I had a patient come in a couple of weeks ago with an interesting situation on his blood work that I wanted to share. And this is all surrounding blood sugar, type two diabetes, A1C, that kind of stuff.
So he had had blood done at his previous doctor's office and came in for some general wellness work. And in going through reviewing his labs I noticed that there were some tests that I normally like to see that were not included in his labs. And he was told by his previous doctor that he was pre-diabetic and they had put him on metformin. So in looking through his labs and getting the new ones to fill in the blanks he had already shown up with a fasting blood sugar of about 106 and his hemoglobin A1C was sitting at 6.0. That's why he was told he was pre-diabetic.
So in doing our labs I looked at a few other things. His triglycerides were 165, which indicates that there's probably some problem with blood sugar and we already knew that, but we looked at his fasting insuli...
So I had another patient I wanted to talk about, another interesting case. This one also has to do with blood sugar management, type 2 diabetes, that kind of stuff. So I just posted another one kind of in that genre. I figured I'd stick with the trend and throw another one of these up here.
This is an older gentleman. We've been working with him for a while. He does have a cancer history, and blood sugar is not well managed. We're running fasting blood sugars in the 150s, 140s most of the time, and that's pretty much with diet. Triglycerides tend to run in the 165, kind of 170 range. I like it below 100, so definitely not saying this is good blood sugar management. But we had seen worse on him. Hemoglobin A1C had been running in the upper sevens. Again, not where I'd like to see it, but better than it's been. We didn't have a fasting insulin, partly because I wasn't the one that ran the previous blood work, but that's kind of where we were.
Now, he had gone in for a su...
I want to talk for a minute about hemoglobin A1c. It's a kind of three month average test for, or how frequently and how high you would spike your blood sugar. We'll talk more about that in a minute. So I was dealing with a patient recently who brought lab work in from her other practitioner and said, "Oh, doc, I think it's really good news. Doctor, my other doctor said my hemoglobin A1c," or she just called it, "My A1C, came back great, he said. So I think what we're doing is working. I'm doing better." Or her hemoglobin A1c had come down from, I think it was eight something, down to 7.2, 7.1, something like that, still abnormal.
And her other doctor said, "We're doing great. We're right on target. This is where we want you to be. Don't change anything. This is perfect." Well, I had to kind of explain to her that it's not perfect at all. It's what's considered good management of a type 2 diabetic to be kind of in the upper sixes. Some doctors are okay wit...
Hi everyone. I Want to take a minute and talk to you today about insulin resistance. This is a blood sugar issue. If you're not familiar with what insulin is, first of all, I'm going to go over basics of blood sugar. When we eat something, especially something that has a significant carbohydrate content, or a significant refined carbohydrate content, or we just have something with sugar in it, like we drink a soft drink or something, then our blood sugar goes up. We digest that, it gets absorbed into our bloodstream and then our blood sugar starts to come up. Normal fasting blood sugar's probably going to be, about 75 to 90 maybe, somewhere in that range. Depending on who you talk to, it's 70 to 90, or 70 to 85, or 75 to 95. It varies a little bit, but it's in that range; below 90 and above 70, probably.
But when we eat something or drink something that has sugar in it, that blood sugar number's going to go up dramatically. When it does, our pancreas creates insulin to take some of th...
This is part 2, find part 1 HERE.
Last week's blog post was on intermittent and episodic fasting. It went over well, but I got lots of questions, and I kind of figured I would. That's why I asked for questions, and that's why we do the blog posts.
Today, I'm going to go over some of those questions to get them answered, a part two to last week's blog post. I'm just going to jump right in.
First question I got ... I'm grouping these. I got four main questions, but they were all phrased different ways by different people, so I think if I answer these four, it'll pretty much cover what I got. When to do intermittent versus episodic fasting. That was a pretty common question in some way, shape, or form.
I guess I gave the impression that you only need to do episodic fasting if you're having trouble with intermittent fasting, if intermittent fasting isn't working for you. It can work that way. It can certainly help you become ... Episodic fasting can certainly help you become more meta...
Hi everyone! I you want to tell you a little bit about intermittent fasting versus episodic fasting. You may not have heard of episodic fasting, but we'll talk about it in just a minute. Intermittent fasting is a paradigm, or a plan in which you eat all your food for the day within about an eight hour eating window. Now, that time can vary depending on your situation, but for our purposes here, we're going to talk about an eight hour eating window. That would mean that there's a 16 hour window where you don't eat. You can have plenty of water and you can have maybe some herbal tea, bone broth, something like that. But generally you don't need anything, just a few clear liquids, nothing that would raise insulin levels. That's an important part of it.
So the idea here is we're supposed to have a mechanism by which we eat, or overeat, and we take the extra and store it as body fat. Then in times of need, when we don't have enough to eat, we can pull back out of the body fat storage and...
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