Your Body Has a Built-In Blood Sugar Sponge. It's in Your Calf.

Can you lower your blood sugar while sitting? It turns out there’s a small muscle in your calf that may let you do exactly that, and almost no one has heard of it. In this episode I break down the soleus push-up, a seated movement that helped blunt after-meal blood sugar spikes by up to 52 percent in early research.Most of us sit for ten or more hours a day, and we’ve all been told the fix is to stand up and walk. That works, but it isn’t always realistic in the middle of a workday. What the research on the soleus muscle shows is something different and a little surprising: this one muscle is built almost entirely from slow-twitch endurance fibers, which means it can quietly pull glucose straight out of your bloodstream for hours without getting tired. I’ll walk you through what the studies actually found, where the science is still early and unproven, and exactly how to do the movement yourself while you read email or sit in a meeting. This is lifestyle medicine at its most practical: a small, painless habit you add to time you were already going to spend sitting.What you’ll learn in this episode:* Why the soleus muscle handles blood sugar differently than any other muscle in your body* What the soleus push-up is and how to do it correctly with your knee bent at 90 degrees* How seated calf movement may improve post-meal blood sugar and insulin sensitivity* What the early research says, and why it isn’t proven yet* A simple way to start building this habit during long periods of sittingDr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/your-body-has-a-built-in-blood-sugarCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe