Why Your Blood Sugar Is High (Even With Zero Sugar)

I don't eat sugar. Why is my blood sugar so high? You're doing everything right. You're giving up sugar. You skipped the bread. You haven't had a dessert in quite some time. Yet, you look at your blood test and it's like, "What's going on? My blood sugar is high." Your doctor might even look at you like you're cheating when you're really not. Let me show you what's going on. There's one piece of this puzzle that a lot of people don't even know about. Most people think that their blood sugar is a result of what they eat, right? Sugar, starches, etc. Yet, that's only half the story. I want to introduce you to your liver. Your liver has 500 functions. It is a filter to help you detoxify, but your liver is actually a sugar factory. And so, there's a certain small percentage of your body that has to have sugar. Okay? So, even if you don't eat sugar, these tissues, one is part of the brain and part of the kidney, and there's other tissues that literally depend on sugar. And so if you don't eat sugar, your liver is going to make it. And when a person goes on a low sugar diet or a low carb diet, they're going to get their fuel from the fat from the calories they eat as well as the fat from their own body. And it makes sugar out of things that are not sugar. Okay? It'll make sugar out of fat. It'll make sugar out of protein. And it feeds the different parts of the tissues. Question is, why is my blood sugar higher than it should be? actually you have an off switch for this sugar. Okay? And the off switch is basically insulin. If there's not enough insulin, your liver is going to be a sugar factory. Now, wait a second. That's kind of conflicting information because if I'm not eating carbohydrates, I'm not going to stimulate insulin. Insulin's going to go low. So, then my body is just going to make a lot of sugar. What normally happens is this hormone has been abused. It's been overstimulated for many, many years, like 10 to 15 years, constantly raised. And then the cells, because they're constantly bombarded with so much insulin, start to ignore this off switch to the point where you develop insulin resistance that causes the liver to think that, oh my gosh, I need to make more sugar because there's no off switch. And because that's really important, I just want to explain it one more time. The liver is going to make excessive sugar if you have too much insulin resistance. And you develop insulin resistance by consuming a lot of carbohydrates for a long period of time, 10 to 20 years. And let me just give you another layer of this problem because you go to the doctor, they test your blood sugar, it's normal, yet you're eating a lot of sugar. How can that be? Well, insulin is coming in there cleaning it up and getting it out of the blood. And that happens for a period of time. You can eat a lot of sugar for 10 to 20 years and not have diabetes, but you're going to have high levels of insulin, but doctors never test that until one day you develop so much insulin resistance that insulin now doesn't work. And you're actually deficient at insulin. And so now there's not enough insulin to turn this thing off. and there's not enough insulin to clear out all the sugar from the blood. So now the glucose starts going higher. What's interesting in a diabetic is 80% of the sugar in their blood is coming from this guy right here. This is why certain medications like me orin for example, they address insulin resistance and the liver and they help the blood sugar but they have a major side effect because that medication doesn't fix the cause. It just manages the symptom. But the point is if you're not consuming a lot of sugar, okay, and your glucose is high, it's either coming from the liver, okay, because you have insulin resistance. Don't worry, I'm going to show you how to fix it because it's actually pretty easy to fix. Or you have too much stress because stress activates this cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that will release sugar. So what happens when someone has too much cortisol, especially even when they take cortisol as a medication, prennazone, you can really jack up the blood sugar to the point where the person can even become a diabetic because you're just releasing so much sugar. Now, one little piece of this puzzle is that if you wake up in the morning and test your blood sugars and it's high, yet you didn't eat sugar the day before, that is something called the dawn phenomenon. And that really is a problem with this right here. In the morning, right around 8:00, you have the biggest spike of cortisol. So, cortisol is contributing to it. In reality, to have this dawn phenomenon, chances are you've had insulin resistance for a long time. Probably didn't know it because you never checked your fasting insulin. But if your blood sugar is high in the morning and you're not eating sugar, it's the liver. You have too much insulin resistance in your liver and there's just no off switch. So, the body is just making more and more and more even though you're not eating sugar. But don't worry, I'm going to show you exactly how to correct this because it's actually not hard. But you really need to understand this mechanism right I do here. Now if you had a test called an A1C okay an A1C is an average of three months of your blood sugar. You know you can check your blood sugar periodically and it can be normal but this looks at the average. So it looks at everything. And it is true when the liver starts making sugar, it can contribute to the sugar and worsen your A1C a little bit, but usually it's not going to be that big of a deal because for a lot of people, they only have blood sugar issues in the morning. And if they were just to go for a walk and burn that off, they can really get rid of that sugar fast because when they're walking, they're using up that sugar as energy. But a much better test is to check your fasting insulin. You want it between two and six. You don't even want it like seven or eight. Okay? That's kind of like in the risk area. And if it's like 12 or more, you definitely have some strong insulin resistance. But that's a really good test to see kind of where you're at. Chances are, if you've had insulin resistance for a long period of time, your fasting insulin could be, you know, maybe eight or nine or 10 or more. And this is why the liver is still producing sugar because you're not out of the woods yet. So, how do we fix this problem? Number one, go on a low carb diet. That means not just getting rid of sugars, but starches. Start reading labels. The maltodextrin, the modified food starch, those have to go. Number two, snacking must go bye-bye, especially at night. I mean, it's really bizarre to me that someone would need a meal Okay. And then they would need to eat an hour and a half later. They just ate. Why do they need some snack between a meal? It doesn't even make sense to me. Well, they're not really hungry. It's really called a dopamine hunger where it's not a true hunger. It's more of like these foods are making you addicted. If you were to eat at a Chinese restaurant with a lot of MSG, rice, things like that, and I know for me, an hour and a half later, I'm hungry. Like, am I really hungry? No. It's actually coming from either a blood sugar issue or this dopamine thing. This is why you must not snack between meals. Have two to three meals. I would recommend just doing two meals. Skip the breakfast. Okay? And nothing else in between those meals. So you eat at 12 and then at 6 right after you eat. Kitchen is closed. You must bring with you to the grocery store a list of foods that does not have on it any junk foods or snack foods. Most ultrarocessed foods fall into this category of snacks. I know this is hard to believe, but when you go into a grocery store, they actually have entire rows of snack foods. I'm not kidding. They'll have an entire row of chips and then crackers and then cookies and then snack bars and all these different snacks, right? I mean, before the 1970s, we didn't snack because it would ruin your appetite. And then all of a sudden, we got into this five, six meals a day thing and it just got out of control. And number three, focus on lowering stress because that definitely contributes. Getting a good night's sleep is going to be essential. Doing regular walking exercise will help get rid of stress. Getting actually out in the sun dramatically reduces stress versus inside your office where we have fluorescent lights. And then here's the thing, you just have to do that for a longer period of time because to correct insulin resistance, especially if your fasting insulin is like above 12, could take several months before things reset. How do we heal this resistance? You just have to stop triggering insulin. We just have to lower this insulin for a long enough period of time for these receptors to normalize again. And for some people it takes weeks. Some people it takes months and some people it could even take over a year. But it will happen. So if you're not eating sugar and your blood sugar is high, you're not crazy. It's a liver problem. And since we're talking about the liver, you have to see my other video that I created on the liver. That's super interesting and very informative. It's right here. Check it out.