What's up guys, I'm excited to have the glucose goddess herself join us today. Her book, Glucose Revolution, was not only an instant bestseller, but it was also translated into 30 plus languages. She takes complicated health topics and makes them easy to understand with tips and strategies that are super practical and easy to use immediately. Today, Jesse reveals how to manage your glucose without getting rid of carbs, the seemingly magical powers of apple cider vinegar, and why being skinny doesn't mean you're not at risk for disease.
I hope you guys enjoy listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it, and if you do, please leave a review on the podcast. It's the best way to support us so that we can help more people like you get this information and become truly legendary. I'm Tom Billio, and welcome to Impact Theory. If you do those things, and this is all detailing glucose revolution, you will fundamentally change the biochemistry of your body.
Jesse, welcome to the show. Thank you Tom Fallon. I'm excited to have you, and I want to know what are foods that people, like the top foods that people should be eating that would help with losing weight and reducing inflammation. Foods that contain fiber, so all vegetables, fiber, fiber is amazing.
She's a superhuman. Why? Because fiber is incredibly protective in your digestive system, especially in your gut lining, so in the intestinal walls, to reduce any glucose spikes from foods like structures and sugars that you might be eating. So we need to use fiber to our advantage.
Because glucose is going to be the punchline problem? Because avoiding glucose spikes is one really efficient way to go about making your health better, physical and mental. What about fat loss? I know people care.
Yeah, so fat loss is definitely one of the consequences of keeping your glucose level steady. However, my work on teaching people about glucose is not a diet, and its primary objective is not a fat loss. Its primary objective is to help the 80% of the population who have glucose spikes every day avoid those spikes, so that cravings reduce hunger, reduces energy goes back to back up. You feel better, your body, your mind are thriving.
A common consequence is fat loss, but that's not the primary angle that we're going after. We're going after health first. And is that because you are more concerned about how people feel than how they look? Is that why?
Because you're going out of your way to be like, its not about fat loss, people love that fat loss. I know they love it, but I think there's a few things here, like the amount of fat you have on your body is not a very good representation of your internal health. So some people who are not able to put on fat, yeah, some people who are not able to put on fat will develop their diabetes earlier on because fat is actually protective. Your body puts on fat to protect you.
Every time you have a glucose spike, so a very rapid increase in blood sugar concentration, your body wants to get that level down. Your body does not want to keep you in a state of elevated glucose because that needs to inflammation, aging, insulin, like it's just a nightmare. So your body has a few techniques to take the excess glucose and store it away to protect you. And it puts the excess glucose in your liver, in your muscles, and in your fat cells.
So your ability as a human to grow the size and number of your fat cells is a very good indication of how quickly you're going to develop type 2 diabetes. If you can put on a lot of weights, if you can store that glucose away into fat cells for a long amount of time, you're going to be protected for longer. If you are, for example, of Asian descent and you have a hard time growing the number and size of your fat cells, your glucose is going to be elevated faster. And that's why we see a lot of people who developed type 2 diabetes who are actually not that fat, but they have really high glucose and insulin levels just because they genetically cannot put on fat too quickly.
So fat gain is actually a protection. So that's number one. I understand people want to lose fat, and that's a totally okay thing to want to do. But the way we're going about it, often you just snap back.
You lose a bunch of weight, you snap back, right? Because you're doing these extreme things, like cutting calories really excessively or doing crazy diets. If we look at our glucose levels and we eat in a way that balances those spikes, a few things happen. One, we reduce how many cravings we have.
Cravings are a big barrier to fat loss because people get these intense feelings for why I really want to eat a cookie, then there's a whole cycle of guilt and shame, and just the whole thing is like quite damaging. Second, when you balance your glucose levels, your hunger hormones get tamed. So you're no longer hungry every 90 minutes. Third thing, when you balance your glucose levels, your insulin levels come down.
And in order to lose fat, your insulin levels have to be down. So what I see in my community and the readers of my book is that when they focus on glucose first, they naturally lose fat as a side effect, as a consequence. But the primary objective is I want to feel better now. I want to stop getting this chronic fatigue.
I want to get my mental health back in shape. I want my sleep to be good. I just want to feel better. And also I want to feel connected to my body.
That's really the primary angle. Some people come at it from like, my skin is bad. I want to get my skin better. Other people come at it from, I'm having hormonal issues like PCOS, erectile dysfunction, whatever.
They get to glucose. They steady that and weight loss is a nice consequence. Okay. So fiber, we're going to be eating fiber.
We're going to protect the gut lining. We're going to slowly absorption of glucose that we're regulating our glucose response. What are some other things that we should be eating? Protein is really important.
It helps your body's digestion go a bit slower. So if you eat protein with carbs, the carbs will get more slowly into your intestine and then slower into your bloodstream as well. Healthy fats are also important. So basically, you need to be thinking, I need to eat vegetables, I need to eat sources of proteins, sources of healthy fats.
And then starches and sugars, which are the ones that contain glucose, they're fine to eat, but they're for taste. They're for pleasure. They're there because they're cheap to eat. They're everywhere.
We like them. They're a nice social activity to make a big plate of pasta for your friends. But they're really just mostly for pleasure purposes. And so the problem we're having these days in our society is that most people are eating just starches and sugars, because it's cheap, it's available, it makes you feel pleasure in your brain.
But as a result, their glucose is completely all over the place. So I'm not in the camp of completely cut out starches and sugars. I think that's unsustainable for most people. I don't think that's very fun because I love pasta and chocolate cake and I do not want to give it up.
So what I teach people is these nice principles that allow you to still eat the starches and sugars with less impact on your glucose and your health. So maximum pleasure, minimal impact on your body and your mind. What about, I've heard you talk a lot about vinegar, which I've never really made my radar until reading your book. Why vinegar?
So it's really fascinating Tom. Across these studies, I was like, this must be a fat. Like this must be another like internet wellness trend. Like I just was very, very skeptical.
Turns out there are quite a few like good randomized controlled trials showing that if you add a tablespoon of vinegar at the beginning of a meal, you can reduce the glucose spike of that meal by up to 30%, without changing what you're eating. It's shocking. It is shocking. But is it really that shocking?
Because in many cultures around the world, we've been having vinegar for a super long time. In Egypt, like ancient Egypt, they would make vinegar teas for people who had diabetes. In Iran, they've been making apple cider vinegar for generations. It's like a, it's just part of culture.
So now we're understanding the scientific explanation for why it's helpful. But I think all of these things we've known culturally for a long time, but now we're able to see like how it actually affects the inside of the body. How does it? What's it actually doing?
I'm assuming it has something to do with glucose. It does. So in vinegar, there's a molecule called acetic acid. Acetic acid is the thing that does the work.
So acetic acid does two, actually three main things. The first thing is that in your stomach, acetic acid inactivates alpha amylase, which is an enzyme that breaks down such as into glucose. So vinegar slows down the action of this enzyme. Therefore, slowing down how quickly starts gets broken down into glucose molecules.
And so that means that glucose gets into your intestine more slowly, which is what we're here to do. We want to reduce the speed, velocity of the glucose getting into your bloodstream. Second thing that acetic acid does, it goes to your muscles and it tells your muscles to soak up glucose as it arrives into your bloodstream. I wouldn't say it's mimics exercise, but it kind of tells your muscles to soak up glucose more actively as if they were contracting.
And third thing, acetic acid goes to your mitochondria and tells your mitochondria to burn more fat. So you have this amazing little molecule that acts instantly, by the way. It's not something that you have to build it up over weeks. If today your next meal, you just add a tablespoon of vinegar to it or you drink it in a tall glass of water, it will have an impact on your glucose levels right there in there.
So okay, now that we know the broad swath of things that people should be eating, actually before we go too far down the vinegar thing, let's talk about food timing. That's one of the big punch lines of your book and it ties directly into what we just talked about, which is what you should eat. But even the order in which we eat things can have similar impacts to the things you just talked about. So how do we change up the order, which by the way, since I know the punch line, I will say I actually did this today.
Yeah, I was like, oh my God, I can't believe it has this kind of impact. So this is one I think no different because I eat so clean already. So it wasn't a big departure for me. So it was instead of eating protein and vegetables, I want to give it away.
I'll tell you. Okay, so in the scientific studies, here's what we see. We see that if we eat the consistence of a meal in a specific order, we can reduce the glucose spike of the meal by up to 75 percent without changing what we're eating. God, this so like these numbers are really impressive.
Yeah. So we're not changing what we're eating. We're not changing the order. We reduce the spike so significantly, which means less inflammation, less aging, you know, better or hormone balance.
I mean, we just feel much better. So the correct order is vegetables first, proteins and fats second and starches and sugars last, the sugars last thing makes sense. You know, dessert is always usually last and actually, when you think about it, the vegetables first thing culturally, like this isn't happening for a long time, especially in Europe, like in France, we have Cornita, first in its own capacity. In the Middle East, you know, they often have herbs by the bunch on the table before the meal starts.
And the reason this works is because of that fiber and the vegetables. So the fiber goes from your stomach to your upper intestine and there it kind of deploys itself like a transformers onto the walls of your intestine. It makes this protective mesh, this protective barrier, kind of like this gooey gooey kind of thing. Should you ever read the book, The Fiber Menace?
No. So all of this stuff gets really interesting, very complex. One minute, it's bad, the next minute, it's good. So it's always hard to figure out what the sort of final word is, but The Fiber Menace is a book that's like, hey, all these things about fiber that you think are good are actually bad.
Like even thinking about, as I go through your book, I'm like, this is really effective for people, if you can't get them to stop eating a modern diet, but if you could get them to stop eating a modern diet, like, just like... Like no sugars, no sugars. Exactly. Like, donny sugars or eat sugar or eat, like berries and things where, from an ancestral standpoint, we only would have been able to eat a lot of fruit, like, in the fall, right before we need to fatten up for the winter, or since we actually want to get fat.
And so it's like, does fiber work because it's good for you? And it's like, nature's way of saying, hey, you can have your cake and eat it too. Or is it actually causing a problem? It's stopping the digestion of things that you're eating.
It's creating a barrier that's stopping you from absorbing nutrients. And it just so happens that since most people have access to so many calories, and they're eating the wrong kinds of calories for it, the most part, that fiber sort of accidentally will help you. But in reality, it's creating problems. Now again, that's not necessarily what I believe.
I don't know what to believe. So my thing is, I, and I think, actually I'm gonna wait and see your processing, which I like. I actually really like what you're saying, because fiber is only really useful in the context of other bad stuff that you're eating. I don't wanna say bad, but like other things that could cause problems.
So like, okay, so. You can throw the shade at me. Okay, cool. So imagine I take a piece of fruit, right?
So fruit has a bunch of glucose and fructose in it. Fructose is not something you want a lot of. Interesting. But since there's fiber in there, it's less bad for you.
And actually, if you look at ancestral fruits from like millions of years ago, they have way more fiber in them. Like way, way, way, way, way more. There's a photo in my book of showing ancestral banana versus banana these days that has been bred for centuries. You know, wolves in Tashawahuas, ancestral bananas into these things.
So the fiber is helpful today in modern fruits because it helps combat some of the bad side effects of eating so much sugar. But I think you have a really good point. Like, fiber first is only really important if you're gonna eat starches and sugars later. If you're in a context of already not eating much starches and sugars, the order is much less important.
Okay, so going into glucose. So this is my, I'm obsessed with glucose. So I come from a morbidly obese family. I used to be about 60 pounds heavier than I am now.
And I remember when I first got married, Lisa hates when I tell the story. So I wanna be very clear of my wife's life. I was loving you supporting me. It's been amazing.
But there was a period in our lives where she was very nervous that I was going to have very poor habits and end up with a physique that was moving in the wrong direction. And so I was eating less than I'd ever eaten. I was hungry all the time and I was getting fat. And I was like, what is going on?
Because I was doing a low fat, high carb diet. So you felt like fucking crap. Felt terrible. I was wildly inflamed.
Of course I didn't know that. Wouldn't have even known to use that work back then. You were fast too. Correct.
And it was not good. And so thankfully at that point, I'm like, whoa, I know where this leads because of my family struggles. I really need to learn about nutrition. At first, of course, I attack it from an exercise standpoint.
I'm just trying to exercise my way there. I'm sure this audience has started a thousand times. You can't outrun a bad diet. So it was like, that wasn't really working.
But that actually did show me that I could put on muscle, which is quite exciting. And going through that and starting to learn about this thing at the time, I was like, okay, let me try this thing. It was transformative. It was total fucking misery clicking over to where I was no longer addicted to sugar.
And so that took about three weeks. I remember Lisa and I getting in a huge argument because I was like, if I eat a cookie right now, I'll feel better. And she's like, they need the cookie, but stop complaining. And I was like, oh man, I really want to get to the other side of this.
And so I did need the cookie and it took three weeks, but I woke up one morning and now I would know what I was doing was burning ketones. But I just felt like, whoa, I feel different all of a sudden. I don't feel like anything is missing. I don't have this weird relationship to hunger.
And it was literally one morning. I woke up and just felt radically different. So you had stopped cold turkey, all carbs? 100% other than vegetables, but like not starchy, no potatoes, like broccoli, green beans, that kind of stuff.
And so, and that's one thing, I'm going to see how many people I can piss off right now. So I think that people often, like they will get triggered by me saying, hey, wearing a continuous glucose monitor is awesome. I think everybody should do it. I've even heard you say that maybe not everybody should wear one.
I'm like, people should wear one at least for like a month to see how what you eat does to you. And if you're willing to experiment, you will find the path forward. It won't be fun. I can predict all the things that people are going to hit in terms of if you've got gut issues, which I've been through with my wife.
Here's what that's going to look like. If you are addicted to sugar, here's what that's going to look like here, all the places that sugar is hiding. You're going to figure all that shit out. And then, by the way, you're going to have to start judging how it impacts your body because there's no one size.
It's all it's going to be different for everybody. So what, like you were talking about people I would call skinny fat, where they don't have the out of host tissue, but they have all the biomarkers of somebody that is as a terrible diet. For those CGM, the continuous glucose monitor piece, I would say two things. I would say one, if you're going to wear a CGM and you listen to this, buy my glucose revolution and read it because it will give you the context that will allow you to understand what's happening and make the changes to your glucose level.
What is the context? The context is what is glucose? How, why these glucose spikes you're seeing are harming your body. What are they doing on the actual biological level?
What's happening? Second, 10 really simple principles that allow you to avoid these glucose spikes without needing to go cold turkey like you because you're hardcore. And then third, what are the pitfalls to not fall into? Because if you wear a CGM and you're just optimizing for your glucose, you could actually drink a shit ton of alcohol, eat a bunch of unhealthy fatty foods, and stop exercising because you're going to see that if you do those three things, your glucose levels are flatter.
That's a brilliant point. So yes, it's an amazing lens to which to understand your body and it's really powerful. But you need to do it right because you can do it wrong. Like I did vegan wrong when I was younger and I only ate pasta and Oreos.
Like I did, yeah, because there you can. Pasta and Oreos. And I felt horrible. I'm shocked.
And then I did keto. I did that completely wrong. My period stopped. Whoa, on keto.
Yeah, because in your female body, these extreme things have an impact on your hormonal system. So this is why people don't test on you. P.S. Absolutely.
And that's why so many of the studies on fasting and whatever are done on males. Because, hello, males have a 24-hour hormonal cycle. We have a 28-day hormonal cycle. Very different situation.
It's way too complicated. OK, so let's take these one by one. That's fascinating. OK, so what is glucose?
So glucose is your body's preferred energy source. You mentioned ketones earlier. Ketones is also a great energy source. But glucose is going to be used first if it's there, basically.
Every single cell in your body uses glucose for energy. So my hand cells are using glucose by now to contract. Your brain cells are using glucose to think. And look at me and speak.
Your heart cells are using glucose to pump. Your body needs glucose and preferably runs on glucose. Every single living thing on this planet also runs on glucose from plants to dolphins to humans. Plants?
Oh, yeah. So plants are the ones that bring glucose to the earth. They're up taking glucose from the soil? No.
They're creating glucose. They create glucose from photosynthesis. So create glucose? Yes.
I guess that needs to be self-evident so that they are glucos. They create and they are it and they burn it. So if we didn't have plants, we wouldn't have life. Plants.
And it's their version of ATP? So glucose is burned to create ATP. So they create ATP as well? Yeah, absolutely.
All living things do. So plants through photosynthesis fix the carbon of the air and turn it into glucose molecules. And then this glucose is turned into fiber. It's turned into fructose.
It's turned into other things. It's burned for energy. It's used as building blocks to make the plant. When you look at a tree, that's glucose.
That was made out of glucose from the air and then turned into stuff. That's so weird. So every living thing runs on glucose. Paper is glucose.
Paper is glucose. In my book, I say, if you're reading this book on paper, you're reading a book about glucose printed on glucose. So that's so fascinating. And so we humans, we can't photosynthesize.
I mean, we could try, but it doesn't work. We need to get glucose to food. So we usually eat foods like starches and sugars to get glucose to our body. But when you think about a dolphin, for example, a dolphin doesn't eat pasta and cake.
So how does a dolphin get the glucose that it needs to make its organism function? Well, if you don't eat glucose, your body will make it from within. So when you completely cut out all glucose sources from your diet, some parts of your body are going to start running on fats on ketones. But the parts of your body that need glucose, your body's going to make glucose from within, from the protein and the fat you're eating.
So that's how dependence we are in this thing, that if we don't eat it, we make it from inside. OK, so, but as we understand that part of the equation, what I want to ask is, if it is so necessary, why is it also so toxic? Fantastic question. So imagine I gave you a plant, and I was like, Tom, take care of this plant for two months, please.
You would take that plant, and you would know that you have to give the plant some water every day for it to survive, right? You would give it a bit of water. But if you give that plant too much water, that plant is going to drown. And I'm going to come back after two months and I'm going to be dead, and I'm going to be pissed off.
Just like plants need some water, but too much drowns them, a human being needs some glucose, but too much glucose causes issues, which is kind of not intuitive because you would think, well, if it gives myself energy, I should just give them as much energy as possible by eating as much glucose as possible. So that part I get, so no, I wouldn't think that just more and more and more and more and more. But knowing the punchline about glycated tissues, I'm like, it just seems overly reactive and toxic. If it's useful, walk people through, you've said that glycation basically is aging, that they are the same thing.
Walk us through that. It just seems so bizarre that this thing that I have to have that I'll make on my own if I need to, is also the thing that's killing me. That's extremely to put it, but yes, it's going to cause issues at high doses. It's going to cause issues when those glucose spikes get to levels that are too high.
Is it only if it spikes? It's not, right? No matter what, if a glucose molecule bumps into something, it sticks to it forever. It is now damaged, and I have glycated, kind of like a piece of toast, stealing your words.
Yes, but your cells regenerate, right? So it's glycated forever, but then those cells can die, those molecules can be recycled. The problem is when there's so much glycation or so much inflammation that your body can no longer neutralize and take care of it. You know what I mean?
It's like we all have cancer cells within us, but normally our body's able to see, oh, that one's not good, we're just going to throw it away and make a new one. The problem becomes when the cancer cells are just multiplying, multiplying, and your body can't do anything about it anymore. It's kind of the same for glucose. There's a lot of stuff happening in the body all the time.
Like every second, there's billions of molecules going through each of your cell membranes. It's just like mind-boggling. So there's a sort of base state of glycation happening, and that's normal aging. But then the problem comes when there's too much of it happening too often.
So to get back to what you're asking, like, what happens in the body? There are three main mechanisms that take place underneath our skin that are important to know about when it comes to glucose spikes. So the first thing that happens when your glucose spikes too high to a level that is not healthy for your body is that your mitochondria, so the little organelles in your cells that make energy, they become overwhelmed. Your mitochondria are actually in charge of turning glucose into energy.
They want some glucose to be able to make energy. But if you give them too much glucose, they go on strike. They're like, I cannot. I cannot today.
This is, I just can't. It's too much, too fast for them to handle. So they just shut down. Your mitochondria shutting down then produces free radicals in your body.
These free radicals lead to oxidative stress, lead to inflammation. That's one of the main pathways. The second thing that happens is the glycation that you just mentioned. So from the moment we're born, we're slowly galaicating, we're slowly aging.
It's kind of like cooking. When you're fully cooked, you die. We can't. I don't think you said that was a smile.
It's true. When we're fully cooked, we die. And that's OK. That's just part of the human condition.
We can't stop glycation, although many people who want to live forever are trying to stop it. But we can slow it down and speed it up. And every time we have a glucose spike, we're speeding it up. That's really the punchline.
Let me ask you. If we had the same amount of sugar go through our system, glucose, go through our system. But in one case, I like gobbled it all in the morning. And it's a massive spike.
And then nothing for the next 23 hours and 49 minutes. And then the other one, it's either through eating fiber and vinegar and doing the things I need to do to slow it down. Or just because I really spread that shit out, which of those is going to age me faster? Same amount of glucose.
Just like interesting. So we know that. We know that. Yeah, we know that.
So these spikes are the most harmful to your cells. And the first ones, actually, that suffer the most from these spikes. So you're not really finding your blood vessels. So those, what's been studied is actually in those particular cells, like what's worse and what's better, a very rapid increase in their rapid drop or something more steady, same quantity, but just steadier over time.
The spikes are what's causing the most damage. The variability is really the issue here. And so all the hacks I share are actually acting on that particular thing. I'm not telling you you have to cut out the cake and the pasta and whatever.
I'm teaching you really easy tips that allow you to spread the glucose release out so that you have fewer consequences on your health. And these big spikes, we also feel them consciously. Like we can feel really jittery and anxious when we have the high. And then that crash, that crash activates the craving center in your brain, Tom, and your brain that tells your mind you must eat something sweet right now.
Makes you tired and makes you hungry. Like it's just the spike in the drop of the bed news. Is the fatigue because the variability in the blood glucose triggers a lowering of the rate of creation of ATP? Like is the mitochondria actually slowing down?
Because you really do feel like for real tired, like I'm gonna fall asleep. And that's why I was surprised that going keto, you said you did it poorly, but keto for me changed everything. Because when I went keto, I had a different relationship to hunger. Wasn't that I didn't get hungry?
Was that it didn't make me fatigued or cloudy headed or frustrated? I'm just like, oh, I'm hungry, I want to eat. You know what? I felt when I was on keto.
I felt like aggressive. Like I felt like an animal. Like hangry or no? No, no, no, no, no, no.
Like it's as if my brain switched into like a, I'm gonna fucking crush everything. Yeah, it felt very different to my normal personality. It was like, I think it's just burning fat instead of burning glucose. So yeah, it was like, maybe this is what it feels like when you're a man and like you're running on, you're fasting and you have to go like kill the fucking mammoth.
So I don't know. I don't know if it really felt like a different personality. It felt very like, like animalistic almost. I was not in my emotions anymore.
I was just like. That is fascinating. Don't cross me. I'll fucking bite you.
Like that's how it's about to me. But not hangry. We're a very different place. It's from a place of like, just like.
Aggression, natural energy. That is utterly fascinating. I've never heard that before. I've never told anybody before.
I'm really curious to see if it influenced your testosterone levels or something. It's possible because my period stopped. Yeah. So I have very regular cycles.
I was super healthy. But then when I did that, and I was young, I was probably 21 or something. I just didn't have it anymore. I just stopped for like four months.
And I was like. And it came right back as soon as you went off? Well, no. It didn't come right back.
Like it came back probably two weeks after. Did you lose fat? No. I mean, I was like, I just was like this.
I didn't have much fat mass. But I didn't need to sleep very much. So I would just go to bed, wake up five hours later, when now I need nine hours. Didn't have my period anymore.
I felt like an animal. I just, it was like an experience. Just to show you how powerful it is when you change what you eat. So that was too far from me.
Like I don't want to be, I don't want to live there. But it was such an interesting experience. And for you, such a different experience, right? For you, it's like this.
For me, this information and these hacks, for me, that's this. I feel amazing. Amazing energy, no cravings, level headed, happy, but the keto thing. Let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building.
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TrueMed is for qualified customers only. HSA FSA tax savings vary. That's really interesting. So Keto is the one thing that I would say is as close to universal as not true.
The closest thing I would say everybody should try is cutting out sugar. After that, and nothing works for everybody. But after that, I would say Keto is something everyone should try. Now, like you, if it takes you somewhere that you don't want to go, fair enough.
But in terms of something people should experiment with. For the cutting out sugar thing, I agree with you. I think sugar really is just for pleasure. There's no benefit to eating sugar.
But I think for most people, cutting it out cold turkey is really painful, challenging, stressful. So I encourage people to take a step before that, which is you're probably on a sugar addiction roller coaster every single day of your life. So step one, like use my hacks so you can still eat sugar without creating the roller coaster. So you're still getting the pleasure, but you're not triggering these cycles of cravings that you're on day in and day out.
And all of a sudden, you'll see you'll get some distance. And you don't really crave sugar anymore, so it's much easier to stop it. A lot of people, their body is burning glucose constantly. And they are dependent on getting glucose every two hours.
They feel really shaky. They're like, oh my god, my blood sugar is low. You know? And he told the story of the book that freaked me out.
That there was a woman who would not go to things if she wasn't going to be able to eat every 90 minutes or about. Yeah, she had. So for this book, I interviewed a bunch of people who got all the stories, and it was amazing. But one woman, she needs to have snacks in her purse constantly while she needed to.
Like if she was invited to something, she would have to time, OK, am I going to be able to leave and get back to my car and eat in the middle of the event? Or am I going to find myself without food for two hours? She was on this roller coaster, this addiction, you know, of like spike hypoglyciness, spike hypoglyciness. Every cell in her body was just burning glucose.
She had no metabolic flexibility. She had no ability to start burning fat for fuel. When you cut out carbs entirely, and if you've been on this glucose addiction for a long time, your body will take the week two weeks to be able to switch over to burning fat. And that two weeks is really painful, right?
And that's probably what you went through. So you can do it. You can go cool turkey, or you can sort of ease yourself into it a bit better, using my hacks, et cetera. So you teach your body to burn fat again, get back some of that metabolic flexibility, and then, you know, if you want to cut out sugar entirely, it's not going to be hard.
You're no longer going to be controlled by this craving center being activated every 90 minutes in your brain. It's a very different experience. Why people do that protocol? If you want to ease your way into it and not do the white knuckle approach that I did.
OK, the protocol would be, start with your breakfast. So change your breakfast first. Go from having a sweet breakfast that is just starches and sugars to having a savory breakfast, to build around protein. You can keep starches in your breakfast for taste, like bread, for example.
And if you want something sweet, have whole fruit. What would you recommend? It's interesting that you recommend fruit. What would you recommend for a savory breakfast?
I didn't say I recommend it. I'd say if you want to eat something sweet, a breakfast because you're used to it, have whole fruit, because fiber's there, so it's less glucose spiking. For breakfast, I'd recommend a high protein breakfast. So I love omenets with feta and tomatoes, things like that.
And ultimately, starting a day with protein is the best thing you can do. But in order to get people there, you have to go through a few steps. Protein or fat and protein? Protein first, some fat as well, is really a good idea.
But protein- Are egg whites better than full eggs? No. No, that's been debunked super long time ago. We don't have to worry about eggs anymore.
So full eggs-type- I think many people listening to this will be surprised to hear that. So for a long time, we thought that if you ate something that had cholesterol in it, it would lead to high cholesterol in your blood. And people also thought that, oh, high cholesterol is bad. It's going to give me a heart attack.
Those two pieces have been debunked. One, we now know that when you eat something that has cholesterol, it actually doesn't really turn into cholesterol in your blood. Second, we also know that having high total cholesterol is not a good predictor of heart disease. Half of the people who have a heart attack have normal levels of cholesterol.
Really? Actually, not. Yeah. So we now know that what's more important is your LDL type B, which is a specific particle size of cholesterol.
That's the bad stuff. And we also know that inflammation in your body and in your blood vessels is much more predictive of heart disease. So seractive protein is a great test to do that actually predicts heart disease way better than total cholesterol does. So that's the piece in the blood.
The food thing, we now know that one of the worst things to eat that actually makes this bad cholesterol is fructose. It's sugar. That is a much bigger driver of this cholesterol type than eating foods that have cholesterol on them. As a result, if in the morning you want to have eggs, totally great idea.
So first part of the protocol, and this is the only part where I ask people to change what they're eating, is going from a sweet breakfast to a savory breakfast. Because most people eating like cereals and stuff? Most people eating fruit juice, maybe some bread, jam, cereal for sure. Most people eat starches and sugars for breakfast.
Then maybe they buy a muffin or a pastry or croissant or something like that, or maybe they just have a coffee with sugar in it. Most people start their day like that. The thing is, if you create a big glucose bag at breakfast, it actually controls your entire day. Your entire day turns into this roller coaster.
And if you've never had a savory breakfast and you've spent your entire life having a sweet breakfast, you have no idea how much of a different world it is when you start your day with savory foods. To me, it's like in the movie you walk through the mirror to the parallel universe, that's the power of switching your breakfast and not having a glucose bag at breakfast. So that's step one. And then I would say start eating your food in the right order.
When it's easy, you don't have to be drastic, crazy about it. Like when it's easy. Add a plate of vegetables at the beginning of your lunch and dinner, add some vinegar to it. You can still eat sugar.
It's not a problem. But if you eat sugar, have it as dessert after meal instead of on an empty stomach. And then use your muscles after meal for 10 minutes. If you do those things, and this is all the Italian glucose revolution, you will fundamentally change the biochemistry of your body.
And you're going to help your body thrive. And your body and you are going to become partners in helping you live your best life. About 80% of the population has these glucose bags, Tom. And not just diabetics.
I used to think glucose was just relevant for people and diabetes. Most people still think that. This is what I'm sharing now. The science, this cutting edge science, is showing us that every single person is going to benefit from this.
It's easy. It's gentle. It's fun. You feel amazing.
Like, what else? So is it really that simple? So we've got don't eat the sweet breakfast. Get your protein, maybe a little bit of fat.
Eat in the right order. You're adding in some vinegar. Add vegetables to the beginning of your meal too. And all of the benefits from your protocol, that, it really is that.
That plus, I would say when you do each sugar, make sure it's as dessert, not on an empty stomach. And the movement after meals is good. There's other hacks in here, like putting clothing on your carbs, et cetera. But you don't have to explain that to me.
Yeah, I will. But if you do these things, it changes you from the inside out. These spikes, your glucose levels respond instantly to what you're doing. So if you put these four-pack things in place, which are not very hard, things change from within, for real, on a cellular level.
It's like a whole different world. And actually right now, so I'm running a study on people from my own Instagram community. So I have about a million something followers on Instagram now. And last week, I kicked off a study.
And this is now closed and I've recruited the people. I have a few thousand people who are going to go. If we're going to go through this exact protocol, I mentioned to you. So we're going to start with changing our breakfast and we're adding a veggie starter.
We're adding vinegar and we're doing movements. And we're going to do this over four weeks. And I'm asking them to tell me about their cravings or hunger, their happiness, their energy. And then they're going to report to me anything that happens.
So for example, I have a lot of females in the study who might have hormonal issues, period stuff. So they're going to report that. A lot of men too are going to report on performance or whatever they see fits. I want to start doing more of these things.
Because so far, I've just been translating other people's research into this information that's easily accessible. But now actually, I have a community of people who are really keen to just take this to the next level. So that's kind of the future. How many people in your community use the CGM?
Very few, because most people in my community have a hard time affording, for example, my $20 book. And those are the people I want to serve first. So I think it's hard to say, maybe 5% of people are a CGM. The problem is the CGM's in the market right now are really expensive, like $200 minimum per month.
So very people can actually afford them. And personally, I think the CGM's that are currently on the market are not yet amazing and great for the wellness audience. I think they're still very much in the biohackers here. Things are just totally fine.
But what would you want them to change? I would want them to stop focusing so much on the number and give people a summary of how they're doing that is human, instead of being like $85, $92, and then the person has to figure out what the fuck that means. It's scary. I get messages every day.
It's scary. Yeah. So what way? People message me.
And they're like, my glucose was at $85. Now it's at $92. Is that a spike? Am I OK?
Am I diabetic? Data, without proper support and reassurance, is really scary for most people who are not super well-versed in just devices and data in general. So I would want them to change that. And I still think on the education piece is a lot missing.
I think we can do much, much better. Let's do some of it right now. Because for me, I was startled by how edifying, wearing, a continuous glucose monitor was. Things that I didn't think would spike me, spiked me.
The one that freaked me out. This still, I get very enthusiastic about this. So obviously, I knew if you exercise, you burn glucose. And my wife and I had ice cream.
And I was wearing a CGM. Let me tell you, that'll still be real fast about your ice cream. So I'm eating ice cream. I'm looking at my number on the CGM.
It's just going up, up, up, like 110, 120, 140, 50, 60, 175. I was like, holy shit. So now I'm like, I'm really starting to get worried. Like this is really high.
And so I started doing air squats. Now I did, I did a lot. I probably did close to 300 air squats. But my number, you can just watch it.
Coming back down, down, down, down. Like as, it's not real time, but it's fast. Like I would say within, I probably did them over the span of two and a half hours. And over that span of two and a half hours, dropped right back down to, I think I pulled it back down into like the 80s.
It's amazing. So I was like, what? Like I was shocked at how much I could manipulate that number. Your muscles are your best friend in this Google world.
And that's one of the reasons where I tell people, if you're going to eat something that's high in sugar, before or after you use your muscles, right? The best time to eat a cookie is before you go workouts. Because it's not going to have that big of an impact in your body. You're going to get the pleasure, but then your muscles are going to soak that up really, real fast.
Now do you get the glycation of the tissues? If you exercise and it goes right into the muscle, or because it's being used by the muscle, like does that not happen? So actually, there's another question in here, which is sometimes when you exercise, you see a glucose spike. Have you ever seen that?
You were exercising, you had not eaten, and then it created a glucose spike? Yes, but not like a big spike. We used to get some much bigger spike than I do, because she works out a lot harder to start with that. So it's your first question, like, do you get glycation if it goes straight to your mitochondria to be used for energy?
No, that's what's really cool about it. And the second cool thing that happens, when there's a bunch of glucose arriving in your bloodstream, from ice cream, for example, usually your body's going to release insulin to bring that glucose and store it away. The problem is, over time, too much insulin is a key driver of peptiditis, okay? If after the ice cream, you start exercising, your muscles are going to uptake that glucose without the need for insulin.
Really? Yes. I always thought it was still using insulin. No, so when your muscles are exercising, they do not need insulin-tucked egg glucose, which is why.
It's so cool. That's really powerful. So I'll do that now. If we're going to have a proper cheat, like if it's the holidays or something, then I'll do, and I usually use legs, legs and back just because of this.
I mean, there's a big, it's less like booty, man. Here's a booty. I use my booty. I say maybe a little less exciting for a guy, but yes, I hear you.
And you really can mitigate, like really mitigate the effects. Something that might spike me to 180, 190, I can keep to 130, let's say, by even doing it before I eat. Or what I'll normally do is I'll do it throughout the day. That way it's not super nauseous.
So do a bunch of air squats, leg extensions, might throw in a little back, a little chest, just to round it out, why not? It's really impactful. It's so cool. And so that's why one of my hacks is this 10 minutes of movement after your meals.
You can actually just go for a walk, and you can fold your laundry or play with your dog or do the dishes. Even just that, within 90 minutes of the end of the meal, is going to significantly curb that spike. And so instead of experiencing the spike, having the inflammation, the glycation of the insulin, then experiencing the crash, which puts you on that craving as rollercoaster that we're so familiar with. But this 10 minutes, you're reducing the spike, and you're flattening the crash.
So you're acting on so many different powerful levers here to reduce the symptoms. And you feel different. You really do. Really different.
This is one thing I'm glad you talk about, because I come from a morbidly obese family, and trying to convince them, this isn't a moral thing. Like, I'm OK, if you never lose weight, I'm not going to love you more if you get in shape. So this is just about how do you feel, how long are you going to be around? But trying to convey it.
You will feel better. And yes, without your protocol anyway, it's a little bit brutal getting to the other side. But it is so worth it. You feel, you sleep better.
Your joints don't hurt. Clear thinking. More energy. It's really, really transformative.
It is, but it's so hard. To do the things. To do the things sometimes, when people think it has to be a cool, dirty thing, I work on helping people change their behavior in very simple, painless ways. These hacks, I specifically made them so that they're a no-brainer.
They're easy to do. They don't require you any effort. And then slowly you start feeling better. And then it becomes this virtuous cycle.
You're like, whoa, I feel way better today than I did yesterday. And you continue, you know? Because it's hard to get people to change their behaviors. It's one of the hardest things ever.
Until you do it. Because now that I'm so used to feeling good, I don't cheat. So Lisa and I used to cheat a lot. Like we would do, we would starve ourselves all week.
And then all week. And we'd just go bananas and eat as much junk food as we could fit in our faces. And it was, admittedly, it had almost an orgy quality to it. It was so bombastic.
And I would get up early in the morning and I would drive to my favorite restaurant to get my favorite dessert. And so it had an excitement. So you could make a Saturday feel like Christmas Day. And there's a cool thing to that.