The Real Reason You Can’t Stop Craving Sugar (and How to Stop the Cycle Naturally)

If I get really stressed, I'm immediately like, "Oh, chocolate." Chocolate that's all my issues. And recognizing that is really important because when you can recognize it, then you can start to change the pattern. Welcome to the Balancing Hormones Naturally podcast. This is your podcast host, Leah Brugamann. I am a functional diagnostic nutritional practitioner. Here you are going to get actionable steps you can take today to start balancing your hormones naturally so that you can maximize your menstrual cycle for painless periods, more energy, and weight loss. Learn my three secrets to balancing hormones naturally. Just go to freehormonetraining.com and save your spot. Let's dive on in. Hey ladies, so we are going to be talking about sugar cravings and your hormones. So if you have ever stood in your kitchen with a big bag of chocolate, telling yourself, I'm just going to start on Monday. This is right. If you have great intentions when you wake up in the morning and you go, "Okay, I'm going to focus on these foods. I'm going to do XYZ." And you get to this point in the day, "Where are you going? I need chocolate." Not I want chocolate. Not chocolate would be really nice. Not this would be so useful for me, but like this deep down internal need of, "I need that," or something's going to bust. This is for you. And you know what I'm talking about. It's like, it's when your blood sugar is getting way too low and we're going to talk about why that is happening. But when your blood sugar gets too low, your body obviously wants the sugar, even carbs. A lot of times people are like, "Why don't eat added sugar? It's what carbs turn into sugar." So if all of a sudden you go, "Oh, I need the bagel," or "I need the pastry, I need the cake," or "I need a piece of bread," or "I need it." You know, not that I want it, but I need it. We want to talk about why that's happening. Okay. So what we are going to go over is what can be affecting that. Because I want you to understand what your cravings are actually telling you. And it's not about your willpower, it's not about your ability to muscle through things. I want you to really understand this is why I have cravings at this time. This is what I can do about them. Okay. So obviously, the most obvious one is the blood sugar roller coaster. And that's, you know, you didn't balance your blood sugar at breakfast or snack and blood sugar got too high. And then you have reactive hypoglycemia and then it goes, "You weigh too low." And so you have the spike, the crash, the crave. It's like, "Oh, okay, you just keep," and then you go back to spiking it because you want the carbs again because your blood sugar goes too low. It spikes again. And then you get the crash and then you get the cravings. And you just keep re-looping that all day. And you constantly get the dopamine of blood sugar going up. Yay! To the crash. If I'm tired, I'm exhausted. I'm starving to back up. And I want to kind of, I think that you probably know like if you are eating, you know, Swedish candy by itself or chocolate by itself or ice cream by itself or a bagel. You might know, "Okay, that is obviously something that's going to spike my blood sugar, but I want to like sneak in and give you some thoughts and ideas of things that are going to be impacting your blood sugar and you may not think about it, okay? So that's what I want to talk about specifically with this. So one of the big ones that I see is smoothies. So we'll go, "Okay, I had a smoothie. I don't understand why that impacted my blood sugar, blah, blah, blah, blah." And then we dig into your smoothie and it had protein powder and a bunch of bananas and peaches and mangoes and cherries. So we are on the theory high glycemic side with fruit, which is, I love fruit, don't get me wrong, but we're severely lacking in fat and fiber here. So that's something to take into consideration. Another one to take into consideration is eating fruit throughout the day. As a snack, I do that. I love it. I highly recommend it. Just don't eat a naked carp. So don't eat your fruit by itself. Put it with, so not let's put it with a hardball day, put it with a meat stick, put it with some chicken, put it with something, right? The other one is drinking juice. And I see this all the time with you, adrenal cocktail people. And I love adrenal cocktails. But remember how I tell you when you make your adrenal cocktail, if you use orange juice, for example, keeping it to that lower amount, freshly squeezed, I see people literally doing an entire thing of orange juice, which by the way, you guys, this is a clear protein. I think they're sold now. So I don't know why I'm telling you this, but I'm going to tell you anyway, the Justin Gradients clear protein drinks. I love them. They're so good. I highly recommend. Anyways, that's also why I recommend maybe doing the lower glycemic adrenal cocktails, which use lemon juice instead of orange juice. Does it taste as good? No, but are you as easily going to be spiking your blood sugar? Probably not. Okay. So those are kind of sneaky things. Like I can't tell you the amount of people that I see drinking a glass of orange juice or a glass of apple juice or cranberry juice or whatever. And then not understanding why they have a blood sugar spike or snacking on fruit throughout the day, especially things like watermelon, grapes, peaches, bananas, love them all. I think they're all great. They're just high glycemic fruit. So just don't eat it by itself. Parade with something else. Okay. So those are the sneaky ones that I see creep in. And you might not even be in that category. You may be someone that just needs to learn how to balance their blood sugar. And so if you're one of those people, half your plate non-sarchy veggies, quarter protein, quarter fat and carb, I promise you, you will notice a difference when you do this accurately. One of the big things that I see people start to do when they first start doing this is they just cut out carbs. Don't do that. Your thyroid needs carbs, your brain needs carbs, ovulation needs carbs, just focus on pairing the plate correctly. And I focus on lower glycemic carbs. So lower glycemic carbs are berries, squashes, pumpkin, reheated potatoes, all kind of fit into that category, veggies, but like veggies don't really have much carb at all. But they're great too, include. Someone asked me if I had any snacks, suggestions that they had grabbing go and I said, yeah, meat sticks. And they said, well, what if I'm bored of meat sticks? And I just laughed because how you get bored of paleovalid meat sticks? And then I realized they aren't eating paleovalid meat sticks. Okay. If you have tried other meat sticks and you go, oh, yeah, not super interesting, not super great. You need to try paleovalid meat sticks. They are hands down the best thing ever. My entire family has their favorite flavor. So for me, it's the venison and it's the venison and then the original beef. My husband likes the jalapeno and anything that has slightly a little bit of a kick to it. So you also like subffel of chicken. And my kids eat the teriyaki beef. No matter what your desire in a beef stick or a meat stick is, you're going to find it at paleovalid. But this is what I can promise you, you're not going to find their quality anywhere else. And if you are constantly turning to the same thing over and over and over for a snack, you really want to be paying attention to those ingredients. And they are grass fed grass finish, never use any grain, which actually means that their beef is higher in omega-3s and it's actually higher in glutathione, which is the master antioxidant. So it's a super food. And they also naturally ferment their beef sticks instead of using preservatives. So it's also amazing for your gut. So with one beef stick, you are literally knocking through so many stones. Literally. I mean, you're getting higher omega-3s, you're getting your master antioxidant, you're getting higher nutrients, you are getting natural fermentation. So it's better for your gut. You're balancing your blood sugar and it tastes amazing. I have loved paleovalid for a really long time because of the quality, but also the transparency. They tell you everything about their products. We're right on their website. If you have any questions, you can email them. But guess what? You don't have to because they tell you everything on their website as they should. So if you want to try some meat sticks, go to paleovalid.com/lea or you can use the coupon code "lea" to save 15%. You will be obsessed. Especially if your kids are about going back to school, you need some more grab and go. Snacks, you will not be disappointed. Please tell me what your favorite flavor is. Again, that's palovalid.com/lea. So if you are new to the blood sugar balance, that is that. If you are not new to the blood sugar balance, but you're noticing these things happening, maybe you look into these sneaky little things that are creeping in there. Another one. that's going to be impacting cravings, progesterone. So let's talk about this in the cycle. Okay, so estrogen makes you more sensitive to insulin. Okay, so that means that you utilize carb better in that first half of your cycle prior to ovulation. Thank you, estrogen. So we do like estrogen. Now in the second half, when progesterone's supposed to be the dominant hormone in estrogen should be lower, you are less sensitive to insulin, which means that it's much easier to spike your blood sugar. So the meal that maybe you could swing in the follicular phase and if you're working out more in the follicular phase, you could swing fully in that luteal phase prior to period. Maybe it doesn't work as well. Okay, that would be why. Okay, so it's also important to understand where you are in your cycle. If you're like, "Why do I need to eat my pantry?" That would be why. The other thing, progesterone can make you burn upwards of an extra 300 calories per day in that luteal phase. Thank you, progesterone. We love that. And so if you are someone that's really trying to stick to, you're trying to lose weight. So you are under eating. And I'm not saying under eating is a bad thing. It's just like you're under eating maintenance calories. But if you bring that down too low and you don't eat enough satiation throughout the day, you're gonna overeat at nighttime. It just sounds gonna happen. So that is something to think about is in that luteal phase. If you were already in a chaloric deficit, the chaloric deficit has now gotten a lot bigger due to progesterone. So maybe you need to play around with upping nutrition a little bit during that time, upping calories a little bit during that time to prevent cravings and wanting to eat out your pantry, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maybe you need to tighten your blood sugar balance during that time. The other thing is progesterone is actually supposed to calm. Right? Supposed to calm us, make us feel better. And if we don't have enough progesterone, AKA a lot of people, your body might be craving quick serotonin hits from sugar, right? It's also why in the morning we go right on our phone and we start scrolling for a dopamine hit. It's also why we get dopamine hits from carbs and yay, happy dopamine. Right? So let's just think about that all together. So if you're someone who goes, yeah, every day, I have sugar cravings. Okay, maybe we're on the blood sugar roller coaster. That could be, if you go, no, I tend to have them mostly before my period and that's when I feel like everything gets drilled. Okay, now we're looking more at hormonal, like is it a progesterone, estrogen and balance? Is it, we aren't balancing our blood sugar as well as we should be during that phase. You could get away with it at a different phase, but now you can't. You know, okay. The next one is going to be cortisol and basically stress eating. Okay, so high stress, high cortisol blood sugar spikes, insulin resistance, these kind of all go here. So let's say you're not eating sugar and you get really stressed. Cortisol, can spike your blood sugar. Thanks you, brain. And I think this is so interesting to see with people who wear a CGM and this is, it's just so insightful. So let's say you're wearing a CGM and you haven't eaten anything in the past two hours and you have a really stressful work meeting. I can't tell you the amount of people that will say that their CGM just goes, "Whaaa, like super high up." Yes, your blood sugar is literally going up due to a stress response, due to cortisol. Okay, so that is such a big thing. That's also going to impact cravings because what happened, you just went up, you want stress, blah, blah, blah, and then it's gonna come down and your body goes, "Oh no, we need to get it back up. We need to get it back up." We are stressed, we need more sugar. You have the cravings, okay? So really isn't about willpower. Let's just understand why you're having this, like what's causing it, okay? So I hope this is bringing insight to you and you're starting to go, "Okay, which category do I fit into?" Am I stressed all the time? Am I mostly having cravings around my utile phase? Like what is my root cause here? Okay, so another one to think about with cortisol is this is definitely if you are in the insulin resistance category, stress and cortisol is definitely going to be something that is a big influencer here. So if you are the wired but tired at nighttime, you constantly get the crash at 3 PM. All your cravings are coming at nighttime. This might be you, okay? So where are your cravings coming? This is gonna be helpful. Okay, mineral deficiency. Okay, so honestly, if you don't have enough magnesium, you were gonna have unsavable blood sugar. Okay, this is gonna happen, okay? So on top of that, if you have unsavable blood sugar or low magnesium, you have unsavable blood sugar and you also don't have the minerals like potassium, insodium to support your adrenals, we'll come back to the cortisol, recirculating. We're also going to have unsavable blood sugar, okay? And so also, let me like give you a sneak peak, hint, bonus hint. Okay, what are you craving when you are craving things that you feel like you shouldn't be eating? Is it salt? Okay, maybe this is really adrenals, potassium, sodium. Yeah, are we craving salt? Are you craving chocolate all the time? Versus just sugar, like specifically chocolate, maybe you just need more magnesium. Okay, so this is where it can get more, your cravings can get more insightful. So often when I see people be like, I need chips. I'm like, oh, are you just craving the salt? Like can we fill this needs somewhere else and support the adrenals somewhere else? The other thing with cravings, it can also be parasites. I know that's really gross. It's kind of like a bonus angle. Because parasites feed off of serotonin, which rises at nighttime. So this is again, one of the clues that you should be looking at if you get all of the cravings at nighttime. And let's say you did eat enough food throughout the day. But you're just getting this at nighttime, it goes, if you're waking up multiple times at night and go, if you notice that cravings get worse around the full moon, I go, maybe parasites are your connection here. Our parasites are root issues, now parasites are not a root issue. We have to figure out why you are a perfect host for parasites. Like why do parasites think that you are the perfect person to come habitat in? So gross sounding. Okay, so see how there's multiple things that could be causing this? So when people go, oh, I just have blood sugar, or I have sugar cravings, like I just have no willpower, bubble, bubble, blah. I'm like, no, there's a lot of reasons that could be causing this, okay? And especially when it comes to minerals, I love looking at the adrenal ratio, and then there's also blood sugar ratio that we look out on there. Calcium magnesium is our blood sugar ratio. And how those literally relate to each other, like their levels in comparison. And I find this so interesting, because I'll have so many clients who on paper, like are on a blood test, their glucose is within range. And we will see that those minerals are already starting to creep out of range, and they're like, yeah, I am starting to have like x, y, c symptoms. And if we can get those minerals back into balance, we can fix that before it becomes a bigger issue before we start seeing the glucose change in the blood, before we start seeing the fasting insulin creep up. And that's where I really truly think that a herit tissue mineral analysis can be such a game changer in the preventative source because you can see things are really near there. So obviously you guys know we do mineral testing, herit tissue mineral testing with all of our clients. This is one of our base labs that we do in the hormone reset program. You're also able to add it on in the membership, but it is included in the hormone reset program. And this is where we are digging in deep with you, going, okay, where is your root cause of blood sugar and balance in your cravings? And how can we help you like navigate that? And how can we help you not only figure it out, but make it sustainable, you know? It's not sustainable. If you go, yeah, I can do it really well for two days. And then I can't sustain it. It's like, well, that's not gonna work. You're not gonna see results there, okay? So if you want to dive into this with the as you may, if you want this help figuring this out, if you want us to walk alongside you and not have you have the throws to get it at the wall and figure it out, go ahead and book your call for the hormone reset program. Go to bit.ly/harp free call and we'll hear your story. We'll see if we can help you. We have our last round for the year, starting end of September. So that's awesome. If you're listening to this, not in that timeframe, see if we have another round. 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Now emotional slash dopamine based eating. This is if you are someone that just had a really stressful situation or a confrontation or you had a bad day or And you go, I need your you know, it's an emotional eating, but it's it's not just emotional. It's literally your brain is getting depleted from chronic hormonal dysregulation. Your body is seeking that dopamine hit. And you're not craving a cookie. You're craving relief. Right. And your body knows sugar gives that to you for five minutes. And you want to get so if you go, okay, yeah, that's totally me. I will tell you I will raise my hand here. This is me. I if I get really stressed, I'm immediately like, oh, chocolate. Chocolate itself on my issues. And recognizing that is really important. Because when you can recognize it, then you can start to change the pattern. And then I go, okay, I'm doing this because of this. And so something that's been really helpful for me is, I recognize that's why I feel they need to eat that. And then secondly, I can then when I understand the science, I find it useful. I can then go, okay, well, I'm going to do this first. I'm going to do a regulation exercise. I'm going to go outside for a couple of minutes. I'm going to punch a pillow. I'm going to do something else that I also know will give my body that relief. And then I'm going to circle back and go, okay, do something to cookie. Okay, great. We're going to have a cookie with me sick or whatever. But understanding the science helps me make a more informed decision and maybe set myself up for more successes. I go through that. So I have that makes sense. I think it makes sense to you. Here's more. Okay. So and this is why cutting sugar doesn't really work. Okay. Because you aren't learning how to get off the roller coaster, right? And just cutting sugar doesn't mean you also aren't eating like bagels and a ton of fruit and still imbalancing your blood sugar. Okay. So This is where like die culture is tricky because if you just cut out sugar, you're like pulling the fire alarm and going, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, this is an issue. But you know, putting out the fire. Okay. And that's where if we can come in with this really strategic approach of balancing the blood sugar, like learning how to balance not just cut things out. How can we balance the blood sugar? How can we teach our body and show our body other ways of supporting dopamine and serotonin? How can we balance out those hormones so that progesterone is at an optimal range. How can we balance out our minerals? So we're setting ourselves up for success here. How can we get rid of parasites if they're part of the issue and make it so that we're not a perfect host for parasites anymore. To see how we're coming full circle here when we can do all of those things, we can take that functional approach. That's when we see the long term success. Yeah, I can balance my blood sugar. But you have to be strategic with it and you have to want to make a change with something that I see. I'm just going to like point this out. And then you, you know, you can smack me. Is that I will see people go, okay, I get it. I need to bring in more protein. I need to bring in blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the way I could case, so for breakfast, I put college in my coffee, great dark college in my coffee. And I had a protein bar and then I had a protein bar for a snack. And I have my 30 grams of protein for breakfast. I'm like, yeah, but nowhere in there where we're focusing on real food, nowhere in there where you're focusing on food volume to help with satiety. You know, so don't just try and hit those numbers of XYZ because you have to look at your nutrition as a whole like how mineral replenishing was that protein bar, you know, probably not super great. Another one is I had someone send a picture of candy. And it had no added sugar. And so they're like, this is a great option, but it had a throat all. Sorry, it's nothing about I A throat all, which is a sugar alcohol, which we have it on the gut and super low. So it's like, oh my goodness. Could we talk about how bad super low says for you. And red food die corn syrup. And I'm like, Well, it doesn't have any added sugar, but this also isn't going to be serving you in terms of your goals in terms of replenishing minerals and balancing blood sugar, blah, blah, blah. So just cutting out sugar. We're not really fixing the issue. Okay. So I hope that gives you some insight there. So here are some steps that you can start coming in. Call it your craving reset. Okay. So let's start first of all with stabilizing our blood sugar with hormone plating. So that's why I want to call it And minimum of 30 grams of protein. I am going to give you chef's kiss if you're focusing on animal protein. Good job. Good job, you have your plate non-sarchy veggies and then a quarter fat and carb. And look at your plate and go, where are my minerals? Where are my minerals? Okay. Because you can just eat a salad. That's not hitting all of our things. Okay. Again, another one I see I ate a salad. I should be balancing my blood sugar. I should feel better, but your salad dressing had six grams of added sugar per serving and what you didn't realize is you put on four servings. That's a lot of sugar. Okay. I see this with ketchup. Sorry. I know I'm knowing going off on a tangent here, but ketchup. Oh, my Atlanta, like I cannot tell you how how much this bike somebody's blood sugar because nobody knows what serving of ketchup is. And so they go, oh, it's only four grams of sugar. And then they realize that they put it on their hamburger and they're dipping their fries in it and they've actually had six servings of ketchup because of serving was one of the tables. Boom. Okay. I just wanted to bring that to your thought pattern. Same thing with barbecue sauce. Same thing. same thing. Okay, so when you're looking at your food, let's look at all the nourishment we're getting from it. So where's our protein, where's our fat, where's our carbs, where our minerals, and this is, I think I hope will help you look at your meal as more nourishment in whole foods versus like, oh, I got protein, I got 30 grams of protein, and I got my fiber. So check, Mark, are you really going to feel nourished? Are you really replenishing your minerals? No, like avocado, nettle, sweet potato, spinach, I'm just thinking of all the things that are high in potassium. Okay, then next, let's fix our mineral base. Okay, so adrenal cocktails, great one to bring in. I know I just murdered them, but maybe do the low glycemic one, which is lemon juice, some coconut water, you can even put some camo, camo powder in there, put a half a teaspoon of like red men's sea salt, bam, you're looking for sodium, potassium, and vitamin C. So however you would like to like, shh, sprinkle that in through a whole food based source, you're going to be doing great. Okay, maybe you're going to get in a lecture lights throughout the day. Maybe you're going to do mineral mocktails. Okay, mineral mocktails is literally just like sodium, potassium, really not that, it's really not that exciting. You could literally be making an etaltine and put some sodium in there, put some sparkling water, mineral mocktail, there you go. So that's another great way to get this in. Again, acime testing, this is going to be really helpful. So many women are walking around very, very depleted and they're taking electrolytes, they're doing adrenal cocktails and they don't know why they don't feel better, it's because we need to get in there deeper and figure out where your minerals are off versus just like here, take it down to minerals and yeah, it's going to help sodium, potassium, but it's not going to help the other minerals and it's not going to help why certain ones are off and that's where again, acime testing come, come see us, let us help you, let us help you. Okay, let's get this out to more women. And then number three, step three, support the luteal face. Okay, so that's going to be supporting pregesterone. You guys, you know, I already talked about this in terms of blood sugar, but let's talk about it in terms of supporting cortisol. Okay, so maybe no hit during this time, maybe switched to matcha instead of coffee, if you get anxiety with that, maybe you're going to bring in magnesium glycinate to help calm your body during this time. Again, not medical advice, talk to your doctor before bringing in any supplements. Maybe you're going to bring in some adaptogens to help your body during this time as well, like rodeola, shwaganda, tulsi, breathwork, links up and while walking, anything to help calm the nervous system, support the nervous system so that we can support pregesterone. Okay, we're going to be getting in lots of good fats during this time because obviously that's going to help pregesterone production as well. Lots of B vitamins during this time and from whole food sources is also going to be really great. So when you think about all of this, I know I just dumped a lot on you. Just know that like cravings aren't a weakness. Okay, it's not because you're dumb, it's not because you don't have any willpower. They're just little clues. Okay, so let's listen to the message. Let's clue in underneath the sugar like what's going on. Where is it going off? Okay, then we can fix the minerals. Let's nourish the body. Let's support the hormones and the cravings are just going to go, yeah, I just don't have them. Okay, so if you really want to dive into there and go, one of my cravings saying, how can I feel better here? You need HTMAs, you want to literally just decode all of this bit.ly/hrpfreecall. Let's talk. Let's get in. Let's do this. And if you listen to this episode and you went, okay, that made a lot of sense to me. I want you to send it to one of your friends because she might just need some magnesium too. And sharing is caring when it comes to knowledge like this. Thank you for listening to today's episode of balancing hormones naturally. If you found this helpful, I would love for you to share it with a friend and post it on your stories and tag balancing hormones nationally podcasts so we can get this message out. You can find me on Instagram @liya_bruigi and I would absolutely love to hear from you. [Music]