Jessie Inchauspé (The Glucose Goddess)
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
Actually, breakfast food is usually a top offender, right? So orange juice, fruit smoothies, breakfast cereal, even if they say no sugar or low in sugar, that doesn't mean they don't contain glucose. It just means they don't contain any table sugar, but they could also contain sugar from fruit, which is quote unquote natural. So it doesn't have to be claimed as an added sugar in a package, right?
breakfast foods huge huge offenders and then kind of like funny things that you wouldn't expect like eating a lot of grapes yeah if you eat 50 grapes that's actually a lot of sugar because the fruit that we eat today has been bred to be extremely high in sugar and concentrated in sugar but i think breakfast foods are one of the biggest ones oh also dried fruit
People don't realize that it's not because something comes from fruit that it's good for you. Dried fruit or fruit smoothie or fruit juice can contain tens and tens of grams of sugar, even though it originally came from a fruit.
But your body doesn't care whether sugar came from an orange juice and is now in an orange juice, or whether sugar came from a beetroot and is now in a can of Coca-Cola, right? Those sugar molecules will both lead to a glucose spike.
Well, listen, the glucose spike that we experience after breakfast is going to control the rest of our day. So if you eat in the morning something that is pure glucose, like most of us do, right? I grew up on orange juice and Nutella crepes, so I know.
It was amazing. But then at 1030, I was exhausted because I was crashing. My glucose levels were crashing. And I was super, super hungry. Because after a big spike, you experience a big crash. And that crash activates the craving center in your brain and literally tells you, Jay, go find some chocolate. You know, and you cannot resist. I know what that voice sounds like.
And you can't resist that urge. So your breakfast, if you're having a big glucose spike at breakfast, you're setting yourself up for a day of cravings, fatigue, inflammation, and you're gonna feel quite awful. An important switch to make is to switch from a sweet breakfast to a savory breakfast built around protein. Right? Whatever kind of protein you like. Maybe it's dairy. Maybe it's tofu.
Maybe it's protein powder. Maybe it's leftover fish from last night. Maybe it's eggs. Whatever kind of protein you want, that's going to keep your glucose levels nice and steady. Add some healthy fats in there. And you can have some starch like a slice of bread for taste. But importantly, a savory breakfast contains nothing sweet except if you want some for taste, some whole fruit. Right?
And you know all those sweet breakfast foods that you love? You don't have to say goodbye to them completely. The best time to have them is for dessert after lunch or after dinner.
Because if you eat something that contains a lot of glucose, something starchy or sweet, after a meal, the glucose molecules are not going to arrive as quickly into your bloodstream because there's already going to be food in your stomach. The worst time to eat starches and sugars is breakfast because your body is super empty. So anything you eat goes to your bloodstream in a second, right?
But it's actually the meal of the day where most of us eat just starches and sugars. Think about the typical breakfast. Orange juice, oats with honey on them, breakfast cereal, fruit smoothies.
And then you wonder why most of us feel so terrible throughout the day. Why it's 4 p.m. and we're exhausted and we need coffee or Red Bull. We have cravings all throughout the day and even at night. Your breakfast controls how you feel for the whole day. And I think switching from a sweet breakfast to a savory breakfast
is almost like, you know in the movies when they go through the mirror, it's a parallel universe?
And you really feel so different. Absolutely. So, so, so different. All of a sudden you have steady energy, your brain is clear, you feel good, you feel like yourself, you're not controlled, you're not a victim to these cravings anymore.
And how does it cause those symptoms? I think what you're talking about is if somebody goes cold turkey and just completely cuts things out. And that's not actually something that I recommend. I think, again, like I don't have that kind of willpower and I want to help people improve their health without having to give up the sugar.
So even if you delay the sugar from breakfast to after lunch as dessert, you're not going to get all those withdrawal symptoms. You're still going to be able to enjoy it and get the dopamine, but with less impact on your glucose levels. And listen, sugar is addictive, right? And that dopamine... is very, very, very, very addictive.
And as human beings, eating something sweet is a very easy way to get a hit. Now, what you're talking about can also be due to if somebody completely cuts out carbs, so starches and sugars, completely. Let's say from today to tomorrow, you cut out all carbs.
That can cause issues because if you've been eating carbs your whole life, your body expects these carbs every two to three to four hours, and your body's actually just burning glucose for energy. So all of a sudden, you cut off its supply of glucose, and it becomes a little bit stressed out, especially if your body's not used to also burning fat for fuel.
In a healthy body, you can switch from burning glucose for energy to burning fat for energy easily. So either you eat glucose and your body gets energy that way, or you're not eating and your body's burning fat. And most of us, we're eating every two to three to four hours some carbs. And so our body doesn't know how to burn fat for fuel anymore. It doesn't have that muscle.
So the idea is to train it slowly to be able to do that, not to just cut out completely the glucose, you know, cut the grass under the foot too quickly. That's going to be difficult.
I hate that. And diets, you know, they don't work. They're super stressful. They're actually a pretty strong way to control women. Like I have been from the moment I was a teenager, The magazines are telling you, lose five pounds in a day, lose your belly before summer. You're bombarded by these messages that make you feel inadequate if you're not on a diet. I mean, it's pretty messed up.
The amount of fat on your body or how much you weigh is not a good representation of the internal health of your body, right? Absolutely. And if you're just focusing on, I want to lose weight, I want to lose weight, there are very unhealthy ways to do that that might actually make your health way worse. Mm-hmm. What I like to teach people is these simple hacks.
So savory breakfast is a very important one. Eating sugar as dessert instead of on an empty stomach is another key one. And these hacks are going to help your body on the long term and create better health from within. And you might lose weight. For example, in my experiment, about half the people lost some fat on their body without trying to.
without counting calories, without cutting out foods, just because naturally that's where their body wanted to be and it readjusted, right? But the objective is not weight loss. The objective is being craving free and not feeling victim to finding sugar three times a day or not a victim to the pot of ice cream at the back of your freezer after dinner.
Good energy so you can actually live the life you want to live and go after your dreams, you know? That's the point. And play with your kids and have time for yourself. And then improving any medical condition you might have. from mental health through infertility to diabetes. Weight loss, consequence. It's not the whole point. It's not a diet, you know?
Let's make it about health.
Absolutely. And it's shifting. You know, we're now understanding that's not the way to go. We need to focus on health, not body size or body weight.
you know slump they do they do but it actually can go away if you steady your glucose levels and if you no longer have these spikes you don't have to feel that post meal slump anymore because generally that slump comes from your glucose having spiked and now dropping because after every spike there's a drop and this drop can make you feel really really really tired
So if you feel those symptoms of the post-meal crash, the best thing to do is to start with your breakfast. So have a savory breakfast. Then the second thing I would recommend is at lunchtime, make sure that you start your meals with a specific type of ingredient that is going to help balance your glucose levels.
And before I tell you what that is, I want to tell you about this amazing research study, Jay. So researchers looked at a meal and they found that if participants ate the elements of that meal in a specific order, they could reduce the glucose spike of the meal by up to 75%.
Without changing how much they're eating, without changing what they're eating overall, just by changing the order. And when I was in school, I remember biology teachers telling us, oh, when you eat, it all becomes a big soup in your stomach. And so I thought, how is this possible? How can the order in which you eat the elements of a meal have an impact? So the research is fantastic.
It turns out that when you start your meals with vegetables, the fiber in the veggies, when you eat it first, has time to coat your upper intestine and create a sort of protective mesh, like a shield on the walls of your intestine. And that shield then slows down how quickly the rest of the meal is going to access your bloodstream.
how quickly the molecules from the rest of the meal are going to make their way into your bloodstream. And so veggies first is this very important hack.
And you know, actually, so when you go to restaurants, they often give you bread at the beginning of the meal. And actually, it's pretty smart. So I think there's a whole conspiracy here. Because if you give people some bread at the beginning of your meal, so you're super hungry, you eat the bread. Bread is starch, it turns to glucose. So very quickly, you experience this glucose spike.
And about 90 minutes later, you're crashing. And that's when the waiter comes over and is like, hi, anybody would like some dessert? And at that point, you're feeling this intense craving for sugar because of that glucose drop. So you're going to order dessert. Wow.
But the best thing to do, actually, is to delay that bread and first have your veggies and then have your main dish and have the bread during the main dish or after the main dish. And that way, you can still enjoy the bread, but the glucose molecules are going to be protected by that fiber mesh and not going to create that big of a spike. So you won't feel those cravings 90 minutes later.
You won't feel the energy crash. So that's another super important hack. And if you do nothing else, just at your next meal, Eat what you would normally eat, just add a plate of vegetables to the beginning of your meal.
And it can be three baby carrots, it can be some beautiful roasted cauliflower with tahini or whatever, it can be some salad, it can be any sort of veggies you have in your fridge, and tomatoes count as well. And you'll see how different you feel after the meal. No crash, no cravings, and you know you're also helping your body become healthier from within.
And interestingly, Jay, this hack actually has a lot of parallels in cultural habits. So I'm French, and in France, we have this tradition of crudités at the beginning of a meal, which is raw veggies. In Italy, they have antipasti, which is generally vegetables at the beginning of the meal. In the Middle East, you usually start your meals with herbs eaten by the bunch.
So, none of the stuff I'm talking about is that revolutionary. It's kind of common sense, but we've lost touch with these traditions, and now we understand the science behind them, so I want us to bring them back.
I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy.
Six days a week you exercise.
methods, strategies, diets, hacks in the food, nutrition, health and wellness space that I think cause a lot more harm than they do helping people because it is so restrictive. But one of the first pages of your book talks about this is not a restrictive diet.
But it's not restricting you from eating anything. No.
Now, you probably don't want to overconsume on sugar all day long.
Man, those pastries though with the chocolate inside and just, oh man, the donut in the morning.
I need that spike again.
So hard.
Never as a snack. So you eat something first before you have the sugar.
Before.
So, for example... So, you could have a bite of cake, but then have something else... Yes, you could... ...of that within that.
Don't eat it naked.
That's powerful. So the more glucose spikes we have on a daily basis, And the more we have over time, it causes us to live less.
It won't allow us to live longer is what I'm hearing you say.
What does glycation mean?
You start to cook.
Wow. How many glucose spikes is ideal to have on a daily basis? Like what's the optimal amount of spikes that we should have?
I mean, besides not eating, I guess, how do you not have a glucose spike when you're eating foods?
What is the optimal amount of eating in a day to manage glucose in a good way?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So you don't need to skip breakfast. You don't need to skip dinner.
You don't need to have 500 calories a day and restrict calories.
Now, are you still going to look healthy and lose weight in this process? Or are you going to gain weight if you're just eating whatever in the right order? No.
Your hormones are healthier.
Something you mentioned here, that I love is around freedom. And I think a lot of people don't feel free today with food, diets, restrictions, needing to biohack their life all the time. It feels like they always have to do something else or restrict something they love in order to be healthy, in order to optimize their life. And the more I'm hearing you speak about
Just understanding, it's almost like intuitive eating as opposed to restricting, counting calories, fasting, all these other things that are trendy right now. So, because my fear is that a lot of women specifically, and now men more so with social media, feel like they need to look perfect all the time.
They feel like they need to eat a certain way and be on the recent trends in order for their bodies to morph in a way that makes them feel like they're enough.
So how do we apply these hacks without feeling like it's some new trend, but more understanding, it's more intuitive for me to just live a holistic, healthy life.
It's so hard to have willpower.
What's the science behind all those hacks?
But after you eat the protein.
But no one uses it. True. No one likes the taste of it.
I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money and this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode on the School of Greatness. I'm curious, where does brain fog come from? And how can we
So what's the routine then, the ultimate morning and evening routine to set your brain and your mind up
What's the science behind it?
I've done this a bunch in the past, not a bunch, but a handful of times. I just feel like I have to close my nose while drinking this tall glass of water because it just burns. It tastes bad. It smells bad. It's just like, man, this is not enjoyable. So how do you make it enjoyable with vinegar? Is there like unflavored vinegar or like lemon vinegar?
Yeah.
But do you shoot it before every meal?
And what is the, when you track this with a glucose monitor or how you're tracking it, what do you see the spike doing instead?
If you just have a tablespoon.
Like 10 minutes before. Doesn't matter.
Wow. 30% less of a spike.
I want them bigger though.
Stronger. Really? Let's go. Nice. Not too big, but you know, just.
It is. It helps you process sugar better when you have more muscle.
Move, walk, stretch, jump.
What happens if it's 10 o'clock at night, you know, Ben and Jerry's is calling my name from the freezer or whatever ice cream you like is calling my name. I'm just sitting there watching a movie, eating a whole thing of ice cream. And then I sit there and then I go to bed a couple hours later. What happens to the brain, body, gut? if you do that by itself without applying these hacks?
Your face swollen.
There's always solutions. So if I've eaten the cake, the ice cream, the cookies, and I've forgotten to do all these things beforehand... but I can still do it afterwards a little bit. Even if the sugar is just in my gut already and just soaking down there, I can still have a couple almonds or have vinegar and it'll still help.
Okay, cool. Do some push-ups, whatever it might be.
Okay, so these are the four hacks in this book. Do you have other hacks that you recommend as well?
Should we eat snacks?
Or if you could have a snack, should you have vinegar right before?
Yeah, that's cool. But the more consistent you can be with it, the better off you'll be.
So what would you call that? Is it the beginning of the day and the end of the day? What does that strategy call? Is it just mental focus? Is it gratitude?
Yeah, so you have a moral code. You're doing the right habits for yourself. You're not just like, I'm not going to care. I'm going to drink all day. I'm going to eat whatever I want. Everything's going to be fine. You want to have some, well, if I do this action, there might be a negative reaction later as well.
I need to raise their anxiety. So what would you say are the three main causes of someone more likely to reach a dementia state over 85 or before that even? What would those things be? the three bad habits or the causes of dementia, would you say?
So does that happen if you're 30 years old and you're younger or is it like only happens in children? Really?
Now, there's something you touched on a little bit ago about the negativity bias and the positivity bias. I like to believe that I think in a positive way. I see the perspective of a situation. I try to look at the good perspective of the situation. I try to appreciate the things that I have as opposed to things that I lack.
I try to see, have compassion and empathy for certain situations and say, that's really unfortunate. So I should be extremely grateful for where I'm at. You know, in all areas of my life, I try to have that perspective. I feel like it's a positive bias, right? because it makes me feel better.
There's been a lot of talk lately with different researchers and professors talking about the negative effects of, call it toxic positivity or too much positivity, I guess. Is there really a negative effect to the brain if you're thinking positively all the time? And if so, can you be toxic in the way you think in a positive way?
Okay, so I like that. Accurate thinking with a positive bias. Yeah, accurate thinking. Okay. Is there such thing as toxic positivity in your mind? Well, it could be.
Absolutely. And so how do we figure out what our brain type is then? There's different brain types. How do we know what ours is?
Yeah, you might have two or three. I'm like, I like three or four of these things at times. It's like, I like my routine, but I also like to get out once in a while and do something spontaneous.
What can we do once we know which type we're at? What do we do then with that information?
Feel guilty when it doesn't. I know that feeling. What do you say is the biggest lesson you've learned about your own personal life of assessing, I think it's 200,000 brain scans now, over 30 years? How long is it? 30 years of work of just assessing the world's brains and these different types. What's the biggest lesson you've learned about yourself
in personal life, relationships, you know, all these things?
You were eating whatever?
I was stupid. You're bragging. Oh, I only need four hours a night of sleep and I can function. Yeah.
I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you are looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to Make Money Easy book. dot com right now and get yourself a copy.
I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to the next episode on the School of Greatness. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
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make sure that we have great morning routines to support us so that we don't have brain fog at all in the morning or later in the afternoon?
So this is important to do in the first 60 minutes of waking up. Get outside 10 minutes. You don't have to be in the sun, but you want to be able to look and see the sun, right? Is it okay to be in the shade or you want the sunlight hitting your skin?
So you won't look directly at the sun?
Like waiting for that, you're savoring it like, oh, my first sip.
Yeah. Okay. So water, bright light, no caffeine until 90 to 20 minutes. What's next?