Dr. Mary Claire Haver

So here's the quick and dirty.

Here's kind of five things I think you should know about yourself at any age, right?

If you're premenopausal, perimenopausal, postmenopausal.

These, for women in midlife, these are five lab tests I really, really think you should know.

This is part of our lab program.

checklist that is free to download 100% go to the website at the pause life you can find it but if I was going to give you top five so you guys get your pencils out you can take notes number one would be you should know what your fasting insulin and fasting glucose are those are so important why because we have no diabetes pre-diabetes diabetes right it's a continuum of blood sugar

We all start out with how our body is, how much insulin is secreted in relation to a glucose load.

So your fasting insulin and glucose level, you can run it through something called the HOMA, H-O-M-A-I-R, insulin resistance calculator.

They're free online.

You put in those two numbers and it will tell you, and you want it to be less than two, just FYI.

You want that HOMO-IR score to be less than two.

Anything above two is insulin resistant.

You may have totally normal blood sugars.

This is a red flag early warning system, okay?

A marker to tell you, hey,

I need to work on this.

I need to make some changes because I am insulin resistant.

I'm not pre-diabetic yet, but over time I have much more likely to be.

So that would be one thing to get an early warning system.

So fasting insulin, fasting glucose.