Something interesting I find in our audience, is holding on to the belief that if the doctor has not officially said you are insulin resistant, your PCOS cannot possibly be that bad. But did you know, it's not what your fasting blood glucose says in the doctor's office that matters? The problem with PCOS is how well your body handles the carbohydrates you DO eat, in REAL time. That is why I like to challenge clients to purchase a glucose meter (you can get them at Walgreen's or any drugstore), and test glucose in their own bodies. What will you learn? 1. You will learn what your own body does morning, noon, and night. 2. Rather than work off of a generic glycemic index list, you will know exactly which foods cause spikes in blood glucose. You can customize your own program. 3. You can start to make connections between how you feel and what your blood glucose readings are. One of my clients, for example, has started to see that after she eats something very high in carbohydrate, she feels sleepy, and it goes away when she eats protein. She is gradually learning how to eat to avoid the sleepy part because her own numbers are more meaningful than any theories I might tell her. She won't need to test for the rest of her life, she just needed to do it long enough to learn what that sleepiness was telling her about her own personal metabolism. 4. You will find it harder to convince yourself"just one soda can't make that much difference", because you can visually SEE what difference it IS making. 5. You will find it easier to exercise, because you will see the power that exercise has on keeping your body using carbohydrates efficiently. 6. If you use this technique to minimize your blood sugar fluctuations, it makes it so much easier for those trying to help you balance your hormones, get an idea of what is going on. When your blood sugar is erratic and your hormones are out of balance as well, who knows what's causing the moodiness, the depression, the hunger? Tackling the glucose is relatively easy, and it also makes the hard part of the equation much easier to address. One of the reasons it is hard to make behavior changes, is that it is hard to take vague, general information and believe that this is how your own body works. It's hard to stay in denial when you're looking at your own measurements. If you'd like to do some glucose tracking, where you get the numbers and we interpret them together…that can be a useful type of inCYST consultation.