If you have read my story of healing from hypoglycemia using a low-carbohydrate/ketogenic way of eating, you know that I used to have severe reactive hypoglycemia (i.e. low blood sugar between means). But, here is a MAJOR newsflash and a powerful truth that I learned on my keto journey: being hangry is not normal! It may sound cute but it’s not. And, you, like me, deserve to be free from the constant spikes and dips of carbohydrate dependency and intolerance.
For those of you who don’t know, I explain hypoglycemia to people like this: it is like the opposite of Diabetes. Instead of the risk being that your blood sugar spikes too high, like with Diabetes, with hypoglycemia, the risk is that your blood sugar drops too much. This triggers a stress response in your body that usually includes symptoms of shaking, confusion, irritability, impaired motor coordination, rapid heart rate, fatigue, dizziness, nausea, and other symptoms that are not exactly comfortable. Throughout they years when I was struggling with hypoglycemia, I could not go over three hours without eating a full meal because I would immediately feel all of the above symptoms. I would even sometimes get the above symptoms even when I had just eaten and “felt just fine a minute ago.” I never knew how much food was “enough” and this caused constant anxiety and the need to bring food with me wherever I went just in case my blood sugar unexpectedly bottomed out on me despite my best efforts at listening to my body.
It would always amaze me how others I knew could go for hours and not even think about food or the need to eat! I always had a fast metabolism as an athlete so I figured me needing to eat all of the time may be attributable to that. But, when I started asking questions of my doctor, I learned that the average person should be able to go at least four hours without food without feeling ill. I then knew that something was wrong!
Attempting to get to the bottom of it, I asked for a glucose tolerance test (the same test they give pregnant women to test for Gestational Diabetes). I got to fast overnight (which was already a huge struggle), drink this horrible sugary orange goo, and have my blood drawn multiple times to see how quickly my blood sugar reacted. After receiving my lab results, my doctor told me I was “definitely hypoglycemic.” The strangest thing: my blood sugar levels were still within the “normal” range, hovering between 70mg/dL and 80mg/dL!
So, here is the newsflash:
If something feels off, it probably is! Above all, listen to your body!
Digging deeper into the science behind blood sugar dis-regulation, insulin resistance, and carbohydrate intolerance in my own research and through my training as a Nutrition Network Practitioner, I found that it is not uncommon for people to have significant symptoms of hypoglycemia or metabolic dysfunction even when their labs are “normal”. Even people with Diabetes can have “normal” fasting glucose and glucose tolerance tests! This is because there is so much more going on with blood sugar than is able to be detected with a simple test.
It is not only about the glucose response, but the insulin response to stabilize the glucose; in addition to how rapidly the glucose is changing. (Sometimes, and I learned this in my own life when I started testing my sugars with an at-home meter, people feel hypoglycemic not because their blood sugar is outside of the “normal range,” but because it has dropped too rapidly from a higher value.) If nothing more, issues with glucose and insulin suggest a condition called “Insulin Resistance,” for which there are no clinical guideline for how to either diagnose or test. In addition to all of these complicating factors, such tests tend to return as “abnormal” only after there has been significant metabolic dysfunction. So, by the time labs come back formally as “abnormal,” significant damage has already been done.
You deserve to not feel at the mercy of your blood sugar crashing every couple hours. And, indeed, it is not normal. With a ketogenic way of eating, you can switch your body’s fuel source from the rapid burning (which means rapid-crashing) glucose to the slow- and clean- burning fat (from ketones) and not have to live with the constant roller coaster of blood sugar instability!
So, even if your doctor says what you feel is “nothing to worry about,” do what I tell all the people I work with to do: listen to your body! You should be able to go hours without eating and not feel like you are going to die. You should be able to eat a meal, feel satiated, and not feel like you have to have your next meal RIGHT NOW or you are going to lose your mind. Switching to a ketogenic way of eating has completely changed my quality of life and has helped me to regain trust and stability with my body. Although my physicians weren’t concerned about my symptoms, I was. And, when I advocated for myself and did my own research, I was relieved to learn that being “hangry” is not normal. There is something you can do about it. Hope is possible!
