After a surprise $300 lab bill, I found a better way to order the tests I need — for a fraction of the price. Here's how cash-pay labs work and how you can order your own.

Maybe it's not the food? When your blood sugar numbers are creeping up, most of us quite rightly think the problem, and therefore the solution, will be food-related. But sometimes it's not the food. It's stress. So let's talk about the connection between stress, cortisol, and your blood sugar.

Cortisol is one of your stress hormones. These days, we tend to think of it as the bad guy. But let's remember that cortisol is actually super helpful. You want it, but you want the right amount at the right time.

I'll never forget my patient Ellen. At 53, she'd been "slimming" since her 20s, eating low-fat everything - cereal, salads, fat-free yogurt. She was doing everything "right" but couldn't lose weight and felt increasingly flabby.

The problem? Her well-intentioned diet was almost all carbs with very little protein. Decades of this approach had slowly destroyed her muscle mass, trapping her in a cycle where less muscle meant harder blood sugar regulation and more fat storage.

Does this sound familiar?