What Does A Normal Glucose Response Look Like?
Today I’d like to talk about sugar regulation, including the conditions hypoglycemia and hypoglycemia. There is a lot of research related to this topic, so we’ll also go over some clinical data, and hopefully give you some skills you can incorporate into your own life.
If you have a problem and you have dysglycemia, poor sugar regulation will be contributing to your problem. You may even be unable to recover completely from your issues. It does not matter what quality of care you receive, if your sugar regulation is out of control you will likely not recover.
What Does A Normal Glucose Response Look Like?
One thing should happen when you eat: your hunger pains go away. That's it. The follow signs that you may have a sugar regulation problem might manifest after eating:
- You get more energy.
- Shakes.
- Brain fog.
In contrast, normal glycemic control should include the following:
- You should wake up with lots of energy.
- Wake up with an appetite.
- Hungry between meals.
- Not craving sugars.
- No change in function between meals.
That last one is very critical: no change in function between meals. If you're changing in function between meals, or if you have any kind of symptoms between meals, this is an indicator that you could possibly have sugar dysregulation. No fatigue or change in energy after or between meals is ideal.
Hypoglycemia
Symptoms of hypoglycemia (when your blood sugar goes too low) include:
- You wake up with difficulty.
- No appetite in the morning.
- You consume coffee or sugar for breakfast.
- You lose function between meals (for example, you eat, you feel good, and then you crash).
- Difficulty staying asleep through the night.
The last one is very critical to understand. If your blood sugar goes down too low, your adrenal glands produce epinephrine and norepinephrine to produce glucose. When that happens, that's going to wake you up.
A spike of norepinephrine and epinephrine is an adrenaline rush. That means if you have too low blood sugar,or hypoglycemia, your adrenal glands kick in. They produce epinephrine, norepinephrine, and you wake up.
So if you're waking up through the night, a possibility is sugar dysregulation.
Later on in this article, I'm going to show you what you can do at home to measure this, to figure this out.
Hyperglycemia
Now we go to the other spectrum: insulin resistance.
Signs and causes of hyperglycemia (blood sugar levels are too high) include:
- Waking up not feeling fully recovered.
- Waking up with sugar cravings.
- Eat high-sugar and high-starch breakfast.
- You crave sugar all day
- You're fatigued after a meal (this one is critical, and we will revisit it in a moment).
- Difficulty falling asleep.
Are these some symptoms that y