Hypoglycemia For Dummies

Cheryl Chow, James Chow

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118051382
• Edition: 72
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nutrition, Dietics & Bariatrics

This no-nonsense, plain-English guide lays out the facts you need to maintain a healthy body. Hypoglycemia simply means "low blood-sugar, " but without concrete symptoms it's very hard to diagnose. It is nevertheless a condition that should be watched over carefully. People react differently to low blood sugar as well as to the treatment they receive. Hypoglycemia for Dummies explores this fickle condition and shows you how to manage your blood sugar to feel better.

It offers expert advice on identifying symptoms, changing lifestyles, and also extensive coverage on diet, exercise, alternative treatments, and the link between low blood sugar and diabetes. This expanded 2 nd edition provides:

• A thorough explanation of hypoglycemia and how it affects your body
• Exercise routines that lead to a healthier lifestyle
• Diet suggestions on what to eat and how often
• A basis for choosing a doctor that's right for you
• Vitamins and supplements that treat your symptoms
• Ways to manage hypoglycemia in the workplace
• An explanation of how hypoglycemia affects family and friends
• Methods to de-stress yourself

Complete with tips on helping other hypoglycemics and myth-debunking facts about the disease, Hypoglycemia for Dummies is the fast and simple way to learn and treat the condition, with the help of the most up-to-date medical information available. Escape the blood sugar blues and starting feeling better in no time!

Part I

Addressing Your Ups and Downs: Could This Be Hypoglycemia?

In this part . . .

If you want to know the most important facts about hypoglycemia, you can find them here. This part lists the different types of hypoglycemia that are known to the medical world, and how they may affect people at different ages. We cover some of the hypoglycemic complications that can result from diabetes, and we tell you about other common conditions that you should watch out for. We also show you just how many symptoms are associated with hypoglycemia.

Chapter 1

Riding the Blood Sugar Roller Coaster Isn’t Any Fun

In This Chapter

Figuring out what hypoglycemia is

Linking hypoglycemia and diabetes

Identifying symptoms of hypoglycemia

Looking at who’s prone to blood sugar imbalance

Taking the road to radiant health

O ver the years, researchers have coined different names for the condition that people suffer from when they believe that they have hypoglycemia, including functional hypoglycemia, relative hypoglycemia, disinsulinism, hypoglycemic fatigue, and insulinogenic hypoglycemia. Don’t get too hung up on the names, though. Your attention should be on regaining your health, not worrying about what your constellation of symptoms should be called.

No matter what you or your doctor calls your low blood sugar, this chapter is a great starting point. This chapter gives you the lowdown on hypoglycemia, who’s prone to having it, and what you can do to make this roller coaster ride not so rough.

Defining Hypoglycemia

Defining hypoglycemia is easy. It’s low (hypo) blood sugar (glycemia). Modern medicine, or allopathic medicine, which is Western medicine as it’s practiced in developed countries, recognizes two major categories of hypoglycemia — organic and fasting, which both generally have clear-cut causes — as legitimate. Other types of hypoglycemia, which fall under the category of relative and reactive hypoglycemia, aren’t usually recognized by mainstream medicine. It’s still a controversial subject, although some studies indicate that sensitive people can suffer from hypoglycemic-like symptoms even when their blood sugar doesn’t drop to a level that’s medically defined as hypoglycemia. (See Chapter 5 on how blood sugar is measured.)

The diagnosis of idiopathic reactive hypoglycemia, or reactive hypoglycemia for short, isn’t universally accepted by allopathic doctors. This is the type of hypoglycemia that people are referring to when they complain of being hypoglycemic. Reactive hypoglycemia is also this book’s focus. In the rest of this book, unless otherwise stated, we’re talking about reactive hypoglycemia.

But before you get into the rest of the book, take a look at the following sections to discover more about the different types of hypoglycemia and see where your symptoms might fall.

Organic

With organic hypoglycemia, your blood sugar level when you’ve been fasting is invariably low. (The fasting level is the amount of sugar in your blood after fasting — not eating anything — for 10 to 12 hours.) The symptoms are usually continuous.

This type of hypoglycemia is very rare and may be caused by glandular defects or tumors. If you have organic hypoglycemia, it warrants further investigation to determine whether you have an enlarged pancreas, tumors of the pancreas, or other causes that are unrelated to what you do or don’t eat.

Relative

Relative hypoglycemia is a condition where your blood sugar declines from an elevated level to a low level quite rapidly. The group of people most often misdiagnosed as normal suffer from relative hypoglycemia. For example, you’re said to have relative hypoglycemia if

Your blood sugar falls 20 milligrams (mg) or more below your fasting level within six hours after eating, and you experience symptoms.

Your blood sugar falls 50 mg or more within one hour after eating, and you experience symptoms.

During the test that checks your blood sugar level, your blood sugar increases by 20 mg or less after ingesting the glucose that you’re given to drink for the test, and then falls to at least 20 mg below your fasting level. (Chapter 5 describes the test you can take to check your blood sugar level.)

Reactive

Reactive hypoglycemia refers to how your body reacts after you eat. How high or low does the blood sugar go? With this type of hypoglycemia, symptoms fluctuate according to the food you eat, the time of day when you eat, and so on. In reactive hypoglycemia, the level of sugar in your blood when you’ve been fasting may be normal or even a little above what’s considered normal. Your body then overreacts to the glucose in the food you eat by producing too much insulin, which causes the fall in blood sugar. (That’s why it’s called reactive.) Even if the blood sugar doesn’t fall below what’s considered the normal range, a person may experience symptoms of hypoglycemia if the fall is fast enough.

Many health practitioners don’t differentiate between reactive hypoglycemia and relative hypoglycemia. They lump the two together and call it functional hypoglycemia. If you hear this term, it refers to hypoglycemia that typically occurs because of an imbalance in the body chemistry, probably due to an overactive pancreas producing too much insulin.

Fasting hypoglycemia is sometimes classified as being part of functional hypoglycemia. It can occur when you haven’t eaten for a while. How long that is depends on the individual, but it’s generally sev...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I : Addressing Your Ups and Downs: Could This Be Hypoglycemia?
• Part II : Diagnosing and Treating Your Hypoglycemia
• Part III : Emulating Lifestyles of the Well and Healthy
• Part IV : Spinning a Network of Support for Yourself (and Others)
• Part V : The Part of Tens
• : Further Reading