do is this this is the first step and this is a game changer ayurvedic medicine recommends this in adulthood is that you eat three meals a day and basically only three meals a day now the vatsa body type dealing with hypoglycemia they do say the snacks are in there and i agree with it right but you should be working with the practitioner if you're doing that so the truth is this if you are more than 20 30 pounds over your ideal weight for you you really want to just do the three meals per day i mean you really do because what we need to do is get that blood sugar back down to fasting levels before the next time you eat and then we need a period of um of intermittent fasting which is going to be typically five six o'clock at night uh till 12 14 16 hours later i'm telling you right now i'll talk about this on a different show my absolute best night's sleep in terms of rem deep sleep and hrv are always when i stop eating early four o'clock five o'clock so if i'm not with my family and i'm traveling i might stop eating at four o'clock that day i've done that before especially if i have night flights home i'm not gonna eat airplane food so i'm like no i would just i'm gonna have my lunch and i might have a little snack at 3 30 for and that's considered my dinner that's it i'm done and then i go until 8 o'clock the next morning or so so what do they do well it's 16 hours which is normal for a lot of people but what i'm saying is this is that it's the more hours before bedtime that matters the more hours before midnight is what seems to matter and it's being backed up by a lot of people in our field because again the people doing the work now are always always way ahead of the research studies and the textbooks so but what i'm always saying is you can track this for yourself on an oral ring or another device as well but anyway we want to move to three meals a day so we want to make sure that that blood sugar drops down between meals and that means you want four to five hours between meal so it takes two to three hours for most people for their blood sugar to fall back down to normal levels ideally two but two to three for a lot of people so if you eat at 8 am it should be back down by 10 10 30. now you're not going to eat until let's say 12 31 okay so then it's up until about three okay and then you're not eating until let's say 5 30. great so you've got your four to five hours between meals it falls down for a couple hours between the meal blood sugar's normal and then again you're fasting for 12 14 16 hours overnight so it's the easiest it's the best way to do it do make sure that you're combining all of your meals into three meals so if if you love certain foods and snacks and you're eating it for your total calories per day no problem just add it to the meal before right that's it just add them and that's really it it's going to be the same amount of calories and instead of having your glucose up and down all day long now you can have it only up three times per day all right so check that out and believe me if there's enough fiber and protein at that meal uh you'll stay satiated you won't need the extra food every every couple hours you might just take a little getting used to also check out my podcast on this i did it a few years back it's called why three meals per day and it really explains this outline as well state of the art science meets ayurvedic medicine which i like to study both so the second way is this walk you've already heard me say this before walk walk after you eat now i'm going to give you a different thing besides walking if you don't have the ability to just kind of get up and move if you're at work but here's the thing it's it's pretty it's pretty crazy but my blood sugar after a meal goes back to normal faster after dinner than it does at lunch doesn't make any sense except when you look that i'm oftentimes not doing my walk directly after lunch sometimes it was earlier before that but after dinner what i'm doing is i'm up moving my body still the same basically protein carbs fats it's not radically different and basically i get a protein i've got a starch and i've got two vegetables and then i put healthy fat on top like that's that's how all my meals are structured um and again i have that inside of uh besides my smoothie in the morning i have that on my um you know my typical mediterranean diet i call it so all right so what am i sharing with you is this is that the scientific research shows postprandial glucose that means your blood sugar levels after you eat postprandial is dramatically improved if you walk after you eat now how long do you need to walk only 10 to 20 minutes that's the amazing thing so here's a couple tips if you're home take your dog for a walk your dog would love to go for an extra walk take him for a walk or her for a walk all right if you're at work see if you can do a call while walking on the phone i have a lot of private wellness clients friends family go for a walk after lunch and they do a 20-minute call great great use of your time all right another thing to do is if you're home when you have lunch do some house work that you have to do anyways go get the laundry fold the laundry moving around um you know whatever do the dishes clean the floor whatever you need to do move your body for 20 minutes after you eat now i'm not talking about a workout we're talking about just light movement after you eat this is going to be really helpful and uh it's going to lead to better blood sugar levels which means it won't go as high of a spike in blood sugar which is great and it won't be as a severe fall or it won't take as long to come back down check that out try it it's gonna be great one other tip i want to give you there if you're blood sugar if you wake up and you take your glucose level with it just again a simple glucometer or you scan the back of your arm like i do for that cgm here's what you want okay 70 to 89 right below 90. if you're in that range good to go life is good let's say you were at 98. all right it's too high it's not where it should be what do you do if you can go for a walk 20 minutes all right just go for a walk that's basically it and it's going to help bring that down you could say well i'm just going to keep fasting you could you could keep fasting no doubt about it but that might not bring it down either depending on your stress levels and i've done many shows on how stress affects glucose as well all right so take those two tips the third one is this fasted cardio or i shouldn't say fasted it's just you can do cardio anytime it could be first thing in the morning i'm going to explain what cardio is because it's actually not the same as every form of cardio or it could be a couple hours after a meal or it could be even when you have higher levels of glucose let me explain the the cardio that i'm talking about is it's either fasted cardio first thing in the morning when you haven't eaten or it's a couple hours after a meal okay so basically you haven't eaten for a couple hours now what the cowardio that i'm talking about is is based cardio that means steady state that does not mean high interval uh high intensity interval training sprint interval training no sprints no resistance workout with weights no high intensity interval training do i love those of course i do i do them three times a week monday wednesday friday those are my resistance training days and i'm doing basically tri sets or circuits and that's how i do mine my heart rate's up working my muscles working through a grouping of exercises resting for a certain set period of time going back them through them again resting for a certain period of time and then going back through them again right and it works great but that's not the same and when i do that and if you're tracking new glucose you'll often see that you get a little rise in that type of workout now it doesn't mean it's a bad workout because again blood sugar's meant to fluctuate don't listen to all the people out there that say no your blood sugar should just stay at 76 all day long no that's not how blood sugar works that is not normal dynamic equilibrium and it actually is not always to your benefit you actually need to be able to adjust a healthy individual can adjust to eating carbohydrates and proteins and other foods very very important okay so here's what i here's what i wanted to say about that that's not going to give you typically a reduction in glucose for at least a couple hours if you want a reduction in glucose which is what today's podcast is all about endurance steady state cardio actually does that and believe me there's a time and place for steady state cardio it is great for the cardiovascular system it's great for your heart and lungs it's great for circulating the blood it's great for not creating more acids within the body when you work out again i'm not against that but there's actually two parts anaerobic without oxygen aerobic with oxygen very helpful very very helpful in medical science is actually showing that it has beneficial effects for people dealing with cancer and other issues as well so please don't overlook steady state cardio i did in my 20s i was like because i was helping people with like elite body transformation i mean i was helping people i helped celebrities get ready for certain roles in movies i helped olympic athletes i helped athletes make weight i i helped other personal trainers and their clients with their nutrition and it was always about body transformation so basically we were doing high intensity interval training before it was cool and we were doing paleo before it was cool and we were doing cyclical keto before it was cool uh you know now 10 15 20 years later it is but again i wasn't the only person doing it i obviously learned it from other individuals as well so but i'm just saying this because remember before everything is put into a fad or a new thing and just that everybody should do it which i never believe in in the first place uh people are already doing in practice so just try to again listen to somebody who's been doing it for 20 30 years has worked with tens of thousands of people so they've seen a lot of data again it doesn't have to be me i'm never saying that i'm saying listen to those people it was it's difficult i mean i was in my 20s and i was helping people get great results but i could have been doing that with also long-term results too and so there is that piece to it um okay so what happens if you find your blood sugars elevated especially above 100 fasted cardio in the morning going for a jog for 20 minutes could work great to lower that blood sugar and it does i've now analyzed the data from my private wellness clients who have diabetes type 1 diabetes as well type 2 and i've analyzed the data from healthy fit individuals that have normal blood sugar and what happens when they do cardio so i have seen my own on tuesday thursday cardio based workouts when i do cardio my blood sugar drops okay it does not do that when i do resistance workouts and i track everything because again i'm using a continuous glucose monitor so it tracks it 24 hours a day so what i'm saying is keep doing your resistance training your hit your your sit training as well but aerobic cardio it doesn't even have to be your whole workout for the day can be a quick way to get those blood sugar levels down so hopefully this has been helpful i'm happy to do follow-ups as well always just feel free to reach out i'm always happy to do that cabral group dot com is a great place to ask questions ask cabral is a great place to ask questions uh in the comments whatever works for you just let me know so hopefully today's show was helpful all the links will be at stephencabral.com forward slash 2050 today and of course if the show was helpful please do feel free to share it with anyone else you believe it could serve take care [Music] you