Episode 3: What is Metabolic Dysfunction?

Hey, hey, hey, hey, Jessica Veloza, Proactive Wellness, coming at you with episode three. How you doing? This episode is going to be about metabolic dysfunction. Welcome back.

I am Jessica Veloza, Jess Vee, NP - autonomous APRN, functional medicine practitioner, nurse, and someone who understands what it feels like to be exhausted in your bones. And then still told that your labs are normal and everything's okay.

Today we're talking about something that is silently affecting millions of people, especially nurses, shift workers, mothers, and high achievers. It is metabolic dysfunction. And if you've been feeling exhausted but wired,

gaining weight despite doing everything right, feeling inflamed, boggy, moody, struggling with sleep, dependent on caffeine, or watching your A1C slowly creep up, this episode is going to hit. But here's the most important thing I want you to hear right now. You are not broken. Your metabolism isn't lazy, and this is not a willpower problem.

This is a systems problem and it can be reversed. So what is metabolic dysfunction? Metabolic dysfunction is when your body loses flexibility. Your metabolism is supposed to be adaptive. It should switch between fuel sources. It should regulate blood sugar and it should manage inflammation.

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and it should respond to stress and then return back to baseline. When that system starts to fail, subtle things begin happening. Excuse me. Most providers miss it, okay? Because we are trained to diagnose disease, not dysfunction. Metabolic dysfunction exists.

long before type 2 diabetes, PCOS, fatty liver, hypertension, obesity, autoimmune flares. It begins with insulin resistance, mitochondrial stress, chronic inflammation, cortisol dysregulation, nervous system overload.

And for my nurses listening, this is where I need you to lean in, okay? All shift work is chaos on your body, but night shift alone increases insulin resistance. Chronic stress alters cortisol rhythm, sleep deprivation impacts leptin and ghrelin, and repeated adrenaline spikes rewire glucose metabolism.

You are living in metabolic injury every single week. And then the system tells you to eat less and move more. That's not just oversimplified, okay? When that is all the guidance that you get from your provider, that is not just oversimplified direction. It's negligent, in my opinion.

So how does it feel? How does it feel? How does metabolic dysfunction feel? Okay, metabolic dysfunction doesn't show up dramatically at first. It kind of whispers. You feel puffy, inflamed, cravings might feel intense or uncontrollable. You get energy crashes. You only get 3 a.m., 3 p.m. energy crash.

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You're starting to get belly weight that won't budge, brain fog during med pass, irritability at home. You start questioning yourself. Why can't I get it together? I used to be disciplined. What's wrong with me? Well, guess what? Nothing's wrong. Nothing. Nothing is fricking wrong with you.

Your physiology has adapted to chronic stress and adaptation when prolonged becomes dysfunction. Your body is just trying to survive your lifestyle. Okay. Let that sink in. Your body is just trying to survive your lifestyle and survival mode is not where healing happens. Okay. I've, I've seen this again.

You've been in a state of surviving over thriving. We ought to flip that, okay? Now let's talk about the science. Let's talk about the science without the overwhelm of too sciency. We're gonna simplify what's actually happening in metabolic dysfunction. When you are under chronic stress, emotional, physical, inflammatory, any chronic stress,

your body prioritizes survival. Cortisol rises, blood sugar rises, insulin rises then to compensate, and over time your cells stop responding to insulin efficiently. That is insulin resistance.

Now, glucose is hanging out in your bloodstream longer, your pancreas is having to work harder, and inflammation overall increases. And then your liver begins storing more fat. You've shoved all the extra sugar wherever you can, extra glucose is converted into being stored as fat, okay? Your liver becomes a fatty liver.

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Your mitochondria, the energy factories, they become less efficient. And now, how do you think you feel with all of this going on? Of course, you feel tired, you feel sluggish, you feel brain fogged and inflamed.

Because your body thinks it's a danger, it's conserving energy. Fat loss becomes harder, cravings increase, hunger, hormones become dysregulated. That's the insulin, that's the ghrelin and leptin I mentioned earlier. This is not a simple calorie math problem, okay? This is a signaling problem.

and traditional medicine often waits until your fasting glucose crosses 126. But dysregulation starts years before that, okay? You can have a normal A1C, you can have acceptable or great or perfect labs, and still be metabolically compromised.

This is why so many nurses feel crazy. This is why you feel like something's wrong. You know something is off, but no one can find it. Functional medicine looks earlier, okay? The functional medicine approach, we look upstream. We look at patterns. We look at physiology, not just pathology.

Now let's talk about why nurses get hit harder with this. Specifically about nurses. The hospital environment creates metabolic injury. All of the things that impact metabolic dysfunction, you're doing it. If you're working in the hospital or a high stress home health or anything you're taking work home, speaking to my nurses, my nurse practitioners.

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You're doing rotating shifts. You might have blue light up in your eyes at 2 a.m. These fluorescents, Lord. You're missing meals. You're either overeating or undereating. There's no consistency to your pattern. Sorry, you might even have vending machine dinners, know? Cafeteria food, the last pickings, the fast food, the packaged stuff, the door dash. You're getting a lack of sunlight.

You're dehydrated because you don't want to have to pee every two minutes. And you have sleep fragmentation. You do not have a consistent sleep cycle. And our body wants that. Our hormonal regulation wants consistency. You're asking your endocrine system to operate in chaos when all of this stuff is going on.

and the body wants to adapt to chaos. But that adaptation, the way that it's compensating and adapting to this dysfunctional situation, it comes at a cost. Over time, nurses experience high rates of metabolic syndrome, higher BMI trends, overall autoimmune issues, hormonal dysregulation,

mood disorders. And here's the heartbreaking part. Who do you think we blame? Of course, we blame ourselves. We blame ourselves. Instead of recognizing occupational metabolic trauma. Let me say that again. This is a clear example of occupational, occupational metabolic

Trauma. It's not weakness. This is just your physiology under pressure. Your physiology in a pressure cooker, okay? The danger to normalizing this? A lot. We've been normalizing being tired, being inflamed, being pre-diabetic, being on multiple medications by the age of 40, being deb-

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on caffeine and being chronically stressed. We call it adulthood, we call it adulting, we call it motherhood, we call it just nursing. This is what it's like to be a nurse. This is the price I have to pay. But chronic metabolic dysfunction is not inevitable. It's very, common, but it's not normal. Common does not equal optimal.

But there's hope. I really, really, really wanna give you a lot of hope. This is the part I really, really want you to hear. Metabolic dysfunction is reversible. The body is incredibly intelligent. Insulin sensitivity can improve.

and inflammation can decrease. Mitochondria can recover. Cortisol rhythms can stabilize. Weight can normalize. Energy can return, but not through punishment, not through starvation, not through extreme cardio, and definitely not through shame. Shame, guilt, and fear will be the end of you.

those vibrations, those frequencies lead to further dysfunction and they will just drag you down. Healing requires strategy, okay? It requires understanding your nervous system. It requires personalized metabolic support and it requires addressing root drivers, not just symptoms.

This is exactly what most women and nurses have never been taught. So, if this episode made you feel seen, that's intentional. Because metabolic dysfunction is not a character flaw. It is a physiological response to chronic stress, inflammation, and dysregulation. But it does not have to be your future.

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If it is your present experience, you need to really hear me when I say it does not have to be your future. In the coming episodes, we're going to dive deeper into insulin resistance, cortisol and night shift, inflammation, hormones, weight resistance, and nervous system repair.

And if you are ready to stop guessing, if you're ready to stop Googling and chat GPTing, if you're ready to stop blaming yourself, there are deeper ways to work with me inside of proactive wellness because education is powerful, but guided transformation changes lives. And friend,

Your metabolism is not your enemy. It's been trying to protect you. Now it's time to learn to work with it. I'll see you inside the next episode. And I, of course, have to end by saying that I love you already.