Archive for low blood sugar
the chicken or the egg?
I don’t know what to blame more, or what to focus on. I still often wonder is it mainly the blood sugar causing me grief and how much does the thyroid even play into it. I wonder because: today I’m working a 7 hour shift at the model home. I brought tabbouleh for lunch and triscuits and pecans. But after that I was majorly dragging. Just wanted to nap. Then I was starving. I knew this health food wasn’t doin it for me. I need grease, bad. So I went and got a happy meal.
This reminds me of a specific memory. It’s freshman year in high school. The day of a cross-country meet. The coach told us not to eat greasy food because it would make us sluggish. I decided to try a pizza hut pan pizza and see what happened. I ended up shaving 4:55 minutes off my time. Now, I don’t think this would always yield the same results but I just can’t figure it out. Like sometimes I eat mcdonalds fries and get blurry vision and a slow stupid mind. Other times it fuels me for hours and I feel great (like if I do that for my first meal of the day.) There just seems to be no rhyme or reason to how I use food. That tabbouleh was working out great for the last week, until now.
Then there’s another question. The fertility place says that thinner people get PCOS from being high school athletes because that caused them to have too much testosterone. But then they tell us to work out all the time, so I’m confused. Like doesn’t that have to do with why I have the problem in the first place? I also keep drinking iced tea to get some energy during the day. I feel more hypo in general but who knows. None of what’s going on is making sense. It seems like my body craves fat as a fuel, and when I eat super healthy it just backfires.
blood sugars and hormones and heat – oh my!
I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while. I was in the midst of a job transition. And still am. I’m finally doing real estate full-time. Now when I get home I’m not usually as stressed out so I feel like I have free time and I need to get a life and socialize more. The weather has gotten much warmer and I am already freaked out by it. I’ve worn shorts the last 2 days and to me it’s on the edge of comfortable. I really don’t want it to get any hotter. But I know this is nothing compared to summer. And it’s weird because I used to be so unphased by the heat. In fact, I loved it. I remember laying on a hammock in the summer with a bath towel on top of me, sweating mildly and loving it. But now I can sweat when it’s not even humid out. But today wasn’t hot. It was comfortable. I’ve also realized that mentally I’m in a much better place with acupuncture, but I still need to be careful in terms of realizing that I can get overheated and dehydrated very easily.
I also finally purchased the Pines Wheatgrass Powder at my healthfood store. I like that it mixes in water pretty well. I’m not going to lie and say it tastes like a candybar. I mean it tastes like green. Grassy green stuff. But I’m excited about any product that will help me get more greens in my body. Plus, when I used to see the herbalist, part of her treatment plan for hyperthyroidism was me drinking chlorella, which is a freshwater algae from Japan. It’s supposed to detoxify the body. But this stuff didn’t mix into drinks at all so you had to blend it every time (and clean up the blender) and it was much fouler than the wheatgrass. You pretty much had to blend it with a banana and the milk of your choice just to get it down.
I went to my fertility specialist the other day to get her to let me try a different pill and see if she had any new thoughts on the yeast beast. Of course I’ve been using these tea tree suppositories so that made everything look perfect. So she still doesn’t know for sure if it even is yeast, so that was irritating. But she did ask me if I was diabetic. I said “I don’t think so, no one’s ever told me I was.” Then she asked more questions about my fasting blood sugar. I said “well, it’s always been normal. I first got diagnosed with having low sugar and I do have some high sugars after I eat, but the fasting is always fine.” Then she said that I may want to have a glucose tolerance test because I obviously have a problem and could be diabetic since I hadn’t had that test done.
She pointed out that thousands of people are diabetic and don’t know it. So that really freaked me out. I had figured from the way I felt that my body would go diabetic in maybe 10 years, but she made it out like it would be much sooner than that. I was shocked because I have a blood sugar tester and I didn’t think my numbers were bad enough, often enough to be diabetic. But I can see her point. If they make me drink a ton of sugar on an empty stomach, my sugar could go high enough for me to be called diabetic, because my body can’t control itself. I just didn’t know you could diagnose diabetes that way. I thought it was ONLY if you had a high fasting, meaning that you wake up with it already high. I think it will be a while before this test gets scheduled. Because I don’t have insurance so I will have to have her write a note that I need it. Then I will have to go get an appt with the city health people and see if they will give me permission to get it done. Then I may be waiting for a month to even get it scheduled. So who knows. Unless it’s not very expensive with her people.
Then that very day, I got home and ate a bowl of pasta and meat and ran around the block twice. By the end I could barely lift my legs up and then I felt really dizzy, shakey and like my vision was kind of blurry. So I figure it had something to do with the blood sugar. Maybe I burned through too much sugar too fast? I’m not sure, but it aroused my suspicions even more.
I also talked her into letting me try a progestin-only pill. And I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. She doesn’t think I will like it. But I had read that people with PCOS are lacking progesterone, not estrogen. And I also feel like the combination pill makes me kind of sexually numb from the waist down, to some extent. I also wonder if it has anything to do with me feeling dried out like an old lady and having this nonstop yeast beast. It does say in the package insert that it can cause yeast problems, so I figure may as well take it out of the scenario. But then I read up on progestin only pills and it said they can cause hair growth on the face and acne, 2 of the symptoms of pcos and too much male hormones. So I hope progestin is not derived from a male hormone. I’m pretty nervous about trying it. Even though I was on the shot for 2 years and loved it – even though a few endos told me it was horrible and to get off it asap. Oh well, I’ll keep you posted.
the latest
well, I still can’t seem to get caught up on my bills, even since I’ve started working full-time again. I’ve been toying with the idea of going with a less expensive acupuncturist since my Massage Therapist friend knows of one. I feel bad even thinking that though since I really like my acupuncturist and feel like we have a rapor and I want to be loyal. Plus, she worked at a hospital in China. But money is an ongoing problem with me, so we’ll see. I would at least find out if the same herbal formulas are available at a different place before I would try a new place out.
I still don’t sleep much during the workweek. I am not a morning person, nor do I ever really want to be one. I have to be at work at 7:55 and I usually get there at 7:58 which is already a problem. I’m hoping I can save up money and jump into real estate full-time at some point, but I don’t know how soon that could happen. Things keep coming up. At least with real estate there are no rules about what time you have to get there or anything like that. (Well, at my company there aren’t).
I went running in the woods at that park earlier this week. I figured out which way to go so that I wouldn’t have to really do any uphills. So I did the whole loop and it probably wasn’t too far but I felt proud of myself. But for me running in the woods is way easier than on the roads. I still hope to do a 5k at some point but feel no immediacy about when. Since I felt bad that one week when I ran 2 days in a row, I’m not pushing myself at all. Once a week or so is fine by me. A girl I work with is going to walk a 5k in a month or so and her saying that got me thinking about it more. So who knows. But my muscles have been hurting a lot lately. Not because I did anything. Just because I guess it’s a part of the Graves. My dr. had suspected fibromyalgia at one point because I have Lupus antibodies and I had a high sed rate once. I’ve been sent to rheumatologists twice and they just said it was the Graves that causes those labs. I do think I have some kind of chronic inflammatory issue going on from the Graves and the achiness has been bothering me lately and freaking me out, considering that I’m in my twenties. It makes we worried about what it might feel like when I’m actually old. But I do still have hope that things will come together one way or another. I feel like I have new weapons by looking outside the box.
I also came across an interesting tidbit online yesterday about PCOS. If you go to the wikipedia page on it, at the bottom there was information about a supplement that supposedly treats all of the problems by fixing a missing link in the insulin process. It looks like there are actual published studies on this substance and it really does work, the problem is that it is pretty much impossible to get in the U.S. But I guess there is a similar supplement available. I may try it at some point, because I am getting more and more fed up with the PCOS options that are out there. I always think,”Who has the money to take Metformin and end up in the hospital all the time from the side effects?” Not I said the little red hen, Not I.
I also always feel the weight of that stigma, where they say that people with blood sugar problems/diabetes got it because they gained weight and didn’t take care of themselves. I constantly see this message all over magazines and the media and it makes me mad and I feel the unfairness of my situation. I loved working out and suddenly had to stop from being so weak from the Graves/blood sugar problems that came on at the same time. I hate the diabetes stigma, I think it’s an unfair message to be propogating. Instead, we should talk more about having a food supply that is closer to Canadas. Take out the MSG from our Campbells soup, our chips, our sausage and everything else. Take out the corn syrup, the excessive salt, the preservatives. I think it’s not that people don’t try, it’s that in America our food supply is basically tainted.
Prime example. My mom had a Curves magazine and I was reading it. They were saying not to eat corn syrup – it makes you fat. Well, well, well – and what do we have in Curves cereal which claims to make you thin? …..Corn Syrup!!!!
hmmm
- the last time I had acupuncture was aweek ago (December 28). I remember I had been kind of depressed and I told her that and now I’m not. Sleeping has been more of a struggle but not as much in the past few days. I have a hard time with being wired when it’s time to wind down during the week (and right now I’m physically spent but mentally not).
- I did get hired at a new job but haven’t started yet. It’s from 8-5 every day and I’m nervous that it will be a struggle to go to bed at a decent hour and get up. (Always has been a struggle). I tend to get stressed out when I know I have to get up early. Then I can’t sleep or am just wired wanting to read late at night and usually by the end of the week I’m dead. I’m also nervous about the eating at work/low blood sugar situation. To feel good I really need to eat every 2-3 hours, which always makes me feel like a lazy person or paranoid that I will get in trouble for it. But I will say that when I was doing acupuncture once a week my blood sugar was not as big a part of my life.
Hopefully the new job will also give me a little more money to get back into eating healthy and experimenting with new things. One of the things I wanted to try was wheatgrass powder. I guess you just pour it in water and make a drink out of it. If it tastes decent it could be a good way for me to get more greens.
I also ate little cups of applesauce this week in between breakfast & lunch at work and that was a catastrophe. My mom buys the kind with corn syrup added and I’m not sure if this is why, but both times after I ate it my vision was all blurry and I got hot and felt like I was getting closer to passing out. So I am steering clear of that from now on.
I’m hoping to have enough money to do acupuncture once a week again, but we’ll see.
Also tonight I finally went shopping for some running clothes. I got a few tops and a pair of sweat pants and the modern loose polyester equivalent of what used to be running tights. I’m excited about this new gear – a lot of it seems sleek and I’m hoping it will get me more enthused. I like the idea of feeling compact and streamlined when running. I’m thinking running could be an important part of me improving if it really will help my blood sugar problems. My goal of course is to get better to the point where I can run 5k races again like I used to in high school. I need some of those long-sleeve running t-shirts that you get at the races (always the main motivator for me to race, but now that I’m older I also like that the races benefit good causes).
Although I have felt NO urge to go running lately. I haven’t had the energy I had when I was going to acu once a week. But I think that even going every other week I am doing better than I was before I started ever going.
I think my outlook is way better. I realized that by constantly thinking about Graves disease, with it’s disease name I was feeding the beast. Now I think more about healing, or getting better, or the improvements I have had.
