Reactive Hypoglycemia hacks?

[bumpkin]

For those who deal with reactive hypoglycemia..

If you overdo it on carbs earlier in the day, do you find that you can 'get away with' similar (but slightly lower high-carb) snacks a couple hours later, as if you're padding the anticipated drop in blood glucose and keeping it slightly elevated while bringing it down gradually? 

I've done okay maintaining it with not going too heavy on carbs and then having low-carb fruit snacks a couple hours after meals, but I'd like to eat more of a variety of foods, and carbs especially give me a nice energy boost.. It seems like as long as I don't go too long without eating anything, and as long as I don't go super heavy on carbs in a single sitting, I can still have some fairly high-carb items without the absurd hypoglycemic (but not actually-hypoglycemic) backlash. 

Just pondering how many times a day I could roll those dice without it coming back to bite me.. Not a fan of living in fear of hypoglycemic reactions just because I wanted to live a little and eat my favorite foods.. there's gotta be a better compromise than subbing out all the best ingredients for stuff that's just safe 🥲

Wondering if it's something that can be safely manipulated throughout the day, since the big deal seems to be the resulting gap in blood glucose between too many and none.. Maybe could ride it out from one meal to another living it up with pasta etc and then do the boring low-carb snack toward the end of the day to prevent it from completely tanking 🤔

[MomtoGiuliana]

I deal with this when I have severe flare ups.  Usually it only lasts weeks at a time for me, so I don't have lots of experience with it.  The only thing that really helps me is eating a lot of small meals/snacks and avoiding added sugar like the plague.  If I go too long without eating anything (eg several hours) that is my biggest trigger.

[MikeO]

Unfortunately blood sugars can be unpredictable at times. You do the best you can. There are variables like stress, illness, a poor night sleep, hormones, food, activity etc..... that can affect blood glucose levels unexpectedly.

I agree that eating small meals throughout the day is advised. sugars i.e pasta (which converts to sugar) can aggravate RH. i run into lows quite frequently so i will correct with a snack or eat a small meal depending what the prior meal was and my blood sugar response. skipping meals is bad....

I do benefit being able to test or see my BG's in real time so i stay ahead of the curve.. A protein a couple of hours after a carby meal can help (string cheese) or a piece of toast with peanut butter.  

 

[bumpkin]

I appreciate y'all weighing in on it, I'm clearly still in the bargaining stage over here 🥲

I indulged in a cup of mac and cheese on the side with dinner earlier and am getting the creeping feeling like I surely made a deal with the devil (it's been a quiet evening so probably just sensing the fluctuation) but also sensed that perhaps if I snack some more then maybe the devil won't collect my hypoglycemic soul, lol. 

Couldn't help it, I got those dysautonomia blues.. everyone else around me has been having pizza all week, and places around here hopped off the "whole wheat pizza crust gimmick" bandwagon years ago.. Started thinking maybe I could grab some whole wheat English muffins and make mini pizzas with those 🍕

Thanks again for the tips, I'll have to pick up some string cheese.. been awhile since I had those on hand 🐭 Will admit I've gotten a little tired of beef jerky and snack bars.. need more variety

[Pistol]

I second what @MomtoGiuliana mentioned - frequent snacks seem to do the trick for me. I eat snacks all day long, this helps me avoid sudden blood glucose drops following meals. Cheese seems to do the trick for me - half a slice counts as a snack and it prevents drops. 

[MikeO]

8 hours ago, bumpkin said:

everyone else around me has been having pizza all week, and places around here hopped off the "whole wheat pizza crust gimmick" bandwagon years ago.. Started thinking maybe I could grab some whole wheat English muffins and make mini pizzas with those

One suggestion i can give you is ditch the whole wheat muffins and use some keto tortillas (net zero) as the crust and then add whatever toppings that work for you. Here i attached a graph that shows a slow blood sugar crash. Ate 1/2 cup of oatmeal (equivalent to 2 slices of bread 30 carbs) at 9:15 am took about 4 hours to get my BG down to a point where my CGM alerted me as to going low soon. so i corrected (I no longer wait to see how low i will go) with a piece of bread with peanut butter.

Rumour is there is early RH 2-3 hours after eating and then late RH 3-5 hours after eating. I have seen both.

 

[bumpkin]

Thanks @Pistol that is a good policy, I used to eat like that (a decade ago after a coworker heard wrappers constantly crumpling on my side of our shared cubicle wall, they felt compelled to ask me "Are you just always eating?" Yes, I was, lol, it worked well for me then) but I later became concerned about insulin levels through the day after hearing about how we're supposed to have fasting periods.. now it's broken though so I'll be eatin' to save my life, it looks like 🙂

[bumpkin]

13 hours ago, MikeO said:

One suggestion i can give you is ditch the whole wheat muffins and use some keto tortillas (net zero) as the crust and then add whatever toppings that work for you. Here i attached a graph that shows a slow blood sugar crash. Ate 1/2 cup of oatmeal (equivalent to 2 slices of bread 30 carbs) at 9:15 am took about 4 hours to get my BG down to a point where my CGM alerted me as to going low soon. so i corrected (I no longer wait to see how low i will go) with a piece of bread with peanut butter.

Rumour is there is early RH 2-3 hours after eating and then late RH 3-5 hours after eating. I have seen both.

 

I really appreciate the pro-tip and the CGM graph Mike, and I've felt both of those too. Maybe just avoiding getting to the crash point and mitigating it with snacks through the day should be enough.. As long as they're not heavy meals that cause the blood pooling to the stomach, I'd expect that closing the gap before the body detects too wide of a drop should help avoid the hypoglycemia reaction. But you also had an important point about all the other factors that affect blood glucose levels, since there's a lot outside of our control about it, the risk of such a bad trip isn't really worth the delicious high carb foods. 

Glad to hear you no longer wait to find out how low it's gonna go, that's certainly been enough experimenting with blood sugar and imminent syncope for a lifetime! Your doctors should have all the examples of it that they would need by now to believe you and treat it. 

Oatmeal was part of my routine for awhile (I was even buying the fancy organic kind that was supposed to be a slow burning carb) but I could regularly feel those spikes too, so I ended up basically cutting oats out for the most part to avoid the symptoms. 

I'd completely forgotten that I had looked up the glycemic index for whole wheat English muffins once before, it was many months ago now while I was out shopping (the glycemic load listed on.. I think it was Foodstruct, was what put me off from those that night, and then after that I had simply put most breads out of mind regardless of whole wheat, whole grain, etc). But i keep daydreaming about pizza in any form, so now my brain wants to queue them up again as a possibility lol. I get small pizza-like fixes here and there, like I do alright with mozzarella sticks on the side with some marinara sauce, but the breading on those isn't as dense as a pizza crust or slices of bread. One farm-to-table place makes a good margherita flatbread I seem to do fine with. 

I looked around for the keto tortillas tonight but I'll have to try some other stores. Did grab some mini beef jerkys, string cheeses, and some mini organic juice boxes since those seem to help keep me level and also help hit the spot whenever the ol' sweet tooth strikes (I swear, high fructose corn syrup must be a drug, there's times I'll be absolutely fiending for some fruit punch.. Growing up in the 90s left me with some really bad food habits that it took me until a year ago to shake off, can't believe I still get the junkfood cravings).