Latest / Unlearning Beautiful / Ep. 22 Healing Your Relationship with Health Advice (Glucose Revolution Book Review)
Transcript
- Kristina Bruce: When you finally decide to walk away from the exhaustion of dieting and weight control, a rebellion can occur. You can feel this desire to toss out every rule and piece of nutrition advice you've ever heard. Because after years of stress from following the rules and restrictions, you can be so done with listening to any of it again. But after you've done that initial healing work to make peace with your body and food, settling begins to happen. You might find yourself becoming more open to nutrition and health advice again, but this time not from an attempt to control and manipulate your body size, but rather taking it in from the perspective of supporting your daily living, not as a weapon to use against your body. That's why today I'm reviewing the book Glucose Revolution by Jesse and Chopé. I found it refreshing. A book written from a factual weight neutral lens that focuses on how our body functions rather than how our bodies look. It's how I think health and nutrition advice was always meant to be followed by taking in the information, testing it out for yourself, and noticing how you feel, keeping what works and leaving the rest. Okay, let's get into today's episode. Welcome to Unlearning Beautiful, a podcast for women tired of trying to look good enough and ready to feel good from within. I'm your host, Christina Bruce, here to help you let go of the pressure to look right or do it all right and reconnect with your inner guidance, your natural worth, and what truly makes you feel fulfilled. Because the freedom you're craving was never in how you look. I came across The Glucose Revolution by Jessie and Chopay through scrolling social media. I found a clip of an interview that she was on and she was talking about her glucose hack. And my initial reaction was, ugh, hack. I'm so done with the biohacking. But for some reason, something had me watch it and it stuck in the back of my mind. So I went and got the book and decided to read it. And there was that resistance at first, even after years of doing this work of leaving diet culture, I still had this residual, let's just call it now more of a critical eye, more being a little bit hesitant of what I'm listening to and what I'm taking in and is this really just another thing where weight is the problem? But I found that wasn't the case with this book. And I think this is a really important topic to talk about because so much of health and nutrition advice, which is really valid, has just been completely overtaken by this idea that it's about managing body size. Everything has just become about weight. It's almost like the health effects are the side effect versus what really I think should be the other way around, that if there is a change of weight in the body, that's a side effect. of making changes that are optimal for your health. So whether that happens to be weight loss or it might be weight gain, because if we've been suppressing our weight for a very long time, doing things to help your health could mean weight gain or it could be vice versa. What I liked about the author in the way that this book is written, she comes at it from a biochemistry perspective. And because of that, feel like her lens around food is different. She was just looking at it more to see what's the effect that food has on the functioning of cells in our body and just purely looking at data. Her story is when she was young, she was in an accident. She ended up breaking her back. And so she went through some real severe health challenges and had some mental health issues that stemmed from that. And so she was cared about her health and because of her biochemistry background, ended up bringing her to work at a company that had started piloting continuous glucose monitors. So she was using it on herself just to test it out, just to kind of have fun and out of curiosity, not as any means to control her weight or body size, but just looking at as a scientist to how the impact of certain foods have on our glucose levels and how that affects our health. We're always told sugar is bad, right? Like sugar is the problem. We need to have less sugar. And what I liked about the research that Jesse found through her testing is that it's not that sugar itself is bad. She talks about glucose and Most of the foods that we eat break down into glucose. She uses the example of an old steam engine train that ran on coal. If there's somebody there with the coal fire and it needs fuel to keep the fire burning, if the glucose that you're intaking is like the coal and you're bringing the coal down to the person to shovel into the fire, if they're able to use it as it comes in, no problem. But you may be bringing more coal than is actually needed at the time, in which is the case that's fine, it can store the coal in, you know, another room. But if you keep bringing too much coal that doesn't end up getting used, it ends up getting overloaded and has to keep finding more and more places to store the excess coal, or in this case, excess glucose. And the thing about this book, by the way, is if you are someone who is into nutrition and likes the science. It is a very layman's term book. So it's great if you're not into the science. It's probably frustrating if you are because it's not going to get as much of the specific details as you may want. But for those of us who are like, OK, I just want a general understanding what's going on, but don't bog me down with the science. This book was good for that. So essentially how it works is when we can't use up the glucose at that given time, first it gets transmuted into glycogen, which gets stored in the liver and in the muscles. And when that storage capacity is used up, it gets stored as fat. And what I like about how she talks about this in the book is she doesn't talk about that as being bad. She doesn't say, ⁓ and this is why you're gaining weight. She actually talks about it almost appreciative of the functioning of the body of like, this is just how it works and how great that our body is designed to manage this excess glucose in order to keep us healthy. Then she talks about how insulin is the thing that ushers the glucose to be stored. And the problem that we run into with things like type two diabetes is insulin resistance. Then the sugar stays high in the bloodstream and that's where there's issues. So she's not shaming it, she's just laying out, this is how it works. And then she goes ahead and gives these hacks. Now, if I was able to get over the word hack, which I did, because when I looked at what she was talking about, they really were kind of hacks. It's not a diet, it's not a new rule. She noticed through testing that if you implemented these different hacks, they were all designed to slow down. the amount of fuel, the amount of glucose that's going into the bloodstream so that the engine room isn't overloaded and doesn't have to go to work storing all this excess glucose. And what she found was that throughout the day, there's these repeated spikes of glucose where the bloodstream is constantly getting flooded with more glucose than it can handle. And so it needs to quick rush the insulin in and store it away. And what she was noticing is that if you just slow it down so that it's not a rush every time, but that it's more of a steady slower stream, it could be used more efficiently. She's pointing out that when people started to slow down the release of glucose into the blood system through these hacks she gave, a lot of the symptoms of ailments went away. Some people were able to reverse their type two diabetes. people with PCOS were not experiencing the symptoms. So it was really surprising and she's like, wow, we're really onto something here. And she talks about how the problem with excess glucose in the system, it ends up creating free radicals and oxidative stress on the body. And that's the challenge with these different issues such as chronic inflammation or cellular aging damage to the DNA. brain inflammation or glycation, which essentially crusts the proteins in the body, which can damage things like your eye health. When you hear it, it's like, ⁓ I want to be able to care for my health. I want to be able to improve it, but I'm so done with focusing on the weight piece. I can get on board with this, and if I can work on slowing down or what she calls flattening out the glucose spikes. then I'm going to be able to improve how I feel. And that's what she talks about a lot as well is pay attention to how you feel. Do you have more sustained energy throughout the day? Are you less foggy? Are there less bursts of energy and crashes which come from the glucose spikes? And one of the other things that I really like about this book of where I feel it's more weight neutral is because she also saying this now isn't about making glucose bad. This isn't about trying to have the flattest curves out there in terms of your glucose curves, because she's like, we want to live, we want to have joy. Like, yes, you want to eat the delicious foods, of course. Here's how we can do it in a way that's going to support our health instead of throw it out of balance. So she gives these 10 hacks and I'll share a few of them here. Quick interruption, if you're listening to this podcast, there's a good chance you spent years feeling at war with your body. Maybe you criticize how you look in photos or you fear putting on a bathing suit or you find yourself stuck in your head thinking about how you look instead of being present with the people that you love. I know how exhausting that is because I lived it too. And if you've ever had the thought, I should be able to figure this out on my own. You're not alone in that either. Most of the women I work with felt that way for a long time before reaching out. Body peace coaching helps you shift out of this pattern at the root so you can actually feel at ease in your body again, not just on a good day, but more consistently. This is one-to-one or small group coaching. So you're not trying to do this alone in a world that's still telling you to shrink. And if part of you feels like... I'll never be able to feel okay in my body. I used to believe that too. And now I can say that's not true. So if you're ready to stop thinking about your body all day and feel more at ease in your own mind and skin, you can learn more about body peace coaching in the description below and book a free body peace consultation to see if it's a right fit for you. All right, back to the episode. So first one she talks about, which she says is the most important is the order that you're eating your food. She says that you need to start first with eating the most fibrous foods, which are green leafy vegetables. Because they're the most fibrous, they create a viscous mesh in the intestine, which slows down the absorption of the glucose into the bloodstream. So you start with that first and you create this added layer of proteins and fats, which helps to slow down the release. And then the last thing you're eating, you're putting on top is the carbs and the sugars, which break down the fastest. So if you were to do it in the other way, if you were to eat the carbs first, because they break down so fast, they hit the bloodstream really quickly, which causes that spike. It's like too much energy into the engine room at once. So you get the bombardment of insulin and then the glucose needs to be stored. She's saying when it's happening over and over and over again, all day long for many, many years, that's when you're getting these health issues. So just by making that really small change, it makes a difference. My husband and I decided to try these out for ourselves to see how they feel. And I have to say we're loving it. He noticed a difference in his energy levels. I noticed a difference in mine as well. And we started out by just simply adding a salad to our dinners or start with some celery sticks and hummus, and then we would eat our meal. There wasn't anything that we were changing in terms of what we were eating except just adding in some extra vegetables. So it was really simple. Another hack that she gives is having your dessert or having sweets at the end of your meal. She's not saying don't eat the dessert. She's saying, yeah, have your dessert, but have it at the end of your meal. And that's going to help the body be able to metabolize the glucose at a slower rate. And another hack that she gives is having vinegar. before you have a very carb-heavy or high-sugar meal because the acetic acid in the vinegar temporarily inactivates the enzymes that are responsible for breaking down starches. And it also slows down the stomach emptying. It's just a way to help slow down the release of the glucose into the bloodstream. You take a tablespoon of any vinegar, mix it in tall glass of water. so doesn't wreck the enamel of your teeth and drink that before. That's a hack that she uses. And she's got several others that she gives. These very simple things that aren't meant to be rules. And she'll say, these hacks are causing any stress for you, if you're trying to be perfect with them, don't make them into this perfectionist thing. Do whatever feels good and easy to you. And just doing some of these is going to be of a help. So I really liked that attitude that she had about it. She wasn't militant about it. She wasn't making glucose bad. She wasn't making fat bad. She was just saying, hey, we want to enjoy life, but we're noticing that these glucose spikes are having a negative impact on our health. So if we just slow down the release by making these small little changes, we'll be able to improve our health and enjoy our food. And I feel like that is such a great way to take this nutrition information and use it in a positive way to support our health without making anything good or bad or right or wrong, but just looking at the pure facts. Now, she'll also say that people's bodies respond differently to foods. The glucose spike in one person who eats an apple pie might be higher than somebody else. And she said, we're not really clear on why that could be the case. but we're just sort of noticing it right now as of course there's many different factors and history and whatnot that end up affecting our health. So I thought this was a good book. I would recommend reading it. Now of course, does she talk about that people lose weight from implementing these hacks? Yes. Does she mention some things about wrinkles being created on your skin too early because of Glycation, yes. So there was maybe that one little piece in there of like the anti-aging, uh-oh, don't want wrinkles piece that I don't think I aligned with as much. I don't think that we need to be fearing aging. However, I think what she was just trying to say really is that it slows down the aging process of our bodies because apparently, and again, not a science person, but as I understand it in her book, the glycation is what ends up aging our bodies more. course we all want to be as healthy for as long as we can and feeling energized and youthful. If these different hacks and these different ways of regulating the glucose absorption in our bloodstream helps, why not do it? This is why with the body piece work I do, I say this is about feeling good in your body. It's not about eliminating all of these rules and health advice. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, but it can be hard to tease it out from the desire for weight loss. That's why I find when people are attempting to lose weight and they end up having positive health results, if we want to look at this from the perspective of what she shares with glucose spikes, what are people normally doing when they're trying to lose weight? They're eating more vegetables, they're exercising more. That's actually one of the hacks that she talks about is going for a walk after you eat. because the muscles are working and then they're able to absorb the excess glucose. So exercising more, eating more vegetables, probably doing things that are slowing down or flattening the glucose curve, as she would say, but unintentionally. It's just happening as a result of trying to lose weight and then they end up losing weight and say, ⁓ see, it was the weight. But it's like, no, it was actually because of the difference in the internal processing. the way that the body was metabolizing the food and the exercises and those changes that were happening internally, where that weight loss was a side effect. This is why we say with body piecework is 100 % about how you feel in your body. I think it's a really great example of how we can use this data to focus on how we feel instead of making it about weight and then still being able to enjoy our life. We don't want to become militant about it. We don't want this to be a new rule because then we're just kind of back to living the way that we were with dieting. It's that balanced place where we can take that information, use it in a way that works for us without having to focus on manipulating our body size to do it. Well, I hope you found it interesting, helpful. If you end up reading the book and trying out the hacks, let me know how they work for you. I'd be really curious to find out. Hope you enjoyed the episode today. I'll see you in the next one. Thanks for listening to Unlearning Beautiful. If this episode resonated with you, follow the show and share it with another woman who's ready to see beauty and herself in a new way. And if you feel moved, leave a rating and review. It will help the show reach more women who need to hear it. Remember, you're already everything you've been trying to become, enough worthy and free. I'm Christina Bruce. Until next time.