Hello Health Champions. We all know that when you eat food your blood sugar goes up, and when you don't eat your blood sugar is supposed to come down. But for a lot of people the exact opposite seems to be happening and if you've noticed this you're not alone.
That when you're fasting your blood sugar stays high even in a diabetic range, and it won't come down until you eat something. This all seems very confusing and paradoxical, and it happens mostly to people who are insulin resistant and who go on a diet of low carb and intermittent fasting. So today I want to talk about what's really happening in the body, and if you have something to worry about or if you're actually on the right track.
Coming right up hey I'm DrEkberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete, and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life saving video so blood glucose is how much sugar is in your bloodstream at any given time and it's measured in milligrams per deciliter and a healthy level is to be between 80 to 120 so when you're fasting like overnight and between meals then a good level is going to be in the 80 range then you eat something and now your blood sugar goes up because the food gets from your digestive tract into the bloodstream blood sugar goes up and then your body processes through and over a period of few to several hours your blood sugar comes down again this is how it's supposed to happen but if you are insulin resistant and an extreme form of insulin resistance is type 2 diabetic then your fasting levels are too high typically about 130 or above but this could be two or three or 400 also and then when you eat something your blood sugar goes way way up because your cells are resisting receiving that blood sugar out of the bloodstream so it's difficult for the body to transition the food from the digestive tract through the blood into the cells and therefore you get very high levels and they stay high they come down very slowly but then we have this in-between pattern this paradoxical pattern where people who start doing the right thing they want to reverse their insulin resistance and they eat low carb and do intermittent fasting but their glucose doesn't change much it might come down a few points or it's pretty much the same but then when they eat now their blood sugar comes into a normal range dawn phenomenon is not the same thing as what we're talking about but it's related and it can help us understand a little bit so when you are sleeping and you're getting ready to wake up your body produces some hormones to get you ready for the day so it releases a little bit extra cortisol and adrenaline and glucagon and growth hormone and this is to raise blood sugar to help you make more energy and the adrenaline and growth hormone is there to arouse you to get you ready for the day to get you from sleeping to awake and as a result if you're insulin sensitive there's supposed to be a slight increase but if you're insulin sensitive it's so small it's barely noticeable however if you're insulin resistant now these same small hormone boosts is going to look like a dramatic increase in blood glucose levels because even a small change is going to show up bigger when you're insulin resistant we also have to understand a little bit about insulin and the levels so insulin is the hormone that takes glucose from the bloodstream and into the cells so if you're fasting you're going to have a low insulin level because it just needs to be enough to support that basic level of glucose and a healthy level would be between two and five then when you eat something now you put food in the body the food has to get into the bloodstream and insulin has to help it through the bloodstream and into the cell in a matter of hours and now it produces extra insulin and you're going to see levels of about 50. that's still a healthy level but if you're very insulin resistant like a type 2 diabetic now first of all you have a higher glucose level but on top of that your cells are resistant to the action of insulin so your body makes a whole lot more insulin it might be sitting at 25 units even at a baseline that's typically the cut off for type 2 diabetes but then when you eat something it might shoot all the way up to 150 but even with these huge amounts of insulin it's still not enough to bring the glucose into a normal level and that's what insulin resistance is and a lot of times we hear that in type 2 diabetes they give you insulin because you're not making enough well that's the wrong way to look at it because you're already making five to eight times more fasting and a whole lot more after a meal so you're making a lot of insulin the problem is you've pushed your body into an imbalance by stuffing it full of carbohydrate and sugar all the time and then in our paradoxical example here again people are frustrated because they want their glucose they want their fasting glucose to get into a healthy level and the thing to focus on though is the fact that when you eat the insulin is actually working the insulin helps you get into the normal range now the question is then why does it stay so high before we eat i often talk about how intelligent the body is that there is a reason for everything it does so we want to think of really high blood sugar as an emergency that a healthy level is just going about business as usual but when we go from a hundred units or so 100 milligrams up to two and three and four and five hundred this is an emergency this is very very dangerous this is what causes micro vessel disease and blindness neuropathy kidney failure swelling so this is something that's very very different from everyday business everyday operations now let's talk about a concept that usually is a huge surprise to people the difference between a blood sugar level and a blood sugar amount difference between levels in the blood and amounts of carbohydrate so if you have a level of 80 milligrams per deciliter how much blood sugar do you actually have circulating and most people are shocked you have about 2. 4 grams of glucose because we multiply out this 80 milligrams times 50 deciliters which is 5 liters that's the average amount of blood in a person but then we take into account the fact that only 60 percent of the blood is liquid the rest of it is solid cells the red blood cells we come up with about 2.
4 grams that is less than half a teaspoon of sugar a tiny tiny amount that's all that you have circulating in your body at any given time that's what all this talk is about it's that tiny tiny amount and if you are insulin resistant if you're pre-diabetic now that number jumps to a whopping 3. 6 so it doesn't seem like a whole lot but it makes a big difference that if you go from a half a teaspoon to three quarter teaspoon now you have years and years of adaptation to insulin resistance to create that difference and if you're a full-blown diabetic now you might have a full teaspoon of sugar circulating so we're talking small amounts now let's expand this and understand the difference with amount if you're eating low carb let's say that you're at a healthy level you're maintaining you're eating 25 grams of carbs in a day divided by 24 hours is rounded off to about one gram per hour so you have half a teaspoon circulating and every hour you use up a gram and you put in one more gram so that's a continuous replenishment just a tiny tiny bit one gram per hour from the food that you eat that's not a whole lot it's not an emergency it doesn't take a whole lot for the body to do that and if you're insulin resistant and you've gone low carb then we use the same number one gram per hour if you are diabetic and you're still following the general guidelines of eating plenty of whole grains and pasta and you're eating 300 grams now that's 12 grams per hour so if we represent this graphically then you have this much in your bloodstream at any given time and every hour you have to pass this much through your bloodstream and into the cells but now let's expand this idea this is a fasting situation this is continuous what's what's going on but what about when you eat something now we have to mobilize some resources so you have a meal if you're low carb let's say you're eating twice a day then those 25 grams would be about 12 grams per meal so if we represent that graphically we're talking that amount relative to that amount so this is how much you have at any given time and then in one big lump you're introducing this much which is five times more 500 percent so even though it's a lot more it's not a big deal it's still a small amount the body is not going to panic it does just fine with that and if you're low carb with some insulin resistance then that represents three and a half times 350 percent so again not a big deal to process through that but if you're diabetic and you're following the general guidelines and you're still eating tons of carbohydrates three to four hundred grams of carbohydrate you're eating three meals a day then each meal of a hundred grams would represent twenty times two thousand percent even though you already have more blood sugar to deal with you're adding an enormous amount it's a mountain of carbohydrates and this is not easy for the body to work through now let's put all this together and think of it as a receiving department at a company and we'll look at these three cases again we're having the insulin sensitive so 2.
