Let's Talk about BLOOD SUGAR

Blood sugar control is probably one of the biggest healthcare problems we face in this country right now. Clearly in the top three, maybe number one. Even more so in the trucking industry. When you understand blood sugar control you can see why the factors that contribute to poor blood sugar control are rampant in the trucking industry. 

The food that is readily available for drivers tends to be processed and high in carbohydrates, sugar, and bad fats. Those are all risk factors for diabetes and poor blood sugar control. To be clear, that is what we are talking about. When we say poor blood sugar control, that is the beginning. Pre-diabetes is the next step, full blown diabetes will follow that, and there are a lot of doctors that are calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes. If you suffer from diabetes, your risk of Alzheimer's goes through the roof. So that’s what we are talking about here.

Now, let’s talk about testing your blood sugar. Even if you absolutely know you have no blood sugar control issues, I will still recommend testing. I’ve been doing it on and off for about five years. I love the information I get from this. I’m talking about measuring your own glucose levels. You can do this by buying a blood glucose monitor. I recommend the Keto Mojo GK+. This meter can test both your glucose and ketone levels and you can find it in the Let's Truck Store. 

Here is how you’re going to test your blood sugar. You’re going to get up in the morning, after sleeping for eight to ten hours, which means you probably haven’t eaten for twelve hours. The night before you are going to do this, make sure you stop eating around six or seven o’clock at night. So you get up the next day, if it is six or seven in the morning, that’s twelve hours without food. That’s what we’re looking for, a twelve hour fast. When you wake up, don’t eat anything and don’t drink your coffee. Drink a little bit of water and then test your blood sugar right then. That is what we call fasting blood sugar. Meaning, how your blood sugar is with no food in your system for twelve hours. We would like to see that number under one hundred. The lower the better. Ideally, you would be in the seventies. 

Let me warn you, if you are on a high-fat/low-carb or ketogenic diet, you can get high readings on this. If your fasting blood sugar in the morning comes back in the nineties or even the 110s, don’t panic. I did the first time, because if you read the traditional medical information that would assume that you are pre-diabetic at that point. I panicked until I did the research and found out that this is common on a very low-carb diet and is referred to as 'The Dawn Effect'.

We’re going to do more testing anyway, this isn’t the only number we are going to use. Now what you’re going to do is eat a meal. You’re going to wait one hour after the meal and test your blood sugar again. I want you to eat what you would normally eat at that time of the day. Don’t make any changes to your diet yet. Eat the way that you have normally been eating because what we want to see is how the specific food you are eating is affecting your blood sugar.

For the first two days of this test, you’re just going to eat normally. Every time that you eat, we are going to check your blood sugar one hour after the meal, two hours after the meal, and three hours after the meal. You want to set an alarm, know your times, and when you’re going to retest. One hour after the meal, we would like to see our blood sugar under 140. When our blood sugar climbs above 140 that is when it starts doing damage to the body. Now, this is going to freak some people out because diabetics are typically used to seeing blood sugar levels in the 200s, sometimes 300s. You won’t have any symptoms but that is those years of damage that ultimately leads to losing your eyesight, losing your limbs, and dying. 

So we are looking one hour after the meal and we hope that it hasn’t spiked above 140. If it has, don’t panic. It’s not a huge problem, but that is our ideal number. Then we’re going to wait another hour and at the two hour mark we’re going to test again. Ideally, we would like to see the two hour mark lower than the one hour mark. Then we’re going to wait another hour and we’re going to check our blood sugar three hours after we ate. Remember, don’t eat anything in between these times. That is going to screw up the number. 

In the third hour, we are looking for our number to come back down to what our baseline was, our number first thing in the morning with no food and what we refer to as our fasting glucose number. If that were to happen, if we checked our blood sugar first thing in the morning and it was in the seventies or eighties, then we eat a meal, wait an hour and it hits 120, then we wait two hours and it’s 103, then in the third hour we’re back down to 86, you have perfect blood sugar control. That’s ideal. 

I like testing, it allows us to tweak things and really know what’s going on. I will tell you that this problem is simple enough that diet alone will fix it. We’ve proven it over and over, so have many other doctors and practitioners. You could take somebody on four or five medications, put them on a low-carb/high-fat ketogenic diet, and over time we can eliminate every single blood sugar medication that they are taking and we can reverse many of the problems that were created. The sooner you do this, the healthier you’re going to be.