Hi Jimmy — welcome to our forums!
As a person with hypoglycemia also (although now 100% controlled) I am going to venture some ideas that I think will be very helpful for you.
You have not mentioned how long you have been on the BSD, so I am assuming you are recently started and give my advice from that viewpoint (so if it all seems too basic, sorry for the primer!).
Your (and my) hypoglycaemia is probably due to an overeager insulin response in your body. The human body does not like its stasis point to be changed much — when it has unusual new inputs, it works very hard to get back to a “set point” that it has become adjusted to.
A person with a high insulin response will secrete a lot of insulin after eating a meal, and that secretion, along with a chronic high background level of insulin (which you might have inherited), will quickly clear all the sugar from your bloodstream. The sugar will be packed into your muscles, your liver and packaged into fat transport molecules to go to your fat stores.
When your blood sugar is depleted, you feel it as a period of hypoglycaemia— you get that weird cold feeling on your skin, numbness around your mouth, shakiness, weakness and a generally creepy feeling.
You don’t like it and your body doesn’t like it because it is threatening that stasis point I talked about above, so your body shoots out adrenaline to counter the low blood sugar. Which sets you up for adrenal exhaustion and icky shakiness and your description of it — depriving you of happiness.
So what is the solution? Well, the BSD is an excellent solution so you are already on the right track — however, for a few weeks or months you are going to have to get even more strict with your intake of carbohydrates in order to learn where your own personal hypoglycaemia threshold is — in other words, how MUCH carbohydrate and what KIND of carbohydrate can you eat without setting off a hypoglycaemic episode.
Your body is unique and you need to learn what your body can tolerate — I can’t tell you what is going to work for you, but I have some starting points for you.
First, you need to get into ketosis, where your body is burning your own fat stores for its fuel. This takes a bit of time, our bodies actually need to LEARN how to burn fat instead of carbohydrate — they get better at it with practice.
So start now to cut your daily carbohydrate intake to a strict minimum — 20 grams of carbohydrate per day will get you into ketosis and burning your own fat stores. It may take some time to get that low, but just keep cutting back on carbs, substituting fat and a bit more protein for the carbs. It took me about two months to figure this out and to understand how I felt when I was in ketosis.
I recommend NO bread for now (it turns to sugar too quickly in the body) and very little fruit for a couple of weeks. You can add back in high quality carbohydrates later when you have blood sugar control.
Once your carb intake is low enough, your hypoglycaemia is going to stop. This is because you have your own fuel source with you at all times — your fat.
Why does this happen? It happens because once you lower your carb intake, your insulin levels are going to plummet. Insulin is your “fat storage” hormone and it works to push fat into your adipose tissue and, most importantly, LOCK IT UP in your fat cells so you cannot access it.
When insulin is high, you have low blood sugar and you feel starving — and you ARE starving on a cellular level because you cannot mobilise the energy you are carrying around as fat. That insulin is a little sheriff, locking up your useful fat and starving your cells of fuel.
Your goal is to lower your insulin and maintain the insulin at a lower level.
So snacks for us are, nuts (walnuts and pecans and hazelnuts, not cashews or peanuts). Eggs, hard boiled. Meat, cooked chicken, ham, sausage or other like that. Cheese.
No milk, no sugar, no bread, flour, pulses, no beer. Later on you can try these back one by one and watch your body’s response.
I have only had one low blood sugar event in three years — that was after eating an apple on an empty stomach. I have been 30-40 carbs per day for three years in maintenance.
It absolutely works. Your body was designed to work brilliantly. Give it a chance — it’s going to become your trusted friend again.
