What Glucose Trackers Get Wrong About Women’s Bodies | Dr. Stacy Sims | Dr. Stacy Sims

Watch the FULL video here: https://youtu.be/hsaGZXiEbNs

Most women don’t realize how much their hormones shape their metabolism and recovery or how wearables often get it wrong. In this clip, Dr. Stacy Sims breaks down what really happens to your insulin sensitivity and immune system throughout your cycle, why progesterone makes you temporarily more insulin resistant, and why that’s completely normal.She also exposes how continuous glucose monitors and fitness trackers often mislead women built on male-based data, their algorithms can cause unnecessary stress and confusion.

Dr. Stacy Sims

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This episode is sponsored by: NOWATCH: Health tracking reimaginedKnow your body, trust yourself.15% off with code LWBW15 at nowatch.com

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers
improve their health and well-being.
Are there more times when we're more insulin resistant during
our cycle? And if so, how should we be
looking at that? Because I think it's important
to talk about because I don't want you to become scared of not

(00:21):
having carbohydrates. So how should we be looking at
this for oneself? So this comes to the ovulation
standpoint, Yeah, because after ovulation with progesterone,
like I said, progesterone is catabolic.
Its whole goal is to provide thebuilding blocks for endometrial
lining. So it is preventing a lot of the
carbohydrate and glucose from being up taken into cells that

(00:43):
are not part of the endometrial lining.
So we have a little bit of insulin resistance there for the
general woman who doesn't have any undercurrent of syndrome or
diabetes. It's not a big thing because if
it was that, we wouldn't be here, right?
There would be, you know, an evolutionary change that would
have wiped out humankind. So if you're generally healthy

(01:08):
and you're active, it's not a big thing to worry about.
If you have metabolic syndrome or you have pre diabetes or full
diabetic, then it's something toconsider within your treatment
and understand that yes, you have more insulin resistance
after ovulation that exists until your next bleed.
So you have to time carbohydrateaccording to physical activity

(01:30):
as well as when you are using your insulin, OK.
So it helps with insulin controlin those clinical situations.
OK, but the normal woman that's training maybe 3 or 4 times a
week? She shouldn't worry about it.
She doesn't need to overthink. No, and the reason why it's
become such a thing is because of continuous glucose monitors
being used in a healthy population.
Well, I was. About to ask your your opinion

(01:52):
on that. Yeah, I.
Know, so I look at it as one of my PhD students just finished
doing longitudinal study on ultra runners using CGM to
determine fueling during ultra runs.
And there's definitely a change across the menstrual cycle with
the way your body uses glucose and how your body will use it

(02:12):
during training. Does that impact what they
should be doing when we find out?
No, actually you can have a low amount of carbohydrate intake.
As long as you have an elevationin blood sugar, your body's
going to be fine. So when we look at continuous
glucose monitors and people are using, oh, I can't have oatmeal
because it makes my blood sugar spike, it's like, well, yeah,

(02:34):
anything that you eat is going to bring blood sugar up.
But the continuous glucose monitor isn't monitoring blood
glucose. It's monitoring interstitial
fluid. And there's about a 20 minute
lag period. So people are freaking out about
the the actual notes that happenafter each kind of food that
they eat. Really, if they're worried about
it, they should look at trends over time.

(02:55):
And this is the problem. When you're using something that
is been designed to detect nuances in a clinical
population, trying to bring it into the healthy population
creates a whole bunch of confusion, which is what we're
seeing now about people not understanding how they should
eat because they've been using acontinuous glucose monitor as a
healthy woman. So you actually think it's quite
detrimental? I think that's a really big

(03:17):
thing to say because I think it's become quite the norm.
I mean, I just see it a lot now within my clinic where people
will walk in with a, with a glucose monitor on an aura ring,
a whoop, A garment, and they're tracking every single part of
themselves. And I, I can understand the want
and the need to become more preventative.

(03:39):
I understand that. But I also think we're becoming
hyper disconnected to actually how we're feeling.
Yeah, because my aura ring says,well, you slept badly tonight.
So actually now my brain is telling me I've slept badly as
opposed to thinking, well, how do I actually feel?
Right. And we see that athletes from
collegiate athletes to professional athletes who are
sponsored by WOOP or sponsored by AURA or other wearables that

(04:03):
are tracking sleep. The coaches are like, you can't
wear that leading up to key events because the psychological
aspect of getting something in the red is more damaging than
actually maybe not have recovered well enough because
that psychological impact is going to sit there and fester
and and really affect your performance.

(04:25):
So if I think about that in thathigh performance environment
where we're really cognant in saying we don't want you to look
at any of that kind of data leading into a major event, for
the general person who's highly stressed and trying to interpret
this data, it's a problem. Yeah, yeah.
And I think that's the thing. They're trying to interpret data
that they've not been trained in.

(04:46):
Right. And the algorithms are very
rough. And we also see that the
algorithms for women are not there.
So the algorithms on the wearables are driven by male
data. And they're like, well, we're
using AI now. AI is learning from existing
data, which is perpetuating the misstep in health management

(05:06):
between different ethnicities, the different genders.
And so when you're getting this data all the time, it's not
truly representative of a femalePhysiology and how a woman is
responding. Well, this is the biggest thing,
isn't it? Because none of our, none of the
scientific research, I mean pre five years ago was really done
on women. No.

(05:28):
And I think that's, I mean that was the first part of our
conversation, which I think is really important.
It comes to another question. I before I move on to kind of
perimenopause, which which I will get to is around the immune
system because is it true that we have kind of more resilient
immune system around 12 to 13 days around ovulation?
Yeah, I find that quite fascinating.
Why? So if we look leading up to

(05:49):
ovulation, our body's really, really good at fighting off
virus and bacteria. After ovulation, there's a
change where we have more of a pro inflammatory response.
And the reason for that is the biological doesn't want the
immune system attacking A fertilized egg, understanding

(06:09):
that it might be a pathogen. So there's a change in the
immune system. So you're very stress resilient
and you're trying to maintain that stress resilience.
And it's all about developing a really good egg for release.
And part of that is keeping the body healthy.
So it's really on target for fighting virus and bacteria.

(06:31):
But then after ovulation with pro inflammatory, it's all
about, OK, let's invoke a fever or let's invoke some
inflammatory responses to fight off anything that's coming in
for an infection because we don't want to have the immune
system attack fertilized egg. Thanks so much for listening to
hear the full episode. There's link in the description.