Why Winter Wrecks Blood Sugar (Unless You Do This) | Episode 293

Y'all, I'm almost 40 and I really want to slow down aging and I have recently come across something that will help and I'm super excited to share it with you all. So research suggests that a big contributor to poor aging is what's called these senescent cells. I've done podcasts on this so maybe you guys are familiar but if you don't know what they are, they're kind of like these zombie cells. They're worn out old cells that linger in your body after their useful function and they waste your energy, nutritional resources and they also start to secrete inflammatory molecules that affect all the healthy cells around them. So as we age, unfortunately, senescent cells often accumulate in our bodies and they contribute to sluggish energy, less flexibility, joint pain, slower workout recovery or simply put that middle aged feeling. But in the last 10 years, research has identified these specific ingredients that come from plants which can actually help our bodies naturally eliminate these senescent cells and these ingredients are called senolytics. So the easiest way to get complete senolytic support is this formula I love called qualia senolytic and the cool thing about it is that you only take it for two days a month. So it's like this monthly cleanse for aging. So like I said, you just take it two days a month and it's loaded with these science-backed senolytic ingredients that help your body naturally eliminate these zombie cells. It can help your body feel 10 years younger in just a couple of months. Head to qualialife.com/danny to get 15% off your order. That's q-u-a-l-i-a-life.com/dannyda and I. Hey everyone, welcome to the Light of Beer Metabolism podcast. If you're watching this in video form, I am holding my cat copper. He's being very needy right now and he's also very chatty. So you might hear him talking to the microphone. But anyway, today I'm going to talk about a really pertinent topic for what we're experiencing right now, which is how to improve your blood sugar and optimize your blood sugar in the winter. And a lot of it's like before I learned about circadian biology, this was not on my radar. It was like I was focused on carbs, I was focused on macros, I was focused on digestion and minerals. But I really didn't think any differently about winter versus summer. So now what I have learned is that the way that the seasons change actually drastically impacts our metabolic health, our hormones, things like our melatonin, our cortisol. Obviously vitamin D and also our insulin sensitivity and how much we are ramping up certain pathways like the AMPK pathway, which is involved in things like autophagy and mitophagy. So many of you may have heard those terms sort of from being in the fasting space. Like we want to get rid of these dead and damaged cells and that's autophagy. And we want to get rid of these dead and damaged mitochondria to make room for new ones. That's mitophagy. So here's copper, you want to say somebody? You like mitophagy? Okay. All right, so enough with him. I put him down. So thank you for tolerating the distraction. So let's dive in to what happens when we ignore these seasonal changes. This is not meant to scare you. It's meant to inform you because no one's dropping dead because of how they're eating in the winter over one winter, but year after year, being so out of alignment with what this season is sort of encouraging our bodies to do is really where a lot of dysfunction starts to accumulate. How many of us gain weight over the holiday season where if we look at nature and we look at every animal, what are they doing over the winter? They are losing weight. They fatten up in the fall, right, during harvest season. And then food is scarce over the winter. So they are slimming down all winter. But what do we do? We stay inside. We blast ourselves with lights. We eat sugar, drink a lot of alcohol, celebrate the holidays, blast ourselves with LED, Christmas lights. And so we are doing basically the exact opposite. And so many people are like, oh, it's the season of lights. It's like, yeah, but the light that we had when that term was coined was candlelight. It was fire. It's not the season of bright blue and white LEDs. So someone might want to tell my neighbors. So okay, then we're going to understand what's happening in the body when we're not paying attention to the winter and those signals. And then we'll also talk about how to adjust, how to shift things. And I'll tell you guys about something really exciting that I'm offering that's coming up this Sunday on the Solstice, which is the shortest day of the year. Okay, so let us dive into how we can start thinking about improving our blood sugar over the winter and why winter if we're not conscious of it can be wrecking our blood sugar. Full script is my online supplement dispensary that carries high quality practitioner grade supplements and non toxic personal care products. Supplements are very poorly regulated. So if you're buying supplements on Amazon or something like that or buying private label supplements, they may be improperly stored, which might reduce efficacy and they may not contain what they say they do. On full script, you have access to a huge variety of top brands and you also get access to my public protocols for things like adrenal health, blood sugar, gut health and more. Plus, with my link, you get a lifetime 10% discount. So head to the link and start shopping for your favorite supplement brands today. Okay, welcome back. So the thing is winter is not the problem, right? Winter is not a problem. All sorts of beings on earth experience winter every single year. And so the trees aren't freaking out because it's winter and they're losing their leaves. It's just part of what they've adapted to handle to experience. So winter is not a problem, but it is a shift that we need to be mindful of and take into account when we're building our health routines or when we are, or kind of indicating that we need to shift our health routines. So I'm going to say waking up at the same time every single day of the year, the same indoor lighting, the same coffee first, the same workout routine, eating salads and smoothies because we're trying to lose weight or having the same types of stressors all year long. This is what's causing problems. This is what I'm hypothesizing is driving a lot of problems. So a lot of us are in our modern society are like, I just need to find that one diet that works for me. And I need to find this one routine workout routine that works for me. So it's like, I eat this way. I have this many carbs and then I work out five days a week and I have to fit it in before work and blah, blah, blah. So that's kind of what I see people doing is this sameness that does not shift with the seasons. Now again, this used to be me. I never thought, it never occurred to me that this was an issue, but I'm going to tell, I'm going to share a personal story. So I was living in Miami, Florida and that's when I started doing paleo. Then I moved to New York City and was doing fine when I moved there in June and July and August. Those were the first couple of months I was there. I was doing fine. But as the seasons started to get colder and the light started to dim, I started to notice that I was gaining weight, even though I wasn't changing what I was eating. And by December, January, I had missed my period for six months. I was riddled with acne worse than I've ever had before and I was so overweight. And I only, I'm only five feet tall, you guys. So a couple of pounds really shows up on my body. So I was probably 15-ish pounds overweight, which is a lot on my tiny frame. So I was like, what is happening? Because I'm eating the same foods. And so at that time, I was like, oh, it was because I wasn't taking into account my blood sugar. And that's true. But there's also more to the story that I wasn't like, why did I have to, why was I doing okay with it in the summer? But why was I not doing okay with it in the winter? It was a seasonal component to what I had to look at when it came to my blood sugar. There's a seasonal lens through which I needed to look at my blood sugar. And that would have really, really helped me. So winter is the season of darkness. And so instead of honoring that, like I mentioned, we keep living life sort of like it's summer. And of course, it's the holiday season. So add to that sugar, alcohol, late nights, all these holiday lights, and just turning on lights because it's dark out and how they've shifted the lights from in-can-design to LEDs. Now we have this perfect storm for blood sugar dysregulation, just like I exhibited when I moved to New York and kept eating the same diet, even though it was real foods. So let's talk about what is changing biologically over the winter. So one of the things is that in winter, the sunlight is obviously drastically changing. And so first off, you may be thinking, well, I live in Miami. It's not that much of a difference or I live close to the equator. It's not that much of a difference. You are correct. There's not as much of a seasonal shift around the equator. The closer you get to the equator, the less differentiation you're going to have. However, there are still sometimes differences. and maybe they're not at the same time of the year, but there's often like a wet season and a dry season. And so what you want to pay attention to if you're sort of these equator people is that paying attention to what's around and if there's seasonal changes to lean into that, even if it's not as dramatic as someone living in Canada or New York. Okay. So now I'm going to speak to those people who do have significant seasonal shifts. So right now it's mid-December and I'm looking at my window and here in Austin, Texas, it's peak fall. It is not winter here yet. I grew up in New York, so I know what real winter is, but here in Austin it is peak fall. My tree still has lots of leaves on it, but all those leaves are browning, yellowing. There's tons of leaves on the ground. There's red, yellow, orange, it's beautiful. It's fall here. So the changes are happening, but they're happening at a different pace than I'm used to have north, but the sunlight is still changing. The UV index instead of getting up to an 11 during the day like it did in the summer, it's only getting up to like a four, which is quite low, still strong enough to make a little bit of vitamin D, but very significantly changed from the winter. So even in places where it's quote unquote warmer, we're still getting seasonal changes. So less UVB light because that's the light that significantly reduces or goes away completely. So if you live north of Georgia, you're going to lose UVB light over the winter. And so that's going to mean we are not going to be making vitamin D or we're going to be making very minimal amounts of vitamin D. And so vitamin D we know plays a huge role in immune health, hormone production, and blood sugar and insulin sensitivity. So do we just drop dead over the winter because there's no vitamin D? No, our ancestors were fine without having that UVB light and vitamin D in the winter. But what did they do? They leaned into what was happening outside their window. So they leaned into this darkness because there's a lot more darkness than light. And what happens when we get exposed to darkness, we increase the amount of melatonin, which is a powerful antioxidant hormone that drives repair and also plays a big role in immune health. So there's a there's a Venn diagram where these two overlapping circles that show vitamin D and melatonin. And these circles overlap indicating that there's new research showing that many of the roles that vitamin D plays in the summer are overtaken by melatonin in the winter. So if you think, okay, I can't make vitamin D. What we need to do is lean into the darkness to help our bodies make more of this melatonin to help improve and regulate mitochondrial function, blood sugar stability, immune repair, and of course, support sleep, which is going to drastically improve our blood sugar and insulin sensitivity. So we want to lean into darkness to get the benefits of that hormone. Now another thing that's going to change in the winter is that the body is going to shift into more what's called AMPK activation. So this is the pathway that favors repair, clean up, and also fat metabolism. So to contrast that, if you're like, okay, what does that mean? In the summer, the opposite is true. So in the summer, we get more of an m-tore activation, which is growth, reproduction, burning carbs, building muscles. So these two states, ideally, we're balancing these two states because if we're always in this growth activation stage and we never lean into this AMPK activation, we're going to have unlimited, like, sort of out of control growth and different things and that can lead to a lot of problems. So we hear m-tore coming up in a lot of cancer conversations, for example, because we want to put a stop to some of that growth. After there's growth and building muscle, we need to slow down, repair, take out the trash, get rid of things that are dead and damaged. So we can't always be in this muscle building phase. That, for example, think about it like this. You go to the gym and you work out. Let's say you never take a rest day. You're not going to see the gains that you would if you stopped to repair and to recover from your workout. So think about winter as this recovery period. This is your rest day, but in a season. So another thing that happens is that your cortisol rhythm can be a little bit dysregulated by all of the indoor lights. And so we're not spending time outside because it's too cold and we're not getting outside for that morning light. We're blasting ourselves potentially with LED lights at night in the morning before the sun rises, drinking coffee before we have a meal. And that can be really dysregulating for our cortisol. And so even though we may get this like artificial burst of cortisol from these LED lights, but then we're not going outside. So we don't get that brightness signal to really help that cortisol come up. And then it might be up high in the evening when we want it to be low because we want to sleep. So that's a big issue. So in the winter, ideally we are waking up in the darkness and keeping maintaining that sort of sunset mode of our homes and having a nourishing meal before we're having coffee. And then in the evening, ideally we are keeping those lights dim and having the sunset toned, sun, fire toned lighting to not disrupt our blood sugar and cortisol in the evening. Okay. So I'm going to go into more details about how to do all these things. I'm just giving sort of the overview right now. So what happens when we do this? And then the other thing that happens, let's talk about this is that we're, it's holiday season, right? So we're going to parties. There's Christmas cookies. There's Christmas chocolates. There's alcohol. There's parties. We're staying up late. We're drinking champagne. All these things are happening. And we're also eating our normal diet that we eat because why it's available at the grocery store. So yeah, put the bananas in the cart. Yeah, go ahead. Put the rice in the cart. It's like we're eating all these out of season foods and the cookies and the sugar and baking baking and all these things. And we're eating these foods that are completely not local and seasonal. They are potentially grown in another continent or grown in another hemisphere. And so we're sending mixed messages to our body. We're sending messages to our body like, hey, I know the light outside is super dim and you're getting the signal that it's winter. But actually, it's also kind of summer. And we're in Costa Rica. And so that mixed message by just eating a banana in the winter is very disregulating for a body. Our body is getting mixed messages and that confusion causes chaos in the mitochondria. And that can contribute to inflammation and improper signaling. So our body just doesn't know what to do. It doesn't know what pathway to turn on or off. It doesn't know what hormones to release or hold off on. So we also from this living with the snacks, sorry, with the light and not getting outside enough and not getting the brightness signal, the lack of grounding, the lack of infrared light, we are deficient in energy. We get light from grounding, sorry, we get energy from grounding, we get energy from the sun hitting our skin. But we also get energy from, and we also get energy from movement. So if we're inside all day, we're going to be leaning into that, we're going to be maxing out the energy that we can get from food. So if we're not getting the energy from grounding, we're not getting the energy from sunlight, we're not getting it from movement, we're going to be extra hungry. So we're going to start waking up more tired. We may feel hungrier, more snacky. There's carbs and sugar around. So our blood sugar is on a roller coaster and that's going to drive us to crave even more sweets and sugar. So our blood sugar just becomes harder to control. And so some people will see higher fasting glucose. Some people are going to just be thinking about sugar all day long. Some people are going to have crashes and blood sugar lows. And of course, a lot of this will create waking. And so the weird thing is that even if this goes back to the episode I did last week, so definitely check that out, that a lot of people are continuing to maintain their workout schedule. And so they're working out early in the morning, they're waking up before work to fit it in. And so they're going to the gym at 5 a.m. and it's dark outside, but they're in this blue lit gym doing a workout. So their cortisol is going up. The lights are causing the cortisol to go up. Maybe they had coffee or pre workout before their workouts. So again, all this cortisol, so much cortisol, what is that going to do? It is going to drastically raise your blood sugar. It's going to drive insulin release that can cause insulin resistance, that can cause circadian dysregulation and chronically high cortisol. It can lower our sex hormones because our body thinks that we are super, super stressed. And we are often going to see these high morning fasting glucose numbers. And maybe the glucose doesn't come down a lot. I had a client, my client Gina, I talked about her in the last episode. She just said in our coaching call last night that she's like, you wouldn't believe it. I keep going up in my weights and I've been working out so much less and I've been not doing my morning workout. So she keeps having these gains because she's slowing down the workouts. She's working out at a time when the sun is up. She's not stressing out her body too much. and she's leaving room for repair, which is important. So if we think back to our ancestors, yeah, maybe we would have had to go out and hunt or go out and collect firewood or chop firewood. And so we're not completely, you know, lounging all winter long, but we might not be doing quite as much work as we would be in the summer. And so it's not that we can't move, but that we want to think about, am I making gains in these workouts? Is this feeling nourishing or is it feeling too stressful? Am I really, really forcing myself to hit the gym when a yoga class sounds much more nourishing, right? Or even a hot yoga class where we get a lot of that infrared heat. So another way to start giving us more energy instead of just eating carbs and sugar is all that infrared light. So the sun is 50% or more infrared. And so when we stay inside all day with our energy efficient windows that are blocking out infrared with our light bulbs that are LED that have had the infrared removed, we are in a very infrared deficient environment. And infrared, I think, is one of the biggest nutrient efficiencies we all have. And so we can supplement this into our environment. There's a lot of ways to get infrared and we want to go out of our way to prioritize this. If you have a fireplace light it up, you have beeswax unscented candles, light them up. Get some incandescent bulbs. I love the strainless lighting bulbs. My coat is Danny Health, huge fan of those bulbs. They're like these Edison bulbs. Old-fashioned, they look beautiful, they're dimmable. And they almost look like candle light. They are so relaxing to my system at night. And they add this beautiful glow, the Himalayan salt lamps. I have one behind me if you're watching a video. All of these things can bring in infrared light, including infrared sauna, red light therapy panels. And so we want to think about adding that light into our environment to give us more energy to support our mitochondria and our blood sugar. So we want to lean into what the season has to offer and supplement what we're not getting because we're living inside. And because we're not around a fire every single night, because we're not doing those practices. If I read this book a long time ago called The Paleo Manifesto by John Durant, which is funny because my dad's name is John Durant. So it's one letter away. That's my maiden name if you didn't know. So this book really just stuck with me because I thought it was so interesting. He talked about how in all different cultures around the world, there are always practices with heat and cold. So there's like Turkish humums and Swedish and Finnish sonnas. And like there's just so many practices of that and same thing with the cold. There's also practices with the cold. There's like Russian snow bathing and polar bear plunges and like all different things to embrace these extremes in temperature. So I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the benefits of cold. I personally, and maybe you agree with this, was a person that hated the cold. I grew up in New York and as soon as I could, I fled south. And when I went to college, I went to college in Baltimore because I thought it was in the south and I thought it would be warm. This is before we looked up everything on the internet so don't laugh at me. And I got there and I was like, come on, this is like two degrees warmer than New York. I was so upset. So then when I went to grad school, I'm like, I am looking this up this time. I am finding out where it's always warm. And so my options were Southern California or Miami. And so I chose to go to Miami. And so I lived in Florida, in Miami for 10 years in Florida for 15 years total. And so I actively avoided the cold my whole life. And then I met Tom Seeger. He was a guest on the podcast a little while ago, great episode on cold thermogenesis. Highly recommend that episode. But Tom told me that because my mitochondria are Swedish, you get all your mitochondria from your mom, my whole mom's side of the family is all Swedish. And they are, that's a very cold country. That because my mitochondria have never gotten cold, he told me that I'm a Hashimoto's diagnosis waiting to happen. And I do have low thyroid. And our thyroid is constantly in communication with brown fat. What is brown fat? It's mitochondrally dense fat that is activated by being in the cold because that fat can help regulate our temperature and keep us warm. And so that brown fat is always in communication with the thyroid and it's helping to convert T4 into T3. Guess who has low T3? Me. I have low T3 and it's probably because I don't have brown fat. And so it is my mission this year to start building brown fat. And so getting cold, so this could be cold air exposure, cold water exposure. These things can help to activate that brown fat or start building that brown fat. Babies are born with brown fat because they can't, they can't shiver. And they have this brown fat to keep them warm. And it was thought that we lost it as we aged. But we just lose it because of our modern society because we keep avoiding the cold. We go inside, we stay warm, we bundle up. We never allow ourselves to get cold. So these are all things that can help us improve our health in the winter. So now coming to the how to, how do the shorter days and nights affect insulin sensitivity, cortisol rhythms and blood sugar. That's what I talked about today. So now I am going to do a master class on Sunday. It's going to be really inexpensive. It's $37. And I'm going to give you the next steps of how to put all these things into practice, how to get morning light in the winter, even when it's cold and cloudy, or even when my schedule doesn't support it. We're going to talk about strategies for grounding in the winter so you don't have to freeze your toes off or go outside in the snow with, like bare feet. That's not it. There's so many other ways. We're going to talk about how to get cold exposure, how cold exposure can help your blood sugar and your thyroid and how to do it without it being jumping into a tub at 37 degrees, how to do it without wrecking your cortisol and your thyroid. Plus, we're going to talk about people who may need to avoid the cold right now or baby step it and how to do that. We're also going to talk about the benefits of heat exposure for your blood sugar and how to get that heat exposure and all that infrared, even beyond what I mentioned today. We're going to talk about the best and worst time of day to use red light therapy and infrared sonnas. I see a lot of people disrupting their cortisol and their sleep by doing red light therapy at the wrong time of day. We're going to talk about how to light your home in the winter to support better melatonin production, to decrease cortisol and support better blood sugar. We'll talk about best times of day and worst times of day to eat your meals in the winter, to support your blood sugar and we're going to have caveats for those with high blood sugar and low blood sugar or crashes. We'll talk about strategies for seasonal eating to help ramp up that AMPK pathway to increase autophagy and to improve our metabolic health and blood sugar and support better weight over the winter instead of gaining weight like many of us do every single winter. We'll talk about signs that your winter routine is stabilizing your blood sugar versus stressing it further. We're going to talk about how to get outside times of day to get outside that are benefiting us. We'll talk about caveats about vitamin D and I'm going to be answering your questions. So anything you listen to today, how do I get more melatonin? How do I use cold and heat strategically to help my blood sugar? What happens if I crash after I work out? We're going to talk about best times of day to work out and all of the things that I talked about here. This is going to be a complete how to episode, sort of not episode, but how to class to put all of these things into action because there's so many different things I want to share based on where you are and I'm going to be answering your questions that come up. So we're going to make this really, really tangible to give you the best support possible. So this class is going to be Sunday, December 21st at 1 PM Eastern time, 12 PM Central time and it's going to be about an hour and a half class with about a half an hour for a Q and A and it's only $37. If you can't make it live, you can purchase the class and then you'll get sent the replay and if you want to, you can certainly email me some questions to be answered during the call if you're hearing this before the call errors. So I really look forward to seeing you to continue this conversation about all of these topics for the winter because I don't want what happened to me to happen to you where my thyroid is struggling where I developed PCOS and insulin resistance from just eating my normal way over the winter. There are so many things we can do to really help your blood sugar and metabolic health and have this be the season of rest, recovery and this beautiful embrace of the cold of the darkness instead of just tensing against that and just flipping on the heat and just forgetting about it. Not saying that you could still use your heat, but don't worry, but we're going to make it really doable for you. So I am so excited to see you guys on Sunday. This class is going to be amazing and I can't wait to support you with all your questions. I will see you in the class and the link is in the show notes. Bye.