If you’ve been around awhile, I’m sure you’ve heard me say this before, but blood sugar balance is SO important - even if you’re NOT diabetic! Having imbalanced blood sugar is one of the reasons that things like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and type two diabetes are on the rise.

You also can’t balance your hormones unless you also balance your blood sugar!

Seriously, if I could go back and change ONE thing at the beginning of my health journey, it would be to balance my blood sugar. I didn't know about this back then. I was trying all of the things for my hormones, but my blood sugar was all over the place!

So let’s talk about some of the common signs of blood sugar imbalance and what I recommend you do about it.

Signs of Blood Sugar Imbalance

If you get that really massive energy slump mid afternoon, you need to be looking at your blood sugar. And on a related note, if you find yourself getting really hangry during the day, this is also a sign of imbalanced blood sugar.

And I get it! I used to think that being hangry was just normal and that it ran in my family. My brothers get so hangry — fun fact if you didn't know, I have six brothers! So yeah, I just thought that being hangry was a thing. You just have it or you don't have it.

But no, I just had imbalanced blood sugar! So that’s the number one thing I would go back and change. And here’s why!

This is what happens when your blood sugar spikes.

It’s like a rollercoaster. If you eat a ton of Skittles or drink coffee on an empty stomach, it’s going to bring up your cortisol (which produces glucose) and spike your blood sugar.

And then what goes up, must come down, right? So your body produces insulin to bring your blood sugar back down. And the faster your blood sugar goes up, the faster it comes back down.

So then what happens is your blood sugar drops and your body wants to take care of you, so it says, “Oh my gosh, we’re so hungry; we need carbs to bring our blood sugar back up!”

That’s when you get hangry and crave all the carbs. And you probably think you have a willpower issue around food, but you DON’T have a willpower issue, you just have imbalanced blood sugar!

So now you’re just on this blood sugar rollercoaster because your blood sugar spikes and comes back down and then you’re hangry and your body is producing more cortisol to bring that blood sugar back up. Cortisol is your stress hormone AKA your “fight or flight” hormone. That’s why balancing your blood sugar is so important to balancing your hormones!

Something else that’s interesting about your blood sugar is that it actually can affect your mental health - especially if you already deal with things like anxiety and depression. So every time you get a big blood sugar spike, it actually can really affect your mood and your mental health. And then you’re on this spiral where you want to comfort eat, your blood sugar is spiking and dropping again, and it’s affecting your mental health even more.

How to Balance Your Blood Sugar

Okay, so now that you get why this is so important, it’s time to talk about how we actually balance our blood sugar! It’s really quite simple.

So, the first thing you can do is eat your breakfast BEFORE drinking your coffee in the morning.

Coffee/caffeine will spike your cortisol which is going to bring up your blood sugar and then you're going to have even more of a rollercoaster. This makes it so much harder to stay balanced the rest of the day. So at least drink your coffee after your breakfast OR drink it with your breakfast.

Something else you can do to keep your coffee from spiking your cortisol is put a fat and a protein in it. For example, I like to add coconut milk and collagen to my coffee. Or I’ll add some heavy whipping cream to my coffee.

The second thing you can do is eat protein, fat, and carbs with every meal and every snack.

So you want your plate to be about half veggies, a quarter protein (about the size of your palm), and a quarter fat and carb.

You can still have all the foods you love, it’s just about keeping things balanced. You want to have an orange as a snack? Great! Can you grab a hard boiled egg with it? Can you grab some nuts with it?

Now I want to share with you some other hacks to help keep your blood sugar balanced that are not my hacks. These are from Jessie Inchauspé (AKA the glucose goddess!), a biochemist who wrote The Glucose Revolution.

In her book, she shares lots of double blind peer reviewed studies, which are basically the gold standard of trials because you know exactly what's going on. So these are some of the tips I pulled from her book:

First, simply rearranging the order in which you eat your food can lower your glucose elevation by 75%!

Just let that sink in for a second. So you're eating your food, not necessarily changing anything other than just literally rearranging how you eat it. And you will have a lower glucose spike by 75%.

What this looks like is that you start with your veggies because the fiber is going to help coat your intestinal lining. Next, you eat your protein and your fat. And then lastly, you eat your carbs because carbs digest the fastest.

So since your body is already working on the digestion of the protein and the fat, and the fiber is already in there to coat your intestinal lining, your carbs won’t give you that massive glucose spike. It's going to be more steady.

This is such a simple hack!

As an example, something I’ve been loving lately is sourdough toast. But, I will eat a raw carrot or a pepper first, and then I’ll have my eggs and my sausage (loving some grilled chicken sausage right now!). And THEN I will have a piece of sourdough toast or I'll have a piece of fruit or whatever I'm feeling. This is my favorite breakfast of all time. So anyway, that's something super simple you can do!

And then the second thing that you can do is consume one tablespoon of vinegar with about 16 ounces of water - a big glass of water - 30 minutes before your meal.

The reason you want to take this about 30 minutes before you're eating is so that the water doesn’t dilute any of the stomach acid you’re creating to digest your food. So that's why I always recommend keeping your water 30 minutes away from your food (before AND after).

Also, it needs to be diluted with water because drinking straight vinegar isn’t great for your teeth or esophagus. If you’re struggling to start with a tablespoon, just start with a sprinkle of vinegar in your water and work up from there.

This does two things for your body:

Apple cider vinegar, or any type of vinegar, except for balsamic, will help your stomach start to produce stomach acid to digest your food better. It also stimulates your pancreas to start producing those enzymes to help digest your food.
The vinegar actually tells your muscles to prepare for glucose! It says “Hey, I'm going to be getting some carbs and some glucose. Now you get ready to utilize it.” This keeps your blood sugar levels 30% more stable throughout the day.

These have actually been done in trials, so they’ve been tested and proven to work! They've been tested on type one diabetics, type two diabetics, and people without any diabetes and it works.

For example, my mom gets so fatigued from carbs and I'm always knockin on her to balance her blood sugar! I told her, “Why don't you try rearranging your food?” because she's always telling me that she can't eat carbs. And I'm like, “No, you need to eat carbs - you just need to figure out why you're not digesting them.”

She tried the vinegar hack and told me she had more energy, didn’t get tired, and didn’t get any heart palpitations from eating carbs!

Another thing you can do to balance your blood sugar is do at least 10 minutes of movement within an hour after eating. This helps because you just told your muscles to get ready for glucose and now you need to give your muscles something to do with the glucose!

So to sum up, three signs you need to balance your blood sugar levels are…

Getting that massive mid-afternoon energy slump
Feeling hangry
Struggling with your mood and mental health

And the 4 simple things you can do to balance your blood sugar are:

Eat your breakfast BEFORE drinking coffee (or have coffee with breakfast)
Eat balanced meals (fiber, protein, fat, and carbs)
Rearrange the way you eat your meals - veggies (fiber) first, then protein and fats, and lastly carbs.
Drink 1 Tbsp of apple cider vinegar with 16 oz of water 30 mins before eating

I hope you try these simple hacks to balance your blood sugar!

The recommendations presented in this blog are not a substitute for medical advice from a qualified doctor. Before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle, please consult with your health care provider.

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