How to Stabilize Blood Sugar & Balance Hunger Hormones with Kelly LeVeque
In this episode, we’re talking with Kelly Leveque about how to stabilize blood sugar, balance hunger hormones and find body love every day.
How to Stabilize Blood Sugar & Balance Hunger Hormones with Kelly LeVeque
Kelly approaches the topic of weight loss, body-love, and diet culture is science-backed with tactical changes you can make in your life for more awareness and health.
We take it to the next level talking about blood sugar stability and its relationship to health, PCOS, endometriosis, and diabetes.
If you haven’t listened to Kelly’s first conversation on the show I highly recommend listening to it to get the break down on the fab four, the science of fiber, fat, protein, and greens, stabilizing hunger hormones and blood sugar stability, all of which we’re going to continue in this episode.
Be sure to also check out this free Winter Meal Plan, available for a limited time.
On Kelly’s new podcast:
Kelly started a podcast after receiving such good reviews as a guest on other people’s shows.
Her intent is to talk to the people who inspire her, who she can learn from, who her audience can learn from, and just to find another way to communicate with people.
For years she built it up to be a really big thing and she was almost too insecure to launch it.
We always build things up to be bigger than they are and it’s always just that first little step, not thinking about the end goal, but really thinking about the actionable steps that are going to get us where we need to go.
When she was just starting out with her business she felt comfortable being really true to herself, but as her audience grew there were more instances of negativity that slowed her sharing down a lot.
She had to retrain herself to think of her audience as just being her closest friends to keep her in “the vortex”, which is when you’re doing something you’re passionate about and you’re good at it (or that you work hard enough at) and everything starts going your way because you’re aligned.
But negativity gets in the way of Kelly’s momentum.
Still, she’s loving podcasting so much that she wants to start having more than one episode per week so she can interview people outside of the health world and have solo episodes.
Even if you have a goal with a deadline but it doesn’t happen, as long as you still have your eye on the prize, it will eventually.
On what led Kelly to write Body Love Everyday:
Body Love Everyday came about to answer all the questions that Kelly received in response to her first book on the Fab Four.
Body Love Everyday goes into the details that she shares with clients, including what protein powders she loves, how to eat the Fab Four is you’re plant-based, or on the go.
The first part is about the Fab Four with a mini-preview of blood sugar balance, condensing information from Body Love, and the following four chapters are protein, fats, fiber, and greens, where she goes into detail about what they are, why she loves them so much, and a lot of science behind it.
Chapter six is the Not-So-Fab Four, diving into concepts like incorporating starchy carbohydrates, acellular carbohydrates (carbs made from flours), what her favorite flours are, and how to decipher nutrition information, and really giving people the science and details with actionable steps to fill their grocery carts with the good stuff.
The second part of the book includes 21 days of breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, workout tips, and wellness tips, in a really digestible way for four different archetypes based on what she sees most in her practice: Girl on the Go, Plant-Based Devotee, Red Carpet Ready, and Domestic Goddess.
Girl on the Go is meal prep light, nothing fancy, but whole foods on the table with quick meals and how to order when you go out to eat.
Domestic Goddess is 45-minutes to an hour-long meals including recipes like homemade coconut yogurt, homemade granolas, roasting whole fish, and fermenting veggies.
It’s wellness but slow.
Plant-Based Devotee is for anyone who is plant-based and really wanting the support tools to balance blood sugar, make sure they’re eating the right things, getting enough protein, and avoiding deficiencies in things like zinc, b12, and iron.
Red Carpet Ready is full of the tips and tricks Kelly uses with her A-list clients that are surprisingly easy, approaching things like intermittent fasting a little bit differently.
Kelly calls this different approach “circadian-synced intermittent fasting”, during which we eat with the sun and not with the dark.
The research really shows that in as small a 10-hour window, we see decreases in things like triglycerides, blood sugar, insulin, belly fat, all of the things we’re looking to gain from intermittent fasting without the stress throughout the day.
On diet-culture:
It’s a very interesting environment in the diet culture right now; there are people who want to lose weight and are afraid to tell you.
“The world tells you that you can get out there and want a promotion, to travel more, to have children, to buy a house, to save for retirement, to learn a new language, to get a new job, but you’re not allowed to want to lose weight”.
So, people are doing it in private
“You are allowed to lose weight and you are allowed to want to lose weight as long as it’s not keeping you from loving your body now”.
Just like you have to love the process of your daily work or your exercise routine, you have to love the process of losing weight if that is your goal in order to make it a lifestyle and get where you want to go.
If you want to lose weight, the goal should always be nourishing your body with whole foods first, never deprivation, as well as moving your body, sleeping, and checking your blood tests.
If all of those are in alignment and you’re having a great time taking care of yourself in a healthy way, it is absolutely for you to have those goals.
Kelly provides the tools for anyone with weight loss goals that comes from love and science.
“There is a component of emotional weight and there’s a component of traumatic weight, or just letting go of our past, and that takes more than training and sleep and food”.
If you’re nourishing and moving your body, sleeping well, and don’t have stressful relationships but still not meeting your weight loss goals, there’s something else there and holistic approaches to go deeper should be considered.
You might get where you want to go, but you’re not going to stay there if you force it.
“You are never going to get your body where you want it to go by forcing it. It needs to be out of love, nourishing, and listening”.
Go deeper and listen to what you need; sometimes slowing down and releasing gets us where we want to go.
This new book is all about easy things to add to your life, instead of depriving yourself.
The power of Kelly’s work comes down to understanding how to harness the power of blood sugar stability, and then the deprivation part disappears.
We are human bodies and we should be able to understand our biology.
Everyone wants to know how to take care of themselves, and Kelly is meeting people where they are, especially if they don’t love the science of nutrition.
Kelly recommends using a glucometer to understand how your food choices affect you and what your baseline blood sugar is.
Her tip: wake up in the morning and test your blood sugar first thing (you want to average somewhere around 80).
If you have a genetic predisposition for it, averages in the high 90’s or 100’s is going to double your risk for Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias
Additionally, 1 in 3 people who have that kind of high blood test in their 30’s and 40’s are going to have diabetes by the time they are 60 or 70 years old.
It’s a good baseline to understand where you’re at.
With the Fab Four, you’re eating foods that slowly release glucose or sugar instead of a blood sugar roller coaster.
This isn’t to say that you won’t eat a piece of cake or pizza now and then, this is about understanding how those foods affect you, make some swaps to lower the effects on your body and blood sugar, and be knowledgeable about these choices and how they’re affecting your body.
The point is not to test your blood sugar all day every day, it’s just a tool like the Fab Four smoothies, intermittent fasting, and sleep hygiene are tools that are supportive of a balanced lifestyle that you build yourself.
A lot of issues, including Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), are related to dysregulated blood sugar, which dysregulates your hormones and causes side effects and disease.
“It starts with what you’re eating because of its effect on your hormones”.
Using this framework, Kelly’s clients with PCOS have seen changes and improved health of their ovaries.
Equip yourself with the knowledge of how your blood sugar changes your sex hormones and how that’s having an effect on your diagnosis.
If you have this type of disease state or diagnosis, you need to look at the number of times your blood sugar spikes throughout the day and try to bring that number down or bring down the height of the spikes.
Diet is a tool.
“As women, we need to have grace with ourselves and our bodies”.
Use light structure and positive reinforcement to keep our little trains moving down the track.
On what Kelly is most excited about right now:
2020 feels really expansive for Kelly.
She launched her second book, launched her podcast, has a protein powder coming out in 6-weeks.
Kelly considers 100% grass-fed beef protein to be the best of the best, because of the way it’s extracted.
It has three ingredients: 100% grass-fed beef protein from Sweden, organic cacao or organic vanilla powder, and organic monk fruit.
Kelly is also launching a video course, which is the Fab Four for anyone who doesn’t want to read.
In it, she goes through protein, fat, fiber, greens, Fab Four smoothies, how to stock your fridge, pantry, and freezer, and how to meal prep.
It’ll be a two-hour course with 10-minute videos and a downloadable PDF with all of her favorite things.
On what it really means to be healthy:
“The most important things in my life are my relationships with myself, with my husband, my son… our lives can be taken from us in an instant, our health can be taken from us in an instant, and really telling those people that you love them, connecting with them, putting them first, especially yourself, can make all the difference”.
Make it happen:
I invite you to do some experimenting with the Fab Four and the effect on blood sugar, how you feel, your energy, and your hunger throughout the day.
Come at it from less from a diet perspective and more from an energy and a feel good perspective.
Awareness is the first step, here.
Experiment, find joy, and pay attention to your choices.
We have the tools to feel good and support ourselves in the changes that we want to make, and it starts with awareness.
Guest Bio
Kelly LeVeque is a holistic nutritionist, wellness expert, and celebrity health coach based in Los Angeles, California. Be Well grew out of Kelly’s lifelong passion for health, the science of nutrition and overall wellness. Guided by a practical and always optimistic approach, Kelly helps clients improve their health, achieve their goals and develop sustainable habits to live a healthy and balanced life.
Kelly is extremely passionate about the science of human nutrition. Driven by the desire to help her clients, and her own intellectual curiosity, she studies the latest research, evaluates competing theories and reads everything. Most importantly, she uses that knowledge to make individualized recommendations for her clients.
Resources
How I Overcame Trauma (and Lost 50 Pounds) with Katie Wells on the Wellness Mama Podcast
SHOW THE FEEL GOOD EFFECT LOVE
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