Pre-diabetic

katieiwoosley
katieiwoosley Posts: 15 Member
edited November 19 in Introduce Yourself
Ok, so I'm Pre-diabetic/insulin resistant. They put me on (what i was told is the only medication for it) Metformin. Well I had a reaction called lactic acidosis which is basically deadly if it's not found and fixed quickly. So I can't take that. After they took me off it, they told me the only other thing to do was to lose 7-10% of my body weight. My only problem is that I eat, then workout or exercise, then my blood sugar drops and I'm shakey, sick and need to eat again. So I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle. I'm burning calories, just to put them back in. Is there anything that might help with this? Like anything at all.

Replies

  • earlnabby
    earlnabby Posts: 8,171 Member
    I strongly recommend talking with your doctor about this in conjunction with a Registered Dietician. They will want you to test with a meter at all kinds of times and recommend foods to eat and when to eat them before/during/after exercise to keep your blood sugar level. There may be an electrolyte thing going on too. Too much needs to be known for random people on the internet to recommend something.
  • katieiwoosley
    katieiwoosley Posts: 15 Member
    earlnabby wrote: »
    I strongly recommend talking with your doctor about this in conjunction with a Registered Dietician. They will want you to test with a meter at all kinds of times and recommend foods to eat and when to eat them before/during/after exercise to keep your blood sugar level. There may be an electrolyte thing going on too. Too much needs to be known for random people on the internet to recommend something.

    Thanks. If only it was that simple. Unfortunately, I just turned 18, and I don't have a driver's license yet. Which means I have to rely on my parents still to get me places. And every time I mention my sugar getting low, they don't believe me. When I can prove it, my mom tells me that I'll just grow out of it like she did. Back when they diagnosed me as pre-diabetic, I was supposed to go to a dietician, I was like 14 at the time, but my other insisted that I was fine and there was no need. I have looked up some foods that will bring my glucose up quickly, and some that I can eat that will help keep it leveled out and where it needs to be. Hopefully that will help. Electrolytes, like maybe they're low? I'm not really sure how they would test such a thing without sending me to a specialist or a rehabilitation center. It only happens when I haven't eaten for more than 8hrs or right after I exercise. I feel like they would get an improper reading if it hadn't been checked after a good round of cardio. But thanks a lot, you've given me several things to consider. I was just hoping that someone else one here had similar problems and had some advice on what might help.
  • earlnabby
    earlnabby Posts: 8,171 Member
    I am sorry you are not in a position to get better advice.

    One thing you can do by yourself is check your blood sugars with a meter. You can get one at Walmart for less than $20 (Relion brand) and a box of 50 strips is only $9. No doctor's order or prescription needed. Keep it with you and use it when you feel shaky to see what your numbers are. As a diabetic, you should consider eating more frequent, smaller meals to keep your blood sugar level. Not everyone needs to, but it does help many.

    Will you be going to college? The uni health center can be a great resource. Not sure how they work these days, but when I was in school they were free.
  • jgnatca
    jgnatca Posts: 14,464 Member
    You are eighteen and entitled to your own medical advice about your health. There's the bus.

    I think the shakiness is from low blood sugar as you suspect. You are right that the "cure" is to eat.

    Look at pre-diabetes and diabetes as a delicate balancing act, something which people with normal pancreatic function don't need to think about. You have to eat enough but not too much.

    So how you handle the low blood sugar after exercise is to take the minimum needed to get you up and functioning. Get yourself some glucotabs at the store. They are the most efficient at getting your blood sugars up.

    A glucometer can let you know if your blood sugar is low.
  • katieiwoosley
    katieiwoosley Posts: 15 Member
    @jgnatca I'm afraid there's no buses or taxis where I live. It's just a small farm town. I honestly could walk to the doctor's office if it wasn't for my asthma. Unfortunately I can barely walk a mile without my inhaler and a very long break. Considering its about 15 miles to the office and the break I would need between each mile, I wouldn't get there before it closed. And there's a particularly nasty set of people scattered along the route, the kind that young women should never be around alone. I'll talk to my dad about getting glucose tabs though. He shouldn't mind picking them up considering that he gets low occasionally. It actually runs in my family, but nobody else has the problem daily or even weekly so they brush it off.
  • jgnatca
    jgnatca Posts: 14,464 Member
    It sounds like your asthma needs to be better controlled too. Are you on a long term inhaler like Symbicort?

    I want you to get your own visit to a doctor even more than ever now.
  • rickywillis00
    rickywillis00 Posts: 7 Member
    Have you looked into a ketogenic diet with regards to diabetes ? The diet is only 5% carbs in order to keep insulin levels at an absolute minimum and blood sugars at a minimum but instead of "running on sugar" your body will switch to "running on fat" or "ketones" for fuel. I have started this diet around 10 days ago and am now fully into ketosis but am waiting for my body to become "keto adapted" aka the switchover from running on sugar/carbs to fat/ketones and its going pretty well so far, maybe something you might want to look into as many diabetics have adoped this diet inorder to combat the illness. . . Good luck whatever you do! And get your parents to take things more seriously, diabetes and fluctuating blood sugars are nothing to be ignored!

    Rick
  • nvmomketo
    nvmomketo Posts: 12,019 Member
    I would not use glucose tablets. As a fellow prediabetic, the last thing we need is more sugar. :(

    Google reactive hypoglycemia. I had that too. You get the shakes, cold sweats and dizziness a couple of hours after eating because your blood glucose is falling BUT it is not due to actual low blood glucose. Its just your body reacting to quickly falling BG levels, often after a higher carb meal.

    For example, if you ate a meal of jam on toast, your BG would spike upwards. Eventually you would make too much insulin which causes BG to fall quickly, often lower than where you started. If you are relying on carbs (BG) for energy, this may cause symptoms of hypoglycemia even if your BG is at a normal level.

    If you eat a low carb high fat diet, or a very low carb ketogenic diet, you will not be reliant on carbs for energy (to the brain especially) so those symptoms will not occur anymore. Like the previous poster, I eat a ketogenic diet now. I went from having to eat every 2 hours and shaking if I didn't, to never having symptoms anymore. Ever.

    LCHF also normalized my blood gluose levels. Not eating a lot of carbs, which turns to glucose once ingested, helps prevent BG spikes.

    If you get a blood glucose metre you'll be able to figure out how foods affect your BG. Good luck.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da1vvigy5tQ
  • katieiwoosley
    katieiwoosley Posts: 15 Member
    @nvmomketo I saw something about that, but I doubt it's that because I have the same symptoms if I don't eat regularly enough, even if what I ate was perfectly balanced.
  • katieiwoosley
    katieiwoosley Posts: 15 Member
    @rickywillis00 I can't do the ketogenic diet because my family has a long history of gall stones and other problems with the gall bladder. My doctor said it would be a bad idea to change what I eat so drastically because of it. He said for me to slowly adjust the ingredients I use when cooking and to under no circumstances replace anything that would normally have it in it, with gluten free. He also told me that the worst thing to eat when losing weight is actually hotdogs because of how they're processed. As long as I don't eat like a huge peice of cake or drink nothing but sodas all day, my sugar stays level. It's just when I exercise. Like today I spent amd hour in the pool just casually swimming with friends. I was probably only active for maybe 15-20 minutes of it. But when I got out my sugar was so low that my best friend had to make dinner for me. Thank the heavens he knows how to boil water. XD
  • katieiwoosley
    katieiwoosley Posts: 15 Member
    @jgnatca I'm on Ventolin, it's both my treatment and mobile rescue for now because it works well for both. I also have albuterol nebulizer vials for at home that i use when its particularly bad or im sick. The thing is, I have a more rare form of asthma. It's induced by heat. I can have an asthma attack from just walking out to the truck on a hot summer day. As long as the air around me, is much cooler than my body, I don't have problems with it. If it was dead winter out right now, I could walk that far. So it's a lot harder to treat than say, allergy or stress induced asthma. Especially since it's not something that I'm at risk of year round, for the most part I have to have an asthma attack induced at the doctor to be sure that my medication is working properly. On top of that I have severe ADD and the editing I take can speed up my heart, so we have to be careful how we adjust my inhalers around and things so as not to interfere with that as well, if we can avoid it.
  • katieiwoosley
    katieiwoosley Posts: 15 Member
    edited June 2017
    @earlnabby Yes but I'm not sure when. Supposedly they're passing some kind of legislature that makes state and community colleges free for my state. It hasn't happened yet, but it seems it will simply because of who we have for representative and how he grew up as a child (my family knew him personally, my grandmother used to babysit him and his brother) he scraped the bottom of the barrel to get funds for college. I may decide to wait until thats passed and goes into effect, I'm not sure, I haven't decided yet. As of right now, I'm signing up for a phlebotomy class and once I get through that, I'm getting a job drawing blood at one of the hospitals close by. This gets me experience for the field I want to go into, and also gets me accustomed to having a daily job that's not directed by a flexible family member.
    Other than that, I'm not sure I could go to them because of my ADD. I think I have to see a specialist because of the ADD medication I have to take.
  • rheddmobile
    rheddmobile Posts: 6,840 Member
    Hi! I'm a diabetic. I agree with the advice to get a blood glucose meter. You can get one cheaply online, and the strips are not that expensive. Try Amazon, they have good prices. I use the Bayer Contour next but there are many good inexpensive meters. Without a meter you are shooting in the dark.

    What I do is to time my workouts to coincide with times when my blood glucose is naturally high and use that energy to work out. Then eat a substantial snack afterwards to get it back to good levels. This doesn't have to be fattening - I usually have four ounces of two percent milk, or some Greek yogurt with berries, or a piece of fruit. If you time your workouts so that you would be eating a snack anyway, you don't have to eat extra food to treat lows. I try to do something strenuous twice or even three times a day, in 15 - 30 minute sessions, and I stay within my calories despite eating before and after.

    Another trick is that short sprint intervals can actually prevent your glucose from dropping during long exercise sessions by raising your cortisol temporarily. So, for example, you are on a walk and get shaky - run for thirty seconds flat out. You would think this would increase your insulin resistance, but research shows that long term, it improves it. You may not be able to do very high intensity exercise with your asthma, but it's something to consider. Losing weight should help with your heart rate too.

    The main thing is to get your weight down, and that can be done without exercise if need be, just by restricting calories. It's possible that losing a little weight will make the exercise easier to manage by getting your blood sugar more stable.
  • nvmomketo
    nvmomketo Posts: 12,019 Member
    katieiwoosley wrote: »
    @nvmomketo I saw something about that, but I doubt it's that because I have the same symptoms if I don't eat regularly enough, even if what I ate was perfectly balanced.

    If you have the symptoms and are eating a so-called balanced diet, that is probably reactiv hypoglycemia. Every single day, by mid afternoon, I was shaking. It looked like I was 80. If I did not eat every 2-3 hours, it got worse.

    If you eat carbs, Carbs your blood glucose will go up and down if it is reactive hypoglycemia. are anything made from a flour (bread, pasta, rolls, buns, muffins, cookies, cakes, bagels, noodles, cornbread, breakfast cereals in a box, and thickened sauces). Carbs are also sugars (syrup, table sugar, honey, HFCS) and grains (corn, rice, oats like in oatmeal). Carbs are also fruits and vegetables. Carbs are basically anything made from plants.

    Most people use plants in a "balanced" diet. Plants/carbs are the things that make reactive hypoglycemia worse. I now eat much fewer vegetables and almost no flours or sugars (or at leat rarely), and I limit my fruits and root vegetables like potatoes. Most of my food is meats, eggs and dairy. By doing that I no longer get those symptoms because my body does not rely on carbs for its fuel.

    Now that I do not try to "balance" my meals with lost of plants, I can go an entire day of not eating and not shake at all. I EASILY go 4-6 hours between meals... I do think you should look into it more. It is often an early symptom of insulin resistance and should not be ignored.
  • katieiwoosley
    katieiwoosley Posts: 15 Member
    @nvmomketo I am insulin resistance, but when I said balanced I didn't really mean like fruits and veggies, I meant like carbs an proteins. It honestly doesn't matter what I eat, after a period of time I get shakey. And it never varies according to what I eat.
  • nvmomketo
    nvmomketo Posts: 12,019 Member
    katieiwoosley wrote: »
    @nvmomketo I am insulin resistance, but when I said balanced I didn't really mean like fruits and veggies, I meant like carbs an proteins. It honestly doesn't matter what I eat, after a period of time I get shakey. And it never varies according to what I eat.

    I was the same... I shook so much I spilled drinks. People noticed.

    If you have a glucose monitor you test for it.

    Test your BG while fasted. Eat a high carb and high sugar food or drink. Then test again every 30 minutes.

    I did this test in a lab (oral glucose tolerance test - OGTT). They give you aboout 70g of glucose drink. My fasting BG was a bit high at close to a 6. At 30 minutes my BG was 7 or 8 and at 60 minutes I hit a 9. Then my BG fell. By 2 hours it was a 4 something which is not super low but it was a drop of 5 (or about 100) - the drop is what causes shakes.

    Now? I can have a BG of 4 or even lower and I feel fine because I am no longer reliant on carbs for fuel. Cutting carbs really helped me.

    Eating a lot of protein and fat with carbs can help you too, although it wasn't enough for me.

    I wish you luck. I hope you get a handle on it faster than I did. :)
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