Blood Sugar Balancing

Are you at the fridge door again?

Easier said than done at the moment right?  With plenty of us stuck at home surrounded by tempting snacks it’s hard not to over indulge, especially when we are feeling we need some comfort or are a bit bored with our normal routine missing.  But I’ve got a horrible feeling that when we come through this, the incidence of pre-diabetes will be on the rise.  It’s early doors now – so before this is something you become at risk of, take stock of the amount of additional sugar or simple carbohydrates you have in your diet.  It’s a worrying time but try to stay strong and stay healthy in the face of what is going on in our world at the moment.  Keeping your blood sugar level balanced is key, rising blood sugar not only puts us at risk of diabetes but has an effect on many mechanisms, including hormone health, bone health, thyroid health and causes inflammation and stress our bodies just don’t need at the moment.

When you eat excess carbohydrates and sugar, insulin is released from the pancreas, and it is insulin’s job to get energy into the cells so that you can spring into action if needed.  The glucose, our energy fuel, is then used up in exercise or for stress and anything that is not used is stored, so if you are not as active as normal you’ll start to put on weight.  The constant intake of sugar and carbohydrate causes more insulin to be produced giving you not only peaks of energy (potentially unused) but also troughs that leave you feeling tired or a bit depressed.  As this happens more and more, the insulin receptors in the cell start to have impaired sensitivity leaving you with elevated sugar in the blood as it is unable to access the cell and this causes ‘insulin resistance’ which is the pre-cursor for Type 2 diabetes.

So before we go head long into this period of isolation (and we really don’t know at the moment how long it is going to last until normality returns) just start to think about what you can do now to stop this peaking and troughing of blood sugars.  Start analysing the foods you are eating and how much sugar they contain and take note.  This long list contains processed foods, any refined foods (for example white rice instead of brown rice, white pasta instead of wholegrain) any foods that have added sugars, and boy there are so many, start Noticing the ingredients.  How do you feel after a big meal? Do you feel tired?  This could be a sign that your body is starting to struggle to remove the sugars from your blood.  Look up a list of low and high glycaemic foods to make yourself more aware and see how the processed and unrefined foods rocket up beyond anything else.

Where possible break the sugar habit – or start limiting it. Sugar is also a wrinkle monster  because glucose binds to collagen and breaks it down in the skin, so if you needed further incentive then let this be it – let’s all come out of this the other end looking and feeling a lot better, not worse!