28: How to Improve Your Metabolic Health (Part 2)

00:06 - Michael Kummer (Host)

You're listening to the Primal Shift podcast. I'm your host, michael Kummer, and my goal is to help you achieve optimal health by bridging the gap between ancestral living and the demands of modern society. Get ready to unlock the transformative power of nature as the ultimate biohack, revolutionizing your health and reconnecting you with your Primal Self. So you listened to my last episode about metabolic health and you found out shoot, I'm not metabolically healthy and I need to do something about it. Maybe one of those factors would have maybe one of the blood markers was off, or multiple even and now it's time to do something about it to improve your metabolic health, your health span and your longevity in the process. So here are some of the tips that I can share with you that you can implement pretty much today to improve your metabolic health and correct some of those issues that you might have discovered by listening to the previous episode. Number one is very simple. I've talked about this before just avoid seed and vegetable oils as much as you can and that's fairly easy when you do it at home, because you just don't buy canola oil, you buy butter and ghee and you can use a whole lot of nutella and maybe lard and avoid seed and vegetable oils. Going out and eating out is significantly more difficult, so I recommend not eating out too much and, if so, ask them. Ask the restaurant to cook stuff in butter, or even an olive oil, if they have whatever anything but the seed oils. Avoid fried foods, etc. Some of the things I've talked about in previous episodes. Number two very easy as well. Just avoid processed carbs. I mean, there is nothing wrong with consuming carbohydrates from seasonal fruits etc and the least toxic veggies, but avoiding processed carbohydrates Processed food in general, but in particular processed carbohydrates is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your metabolic health today. Number three center your diet around responsibly raised meat, and especially organ meat. I've talked about this in the past as well. If you make the center of every meal protein from animal based sources, then not only will you get all the micronutrients your body needs to thrive, but it also means you're eating less of the things that you should not be eating. I've just done this experiment with my wife. We really made a conscious decision to load up on protein. And guess what? By eating a lot of protein, we feel better, we are more, we are less hungry and we consume less things that are maybe less than ideal, that might be okay or benign, but that are not necessary. So, again, focus your diet. Center your diet around animal based proteins and fat, and you're gonna be on a much better way to improving your metabolic health. 

02:51

Number four walk a lot and lift heavy objects. Walking is one of the most underrated types of activities. It's low impact, it makes you feel good, it gives you time to reflect and think, and it's just great to be out in nature. If you have a tried meal inside, do that, but I'd rather go out and go to a forest trail and just walk as much as you can. It's so helpful to improve your health, to improve your metabolic health and to help with de-stress, which is another factor we talked about before that can negatively impact your metabolic health. Lifting heavy is also important to not only improve your bone density, but if you lift heavy, you build muscle, and more muscles mean you burn more energy because the muscles need to be fueled. So you have to less worry about how many calories or how much food you eat. If you lift a lot, and if you lift heavy in particular, and if you eat the right types of food, you can pretty much. Eat whatever, however much you want to. That's exactly what I do. I stuff my face every single time I eat and I don't gain any weight. I gain muscle weight, but I don't gain any body fat. 

03:53

Number five expose yourself to the sun every day. We talked about this in previous episodes as well. The sun is just so incredibly important for our circadian rhythm, for mental health, but also for our metabolic health. Making hormones in many cases relies on the availability, on sunlight that penetrates, that hits our skin, our retina. So it's so important to get natural sunlight every day, regularly. Use the sauna and the cold plunge. Hormetic stressors are also incredibly useful to improve your metabolic health, to improve your perception of stress and how you respond to stress, your stress resilience. The sauna in particular, is pleasant for most people, even if it can get very hot and it should get very hot, but it's another way of letting your heart do some work, increasing your heart rate, dilating your blood vessels All of those things can help you improve your metabolic health. 

04:43

Maintaining consistent sleep and wake time I talked about this also many times before. It's just so important for everything that goes on inside of your body to maintain a consistent sleep and wake time. If you're sleeping at the same time or going to sleep the same time, or roughly the same time every day, and you wake up roughly the same time every day, your circadian rhythm is in sync with how it should be and every cell in your body can just work significantly better than if you do something that disrupts your circadian rhythm. If you mess with your sleep and wake time, your metabolic health, your mental health, will suffer as a consequence. So do the exact opposite and go to bed roughly at the same time every day, practicing mindfulness and be present more often. That's also something that doesn't many people don't connect it with metabolic health, but stress is an important factor that can derail your metabolic health. If you do things that can help you deal better with stress, become more stress resilient, and being mindful and more present is certainly one of the best ways to avoid stress in some cases and to better deal with it, to perceive it differently. So if you do that, you can also improve your metabolic health. 

05:52

Avoiding plastic food storage containers we talked about this in the Cenoastroson episode. Plastic microplastics, the Cenoastrochens in plastic in food storage containers, but also in personal care products and other things, can really mess with you not only your endocrine system, but with your metabolic health, with your gut health, and all of those things are obviously connected. It's not that you cannot be metabolically healthy if your endocrine system isn't working optimally and you cannot be metabolically healthy if your gut is not functioning optimally and is out of whack. So make sure you avoid plastic as much as you possibly can and next one, filter your drinking water goes back to avoiding toxins that can disrupt your gut health, that can disrupt your metabolic health. 

06:33

For some people it might be useful to wear a continuous glucose monitor for a couple of weeks to really find out how your blood sugar is responding to certain foods. There are even among the God and God healthy foods or foods that I would typically not avoid. They are those that cause a different or a more negative spike or a higher spike in blood glucose than others. Everything else being equal, I don't necessarily think that a spike in blood sugar if it comes down right away is a bad thing, but if you notice that consuming certain foods causes your blood sugar to remain elevated for extended periods, that's not good. I have noticed this in particular I mean no surprise there by eating regular pizza with wheat dough. If I have that for dinner, my blood sugar goes up and down and up and down and up and down throughout several hours at night, and that's obviously not a good thing. That's not conducive to optimal metabolic health. And so wearing a glucose monitor to find out how is stress, how is exercise, how is food impacting your blood sugar levels and how is your average blood sugar and what can you do to avoid some of those prolonged spikes, that's really a good thing. I have a separate article I'm going to link down below on blood sugar or on continuous glucose monitoring, so check that out. That's something I would highly recommend, especially if you're new to improving your metabolic health. 

07:52

Then obviously, checking your blood markers every so often and by every so often I mean I've mentioned this in a previous episode ideally every three months or at least every six months. I would not wait to get my blood panel done once a year. A lot of things can happen within a year and then, if you only get a snapshot of certain things, that is not a very good representation of how certain markers behave throughout the year. Especially there are certain things where if you had just to give you an interesting example if you had sexual intercourse the night before you're getting your testosterone levels checked, chances are your testosterone levels are going to be lower because usually for men after an orgasm the levels go down temporarily before they recover. So that might you know, you might get a skewed reading. Or, if you work out right before a blood test, your CRP might be higher your inflammatory marker. So there are certain things that can be negatively impacted temporarily, but that doesn't necessarily mean there is something generally wrong. That's why I recommend getting them more often so you can figure out how the trends look overall. 

08:59

And the last thing, very important is to not get overwhelmed by all of the things you have heard, by maybe some of the less than ideal findings that you have discovered by listening to the previous episode. Don't get overwhelmed. Just take it step by step. I didn't get to where I am overnight. It's been a long journey. It's an evolving journey. I still learn every day, I fine tune and I tweak every day. The point here really is to do a little bit better than you did yesterday. By making a 1% improvement every day, in 100 days you have improved by 100%. So take it step by steps. Don't get overwhelmed. Focus on one task only Do that. Make sure you feel comfortable before moving on to the next thing, and don't get blocked by so many different things that you end up not doing anything at all. That happens very often when there is an overwhelming amount of evidence or things that you should or could be doing and then you end up not doing anything at all because you're just overwhelmed. So focus on one thing, do that and then move on. 

10:01

And then one thing that I've not mentioned in the previous episode, that I promised I would mention and did not, is where to get your blood tested if you don't have insurance. If you have insurance, chances are your insurance is going to pay for those blood tests, at least for most of them. Might not be paying for all of them, especially if it's something that's not part of the regular blood work. But even without insurance, they are lab corp. They are now even with Quest. You can go to their webpage and they have an on-demand service where you pay for a certain test or for a group of tests or a set of tests. Online. It's fairly inexpensive, fairly affordable, and then you go to either their lab or, in the case of lab corp, you go to I think it's a Walgreens or a CVS one of those two where they do the testing there at the pharmacy and then you get the results a couple of days later. 

10:47

I've done this with lab corp not too long ago. It was an incredibly good experience. I'm going to link that down below as well. The one thing that I typically do is I have I work with an anti-aging doctor I can share the contact information as well if you want to reach out to me and he basically sends someone to come to my home, draw the blood and then send it to a lab, and that costs, I think, less than $400 for a very comprehensive lab test the same lab test that when I did that through my insurance in the past, the lab charged $3,000 to my insurance and I had to go there, and now someone comes to my home and I get it for less than $400. That tells you what kind of mafia is. The pharmaceutical industry is what a medical field is where they make money for stuff that's completely overpriced. But that's a different story. So that's something you might want to consider. If you don't have insurance, if you have, try to leverage your insurance obviously make them pay, but otherwise there are other options on how you can get relatively inexpensive lab tests so you can do them more often than only once a year. 

11:48

We're going to wrap it up. I hope you like this episode Again. If any feedback, tell me what you didn't like. Shoot me an email, mike@michaelcommercom, and let me know what could have done better. I always like to hear feedback. With that, we're going to wrap it up. I hope I'm going to see and hear you in the next episode.