Is Imbalanced Blood Sugar causing inflammation, stress & your gut problems?
Let’s talk about your Blood Sugar
You hear us always talking about the importance of blood sugar balance. We wanted to break down just how important this is when healing your gut. It is a foundation that when out of balance can exacerbate your gut symptoms and can even be a root cause of your digestive symptoms alone! If you are not supporting your blood sugar levels each day, it will be challenging for your gut to optimally function and heal.
Blood sugar is the most controllable lifestyle factor that plays a significant role in our health and how we physically feel - just think about it, we eat multiple times per day and each of those meals are an opportunity to support better blood sugar and better health including gut health!
When we refer to blood sugar, we are talking about the process our body goes through to break down carbohydrates from the food we eat, and turn it into glucose, so our body can utilize it for energy. When carbs are broken down, they turn into sugar, aka glucose. The glucose then enters the bloodstream and causes our blood sugar to rise in order to deliver energy to our cells and organs. Glucose is actually our body's preferred source of energy!
When there is a rise in blood sugar, the pancreas releases a hormone called insulin. Insulin’s job is to transport the glucose out of the blood and into our cells to be used for energy or stored for later use. This process helps to regulate the amount of sugar in the blood and causes it from getting too high or too low.
All food causes a rise in blood sugar, but what we want to focus on is how much and how fast our blood sugar is rising or falling. We ideally want to have a nice slow rise and fall in blood sugar throughout the day. When we have a meal, our blood sugar gradually goes up and as the glucose is shuttled into our cells, we have a slow gradual decline in blood sugar. Picture this as slow rolling hills. What we want to avoid is big rapid spikes in blood sugar followed by a big crash or low blood sugar, this is what we would refer to as imbalance of blood sugar aka a blood sugar roller coaster.
What else impacts blood sugar?
High carbohydrates without balancing the other macronutrients
Low fiber diets
Erratic meal timing
Excess fasting
Exercise especially in a low energy state
Stress
Too low carb
Low mineral status
Blood sugar is impacted by the food we eat, but did you know that how and when we eat, is just as important! Inside of our Nourished Gut Guide we utilize key lifestyle tools for you to practice in your everyday life that will be key in balancing your blood sugar and eliminating your gut symptoms for good! We teach you exactly how to create a balanced plate and optimize specific foods to help heal your gut while also loving your meals! Spoiler alert - carbs are not the enemy!
The Link Between Blood Sugar, Inflammation & Stress!
Now that we know WHAT balanced blood sugar refers to, it’s helpful to understand HOW it plays a significant role in inflammation and stress. We want our blood sugar to gently rise and fall throughout the day and avoid the drastic spikes or drops. If we are on a blood sugar roller coaster each day, this puts stress on the body and can be a root cause of your gut symptoms.
What does a blood sugar roller coaster feel like?
Fatigue
Mood swings
Food cravings, especially for sweets
Headaches
Brain fog
Weight gain or weight loss resistance
Anxiety/depression/irritability especially if you skip or delay a meal
Sleep disruptions
Constipation
Loose stools
Bloating
Imbalanced blood sugar causes an inflammation and stress roller coaster. When your blood sugar is low, such as pushing off breakfast or going too long without a meal. This low blood sugar signal will create a stress response and the body will release the stress hormone, cortisol, among other things, to tell your body to make more glucose from the liver. In the absence of food, cortisol will increase blood sugar. Experiencing low blood sugar is a stressor in the body and it will kick off the stress and inflammation roller coaster.
On the other side, chronic elevations in blood sugar can lead to inflammation in the body. Often these elevations in blood sugar can happen in response to a meal but often we see these occur in response to too low blood sugar and the reactionary stress response we mentioned above. When there is a rapid increase in blood sugar, the concentration of glucose molecules cause inflammation in the blood vessels and can send those inflammatory signals throughout the body causing an inflammatory response. If this is consistently happening, the body will be in an inflammatory state which can lead to a wide range of digestive and health symptoms.
Imbalanced blood sugar involves more than putting together a balanced plate. The Nourished Gut Guide gives you the lifestyle tools to not only balance blood sugar but teaches you how to support inflammation and stress in the body overall! Balanced blood sugar is a foundational piece that must be addressed in order to remain symptom free of digestive symptoms for good!
How Can Blood Sugar Imbalance Affect Your Gut Health?
Addressing blood sugar is a foundational piece that needs to be supported in order to fully heal your gut symptoms. Blood sugar imbalance can even be a root cause of your gut symptoms alone and exacerbate IBS symptoms like bloating, gas, loose stool, and constipation.
One of the main ways that blood sugar imbalance affects gut health is through the stress response. If we are experiencing the blood sugar roller coaster, our bodies are experiencing a higher level of stress. Elevated stress suppresses optimal stomach acid production. Having low stomach acid makes it more difficult for our digestive system to optimally break down food leading to maldigestion and uncomfortable GI symptoms like:
Gas
Bloating
Acid reflux
Early fullness
Constipation
Feeling that your food is sitting in your stomach.
This inflammatory response due to blood sugar imbalances can start to break down the gut lining and damage the tight junctions in the gut. This leads to dynamics such as leaky gut, or intestinal permeability, that can produce symptoms such as bloating, GI pain, loose stools or constipation as well as an increase in food sensitivities. This creates an increased risk of dysbiosis or negative shifts in the microbiome that can lead to IBS symptoms.
Imbalanced blood sugar can also negatively impact the health of our thyroid. Our thyroid controls our metabolism, energy as well as digestion. The most common dynamics we see in practice is low thyroid function presenting as constipation. Blood sugar imbalances negatively impact the production and function of our thyroid hormone which can play a major role in motility. This is why supporting blood sugar balance is a main area we start to support in our 1:1 clients and practice as it impacts so many areas of health in the body.
There are many ways you can start to balance your blood sugar today using a few lifestyle practices we teach inside the Nourished Gut Guide! Learning how to create gut healing, balanced meals are one of the first things we review in NGG. There are plenty of resources packed full of tasty recipes to support you along the way!
How We Support Blood Sugar in Practice
I’ll share a personal story about my own health regarding blood sugar, as I’ve had some interesting information and shifts happen in the past couple of months. As I’ve shared with you all before, I’ve had a long history of healing my own chronic fatigue and chronic constipation. Thankfully most of the big challenges of my symptoms are in the past; however, there were some areas that I’ve still been working on such as sleep, metabolism and consistent energy throughout the day.
After running a number of my own blood labs and functional labs, I decided it was a good time to gather more day to day insight into my blood sugar. My blood markers for fasting insulin and blood sugar are right where I wanted them to be but I had a hunch there might still be some fluctuations happening that might be impacting these mild symptoms. So I decided to wear a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), from Veri, to measure my blood sugar fluctuations.
I wore it for 2 weeks and saw my post-meal blood sugar was great, suggesting the balanced plate model of eating was serving my blood sugar well. However, my overnight and morning fasting blood sugar was higher than I wanted it to be. This got me thinking more about the influence of cortisol and stress on my blood sugar, than necessarily food choices themselves. Experiencing higher blood sugar overnight and waking, suggests stress in the body and the most common stressors can be from undernourishment leading to increased cortisol - because in the absence of food what brings up blood sugar? Cortisol.
So I started to experiment with food timing around sleep and waking and actually brought more food into my routine. The three greatest shifts that made the most impact in improving my blood sugar balance were:
I brought a nighttime snack into my evening routine that paired protein and fat to help balance blood sugar more throughout the night and added in inositol to help support blood sugar.
I pulled my breakfast earlier into my morning, aiming to eat within 30 min to 1 hr of waking versus the 1-2 hour window.
I brought bitters more regularly into my routine using them before every meal to see how that felt on digestion and blood sugar.
I then practiced these habits for another week or so and started to feel the positive shifts with staying asleep through the night more regularly, feeling the more consistent energy throughout the day, feeling no bloating after meals and all these positive symptom shifts suggesting improved metabolism! Then I wanted to see if the data lined up too, so I wore another Veri CGM for another 2 weeks to test out my shifts that showed significant improvements in blood sugar patterns especially overnight and in the morning with the simple adjustments I had made.
It is tempting to think about blood sugar balance and only focus efforts around food. Food does play a significant role in blood sugar; however, how we eat, how much we eat and when we eat is an even greater influence of blood sugar than most of us give it credit for. That is why inside of NGG we focus on all the areas that impact blood sugar as a foundational practice from what we eat to how and when we eat as well as the stress and nervous system role in blood sugar.
Bedtime Bone Broth Hot Cocao
I want to share my nighttime pre-bed snack with you because it's SO good, so simple and helped support my sleep and blood sugar.
1 tbsp full-fat canned coconut milk
1 scoop inositol powder
6-8 oz boiling water
