When was the last time you actually thought about your blood sugar? If you've never been told you have diabetes, maybe you never think about it at all, and I totally get that. But I want you to think about a few things with me today.

Somewhere around 29.1 million Americans, or between 9 and 11% of the adult population, have been diagnosed with diabetes. The vast majority of those are Type 2. But an additional 115 million adults, almost half of the adult population, have prediabetes, and 80% of them don't know it, according to a government website.

Diabetes doesn't just show up one morning out of nowhere. There can be years of changes in how your body handles sugar before anybody ever makes a diagnosis, and sometimes nobody ever does. So if we only start paying attention after the diagnosis, what are we missing? That's what we're talking about today.

When you hear "blood sugar," what comes to mind? Diabetes, right? Finger pricks, glucose monitors, medication. So if nobody has told you that you have diabetes, you're probably thinking none of that applies to you. And you might be right. But blood sugar isn't just a diabetic's problem.

Your body manages blood sugar every single day. It's happening every minute, whether you realize it or not. And long before a woman meets the criteria for Type 2 diabetes, there can be real changes in how her body handles sugar, usually from a lifetime of lifestyle choices that led her there.

A quick definition if you're not familiar. There are two different kinds of diabetes. Type 1 is when the pancreas stops making insulin altogether. That's totally different from what I'm talking about today. I'm talking about Type 2 diabetes, which comes from a metabolic disorder. That's the type that can be hugely affected by our lifestyle choices and changes.

Now, not every woman needs a glucose monitor, and not every woman needs to count every carb. What I am saying is that we've got to stop treating metabolic health like something that only matters once there's a diagnosis. Why would we wait for a diagnosis to start caring about a system our body depends on every single day? Hang on to that question as you read.

If you've been around here for any length of time, you know I found my own insulin resistance. How is that possible?

It's possible because, like many of you, I was going to my annual checkups and getting the standard labs they drew. Those labs weren't the ones you actually need to find something like insulin resistance. Yet I was feeling really bad. I couldn't lose my baby weight, even though I was seven or eight years past having my last baby. I was relying on coffee to get through the afternoons. I just didn't feel good, and I knew something wasn't right.

Around that time, I came across some information about metabolic health that I'd never really thought about. So I decided to look at some very specific metabolic labs, and wouldn't you know it, right there in front of my eyes, I saw that I was prediabetic.

Nobody caught it in the medical system. I found it because I was looking at my health more broadly and trying to figure out what my body was doing to make me feel that way and what I could do better.

Now, I don't want you blindly following my diet, my exercise routine, or anything else I do. And I don't want you blindly following some supplement plan off somebody's ideas on Instagram. What I want is for you to know what's going on in your body so you can make decisions that fit YOU. There's a big difference between waiting until something is obviously wrong and taking a good look at your health before you get there.

A diagnosis is not when the issue starts. It's often a long way downstream from changes that were taking place that maybe you just didn't notice. So I've got five points I want to walk through with you, to help you think about this as it applies to your body, even if you've never received a diagnosis.

Like I said, these changes have usually been taking place for a while, and they just lead up to the point when you finally get that diagnosis. Then all of a sudden we decide we want to make changes. But if we'd seen the signs coming, we could've made those changes earlier.

For a lot of people, changes in how the body responds to insulin have been building for a long time. The pancreas can make up for it for a while by putting out more insulin. Eventually, though, for most people, blood sugar finally rises enough to meet the criteria for prediabetes or diabetes. Insulin resistance can develop before blood sugar ever gets into the diabetic range, and it often does. Insulin can tell us you're heading toward prediabetes up to a decade before your blood sugar ever shows anything.

Prediabetes is a warning flag. If you've been told you're prediabetic, or almost prediabetic, that's a huge warning sign telling you it's past time to start paying attention. Some people have no symptoms at all, which is why high blood sugar can be a silent killer over time, because of what it does to your circulation and your organs when you don't know anything's going on.

But catching it early gives us a chance to do something, sometimes years before full-blown diabetes develops. I don't go looking for disease in every healthy woman. But knowing how most Americans live and eat, I often suspect something is brewing, unless you're someone who is very, very intentional about the way you eat and live.

So I look at risk factors, changes over time, and the bigger picture, because the day of that diagnosis is not the day the problem started. I want to help you find those problems before you get the diagnosis. I don't want to wait until your body meets criteria for a disease before we start paying attention to how well it's working.

Metabolic health is how well your body is being nourished at the cellular level. Think about your body. Your brain, your lungs, your heart, your skin, your muscles. It's all made out of cells. Metabolic health is about how well those cells are being nourished, and that's essential, right? If your cells aren't being nourished well, you're not going to have health.

We tend to put everything in its own box. Weight over here, hormones over here, blood pressure over there, cholesterol here, diabetes somewhere else. But all of those systems affect each other.

Metabolic problems often show up alongside high blood pressure, a cholesterol pattern we don't like, or some extra fat around the middle, and then maybe we finally start paying attention. But those things don't exist all by themselves. They all exist together.

Insulin resistance also plays a role in things like PCOS. Recently, PCOS has been renamed PMOS. The M stands for metabolic, because we've recognized that what we used to call PCOS is very much a metabolic disorder. Insulin resistance does play a role in it, and it affects ovulation. Now, not every irregular cycle is caused by insulin resistance, but it's a major factor.

Then there's muscle. As we get older, keeping our muscle mass and strength is so important, and muscle is one of the main places our bodies use sugar. So we need to see how our bodies are using the sugar from our food, maybe before we ever get a diagnosis, because we want those cells to keep working right. Staying able to do what you need to do at your age. That's the goal.

So when I look at a woman's metabolic health, I'm not just asking whether she's diabetic. I'm looking at her blood pressure, her cholesterol pattern, her weight, her muscle, her pregnancy history, and her family history. Metabolic health is about keeping your body able to work well for as long as you're here, so you can serve well in the Kingdom of God.

When I work with you, I don't just go down a shopping list of labs to look at everything. I look at your history. I look at who you are, how you got where you are, your family history, what you've been through. Not just labs, or a glucose monitor, or some specialty test somebody on Instagram says is the latest, greatest thing. I look at the whole picture.

Did you have gestational diabetes? Have you been diagnosed with PCOS or PMOS? Does Type 2 diabetes run in your family? Has your waist or your weight changed? Has your blood pressure changed over time? What do your triglycerides look like? Your HDL? What do your movement, activity, and muscle building look like?

I'll look at sleep, food, relevant medications, any past glucose records, and A1C results. They're all part of the bigger picture. I'll look at fasting glucose, like the medical system does, but fasting glucose is just your blood sugar at one point in time. An A1C estimates your average blood sugar over about the last two to three months, so it's often a better read.

I also look at something most medical offices don't, because insurance doesn't cover it: fasting insulin. A high fasting insulin often shows us what's coming, maybe years, maybe up to a decade, before glucose shows any signs. Again, your pancreas will work hard to keep up until it just can't anymore.

The questions we're trying to answer decide what we test. I don't order tests willy-nilly. I look at the question I want answered and how we're going to answer it, and that's how I decide which tests to order. Then those results have to be read alongside your history. It's not about how many numbers we can collect. It's about knowing which numbers matter, what they mean, and what we're going to do about them.

So much of the health conversation is about the scale. Do you need to lose weight? Do you need to burn fat? How do you get your pre-baby body back? But what about the woman who isn't worried about her weight? Or the woman whose family is full of diabetes? Or the one who just wants to stay strong and independent but worries about all the diagnoses she hears her friends getting?

A normal BMI doesn't mean there's no metabolic risk or that nothing is going on under the surface. Weight is one piece, but it's not the whole picture. Fitness, muscle tone and muscle mass, heart risk factors, and how your body handles sugar all matter.

We've talked on this podcast a lot about stewardship. We want to steward our one body well. We want to care how our body works, not just how it looks. Serving your family and staying capable as long as God gives you life on this earth is the goal. We want not only years on our life, but life in those years. The scale tells you what you weigh, but it doesn't tell you everything about the health you're building for the next 20, 30, 40 years, however many years you have here. And I want to help you build that.

Being obsessive can cause problems of its own. I don't want you to walk away from this anxious, counting every carb and every calorie, panicking when your sugar goes up after a meal. Some up and down is normal.

What I do want is for you to be curious and sensibly proactive. Learn your family history. Pull up your blood pressure and the labs you've already had done at your last doctor's visit. Ask whether screening makes sense for you. Look honestly at your movement, your sleep, and your muscle.

Just remember that our medical system is trained to look for a diagnosis. It isn't trained to look at what's happening in the background on the way to that diagnosis to help you have true wellness. They're good at seeing it when it's there and giving you a medicine. I don't want you to get to that point. I want to help you see these patterns long before the diagnosis ever comes.

There's no shortage of advice out there about how much protein you need, how much to exercise, whether to fast, how to time your meals, and what supplements to take. But none of that can tell you which change matters most for you and your body. A woman with past gestational diabetes and a creeping A1C needs a different plan than a woman with normal labs who just wants to build muscle and heart health.

You don't have to become your own metabolic health expert. You just need to understand your risk well enough to make good decisions, and to know when it's worth getting help that's built for you.

So here's what I want you to ask yourself: "Am I making decisions based on a good understanding of my health, or am I assuming everything's fine because nobody has told me otherwise?"

This is a big part of why I built my Health and Longevity Optimization Program. Inside that program, we look at your history, your risk factors, your labs, how you're living right now, and what you want the next 20, 30, 40 years to look like. I read your labs myself, and then we build a plan around you. As you go through the program, I adjust it with you so you're not left figuring it out on your own. You get a plan built on where you are and where you want to go, instead of another generic checklist or a supplement routine copied from somebody's social media.

If that sounds like what you've been looking for, you can find it on my Menu of Services. Or you can always email me at lori@morriswellnessservices.com, and we'll talk about whether it's a good fit for what you've got going on and what your goals are.

You don't have to have full-blown diabetes for your blood sugar to matter. You don't have to be trying to lose weight for your metabolism to matter. And you don't have to wait until something goes wrong to start paying attention to your health. God gave you a body that serves you every single day, and the better you care for it, the better it can serve you.

I believe there's wisdom in learning how to take care of your body before you're forced to. I don't want you spending your life worrying about what might go wrong. I just want you making wise decisions today so you have a better chance of staying healthy and capable tomorrow. The way we live and the decisions we make matter, even the small ones. Life is just a collection of small decisions that add up to the big things. So let's take care of those little things before the big things develop.

Thank you so much for spending some of your valuable time with me this week. You can listen to or watch the full episode of If Mama Ain't Healthy (Ain't Nobody Healthy) at the top of this page.