If your energy, weight, and mood is up and down all over the place, one of the first and most important considerations is blood sugar management.
This is best to achieve, via diet and lifestyle, not a supplement or pill. Yes, you can add those, but you won’t get the same results if you do not consider what you are eating and your lifestyle. Get to the root of the issue.
These are my top 4 tips to help you get off the blood sugar rollercoaster and improve your metabolic health. The other side effects include healthy weight management and reduced risk of illness.
Start with Balanced Meals
This means adequate quality protein, healthy fat, and fiber. This is where blood sugar control starts. A diet high in quality protein, healthy fats, and non-starchy vegetables, is the best to promote blood sugar control.
If you haven’t already, you can download my free Balanced Meal Formula for Hormonal Harmony so you can easily create your own balanced meals. This is the exact formula I use with my clients and more often than not, just getting this right, often (not every time) makes all the difference.
Prioritise the first meal of the day.
Sometimes it is hard to make a lot of changes, I know!
So while the balanced meal formula is helpful it is too much to expect someone to create every single meal based on this formula when they are getting started. If you want a meal to prioritise getting balanced, start with Breakfast. Breakfast time (whether that be at 6am or 11am) is when our bodies are the most reactive to sugar and when we set ourselves up for the day.
Eating a breakfast high in healthy fat and protein, and moderate in carbohydrates, can improve our blood sugar balance throughout the day.
Go for the savoury breakfast over the sweet options or check out my Protein smoothie collection for an easy way to whip up a healthy balanced and delicious breakfast. You can also tick off some of your vegetable serves for the day in your delicious smoothie. Once you have breakfast sussed, you won’t have such an issue with wanting morning tea muffins, bottomless coffee and feeling like you need an afternoon nap.
Avoid or minimize snacking.
Waiting to eat for your next meal rather than snacking allows for your blood sugar and insulin to return to baseline. This is necessary to improve our insulin sensitivity. It is also really beneficial for our gut health. When insulin is always elevated, our bodies stop responding and more insulin needs to be released to get the job done. This has a negative impact on our reproductive hormones and can make us less sensitive to insulin (which wreaks metabolic distress and leads to increased fat storage).
If you must snack, and some people will need to when first making changes. Check out my protein snacks and small meals recipe collection for inspiration. This is great also for balanced lunches or if you need work lunch inspiration.
Move after eating.
Exercising or going for a walk after a meal reduces the blood sugar spike and allows our muscles to uptake more sugar from the blood stream without the use of insulin. This is a very good thing! If you have the time, go for a walk or do squats after a meal.
If you would like to read more on this subject, I also have a two-part blog on insulin resistance in perimenopause which has more tips and tools.
