Episode #296: 99% of Your Problems Can Be Solved By Balancing Your Blood Sugar & Staying Hydrated

Intro:

Welcome to The Healthy Catholic Moms Podcast where we make moving and nourishing our bodies the priority, so that we not only fulfill our vocations, but excel in our callings. I’m Brittany Pearson, a Catholic wife, mom, personal trainer, and I’m here to help you build healthy habits that actually fit your life. I am here to teach you how to get the results that you want and maintain the results that you want without spending hours at the gym, or meal prepping all weekend long. I understand I am right here with you getting my workouts done in the nooks and crannies of time, looking up recipes, while nursing babies and trying to prioritize my own health amidst everything else going on. But I have really good news for you, you can get the results you want. In less time without doing hours of cardio and restrictive dieting. I’m going to teach you how to use strength training and eating in a macro balanced way to get you feeling so good and your skin full of energy, and strong to carry out your life. Okay, on this podcast, we’ll delve into how to lose fat in a simple, sustainable way. What your workouts and nutrition should look like during different seasons of life, like during pregnancy and postpartum times. We’ll also discuss healthy quick meals, and how to get them on the table make foods that kids will actually want to eat. Mom hacks for making your day run more smoothly, and so much more. All the while with continuous encouragement to stay the course and live with discipline. This is a place where we’re striving to steward our bodies well, in order to joyfully serve. I am so happy you’re here. Let’s dive in.

Main Episode:
Hi, beautiful ladies, I hope you’re having a wonderful day. I am so happy that you are here. Thank you so much for listening today to me and with me. Very special welcome if it’s your first time and welcome back, if you’re here all the time, twice a week waiting for this episode to come out to your phone, which actually I should say don’t say this often. But if you do want to make sure you get each episode or you get the alert, just make sure you subscribe because it’ll I’m sure you all know this but go right to your phone. So that you’ll see it right in the morning. Or whenever you open it up that oh, there’s a new episode in there from Brittany today.

So today we are talking about something I think is so important. I know that this has occurred so many times in my life and I just wasn’t aware of it. I think awareness is the first piece but then action and taking steps proactive steps to prevent these kinds of things from happening is really important not always be on the defense. So I very often, I thought of this probably the first time my life that I experienced it was I would think back to when I was 10 or 11. And there was like once or twice a year that we would all go my three sisters and I with my mom and my great grandma. So skipped a generation in between there. My grandma didn’t do this with us. But it was my mom and my great grandma would take us shopping, which was very rare. Like my mom hates clothes shopping that note was not a thing that we did often. So it was truly once or twice a year, they would take us to department stores and it was my great grandma was gonna pay for it for us for our birthday. And then for Christmas. So we’d pick out a couple outfits. And that was that it always turned out to be a really long day because there’s you know, obviously different ages once my oldest sister was like at college and stuff like it phased out. And it was then just my myself and my younger sister, but I’m right in the middle. So I was doing this for a lot of years. But I just have this memory it was yes, it was very fun. Yes, it was very gracious all these things, but that by the time we were going to break for lunch, or sometimes it’d be like, Oh, we didn’t find this for this person. So we’re gonna go to this store. It was just a very long day that sometimes it’d be like, well, we’ll just kind of, we’ll get lunch soon. Oh, it’s just basically actually almost dinnertime. So we’ll just do like a four O’clock dinner.

And some of my memories of those days were having huge headaches, being so tired being so done with shopping. And I looked back and I was I was just so hungry because another funny thing my sisters and I used to do Black Friday together Black Friday shopping. So back when it was really fun and nothing opened on Thursday, on Thanksgiving, we would do the like get up at 3am Go through the coffee drive thru grab coffees and hot chocolates and whatever and then like one sister would drop two of us off at one store. Then the other two sisters would go to a different store and they come back and like they just drops off to get in line is this whole fun thing. And then we’d like shop shop shop and get all the Christmas gifts for people. That’s what you know, our intention was and of course we got some stuff for ourselves too. And then we would go we’d ended at the mall and go to the food court. So this is what we did for a couple years. And I remember like again towards the end being super tired in line having a headache According to get and this is the like real big tell starting to get really short and Clippy and snappy in my speech with other people and feel like just like can like no one talk to me like, why is everyone talking and then we’d eat lunch and life would be solved life would be fine again. And I then have noticed this, it’s always on vacations on road trips with my husband, like in our family, you know, and our kids with us that it’s funny the things we don’t notice in ourselves. But I started noticing like, he would just go sometimes we’ll do that whole, it’s a whole push through thing like, oh, well, but we’ll just get there and then we’ll grab dinner at the hotel, and then we’ll just then we’ll just, and I started noticing. And of course, I always have a million snacks and a bunch of food packed and whatever. But you can only have bars and fruit and nuts for so long.

So I will start noticing when he gets really quiet, and he doesn’t really get testy, I get testy. And he’ll just get quiet and kind of spacey and I’ll be like, are you hungry? Or like I will just say like, Hey, let’s get food. And afterward. I’m like you were hungry because you were really quiet Spacey. So I was and I didn’t even like realize it like Yeah, so it’s funny the things that we might notice, or it might not notice about ourselves. But this whole I’ve seen it so much with myself. And then I’ve seen some some really good st quotes, I’ll share in a second that I think we just a lot of times feel like we are in a like we’re having a sin problem, we’re having a moral failing when really it’s just because we need to use the bathroom, we need to eat some protein, we need to drink some water. And it’s it’s true. This is self care. At its very base. At its very essence. Like it’s not it could be the pedicures or the bubble baths or whatever. But at its very baseline self care is taking care of yourself. It’s praying, it is getting the sacraments in it’s literally eating food and nourishing your body doing your very fundamental basic human needs. Obviously even more examples than I can think of like I was realizing on the same days, I was routinely getting snippy with my kids very easily angered. I noticed in particular for weeks, it was like why every Friday? Do I get really? Like I can’t wait till bedtime. Everyone’s annoying me did it at like five o’clock or four o’clock on Fridays? Well, it’s because my husband works late typically on Fridays. And it’s a no meat day. So I’m usually not planning my meals as best as I am the other as well as I am the other day of the week, like a lot of times during the week I’ll have like today I have chicken grilled chicken already prepped in there. So I can throw it in a wrap this that Fridays tend to be the like, Oh, I’ll figure it out. It’s not meat anyway, I’ll like make eggs or something. And then sometimes I don’t. And it’s just like looking like a bunch of random carbs stuff. So by the time it gets to like five o’clock, and I’m trying to wait to eat dinner with him when he comes home, but I didn’t eat that much for lunch. I’m just setting myself up for a disaster. I really am like it’s, I’m maybe not super angry, and my kids are super sick of my kids or having a bad day. Maybe I’m just super hungry. And my blood sugar is all over the place. Or, you know, it’s skyrocketed because I just ate an apple. But I didn’t pair protein and fat with it. So now I’m crashing from that. And or I’m really jittery. There have been days where I’m like, Oh my gosh, I haven’t I forgot to eat breakfast. But I did have coffee. So now we’re at the park. And I’m feeling super shaky, and tired. And like mentally spacey, like all those things. But it’s just because I didn’t need it’s not like sometimes I think to them, we jumped to the worst. We’re like hitting Google. And we’re like, do I have a brain tumor? Do I have this? Do I have that? No, you didn’t eat? We protein with your breakfast, you had a bunch of carbs. And now you’re crashing from it. So and these are the same quotes that are I have one actually just share with you. And you might have seen this one. It’s attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas we all know quotes can be you know, misrepresented. But it’s attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas.

“Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine.” And I love that because yes, it’s like a little more self care ish. There’s that glass of wine and bath that we often see in self care. But it seems like you might feel really sad about a lot of things you might feel like the world’s falling apart, you might feel like your kids are so unruly, and they never listened or this that everything’s bad. And then you eat a meal. And eating a meal wasn’t on this one. I know. There’s another st quote I couldn’t find that’s like, sent very similar that’s like maybe it’s not a moral evil. Maybe you need a good meal on an app. And I have no idea who I can attribute that one, two. But it’s just true. Like sleep is so huge, and a lot of us have little kids and you’re not sleeping super well. Like we can only do what we can with that. But the good news is we can do some of these things on the nutrition side.

One more note, and then I’m going to get into some practical tips for that. So we are integrated beings that we need to take a holistic view of our health and this is something I’ve so much more been focusing on for myself and with all of you on this podcast in my programs with one on one clients. Looking more holistically. Get health because in isolation like yep, just do your workouts. Yep, just following your macros. We are we’re not we’re not made to function and live in isolation. So our spiritual affects our mental or mental affects our physical, our physical so directly affects our emotional, spiritual and mental well being. I mean, there are also I’m not, I’m not at all professional this area, I’m not giving any medical advice. But there’s so many links to eating processed foods not getting sunlight, lots of caffeine with
mental difficulties like anxiety and depression, and things like that. So we need to look at ourselves as the whole person not separate it seriously. Sometimes eating well, and fueling our bodies well, solves a multitude of things that we thought were all these other issues, not all the time, it’s not a cure all. It’s not an end all be all, but it sure helps. And just in that even not looking at these big picture, you know, issues like anxiety and depression, things like that. Just looking at the little tendencies, like I mentioned, like my Friday, like the tendency to become snippy that tendency like, Alright, back that up. Is it that you’re always testing on Fridays? Or is it that you have a pattern here where you’re not feeling yourself enough? And this could be again, with drinking water? Or just even having, you know, quiet prayer time? Have you not? I totally noticed this with myself when I’m just like, at the end of my rope, and like, well, I didn’t wake up in time to pray any day this week. So I feel like I’m always bombarded with people asking me things. I’m like craving silence. But I didn’t get up to have that time. So, you know, it’s not, it’s not always that we need to like, really dig and think like, am I having a crisis? Like, am I not happy? Have I chosen the wrong path? Or are we this or that is, is it my marriage? Isn’t this like, maybe you need a sandwich? Okay, and actually, that’s her real name, and then a list on this list. But maybe you need carbs is a really big piece of this. I’ve had clients who have just noticed this in their workouts. And again, it wasn’t they didn’t notice it, I noticed it with them, which is a really nice thing about getting to be in person, which I know is not the nature of this work. But when I was training people in person share this before I would notice they’re lagging, their mood was off, they couldn’t really focus and like more, so I just noticed in the strength that Hey, what did you eat for lunch, for your training right around 435 o’clock. Oh, I had like vegetable soup? Well, you need some herbs with lunch, because you are totally depleted right now and totally dragging. So again, it might just be that I’m so off today. Oh I’m so this. So much can be kind of fixed.

So a couple of practical tips.

Number one, don’t drink coffee on an empty stomach. This is something I do sometimes in the mornings, if I’m going to like drink my coffee and my pretend then workout. And maybe I don’t always have like an apple or something with it. But here’s the caveat, I drink heavy cream in my coffee. So it’s still not really totally an empty stomach, I’m getting that fat to kind of soak it up into give me some calories paired with the caffeine. But some people like especially I don’t go a long time. If I am doing that, then it’s like workout and then breakfast is right after. Or I just wait. And sometimes I just do wait to have the coffee even like after my workout so that I just get going and then I have the coffee with breakfast. But that’s a really big one. Especially like think about if you have a liter cup in the day, this goes really for any caffeine. And you have that mid afternoon tea or that mid afternoon coffee, but you don’t pair anything with it. Your mood might be really not great or your energy levels in the next, you know subsequent hours because you’re like, Oh wow, well, I the coffee should have done it. No, you need some fuel with that. Okay, next is to pair carbs with protein and fat, so that you avoid that blood sugar spike. So this is where I just mentioned sometimes love coffee and an apple that is only for right before workout. Because here’s the why. And I just shared I do have coffee with cream. So that would give me the fat there and a little bit of protein. But say I see this a lot clients saying like well then for my mid morning snack, I have a yogurt. And then for my you know, mid afternoon snack, I have a handful of blueberries. Great. Those are both good choices for snacks, but you’d want to pair them with a protein and fat to help kind of soak up those carbs and round out that little snack. I talk a lot about rounding out your meals. But the snacks need to be similar because if you’re just having straight carbs it’s going to be even if it’s healthy carbs, spike your blood sugar, and then drop off. We want to keep it nice and even. We want to include some things that take longer for the body to digest. That’s why things like whole grains and better, better option of carbs. Can they take longer to digest, right? They’re slow digesting, like sweet potato takes longer for your body to digest than like a doughnut a white sugar doughnut. White sugar is going to go to your bloodstream right away and then you’re going to crash. But it can be the same way even for natural fruit like an apple. So, the only time I recommend doing that is when it’s right before workouts, your body puts that sugar right to use. But if I’m going to have an Apple as a snack, say just in the mid afternoon, I’m gonna pair it with peanut butter, or I’m gonna pair it with cheese, or something else so that it rounds it out a handful of nuts, that kind of thing.

Next up, have snacks. This one is so so big and so simple, that this can solve a multitude of your problems right now have snacks at the ready, go through and think about where you need to put some snacks I throw granola bars, protein bars, whatever. Right now they’re actually Clif bars, which are very carb heavy, not very protein, heavy, 10 grams of protein, the one I have in like 40 grams carb, but it’s what we had. So I threw a bunch of those in the diet, can they keep really well, they don’t like Mel tourney that don’t need to be refrigerated. So I threw those in the diaper bag. I have a big container like those the the big bulk container you can buy of nuts in the car and raisins, so that for myself or for the kids, if we’re in the car, those both keep really well. They’re not going to melt maybe I guess reasons will be a problem when it comes more to summer. But right now those are both fine having the car. I shared this tip back. I think it was in the healthy food holidays program this previous year. One of our week folks is like go through and put snacks places. And I honestly had been just skimping on that I used to just bring what we needed for the day or like if I knew we’re going to be somewhere for lunch, I pack it up. But I found there were so many times in a pinch where we stayed out somewhere longer than I intended or I didn’t pack myself for lunch, but I picked the kids lunch, I was hungry on the way home, all that kind of stuff, we’re just having some food around you is helpful.

Water, of course, too. I’m very in the habit of just bringing my water everywhere, and bringing kids water bottles everywhere. So if you’re not in that habit, make sure you’re doing that too. Because Same thing goes for water, sometimes you just you’re getting that headache, not because you’re tired not because you need caffeine, but because you’re dehydrated. So keep water and snacks with you. It’s hard to remember day to day and event to event. So stick them in the places where you routinely need these I know a lot of you are really good about this. And I’m good about this. When it comes to nursing when you have a newborn, you’re thinking like I’m gonna go shove some snacks in the in the glider and the rocking chair in the drawers of the change table right next to me really helpful because you get hungry. All right, last tip here. And then a couple more thoughts are to remember this for not only yourself, but your spouse and your kids need to look out for each other. And the more you know, the more you help others, you might be listening to this podcast, and now you’re really well versed in this. But they your spouse might not be listening to this and unless he wants to come listen to the healthy Catholic mom’s podcast that you’re recommending to him. I don’t think he wants to do that. You’re gonna AND and OR sometimes like this is me and my husband, I’ll be listening to book or reading a book. And I will ask him if he wants to hear about me. Like I think the couple things are really helpful. Do you want to hear Him? And He is very good natured person. So he’ll always say yes, but sometimes I will just kind of start implementing this stuff. On the down low. Like I will just put the snacks places. I will like I mentioned on a road trip, just be like, Hey, let’s get it let’s grab lunch. Let’s just like it doesn’t matter what time we get there. Let’s just pull off and get something. Because I notice he needs it. Like, you have to recognize this in your kids too. Because your kids like I mentioned the flashback to me shopping with my mom, my great grandma, nobody was looking at me being like Brittany, you’re cranky and walking really slowly and whatever, you probably need food, they probably felt the same way themselves too. But nobody, like acknowledged it, realized it and whatever. So you know, it’s not always sometimes we do think like, well, they’re just in a bad mood, or they’re just not listening. Like if you just gave your kid we noticed that with sugar I think the most is like, Oh, my kid had sugar. Oh, my kid had red dye, like we totally noticed that they’re bouncing off the walls. Now they’re super irritable. But you might not be this is a whole nother conversation about looking at food quality, looking at what they’re consuming on a daily basis that you’re not thinking about as spiking their blood sugar like that. This is a whole discussion when it comes to like kids bars and kids processed foods. 99% of the bars that are geared to kids are just Sugar Bombs. You look at the it’s like rolled oats and the second ingredients cane sugar. And then the fourth ingredient is good tapioca rice flour syrup or high fructose corn syrup or whatever. And I am still figuring this out for us. And I share tips and things on that.
Right now I’ve just been trying to get bars out of the house and I’ve just been trying to make homemade protein bars with like oats and protein and nut butter and that kind of thing. Because I just cannot find bars that are not a million dollars that are not crap that are not straight sugar. So think about that to you know this place in the conversation for yourself and for your family of we have to do what we have to do like there’s there is a an upper limit and a threshold to our grocery budgets. And I know this is where it gets really hard to like we’re like it’s so hard to eat healthy. The NutriGrain bars are so cheap, yes. But it’s because the processed food that like better quality processed food is what’s really expensive, you know, just normal. I’ve gotten more to snacks for my kids looking like apple slices and peanut butter or which again here’s the caveat, the organic peanut butter I’ve been trying to switch to without all the seed oils is way more expensive. It’s double the price. So that’s a tricky one. But say I say like the like string cheese and a clementine like that. In general, the whole foods are not as expensive as the like better quality processed foods. Okay, that’s a whole tangent, we didn’t we’re not gonna go too far down that road. But just think about that when again, we’re you’re thinking about in yourself, the patterns where you feel like you’re testy, or you’re this that or you’re always angry this time, you’re always cranky in the morning. Maybe it’s because you need to eat within the hour when you wake up. And you need to balance it out with a carb, a fat protein, not just a carb yogurt with granola with fruit is not a good breakfast, it’s all carbs, you’re going to crash unless it’s like a protein added granola and that kind of thing. Or Greek yogurt that has a ton of protein. You know if a lot of these yogurts like you just get a drive thru or just straight sugar. And it’s like 30 grams of carbs and two grams of protein, you’re going to be angry and hangry. And like left depleted in an hour or two, all right. It’s not always that you’re short and patience, you’re you’re this or that maybe you’re just hungry. This is where some parting thoughts for you. This is where taking care of yourself seriously is the best way that you can love your spouse, your kids all that thing love. We’re all of that everyone we come in contact with. And this is where we are presenting the best versions of ourselves. I made a real a little bit ago at the time of recording this that was about how I see health as a means not as an end. I’m not just chasing health to be healthy. I want to be as healthy as I can so that I have energy so that I am joyful, so that like there’s so much like I started out the packets with the integrated, we can’t separate we can’t just think oh, why am I always in a bad mood? Why am I always stressed out? Why am I never the Fun Mom? Why am I always tired? Why can I do this? There’s a lot that affects everything else. So sometimes just things like fueling our bodies well and moving our bodies affect the other choices, then you have energy to like say yes to doing this thing and doing it happily. This is not this. This is where I think too. It’s we can make it a moral evil. Like why am I just always in a bad mood, or I’m just cranky, I’m just a cranky mom. I’m just a cranky spouse. Exercise gives you endorphins. This is not a new concept. And maybe it’s a newer concept to you. I’m not being I’m not trying to be condescending. But in science and research, it’s not a new concept that we literally get feel good hormones from doing cardio from lifting weights from exerting our body from sweating. So it’s no wonder there was actually a time I don’t know if I’d said this on a podcast. This was like two weeks ago, where I had a three day stint of not working out because I kept wanting to film the chasing greatness workouts, but it kept not working out that day, no pun intended were like I planned it for naptime. But then one kid was napping at a different time than another kid and whatever. So it resulted in me not doing a workout because I couldn’t film them. And it was by the third day I told my husband I’m like, I completely notice a difference in myself of like, why am I so tense? Why am I so like pent up feeling like so aggressive, like I just need to go like hit a punching bag. I was like, then I realized I haven’t worked out in three days. And that’s not good for the body to keep that stress in the body, we need to let it out. And it was manifesting itself in my mood and my behavior. But I could take a step back and think like, oh, it’s not that I’m a terrible person. It’s that I haven’t worked out. And I know that I need to get that stress out of my body. Alright, so this is taking care of ourselves. This is what we’re supposed to do for ourselves and for the people around us. All right, I hope this was helpful. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening. Next episode, what are we talking about? We’re talking about the idea of picking three based on a book that I read years ago, and I referenced a bunch of times can’t remember the author, but I will know by the time of our next guest together. This comes more from the idea like how do we balance it all and how I personally balanced it how others are balancing it. Because a dear listener wrote in asking about sleep and she’s like I was listening to routines and I things like that, but like where’s the sleep command? How are people getting good sleep when they have these morning routines? And do you hang out with your husband and that kind of thing? In the book pick three was very helpful for me and to me and thinking about my life of how this looks not just on a day to day basis, but like over our life in the grand scheme. So we’re gonna dive into that next episode for that too, and I hope you have a great rest your day.

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