Type I Diabetes with Lyle Haugen: Rational Wellness Podcast 118
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: RSS
Lyle Haugen discusses Type I Diabetes, with Dr. Ben Weitz.
[If you enjoy this podcast, please give us a rating and review on Itunes, so more people will find The Rational Wellness Podcast. Also check out the video version on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/user/weitzchiro/]
Podcast Highlights
8:15 Lyle talked about how he took a job working on an oil drilling rig and he got blown up, shortly after which he was diabetic. He was living in camp and he was drinking milk or juice because the water was so highly chlorinated and because of the Muskeg, the water has a tea color. He was drinking a lot of milk, which he knows he shouldn’t be eating, and a lot of bread, pastries, and sandwiches, which increases the likelihood of leaky gut and of diabetes. Lyle explained that newly diagnosed diabetics still can produce some insulin and if you can identify them and intervene with diet and lifestyle change, you may be able to reverse some type I diabetes. He believes that if you can interrupt the autoimmune attack on the pancreas that leads to type I diabetes, you can potentially stop the damage and allow the pancreas to heal and start producing more insulin.
18:50 Of the four variables (insulin, diet, exercise, stress management) that we need to manipulate to help manage patients with type I diabetes, the first one is insulin. The normal pancreas is constantly putting out small amounts of insulin to match what is needed. The old system of trying to match the amount of insulin with the amount of carbohydrate in the meal and having the two curves match perfectly doesn’t work very well, according to Lyle. The best thing to do is to first have a good long-term, background level of insulin and Lantus is the best for this. With the standard diet that was recommended for diabetics, which was 50-60% carbohydrate, he was consuming about 50-55 units of insulin per day. This much insulin tends to make you fat and is bad for your health. Lyle said that the same goes for non-diabetics–anything that spikes your insulin will make you fat. He found himself to a low carb diet out of necessity, since he was working a job in the back country in the oil and gas business. Lyle had to pack his food for a week or so and he brought a bunch of energy dense foods like pulled pork and smoked salmon and did not bring any bread. He increased his basal insulin (the Lantus) and he did not need very much short acting insulin. Now his diet is about 60% fat, 20% carbs and 20% protein. And diet is the second important variable to control. Lyle explained that you don’t want too much protein, since this can convert to carbs, and since diabetics have a higher risk of kidney problems, too much protein could stress out your kidneys. By taking less insulin, Lyle dropped 35 lbs. If you want to gain weight, take more insulin. He now takes 36, 37 units of lantus and only has to take maybe 2 units of short acting insulin per day if he doesn’t do his walk in time or eats something he shouldn’t. He maintains his blood sugar levels in the range of 70-110 and after a meal it will drift to the low side of 140 and then drop back down. His last A1C was 5.7. It used to be 13.2, which is not where you want to be. That’s when you get all those side effects of diabetes. Lyle preached the importance of testing your glucose multiple times per day whether you are a type I or a type II diabetic and not just in the morning, unless you use a continuous glucose monitor.
29:01 The third variable for type I diabetics is exercise. Lyle said the key to exercise for diabetics is that they need to do about the same amount and intensity of exercise every day, and you have to be careful not to do too much. He finds about 30 minutes of walking daily to be an easy amount to fit within your reserve capacity. If you want to do some higher intensity, longer duration exercise, such as doing an hour of weight training or a high intensity exercise class, it is an advantage, since all of these different muscles utilize glucose and you even upregulate the GLUT-4 receptors. You don’t want to have a roller coastering of your blood sugar and insulin if you do it inconsistently. If you are using a lot of short acting insulin, sometimes you will get pockets of insulin that were not absorbed that will be pushed into the blood stream by the exercise, thus lowering sugar levels too much, so you have to be careful with such higher intensity and longer duration exercise. This is especially the case if you are relying on a lot of short acting insulin. The same thing can happen if you get into a hot tub or sauna.
33:20 The fourth variable for managing type I diabetes is stress, which Lyle described as the wild card. He explained that one way to help stabilize the food is with the high fat breakfast shake he developed that contains hemp hearts, avocado, and three different nuts (usually pecans, walnuts, and Brazil nuts) and that shake is usually all he needs to eat for 6 hours. Here is the recipe: The Shake. Because it is a high fat, low carb shake, it is like a timed release of energy and allows him to have a nice flat line of insulin without any snacks. Most of the carbs in the shake come from blueberries. He also has a high fat cracker recipe that he makes with pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, chia seeds, and sunflower seeds and he will often have a few of these crackers with some almond butter and this will take him to dinner. Dinner will consist of a piece of well-sourced protein and at least half a plate of greens and some fermented veggies like sauerkraut or pickled cauliflower or broccoli. This helps to make your gut healthier, which also helps in managing diabetes.
45:15 One of the sources of stress for diabetics is trying to get their blood sugar to stay stable through the night, so Lyle has developed an energy bar that he often eats at night. If your glucose goes too high at night, you lay awake at night, tossing and turning and sweating and with leg cramps. If your blood sugar goes too low during the night, you’re drenched in sweat and in full blown shock. This is what stimulates your adrenaline and cortisol stress response. Without the bar, his blood sugar will tend to drop some time during the night. Lyle said that he like GABA for type I diabetics since many are in sympathetic mode and often have anxiety.
Lyle Haugen is a Type I diabetic and a registered nutrition health coach. He also suffered with some of the associated conditions of type I diabetes, including eye problems, Crohn’s Disease, and diabetic gastroparesis. He realized that in order to get his health back on track, he had to figure out a way to manage his condition better than it was being managed by his health care providers. Lyle developed a system to manage his insulin, diet, exercise, and lifestyle factors to get his type I diabetes under control and he has been teaching others as a health coach. His website is Type I Simplified.com where you can get a free report to learn how to sleep through the night, including a recipe for his delicious snack bar that helps you maintain stable blood sugar.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111 or go to www.drweitz.com.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: This is Dr. Ben Weitz with the Rational Wellness Podcast, bringing you the cutting edge information on health and nutrition from the latest scientific research and by interviewing the top experts in the field. Please subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast on iTunes and YouTube, and sign up for my free ebook on my website by going to drweitz.com. Let’s get started on your road to better health. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters. Thank you so much for joining me again today. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, please go to Apple Podcasts and give us a ratings and review. I’d really appreciate that. That helps move us up in the rankings and more people will find out about the Rational Wellness Podcast. You can go to my YouTube page, Weitz Chiro, and see the video version of this podcast, and if you go to my website, drweitz.com, you can find detailed show notes and a complete transcript.
Our topic for today is type 1 diabetes, and we have Lyle Haugen with us today. I’m very excited, this is the first time we’ve talked about type 1 diabetes. We’ve talked several times about type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, but we’ve never had a detailed discussion about type 1. We’re going to discuss what type 1 diabetes is and how best to help patients manage it from a diet, exercise, and lifestyle perspective. For most of us in the functional medicine world, we are likely to see quite a higher percentage of patients with type 2 than type 1 diabetes, because only about 5% of diabetics have type 1. Type 1 diabetes used to be known as juvenile diabetes, but it’s better described as insulin-dependent diabetes. In this condition, the pancreas produces little or no insulin. Insulin is the hormone that signals the muscle cells to pull sugar from the bloodstream to enter the cells to use for energy. It’s generally understood to be an autoimmune condition, and while it usually appears during childhood or adolescence, it can develop in adults. The cause of type 1 diabetes is controversial, though it is generally thought to be autoimmune in origin. 90% of those with type 1 diabetes have at least one of the HLA-DQA1, HLA-DQB1 and the HLA-DRB1 genes.
There’s some relationship between type 1 diabetes risk and both gluten and dairy intake. For example, there’s an increase in type 1 diabetes risk in countries that drink, primarily, A1 milk, as compared to A2 milk. Viral infections appear to be triggers for the onset of type 1 diabetes in a percentage of patients. Exposure to toxins may be triggers for the onset of type 1 diabetes, and some integrative doctors feel that vaccines may be triggers, though the studies so far don’t seem to show this. Children with type 1 diabetes tend to have less diversity of the bacteria in their gut, and they also tend to have leaky gut.
Type 1 diabetes has quite a number of possible complications, especially if the blood sugar levels are not properly managed. Diabetic retinopathy is the most common cause of blindness. Diabetes can lead to nerve damage referred to as neuropathy, sometimes leading to impaired sensations in the hands and feet. This is why diabetes is the leading cause of amputation of the feet. Diabetes increases the risk of high blood pressure and heart disease. It increases the risk of digestive problems and erectile dysfunction. Diabetes is also the leading cause of kidney failure. Helping to manage a patient with type 1 diabetes is quite a bit more difficult than managing a patient with type 2. Patients are all taking insulin, and hypoglycemia, low blood sugar, is as much of a concern as hyperglycemia, which can occur, but it is less common in type 2 diabetics until they start needing to take insulin. Then they become more like type 1 diabetics to manage.
Lyle Haugen is a type 1 diabetic and registered nutrition health coach. He also suffered with some of the associated conditions of diabetes including eye problems, Crohn’s disease, and diabetic gastro-paresis. He realized that in order to get his health back on track, he had to figure out a better way to manage his condition than it was being managed by his healthcare providers. He developed a system on how to manage insulin, diet, exercise, and lifestyle, to get his type 1 diabetes under control, and he’s been teaching others as a health coach. Lyle, thank you so much for joining us here today.
Lyle Haugen: Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Weitz. How are you?
Dr. Weitz: I’m good. Lyle, can you tell us when you first discovered that you had type 1 diabetes?
Lyle Haugen: Well, I was 22 years old. I was just back from dive school. I went back to work in the oil and gas industry, I spent most of my early childhood and young manhood in northern Canada. I was about 15 miles from the Northwest Territory’s border. I opened the building, one day the building blew up. I was flown out of there. Two, three days later, the numbers on the house across the street started to get fuzzy. I was urinating frequently, my thighs were burning, because the bathroom was upstairs in the little apartment that I had. Every time I had to urinate, I had to walk up a set of stairs. I was thirsty and, what do you do when you’re thirsty? In those days, I don’t know if you remember this, this was 1984 or five, we didn’t have bottled water, and in northern Canada the water was highly chlorinated, so you drank everything but water. What did I drink? Well, apple juice.
Dr. Weitz: There you go.
Lyle Haugen: Smart Lake Tractor. I think my first initial reading when I finally … but I knew what it was, because when I was down going to dive school, I took the secondary course. It was quite intensive and I became a diver medic. When you’re in a diving situation, I’m trained to 1000 feet plus on mixed gases. Even though you’re on a ship and you’re really not that far away, technically, you’re a half an inch of vessel material away from being outside. You might as well be halfway to Mars, because it’s 28 days to get out of there.
Dr. Weitz: Oh wow.
Lyle Haugen: 28 days-
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Lyle Haugen: … and that’s if you decompress smoothly.
Dr. Weitz: Wow, that’s crazy.
Lyle Haugen: Well, yeah, and it could be longer. It could be 33, 35.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Lyle Haugen: They trained guys to, basically, be almost the hands of a doctor inside. I was trained to suture, do tracheotomies,…, reinflate lungs, pretty cool stuff. Pretty cool stuff. It was the middle of winter when I got done. I had a job lined up in the Bull Fort. They were starting to do some drilling up there and the new Canadian laws mandated that there was a diver medic on every shift. There was, basically, three people would run in the bell. There was always an extra person in the bell. Along comes another job I have to take, get some money. This is where I get blown up, to make a long story short. How did that relate to my diabetes? Well, let’s do a little bit of a lifestyle. You’re living in camp. Remember I talked to you about the water. It’s even worse when you’re out in camp because, you don’t put milk in the coffee, because it turns green. If you ever been in the back country…
Dr. Weitz: I’m not sure what that means, I’m not sure I want to know.
Lyle Haugen: If you’ve ever been in the back country, and you maybe haven’t, where there’s… like there’s muskeg up in the country where I live, which is like a bog.
Dr. Weitz: There is what?
Lyle Haugen: Muskeg, it’s called.
Dr. Weitz: What is that?
Lyle Haugen: Tundra. Muskeg.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: It’s just like bog or peat material. All the water is kind of tea color to begin with, and that’s what they used to… We didn’t have very good work standards back in those days.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: I was drinking a lot of milk, and I’m in my early 20s, I shouldn’t be drinking milk at all, but I’m drinking a lot of milk. I’m eating a lot of bread. They’ve got a lot of pastries out. You’re taking sandwiches for lunch. You see where this is going, right?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: You mentioned it in your preamble there, you talk about leaky gut, and that’s my biggest thing. My biggest passion would be to get a hold of brand newly diagnosed diabetics, because I remember what it was like. I remember it was this honeymoon period once I got the insulin in me a little bit, and it’s stable, and it stabilized a little bit, and that, I believe, is our window. If we could totally change the diet, right at that point, I think we can rescue some of the pancreas. How do you feel about that?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I agree. Some of the data definitely seems to show that, at the beginning, type 1 diabetics still have some ability to secrete insulin, it’s just not enough.
Lyle Haugen: Right. Right. If we go with the same premise that we’re an autoimmune-
Dr. Weitz: Right, and if you could interrupt that autoimmune attack on the pancreas…
Lyle Haugen: Exactly, but on the other hand, if we don’t, then you end up with that grocery list that you told everybody about that I got.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Yeah. For example, we know that coeliac disease is associated with type 1 diabetes, but kids who have coeliac disease, who completely eliminate gluten, don’t get type 1 diabetes.
Lyle Haugen: Right. I have a client that had… first diagnosed with lupus, then type 1.
Dr. Weitz: Very common, you get one autoimmune disease, you get another.
Lyle Haugen: But I think it’s only common because we’re not stopping the leaky gut.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: Statistically from genetics, what I’ve read is, if you’ve got 1, it’s almost astronomical statistically to get 2, from genetics.
Dr. Weitz: I think you’re right. Definitely, it’s the leaky gut and then, once the immune system starts getting in that attack mode against your own cells, a lot of times there’s cross-reactivity. Your body reacts to the gluten, and then that gluten molecule looks similar maybe to some proteins in your pancreas, and so that those same antigens start attacking your pancreas.
Lyle Haugen: Or even maybe this vision, I had this vision of what’s large is small and small is large. If you are continually expressing proteins into your system, and your immune system is battling the battle of all times, Armageddon, there’s going to be collateral damage.
Dr. Weitz: Yes.
Lyle Haugen: There’s got to be. You just can’t be pummeling yourself that hard for that long.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. You’re not supposed to have those large molecular weight proteins floating around in your bloodstream. You’re going to create problems.
Lyle Haugen: That is, I think, part of the underlying problem with the management and the treatment for type 1. We’ve got, what is it now, I think I read 135 or 137 specialties now in the medical field. Everybody out there, visualize yourself chopped up into 137 pieces, right?
Dr. Weitz: Sure.
Lyle Haugen: It makes it difficult for anybody to find the whole picture of the whole package with that.
Dr. Weitz: I’m the GI doctor. I only look at the guide. I’m the one guy, only look at the lung.
Lyle Haugen: Yeah, exactly. Actually, my doctor, kind of a funny story on that, I asked him, “Why didn’t you specialize in it?” It turned out he had an eye condition from birth and he had to wait till he got to adulthood before they could do anything with it. He was actually in med school at the time, and he was thinking about being an ophthalmologist. Then he found out that there was two or three different types of ophthalmologists. One for the front, one for the back, one for center, I believe. He was aghast. He just couldn’t believe that. I don’t know, it’s a shame. But anyways, getting back to why-
Dr. Weitz: So you think your trauma actually played a role in the trigger for your diabetes?
Lyle Haugen: Well-
Dr. Weitz: I mean, I know it’s hard to … yeah.
Lyle Haugen: … short answer, yeah. Would you like me to describe what happened?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: All right. Let me see. It was 42 below that morning. I got into a rubber tired backhoe. I drove 52 kilometers to this location, well site. It was what’s called a dehydrator building. There’s some big pipe towers on one side, there’s a fire on the other end and what’s called a re-boiler. There’s circulating glycol. What it does is the glycol removes the moisture from the natural gas coming up out of the ground and then it’s dry going through the pipeline, so it doesn’t freeze off the pipeline. That’s the equipment. I get there in the rubber tired backhoe because, remember I was talking about muskeg and tundra?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: The unit was sitting on piles, on steel pilings, but the pad had sunk and took the stairs with it. You’d get to the top of the stairs and then you still had to reach straight up to get into the building just to undo the latch. I first get there, and my job as an operator is see what the unit is doing and make sure everything, record numbers, do all that kind of stuff. I get there and I reach up. I tried to get into the building, I take one glove off, reach the hardware, open the door, reach inside, grab the panic hardware on the inside of the door, the big bar across the door. Inside here onto the sill, pull myself up, and just as I pull myself, I catch a glow, a little orange flash glow from the backside of the re-boiler. What had happened was the building was completely full of gas, the glycol had disappeared, because of a problem with the system. The pump was running away, it cracked a line. That’s what put gas into the system. The re-boiler lost all the glycol. We had a run away. We had a Chernobyl come in on here.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Lyle Haugen: All I had to do was give it the old O2. You’ve got to visualize this now, it’s 42 below. I’ve been on this back hoe, which in 1985 was not heated and not like you see today. It wasn’t a comfortable ride. I had all kinds of equipment on, I was dressed to take 40 below. There was just a bit of my face and the back of this hand, this hand was exposed. That orange glow, I knew exactly what it was as soon as I caught it and it just went… It basically went off. If you [inaudible 00:15:49] this. I started to turn around like this, but I had all these clothes on and I’m standing in front of it. It’s a three-foot door, but everything that could pretty much block this door. I mean, what’s the first thing you do before you put a cannonball in a canon? You put some wadding in there. I was like the wadding around, and I was just standing in the door jam. Well, Dr. Weitz when that thing lit up, I took off. It punched the wind right out of me.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Lyle Haugen: I’m flying through the air. As I’m flying through the air, the flames are coming past me like this, because I don’t travel as fast as they do. I mean, it was shooting straight out of this door. It was like literally being shot out of a cannon. And because the floor was so high, it was probably, I would say eight, nine feet above the ground. You could do the math on that, but I landed halfway between the building and where the wellhead was drilled, which was 80 feet, so 40-something feet before I-
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Lyle Haugen: Then I went in, and I closed all the valves. You get into that adrenaline mode, panic mode, right?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: Because you just had this experience, and even walked right in behind the dehy, like four feet from a wall that was in flames, and I closed the pipeline valve. I closed all the valves off, so nothing ran away. Then I had to get back into the backhoe and drive back 52 kilometers.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Lyle Haugen: But, that’s a whole other story.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: That’s how I got blown up.
Dr. Weitz: I’ve really been enjoying this discussion, but now I’d like to pause to tell you about the sponsor for this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. This episode is sponsored by Pure Encapsulations, which is one of the few lines of professional nutritional supplements that I use in my office.
Pure Encapsulations manufactures a complete line of hypoallergenic research-based dietary supplements. Pure products are meticulously formulated using pure, scientifically-tested and validated ingredients. They are free from magnesium stearate, gluten, GMOs, hydrogenated fats, artificial colors, sweeteners and preservatives, among other things.
One of the great things about Pure Encapsulations, is not just the quality products, but the fact that they often provide a range of different dosages and sizes, which makes it easy to find the right product for the right patient, especially since we do a lot of testing and we figure out exactly what the patients need. For example, with DHEA, they offer 5, 10 and 25 milligram dosages in both 60, and 180 capsules per bottle size, which is extremely convenient.
Dr. Weitz: Now, back to our discussion. Let’s get right into it. What are the four variables that we need to manipulate to help manage patients with type 1 diabetes?
Lyle Haugen: Great question. First thing we got to stabilize the basal, the background insulin amount. If you analyze what a normal pancreas does, it constantly exudes a little bit of endocrine. It’s always managing constantly. It’s a very fluid thing. It’s changing every second of every minute. To manage all of the metabolism in the background, when I first started, we didn’t have a good background insulin. We didn’t have a good long-term, sustaining, flat-lining insulin, I call it. We now have Lantus and that does really well, but prior to that we had too many curves that we had to follow and, literally, you’ve got to be a math pro.
If you don’t understand geometry, if you don’t understand mathematics, good luck on trying to meet the amount. How many years did it take to be able to have one missile coming from this country and another one from here and shoot it down? That’s what you’re doing when you’re putting carbs into your system and then taking some insulin. You’re hoping the two curves are going to meet exactly at the same time, and they rarely ever do. They never do in a person that’s not diabetic, that’s eating high-carb content, right?
Dr. Weitz: Yup.
Lyle Haugen: What is good for people that aren’t diabetic is good for the diabetics and vice versa? That’s where I learned how to manage that insulin, so we stabilize that blood sugar levels. I’ll give you an example. I used to be on about 24 units of background or basal insulin. Every meal you do the carb counting or calculating or choicing, whatever the system was of the day, because they always come up with a new system that never works. Sorry, I’m a little cynical here on this, but it didn’t, it never worked.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: If you can visualize, you’ve got sort of a flat line going along and then you’ve got these peaks of ingested carbohydrate that you’re supposed to get, this curve that doesn’t look anything like the curve that the peaks of the absorption rates are here. You’re trying to get all that to coordinate it and you’re switching it every meal, every time. So,…
Dr. Weitz: Let me just help people who don’t know what we’re talking about. Type 1 diabetics have to try to manage your blood sugar and part of that is, you try to match insulin to the amount of carbohydrates that you’re consuming. You’re using a certain amount of long-acting insulin to try to have some ability to control your blood sugar, but not too severely. Then you’re using a shorter-acting insulin that you’re trying to time with the amount of the carbohydrates that you’re consuming with that meal. Correct?
Lyle Haugen: Correct. You nailed it. You nailed it. Much better explanation than I did. Thank you.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: When I took a total value of all the insulin I was consuming in a day, you’ve got 24 here, you’ve got some for this meal, some for that meal. We’re looking at like 50, 55 units a day. The standard diet that was always taught to every diabetic, and here’s the bad part, whether you’re type 2 or type 1, back in the 80s and 90s and into the 2000s was about 50 to 60% carbohydrate. That’s what killed my mother, because that came out in the early 70s when she got diagnosed, right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: Horrible. We didn’t know that, we rely on the professionals. I didn’t know.
Dr. Weitz: Right, and that was pretty much the story until pretty recently.
Lyle Haugen: Until very recently.
Dr. Weitz: With the Diabetes Association, right?
Lyle Haugen: Exactly, and they’re still a little reluctant to come out with it, because they’ve been on the wrong track for so long. It’s been horrible when, if you go back and you study a little of the history, they were on track right about the time they were discovering insulin, because they knew back then a ketogenic diet you could stay alive a little bit longer. Right?
Dr. Weitz: Correct.
Lyle Haugen: Not a whole bunch longer, but you could definitely get a little bit better. There was a few guys back in the 20s that worked in conjunction with insulin and still that same diet, because they weren’t sure how the insulin worked yet. Roll ahead to today, now we’re a lot smarter. The interesting thing is, in the area I was at, we had no internet. I didn’t have access to any of this stuff seven years ago. Ironically, I stumbled on this on my own. I just went out to work one day, I had the new job. I was going to be gone for seven or eight days, running this unit 24 hours a day. This kind of the business of the job that I had, I needed to pack all my food. I just took that particular trip, everything that was energy dense. I took some pulled pork, I had some smoked salmon, I took a couple of things here and I left out all the bread, all the stuff that I would require short-acting insulin for.
I just sat there out in the middle of nowhere, kids, don’t do this at home, because I had nobody around me to help me. Then, I just slowly started to jack up my background insulin. If you took an accumulation of my insulin at that 50 mark, I figured, well, at some point, if I take out that high peak with the carb, I can take some of that carb, jack up the oils over here, use a moderate amount of protein, because I already know if you take too much protein you’ll need insulin for it, because it breaks into carb too, right?
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. Gluconeogenesis: the body will convert protein into carbs.
Lyle Haugen: And all diabetics are running the risk of a little bit of a kidney issue, so we shouldn’t over-protein ourselves anyways, so just stay at a moderate level. 20% is, I think, pretty good. It seems to be good for me. In doing that, you’re able to control the meal, so that gets into number two, which is talking about the diet program. You switch from a 60 whatever the heck it was, 5% fat, I think and 3 to 5% protein. I don’t know, it was a weird diet. Now, what I am, a pretty much 60, 20, 20 as far as macros are concerned and that’s just fats to proteins to carbohydrates. But if you combine them right, then you can stretch that out, which means then you can raise up your basal insulin to the amount where you have a consistent amount exuding into the system. Example, I’d take 36, 37 units of Lantus a day instead of my previous 50 total.
Dr. Weitz: The less insulin you take, the better it is for you-
Lyle Haugen: I dropped 35 pounds.
Dr. Weitz: Yep.
Lyle Haugen: They’re directly proportional. You want to gain weight, take more insulin. That’s it. That’s simple. You want to lose weight, back off on the insulin, and it works the same in non-diabetics. Whatever’s spiking your insulin, stop it.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: That’s the best thing that I’ve seen in everybody, because that was the thing, after I figured out what was going on with me, people was like, “What are you doing,” because I looked horrible, Dr. Weitz.
Dr. Weitz: Let me get this correct. Now that you have it, you self-stabilize, you don’t use any short-acting insulin?
Lyle Haugen: Only if I get a little silly or if I don’t take my walk in time or… We’ll get through all four things here, but I have a little bit of short acting on the side, but I rarely take more than two units additional a day.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: The reason I only do that is because now I’m in a range where I’ll take a unit if I’m 135, even though that’s normal range to everybody.
Dr. Weitz: Now, what’s your target range you’re trying to keep your glucose in?
Lyle Haugen: Me? Well, counting the numbers, four to six, seven, and yours would be about 70 to 110, 115.
Dr. Weitz: 70 to 110, even after a meal?
Lyle Haugen: No, they’ll probably drift to the low side of 140.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: Right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: They’ll drift to the side, about 140, but then they’ll pop back down.
Dr. Weitz: You’re saying 70 to 110 is like in between or away from meals?
Lyle Haugen: Exactly. My last A1c was 5 7.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great.
Lyle Haugen: It’s just on that edge of being classified as a diabetic, but I used to be 13.2, and that’s just not the place you want to be either.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely.
Lyle Haugen: That’s where all that bad stuff you were talking about-
Dr. Weitz: Now, how do you monitor your sugar? Do you prick your finger, or do you use a continuous glucose monitor?
Lyle Haugen: Great question. They’ve just been approved in Canada. We’re a little behind everybody.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, is that right?
Lyle Haugen: We’ve never had the option, so I still prick my finger, and that was the one thing I did. Had I had a… that was not very good English… A CGM would have been really nice seven years ago when I turned myself into a guinea pig and a bio hack, right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: Because that’s what I did to myself, but I was testing 10, 12 times a day to figure this out, because you need to be able to establish a trend. I think the worst advice is a little off track, but all the type 2s that are out there listening to this, you need to test more than once a day, and morning’s not always the only one.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, absolutely. It’s just hard to get them to do it.
Lyle Haugen: Fair enough. Fair enough, but if you can get that correlation between… Look, if you do this and you know where you’re at… If you went on a trip, wouldn’t you have a little plan of where you were headed? You know?
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely.
Lyle Haugen: If you don’t check the map and correlate, “Oh, am I there now? Okay, now we’ve got to go here,” you know?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: You got to plan this stuff out a little bit. Getting on with our, we talked a little bit about the diet, this is number two, if you want to move on to that. The third thing now is-
Dr. Weitz: I do want to get more into the diet.
Lyle Haugen: The diet? Okay.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: Good.
Dr. Weitz: Let’s go ahead and continue. The third thing is what, exercise?
Lyle Haugen: Exercise, and it doesn’t have to be crazy. It’s just got to be consistent.
Dr. Weitz: Right, the same amount, and intensity, and do it every single day?
Lyle Haugen: Yeah, every single day. You can change up the intensity a little bit. I mean, there’s a little bit of a burst. All I’m talking about is walking and then hit a hill. 30 minutes seems to be a good number, because you’re not going too far with a diabetic. If you look at it this way, and I look at it from my petrochemical background and engineering background, your blood sugar level, between low and high, is a tank. That’s your tank amount. That’s your reserves. Then, beyond that is your level and your muscles, and all that kind of stuff, but when you’re on insulin, and especially if you’re on short-acting insulin too much, that tank disappears like that if you’re not managing it right. That’s why I love doing a long-acting basal. I just take one shot a day, Dr Weitz. Just one.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great.
Lyle Haugen: Some of my clients, they like two. I have them on a split Lantus, that allows them to change it up a little bit, but they love the same thing too. Getting into the food now, I’ve developed a couple of recipes that…
Dr. Weitz: Hang on a second. On the exercise, let me just poke you a little more on that. What if they wanted to do an hour of exercise, would that be more beneficial?
Lyle Haugen: Absolutely. We could get into…
Dr. Weitz: If they do some…
Lyle Haugen: Anything that’s muscle resistant.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Isn’t it an advantage to working the different muscles in the body since they all utilize glucose?
Lyle Haugen: Well, they do. What you’re also going to do is you’re going to up-regulate your GLUT4 receptors. The challenge with that is, if you do it inconsistently, then you suffer from rollercoastering because, all of a sudden you up-regulate your GLUT4s, and you’re taking too much insulin. If you do it consistently, you can finally back off on your insulin to a point where it’s going to start to match, but then once you quit doing that, then you have to up-regulate your insulin because as you lose your receptors, you don’t uptake the glucose as easy. Great question.
Dr. Weitz: You think it is an advantage to do a longer exercise session and, potentially, adding resistance training with, say, the walking, as long as you do approximately the same amount every single day?
Lyle Haugen: For example, myself, I really target on everyday walking 30 minutes and then, addition to that, I play pickle ball. I do that about three times a week, and I typically play an hour and a half to two hours doing that. I’ve rarely have come out of that with having to deal with the blood sugar. That’s the beauty of it. Before, this is something that maybe a lot of type 1s won’t… They’re scared to exercise and I know.
Dr. Weitz: Because they’re worried that their blood sugar will get too low.
Lyle Haugen: Well, if you look back to number one with the insulin regime, if you’re stacking a bunch of… that three meals a day, a whole bunch of short-acting insulin in there, not all of it absorbs, and then you start moving and then you get these little pockets of insulin start exuding into your system. You can prove this by saying another thing, I found this out by stepping into a hot tub, that’s a great way to have a low blood sugar on that other insulin regime.
Dr. Weitz: Is that right?
Lyle Haugen: Oh yeah. All of a sudden all of them little pockets of insulin that maybe haven’t absorbed yet throughout the day, they’re everywhere. It was like clockwork, five to seven minutes, I’d have a little blood sugar and hot up. Now I take one twice a day, because I’m on that nice stable insulin and that just helps soothe the muscles. It’s hydrotherapy, So it’s wonderful that way.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, cool. I want to go more into the diet in a few minutes, but maybe we could talk about number four, which is stress.
Lyle Haugen: Yeah, that’s the wild card. Now we’ve got to number four, any of the mathematicians out there, that’s a whatever you call that, quadratic formula, right?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: You’ve got four variables, and just to pick on my best past regimes that were recommended to me, when you change all four variables all the time, how do you get a calculation? You’ve got to stabilize one to actually run the numbers.
Dr. Weitz: Correct.
Lyle Haugen: That’s where I stabilized the insulin in front. Next thing we’re going to do is, we’re going to stabilize the food in the sense that we’re going to mix it, so that it slowly releases any of the carbohydrates available over a longer period of time. Greater quantity of oils, which you need insulin for as well. You need a little bit of insulin for all of that, but it stabilizes everything. The shake that I developed, I can get, on eight ounces of this, six hours before I have to refuel. I’ll be at a four or five, 80, 90. Eat that shake, I’ll drift up to about a 130, back down, six hours later, I’m down to about 90. I never used to be able to go six hours without having to have two snacks in between that, because you had the insulin doing this all the time. That’s just one example. By the way, that shake is a great way to get people off wheat.
Dr. Weitz: What shake are we talking about?
Lyle Haugen: Oh, I had sent you that. I actually just…
Dr. Weitz: No, I know that. I’m just…
Lyle Haugen: I just-here, sorry. I just call it a breakfast shake. We can come up with a name for it at some point in time. I’m not terribly creative that way. I just call it a breakfast shake. It contains some really good ingredients like hemp parts, avocado, three different nuts. I use, usually, pecans, walnuts, Brazil nuts.
Dr. Weitz: Basically, these are all good sources of healthy fats.
Lyle Haugen: Absolutely, great fiber too. Right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: Believe it or not, when you look at the numbers on this thing, I think it rings out at like 550 or ’60 calories, if you’re looking at it from a caloric point of view.
Dr. Weitz: Correct. Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: But it’s like a time release, and that time release works in perfect conjunction with a nice flat line of insulin, so everything in your background metabolic is getting taken care of. Your incoming digestion is getting taken care of and things are getting tucked away nicely where they’re supposed to be and there’s no rollercoastering going on.
Dr. Weitz: That’s because glucose enters the system, causes a blood sugar spike, then you have to have the insulin to bring it down, and fat takes a long time to break down, and digest, and get turned into energy, so you get a much slower increase of energy over time.
Lyle Haugen: Exactly, exactly, and you don’t have that… For years, Dr. Weitz, the only time I ever saw a 90 or a 100 was either on my way to five or on my way to 50. It was like going like this. I got a client right now in North Carolina and she’s so grateful right now, but she’s about, I just sent her week number five, but it blew her away, and she was just diagnosed two years ago. She had been through three different endocrinologists. She’s on a CGM. She was taking Lantus and short-acting insulin, but she described it this way. She said, “You’d look at my CGM and it looked like a heartbeat, the way the blood sugars were going up and down.” She said, “And then I met you and it just flat lined.” I went, “Well, if I was a cardiologist, I wouldn’t have used that.” I wouldn’t use that example, but for blood sugars, that’s fantastic. Literally, she would show me her graphs. She was drawing like 80, right through the night, steady, you know?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: She’d never been like that before.
Dr. Weitz: When it comes to diet, is ketogenic the best diet, paleo, how low should we go on carbohydrates?
Lyle Haugen: Well, if you’re looking at 20% and if you go by the 2000, I don’t eat that many calories a day, to be honest with you. I don’t think I eat more than about 1500, because I really don’t need it and I don’t think any of us really need it. Depending on what kind of work we’re doing.
Dr. Weitz: It depends upon your metabolic rate.
Lyle Haugen: Yeah, and it depends on what kind of work we’re doing. For me, I don’t need that much, but I would guess carb wise if you were looking at a number, it’s going to be higher than keto. Keto gets a little tricky with us, because we really have to be a lot more into that. Up-regulate those GLUT4 receptors, be out lifting weights, be out grunting, and for quite a period of time. If you’re willing to do that, it’s a great way. Then you can really, you can probably go for… If I did that, I could probably drop to 18 units.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Lyle Haugen: If I did a lot of that, but I’m 57 and not really in the mood to do that much anymore. I love playing pickle ball, because it’s social and it’s fun. I like exercising when there’s a laugh to be had.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: I don’t like exercising just for the sake of having a hard workout. It’s just not my style. I’ll do it for my health, absolutely, but you know what I’m saying?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I’m a gym guy. I love going to the gym. I’ve trained with weights for decades and decades. I need 3000 calories, or I lose weight.
Lyle Haugen: Well, yeah. That’s a great example. I don’t have to do that much anymore. Also, I don’t know. I don’t know how much different our age is, you look quite a bit younger than I am.
Dr. Weitz: I just turned 61.
Lyle Haugen: Oh, well, see? There’s a plug for you. I don’t have any hair anymore.
Dr. Weitz: I appreciate that.
Lyle Haugen: That went by, but no, that’s fantastic. I think that’s probably the thing that really has to ring out the loudest is, I don’t really know if I look 57 either. Especially, when you know that I’ve been diabetic for 35 years.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Yeah, diabetes…
Lyle Haugen: That’s how they do aging, is with diabetics. They do rapid aging with diabetics. That’s how they do…
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely.
Lyle Haugen: Anyway, so talking about number four.
Dr. Weitz: Give me an idea of your… what do you have in the morning for breakfast?
Lyle Haugen: Okay. I have a shake. That’s typically what I have. Usually six days a week I’ll have a shake in the morning.
Dr. Weitz: What are the carbs in the shake, is fruit in there or not?
Lyle Haugen: Yeah, I’ve got berries in there, typically. I get most of my carbs from berries, so usually blueberries.
Dr. Weitz: That’s one of the lower glycemic, higher phytonutrient fruits.
Lyle Haugen: High antioxidant, ORAC, whatever they call that level. Right through the roof. Up here I get wild Canadian ones. Well, they’re little tiny blueberries. They’re just really tiny, but they just explode with flavor. I put about a two inch piece of banana in there, half an avocado, and then those nuts, coconut or coconut milk. I will put a little bit. I use those little, what do you call, a bullet kind of thing, or a NutriBullet?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Yep, yep.
Lyle Haugen: It’s about 16 ounces. That’s two servings. When I build this thing, I’ll try to get the avocado, so the pit pole is up and then I just fill that with a little bit of maple syrup.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. There you go.
Lyle Haugen: That’s how I do all that. I came from, pardon me, I’m going to digress for a second. All my previous teaching was you had to weigh all your food. You had to do all this stuff, and by the time you got your meal, it was cold and horrible. For everybody out there, never eat a piece of protein bigger than the size of the palm of your hand without your fingers and thumb and cut off the wrist. Same size. That works well for almost everybody. Never eat more than that for a meal. I was taught this, you take that, that’s the size of your stomach right there. You only have so much acid resting waiting in the stomach. I found, me the less protein I ate, the more benefit I got from it.
Dr. Weitz: So that’s your breakfast and then…
Lyle Haugen: Yeah, then that’ll take me five or six hours.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: I’ve got a cracker recipe that I use. It’s just four seeds. It’s really easy. It’s just pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, chia seeds, and what’s the other one, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sesame seeds, chia seeds. Those are the four, right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: Is that the four? The chia is going to stick it together. It’s just like a half a cup of each and one cup of water, is the ratio. It’s a real simple ratio. Spice the thing, cook it for about an hour and a half at about 300.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve seen some of those at the market.
Lyle Haugen: Oh, they’re great. They’re real low carb. If you have a cookie sheet of those and you cut it into 24 pieces, they’re less than four grams of carbs. I’ll have a couple of those maybe with some almond butter, and believe it or not, that carries me for enough hours to get to suppertime.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: Then that’s typically when I take my shot, so then that’s when I have, from that time before I go to bed, that’s when I have the little bit bigger curve and the Lantus. That’s also my bigger meal, too.
Dr. Weitz: What’s dinner look like for you?
Lyle Haugen: Usually a piece of protein, well-sourced. Fish a couple of days a week. I do still do pork, but I get raised pork a couple of miles from the house, so I even see how they’re being raised. Oh yeah, that’s why I moved here. We’ve got the same thing with beef, but beef doesn’t agree with me anymore, so I don’t do beef.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: Some people are like that, I don’t know. Maybe I got that bug where beef doesn’t taste good, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it that you get bit by a bug, or… ?
Dr. Weitz: I think I did hear about that, yeah.
Lyle Haugen: Yeah. Beef doesn’t taste good anymore, or something, right?
Dr. Weitz: Right. Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: I think there’s something like that. I’m not sure if that’s it, but it just doesn’t digest well is what I’m getting at. And it is hard to digest, right? We’ve always known that.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: But there’s, at least half a plate of greens. I’m big on fermenting. I make a lot of sauerkraut or pickled cauliflower, broccoli-
Dr. Weitz: Kimchi.
Lyle Haugen: Yeah, exactly. Change it up. Put a little ginger in there, put a little garlic in there. Variety, lots of colors is what I try to go for.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, fermentation is good for the gut bacteria.
Lyle Haugen: And you know what it’ll do? I believe, and we should do some research on this, or somebody should, that the lactobacillus and that will actually lower your blood sugar. Because what does it do? It likes to eat sugar.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, that makes sense.
Lyle Haugen: If you study the process of how fermenting works, the salt water brings out the moisture. It’s got a little glucose with it. They proliferate, way they go.
Dr. Weitz: There you go.
Lyle Haugen: But balancing the gut, I think that’s where a lot of confusion comes for a lot of people, is why can’t they balance their blood sugars? When this isn’t right, you never will.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: You never will. It’s going to be too many variables. There’s going to be too many surprises.
Dr. Weitz: Are there any carbohydrates with that dinner or just… ?
Lyle Haugen: Not usually. Because, then what I do is then I go to the evening-
Dr. Weitz: So, how do you make sure that your blood sugar stays as even as possible through the night?
Lyle Haugen: Well, that was one of the miracles I came up with. I developed a bar recipe, and I have that on my website. It’s a free download. It’s a free report. That thing is wonderful. It’s, once or twice, you’ve got to build it, and then you’ll get comfortable building it, but it’s marvelous. People eat the thing and they go like, “Diabetics supposed to eat that?” Well, it does. It’s got like a cup of honey in there. Actually, by the time you get the topping and everything else done, there’s about two cups of honey and maple syrup combined in the whole thing. But it’s a huge bar. It’s a huge recipe. It’s about three inches by a half an inch. I eat two of those at night, flat lined my sugars right through the night.
So, there’s a lot of nuts and seeds in that. There’s ham parts again. There’s coconut shredded, there’s coconut oil, holds it together. I use cacao, cocoa butter, and either honey or maple syrup for the chocolate topping. Did I get everybody with the chocolate topping? That usually stops everybody. I had them with the chocolate topping. But, it’s wonderful. It’s decadent, but it’s not, because you make it with your own hands. It’s the minimalist of ingredients and the maximalist, if I could use that word, of nutrition. People that aren’t even diabetics, when I feed them that bar, the next day they talk to me they’re like, “You know, I had the best sleep last night.” Just think about it. What’s the body doing when asleep?
Dr. Weitz: If you didn’t have that bar, what would happen to your blood sugar during the night?
Lyle Haugen: Well, being on-
Dr. Weitz: Let’s say you just had dinner, and then you went to sleep three hours later.
Lyle Haugen: I would eventually have a low. So, that’s the deal. You’re pre-filling the tank in a slow burn.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Now, what if you were just to consume some fat at that point, do you think that would be as good or not necessarily? You have to have some of the carb in there.
Lyle Haugen: Yeah. It’s good to have a little bit of everything, I think. But definitely, you’re looking at that 60% mark of fat, and probably that 20% of carbohydrate. Between that, and the protein or fiber, let’s not forget that.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: And that being kind of part of the carb, obviously, but if you stretch that with that load of oil in there, you really flatten that thing out. There’s no spiking going on. And that’s how this all comes together. If you can get a flat line of insulin and a flat line of… or a slow increase, almost like a swell of an ocean, right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: Then, that’s great. And then, you were talking here earlier too, the fourth thing is these adrenaline events, right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: What happens when they come along?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. So, when you’re under stress and then your body secretes cortisol.
Lyle Haugen: Your gut shuts down. All bets are off, man.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: All bets are off at that point. I found that out when I was diagnosed with the gastro-paresis, because I wasn’t really having those kinds of things. But I’d take a shot, I’d eat, 40 minutes, 50 minutes later I’m having a low. And that was back when I was eating a lot of carbs, and I’m like, “What’s going on here?” Well, nothing was moving. That’s an interesting thing to deal with, because now you’re full, now you’ve got to eat more.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Wow.
Lyle Haugen: Because you’re still full. You can’t really eat anything anymore, but now you got to eat more. And then by the time you do that to get your sugar to come up, well then the other stuff finally goes, moves through and digest.
Dr. Weitz: And so the gastro-paresis has to do with stress, you said, or… ?
Lyle Haugen: Well, it can be partially stress, but mostly that’s from long-term mismanagement of blood sugar levels.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: So, the gastro-paresis is a condition where the muscles, the peristaltic muscles-
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, the motility of the gut.
Lyle Haugen: They get weak.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I treat a lot of patients for SIBO, IBS SIBO, and motility problems are a major contributor to that.
Lyle Haugen: Yeah, and I think wheat’s a big contributor to that, like white bread. It just doesn’t want to move through. It just won’t move. It’s like squeezing toothpaste.
Dr. Weitz: Well, it’s actually an autoimmune condition where you get cross-reactivity and it ends up attacking the nerves and the structural proteins that control that motility.
Lyle Haugen: I did not know that. Thank you.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Actually, Dr. Pimentel came up with a test for that auto-immune factor.
Lyle Haugen: Oh, wow. Okay.
Dr. Weitz: It’s an anti-vinculin, anti-cytolethal distending toxin serum test.
Lyle Haugen: Boy, that’s a mouthful. Okay. Have a couple of toddies and try saying that. It sounded like you’re from Scotland.
Dr. Weitz: So, you had this decreased gut motility-
Lyle Haugen: Right.
Dr. Weitz: So then, even though you consume the meal, your carbohydrates weren’t getting into your system and you had low blood sugar. Wow. So, that was really hard.
Lyle Haugen: Oh, it’s a management nightmare. I had been in business most of my life, and I had my own business in the oil industry before I had this premonition, and basically let’s move on and changed fields here five, six years ago. In that industry, there was just that background, always on stress, always on call. When you went, like I was telling you, when I figured this out, I was gone for eight days straight, 24 hours a day. I would sleep in the unit that was my truck. Oh by the way, this unit that I built was… Here’s the irony. I developed a process for cleaning natural gas dehys, that thing that blew up.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: I developed a process to fix the reason why it blew up.
Dr. Weitz: Interesting.
Lyle Haugen: It was a cleaning system that I developed that I would go around and basically sit on the units for days cleaning up and filtering their glycol, and getting everything clean and removing oils and balancing pHs and all those kinds of things. So, chemistry was kind of my deal, which was kind of an easy carry over into this. If you don’t understand the chemistry, it’s a little mind boggling.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Boy, that must have been some exposure to a host of chemicals.
Lyle Haugen: Well, that could be the whole other factor, too. Back in the 80s I probably bathed in methanol more than once.
Dr. Weitz: Oh Wow.
Lyle Haugen: It’s 40 below out there. Things aren’t working, you take the gloves off to work, you can’t work on anything else. We didn’t have rubber gloves in those days. You had the leather gloves and if it got too fine and it was too small to work, you just took them off and you worked with it. We worked with xylene, and toluene, and all these things that would melt waxes, and things that you shouldn’t be pelting in your body probably, too. We’ll just leave it at that.
Dr. Weitz: Exactly.
Lyle Haugen: It was a dangerous industry for deadly toxins. Now the thing about getting on to the stress, you can have that long-term stress is what I was saying, running my own business, you have that long-term, constant stress, that background continual burn, you’re going to have a really hard time managing your sugars, because you’re going to end up lifting your basal rate up to a point to tolerate that, and then, if you get a good day, you’ll be riding low. Developing strategies, I do that with my clients, help them develop strategies, and how to work with those… I find for the immediate thing, GABA’s wonderful.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, cool.
Lyle Haugen: Even as a prophylactic, I’ve got one client who would take one, because associated with, I think all diabetics, especially type 1, is huge anxiety, because we’re almost in the sympathetic mode all the time.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Lyle Haugen: Because, if you think about it from a metabolic point of view, if you’re above range, you’re freaked out. The body is freaking out. A lot of people, here’s a little tip for everybody out there, a real quick one, if you’re hungry, check your sugar, you’re probably high… period. And if you’re high, why are you eating? Just take a little bit of insulin and wait it out, and prove me wrong that you’re not going to get satiated, and ill guarantee you, you drop below eight, you’ll be like “Oh, I don’t like that guy anymore.” That’s the way it works. If you live between 70, 140, you’re never ever hungry.
Dr. Weitz: So what are some of the other things you can do to manage stress besides GABA?
Lyle Haugen: Well, you know that walking works really well. Getting out in nature. Don’t take yourself so serious sometimes.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. They call that forest bathing.
Lyle Haugen: Well, the thing is, we’ve got a lot of stuff to do in the day just to actually exist, right?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: And I think this is the hardest disease that ever preyed upon people that are disorganized, because it’s hard on them. The poor people get it when they’re five, six, seven years old. I didn’t get it until I was in my 20s. I already knew a little bit of lifestyle, what I wanted to do, it was nice to pick up, and go, and do this whenever you felt like it, but you don’t get to do that anymore. You’ve got to plan stuff. You’ve got to work on things, so there is a lot of extra time, and that weighs on people a lot. I think that builds a lot of anxiety. That builds a lot of resentment. I think every type 1 diabetic, regardless of how it’s brought on, is in a mild form of PTSD. Depression runs rampant in our field, and I think some amino acid therapy is somewhat helpful in that. I believe we’re in this rollercoaster, and all we’re doing all the time is we’re taking insulin, we’re taking sugar to counteract the insulin that we took, and where’s the nutrition?
Dr. Weitz: Yes.
Lyle Haugen: We’re not getting any of the proper amino acids when we’re chasing the high blood sugar, to low blood sugar, to high blood sugar, and obviously dipping into the donuts isn’t really going to give you amino acids, but you really want one when you’re down in the low blood sugar, it looks pretty good at that time, right?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, and amino acids can be precursors for serotonin, and dopamine, and…
Lyle Haugen: You bet. Yep.
Dr. Weitz: Really
Lyle Haugen: And that, getting into the sleep-
Dr. Weitz: Depression, and anxiety, and everything, yep.
Lyle Haugen: Right, and then we get into that sleep. That all night sleep report that I have covers a little bit of all of that, and it’s really mostly about trying to get into good blood sugar balance, because if you’re running the bed, and you’re high, you’re just going to toss and turn all night. IF you don’t have the right balance going in and you get a low, you’re going to wake up. You’ve got to get those blood sugars balanced, and if you fix this, you know what it’s like, you’ve seen it. It always amazes me. It always amazes me.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. So, this has been a great podcast Lyle. I appreciate you providing us a lot of interesting strategies, and ways to think about how to manage type 1 diabetes. How can our listeners get a hold of you and find out about some of the things that you offer?
Lyle Haugen: Oh great, thank you. Type1simplified.com, that’s my website. Download the free report. Great information for the sleep, and if anything, the chocolate energy bars.
Dr. Weitz: When are you going to market those? When are you going to put those on the market?
Lyle Haugen: Everybody asks me that, and-
Dr. Weitz: You’ve got to put those on the market. You have to.
Lyle Haugen: The problem is, when you try to put them on the market, you’ve got to change the formula sometimes to satisfy the industry, for market conditions.
Dr. Weitz: Maybe, maybe not. There’s bars that are in the refrigerated section of some of the market…
Lyle Haugen: I see that now. I don’t know, you may have something there. Try them, please, try them. Try them out. Let me know what you think of them. Pass them on to your clients.
Dr. Weitz: How do we get the recipe for the bars?
Lyle Haugen: It’s in that free report.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: Okay, and my shake is on the website. There’s a little article that I just wrote, and I just recently got the website up, so I don’t have a lot of articles in there, but it’s about ibuprofen and either having the shake in the morning. It’s a little story about pickle ball.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay.
Lyle Haugen: I had some friends that, she was taking a lot of ibuprofen, and her and her husband, they were visiting town, they were pros in pickle ball. They were coming for training, and teaching, and stuff, the instructors. I fed them a shake in the morning, and then we’re down playing, and about an hour later I hear them giggling, and laughing, and he’s like “Why are you shooting out?” She goes “I don’t know, I’m loose.” All of a sudden, they were over hitting shots because they didn’t have that inflammation anymore.
Dr. Weitz: I think you put some tumeric or something in there, right?
Lyle Haugen: There’s tumeric, there’s cinnamon to help your insulin work a little better, increase the efficacy of it. There’s a little bit of everything there. I put iodine in there. It’s kind of my carry all for… And then the winter time, this is a quick one if we can get this out, vitamin D, folks, for diabetics, got to have vitamin D.
Dr. Weitz: Are there a set of supplements that you like to use for type 1 diabetics?
Lyle Haugen: Vitamin D, magnesium, GABA, 5HTP.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Lyle Haugen: The 5HTP is a precursor to serotonin. Take that in the morning, and then when the blue light shuts off, we get our melatonin from that. That’ll help your sleep, and if you’re really stressed out, take a GABA.
Dr. Weitz: What do you think about some of the blood sugar stabilizers that we typically use for type 2 diabetics? You know, the supplements, and if things like chromium, you mentioned cinnamon, vanadium, lipoic acid…
Lyle Haugen: Copper and zinc is very important. Everything in proportion. Everything in the ratios that it’s supposed to be. I think that would be great. Again, we get back to this. I think most of us, being in the condition that we’ve gotten to at that point, are nutritionally deprived, so if we can get most of it from the diet, great, but up front, when they’re not feeling good, I think they need that little help. What do you think?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Lyle Haugen: I think they need that extra supplementation.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. I think it would be helpful.
Lyle Haugen: Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Weitz: Good. Awesome. Thank you, Lyle.
Lyle Haugen: Thank you, doctor.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!