Hypoglycemia
How Bad it WasThe Test
How Hypoglycemia Works
How the Diet Changed Me
The Diet
Menu Ideas
Links
This is my personal experience with hypoglycemia.
I am not a doctor, but I have been successfully living with it for about
15 years. I do recommend that you visit the links at the bottom of this
page for more help, recipies, and information. I want to share how bad
it used to be, and how symptom free I am now. Plus, of course, the diet
that changed my life. If you strongly identify with the things on
this page, go to a doctor who takes hypoglycemia seriously, and visit
the links at the bottom of this page for more information and help.
I believe now that I always been hypoglycemic, but I did not know it until my symptoms became severely pronounced after the birth of my first child. The worst symptom that I had was terrible tiredness. I was home all day with the baby, and I was exhausted all day. Everyone said it was because I was a new mother. But as the months wore on, I wasn't getting my strength back like my friends. I always needed so sit down and rest. After lunch, I would get so extremely tired. My eyes would get heavy and I could not stay awake. I felt drugged. My toddler could stay awake just fine, so I would lock us in his bedroom where it was safe, and I would sleep on the bed, and he would play on the floor. I used to get headaches after eating deserts. I also was depressed, crying, and I couldn't focus. I tried eating more healthy foods: I cut out all junk food, and was eating whole wheat bread on my sandwiches, big glasses of milk or fruit juice, and brown rice and pasta, but nothing changed. Also, I was starting to lose too much weight. I had always been skinny, so I could eat whatever I wanted. But I went from 110 to 103, and I was not dieting. My girlfriends said that maybe I had PMS, the fad ailment at the time. I charted my days through the month, but all month I had low energy, grouchy moods, and crying. I got a checkup. The doctor looked in my ears and down my throat and said I was fine. I thought maybe I just didn't know how to clean the house and take care of a baby, and maybe I was doing it all wrong. I bought all kinds of books, and I leaned a lot, but I couldn't implement what I read. I was just so tired. My friends started thinking I was just lazy. Richard said told me that he wished I would get hit by a car and die (since divorce was a sin). We went to our pastors for counseling, and they said I probably had a demon, so they prayed over me. Someone said that maybe I had a thyroid problem, so I went to the doctor and got a blood test. They took blood and had the lab send back the results: thyroid fine, sugar level normal, etc.. Nothing was wrong with me.
One day my mom said, "Why don't you go to my doctor?" I told her that all the doctors said I was okay. She said she would pay for it. So I went. The doctor was an endrochronologist. He gave me a list of symptoms to fill out, and I had 99% of them. I was encouraged that this was the stuff he regularly dealt with. He said, "First, we are going to give you a 6-Hour Glucose Tolerance Test.
I had to eat a lot of carbohydrates for two days. It was much more than my normal amount, and I began to feel nauseous. Then I went to the doctor first thing in the morning fasting. They pricked my finger for a drop of blood and charted the sugar. Then I had to drink a super sugary soda as fast as I could. That almost made me sick too, but they said if I couldn't keep it down, they would have to give me another one. That was an incentive. They pricked my finger again, and then every hour for six hours while I sat in a chair and read all day. I guess my blood sugar was doing something interesting, because they decided to step it up to every half-hour.
When it was over, they pretty much just said, "Well, you are Glucose Intolerant. Eat only the stuff on this handout, and come back in two weeks." That was really miserable since everything on the no-no side was my favorite stuff, and I ate it all the time.
The reason that the first blood test by the general practitioner didn't find the hypoglycemia was because it only took a "snapshot" of my blood sugar. I had probably eaten before I went, and the test could not tell if the blood sugar was going up or down, or how fast, or for how long. I have also discovered that many doctors do not "believe" in hypoglycemia. They say it is a fad or non existent. Therefore, they refuse to test for it or even discuss it. Or, they say, "well, if your blood sugar is low, then you need to eat more sugar". But that is the exact opposite of what you need to do.
Now I am not a doctor, but
according to the best of my understanding from reading books, this is what
happens:
When a regular person eats carbohydrates, the pancreas
says, "Oh, sugar. Send some insulin". This keeps the blood
sugar levels safe and even. But when a hypoglycemic's pancreas detects
sugar, it panics, "Oh-My-God! Sugar! Red alert! Quick, the insulin!",
and pours way too much insulin into the bloodstream. Then there is not
enough sugar that is needed, and you feel tired and crummy and say, "Gee,
I'm craving sugar". So you eat more carbs, and the pancreas overreacts
again, thus creating a vicious cycle. The brain, which is very sensitive,
needs sugar to think (which explains the depression, poor motivation and
concentration, and the plummeting emotions), and the body needs sugar
for energy. In some forms of hypoglycemia, such as Reactive Hypoglycemia,
eventually the pancreas will exhaust itself and not be able to put out
the insulin anymore. Then you become diabetic. The answer is to get energy
without alerting the pancreas. We need to tippy-toe around it by using
protein as an energy source.
It was very, very hard to stay on my diet at first, but I did not cheat at all. Richard was no help, stuffing his face with potato chips and ice cream while he admonished me to stay on my diet. (He was upset that I had a physical ailment, and he said, "I know I said 'in sickness and in health, but I didn't mean THIS!". What did he mean then, a cold? Later among our couple friends, one woman developed brain cancer, and one came down with Lupis. I mean, let's put this in perspective!) Anyway, I am not a creative cook, and so everything seemed pretty bland and boring. But things began to change pretty quickly, like in a couple of days. I wish I had kept a journal of it because it was such a dramatic difference. The first thing I noticed was that I was not tired anymore. I woke up perky and energetic and ready to tackle the day. I could stay on top of all the housework chores, plus deep clean one room each day. I became focused, motivated, organized, and my depression evaporated. I could control my temper. My craving for sugar evaporated. My weight went back to normal and stableized. All the books I read about housework became useful and I was teaching my girlfriends my shortcuts. But the best thing was that I did not need a nap after lunch. Now after lunch, I had a burst of new energy, as if I had just jumped out of bed. I got pregnant after a couple of weeks of getting on my diet, and even though pregnancy really taxes a woman's energy, I remember clearly that I only took two afternoon naps during the entire pregnancy. I remembered when I was younger, and I could see now that I had always been hypoglycemic. I read that 1 in 10 people have it. I thought back to my classes in school. I remember after lunch, I usually had a hard time staying awake in class, and would fall asleep at my desk. So did two other specific students in a class of 30. Hmmmm. I wonder if they had it too. I was labeled an underachiever all through school. But now I could focus and concentrate. My mom used to say that I used to get overly tired and hungry when I was a toddler, and flop down on the ground crying. She knew that a little snack, like a piece of cheese, always helped. My sisters weren't that way. With my new brain and energy, I see that I could have done well in school if I had only known about this years ago. I was such a new person. I felt like I had a brain transplant. After two weeks I went back to the doctor and he said that I could add only two pieces of whole wheat bread to my diet. I stayed on that diet for two years straight. I had my second child and nursed her for many months while on that diet.
After that, I started to cheat to see what would happen. I discovered that I could eat a sandwich, as long as I did not have milk or juice with it, otherwise I would get sleepy. If I wanted some milk or some other forbidden food, I ate it between meals when I was not too hungry or just ate, so that my body was not already stressed. I was careful not to overdo the cheating either. I learned that I could go back to eating most of the healthy foods that I had eaten before, but as soon as I had any symptoms, I would go back to the strict diet for a few days. My pancreas was no longer trigger happy, but I just had to be careful and aware.
For fifteen years I have been eating that way. The fatigue is gone for good. If I don't get enough sleep the night before, I am tired for the whole day. But if I am awake in the morning, and then suddenly sleepy after lunch, I know that it is my pancreas pouring on the insulin. I never overdo it anymore so that I have the headaches and the cloudy thinking. After my divorce, for many years I usually worked two jobs, getting up at 5:00 a.m., and going to bed at 11:00 p.m. I know this normal for many people, but I was not feeling that drugged sleepiness from hypoglycemia. Twice I worked full time during the day, and I went to vocational school at night, four nights a week for over a year. I was the only Valedictorian for the night classes in paralegal school, and I got a 3.85 at computer programming school. I have the ability to stay awake, work hard, push myself, think clearly, and study hard.
When I moved in with John, his mom was doing the cooking for everybody, and I had more ready-to-eat food handy. I wasn't straying from my diet too badly, but I started gaining weight because I could eat until I was full. I wanted to lose some of the weight, but all the diets said to cut out fat, (which was usually found in the protein foods. But low-fat diet products usually made up for the fat by adding extra sugar. To go on a low-fat diet would mean eating too much carbohydrates for me. I tried not eating, but after a couple of hours, I would get hungry. I could not budge the weight at all. Someone mentioned that my hypoglycemic diet was similar to the Atkins diet, which was supposed to help you lose weight. So I went back on my strict hypoglycemic diet, and the pounds started to come off, even though I eat whenever I am hungry. When I was at work, I shared my diet success with my girlfriends, and some of them chose to cut back on carbs and try the protein instead, just to see if it would help them lose weight. The next thing you know, they were losing excess weight without starving, and they were sharing that they were feeling more perky, more energetic, more focused, less depressed, and best of all not fighting the overwhelming urge to nap at their desks after lunch. I had no idea that my friends were struggling with these problems.
The Diet
Now, this is the diet that my doctor gave me. He pulled in out of the filing cabinet and handed me this on a pre-printed sheet, so I guess that this is pretty standard. However, people are individuals, and you might need some adjusting if you have different tolerences to things like apples, strawberries or milk. Check with your true-believing doctor.
| General | |
| Eat whenever you are hungry, but just eat until
you are satisfied. Do not eat until you are
stuffed. MOST IMPORTANT! You must have AT LEAST one ounce of protein: Every 2 hours while you are awake Within an hour of waking up in the morning (breakfast) Lunch Dinner, ½ hour before bedtime If you wake up in the middle of the night. You must have between 10 and 12 ounces of protein each day. |
READ ALL LABELS (or just quit buying packaged stuff). No sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose, or any other "ose";. They are all fancy names for pure sugar. No corn syrup, regular syrup, corn starch, or honey. |
| Misc. | |
| Yes: Decaffinated Coffee, herb tea, Valodol, Plain Aspirin, or Tylenol. | No: Caffine at all! Coffee, cola, pain killers
with caffeeine (Anacin, Excedrin, Emprin,
etc.) No: Alcohol No Beer, Wine, Champagne, Hard Liquor |
| Meat and Nuts | |
| Yes: Most meats such as: Beef, Pork, Lamb, Veal, Chicken or Turkey without skin, Seafood, Nuts. (If you are gaining weight, cut out the nuts.) Peanut butter (read the label: no added sugar!) | No:Processed meat, like Bologna, Salami, Bacon, Sausage. |
| Dairy | |
| Yes: Cheese (preferably white cheeses), Cottage Cheese, Cream, Sour Cream, Butter | No: Milk (no Whole Milk, Lowfat Milk, or even Skim Milk), processed cheese, like Velveta, and American Single slices. |
| Vegetables | |
| Yes:Most vegetables, such as: Broccoli, Spinach, Cauliflower, Asparagus, Green Beans, Cabbage, Raw Salad Vegetables, Mushrooms, Tomatoes, Avocados, Cucumbers, Bell Pepper, Brussel Sprouts, Alfalfa Sprouts, Squash, and Okra. LIMIT Carrots. | No: Easy carrots. No Pinto Beans, Kidney Beans, Navy Beans, Potatoes, Peas, Corn. (Even though "Rice and Beans is a complete protein";, your pancreas sees them as carbohydrates.) |
| Fruits | |
| Yes: Most fruits such as Apples, Oranges, Grapefruit (plain!), but ONLY THREE EACH DAY, and not all at the same time. (It's good to space them out between meals.) | No: Fruit Juice (1/2 cup juice counts as one whole fruit allowance, even then check the container to make sure that no corn syrup is added). No Bananas, Grapes, Watermelon, Dried Fruits. No Jam, Jelly, Preserves. |
| Starches | |
| Yes: Nothing | No: Breads and Pasta Bread, pasta, rolls, cereal, flour cake, donuts, etc.. |
Breakfast: Eggs:
Omelets with cheese and / or vegetables,
Scrambled (with cheese or vegetables), Hard boiled for packing in
lunchsacks.
Lunch: instead
of a sandwich, make hearty salads: Lettuce
and tomatoes with tuna salad, chicken salad, or egg salad. Stuff a tomato
or avocado with these protein salads.
Dinner: Meat
with vegetables. Put cheese on spinach
broccoli or squash. Put spaghetti sauce on zucchini or chicken. (If it is
bottled, read all the labels until you
find the one without the corn syrup added). BBQ meat (without BBQ Sauce),
Sautéed mushrooms.
Snacks: Mixed
nuts (I buy the packages and mix them
myself because it is cheaper), Cheese, Chicken pieces, Green Apples with
peanut butter, 1 popsicle made out of
pure fruit juice (by you at home with a mold!), Cottage Cheese with
tomatoes.
If you have any ideas or suggestions, please e-mail them to me: kizu@earthlink.net
H.E.L.P. The Institute for Body Chemistry
Sweet Nothings Hypoglycemia Newsletter
Stop! Don't Shoot! Help for Hypoglycemics
(I would like to thank William M. Thompson from "Stop! Don't Shoot!" for his
helpful suggestions to my page.)
The Reactive Hypoglycemic Home Page