delay eating until numbers drop?
kvsmith1959
Posts: 2 Member
Hi,
Just a quick question. If my numbers are high in the morning, does it make sense to delay eating until they drop down to an acceptable level? For example, this morning it was at 165. Should I wait until it goes down to 130 to eat?
Thanks,
Kevin
Just a quick question. If my numbers are high in the morning, does it make sense to delay eating until they drop down to an acceptable level? For example, this morning it was at 165. Should I wait until it goes down to 130 to eat?
Thanks,
Kevin
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Replies
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kvsmith1959 wrote: »Hi,
Just a quick question. If my numbers are high in the morning, does it make sense to delay eating until they drop down to an acceptable level? For example, this morning it was at 165. Should I wait until it goes down to 130 to eat?
Thanks,
Kevin
Since everyone is different, you could always try a delay, maybe up to 3 hours, to see if your BG #'s come down by waiting until later in the morning. Some people have high BG #'s early in the morning (i.e. I believe this is called the "dawn effect") and their BG #'s drop after a few hours. I'm the opposite--my BG #'s are lowest when I first wake up and increase over the next 2 hours, which is why I wait until then to eat breakfast (to better judge what meal-time insulin dose I'll need).
I know for me, waiting until later wouldn't work for me without insulin--when my #'s were high (200's or more) in the morning due to eating more carbs the night/day before than I should have eaten (& not injecting enough meal-time insulin to deal with those carbs), it could take anywhere from 12-24 hours for my BG to come down to something acceptable. However, during that waiting time, I'd be miserable if I didn't eat anything--hungry, cranky, cloudy thinking, tired & feel like I'm dragging myself around all day. For me, under this situation, waiting a few hours would have very little effect on lowering my BG and I would very likely see it increase instead due to my liver "dumping" sugar into the bloodstream once I'm "up & about" for the morning.1 -
Fasting raises your cortisol levels, which blocks the action of insulin, so no, that's not necessarily a good idea. I frequently get a Dawn effect of about thirty points, and sometimes when I eat breakfast my bg ends up lower afterwards than before, because the eating lowers my cortisol so my natural insulin can get in and do its thing.
You could try it and find out what effect it has on you - everyone is different. What I usually do when my pre-breakfast sugar is high is eat a lower carb than usual breakfast (which for me means about 20g) and take my blood at 45 minutes, which is when it usually peaks. If it's unreasonably high I get up and do my morning cycling which quickly lowers my levels. Again, you have to find out what works for you - some people find that exercise makes their levels go up, not down, again due to cortisol.2 -
rheddmobile wrote: »Fasting raises your cortisol levels, which blocks the action of insulin, so no, that's not necessarily a good idea. I frequently get a Dawn effect of about thirty points, and sometimes when I eat breakfast my bg ends up lower afterwards than before, because the eating lowers my cortisol so my natural insulin can get in and do its thing.
You could try it and find out what effect it has on you - everyone is different. What I usually do when my pre-breakfast sugar is high is eat a lower carb than usual breakfast (which for me means about 20g) and take my blood at 45 minutes, which is when it usually peaks. If it's unreasonably high I get up and do my morning cycling which quickly lowers my levels. Again, you have to find out what works for you - some people find that exercise makes their levels go up, not down, again due to cortisol.
That's an interesting point.
I ran across this article recently on cortisol and fasting. I was surprised to read that in fact for some people, fasting may contribute to high BG and that eating small amounts more frequently may be helpful.
https://chriskresser.com/intermittent-fasting-cortisol-and-blood-sugarOne of cortisol’s effects is that it raises blood sugar. So, in someone with blood sugar regulation issues, fasting can actually make them worse.
I’ve seen this time and time again with my patients. Almost all of my patients have blood sugar imbalances. And it’s usually not as simple as “high blood sugar” or “low blood sugar”. They often have a combination of both (reactive hypoglycemia), or strange blood sugar patterns that, on the surface, don’t make much sense. These folks aren’t eating a Standard American Diet. Most of them are already on a paleo-type or low-carb diet. Yet they still have blood sugar issues.
In these cases, cortisol dysregulation is almost always the culprit. When these patients try intermittent fasting, their blood sugar control gets worse. I will see fasting blood sugar readings in the 90s and even low 100s, in spite of the fact that they are eating a low-carb, paleo-type diet.
That’s why I don’t recommend intermittent fasting for people with blood sugar regulation problems. Instead, I suggest that they eat every 2-3 hours. This helps to maintain stable blood sugar throughout the day and prevents cortisol and other stress hormones like epinephrine and norepinephrine from getting involved. When my patients that have been fasting and experiencing high blood sugar readings switch to eating this way, their blood sugar numbers almost always normalize....
(For others, particular those on very low carb/ketogenic diets, the situation appears otherwise. http://www.ketotic.org/2014/02/the-ketogenic-diets-effect-on-cortisol.html )1 -
I experience mild dawn phenomenon too. I eat very low carb so my morning numbers are always the highest of the day. I tend to have some reactive hypoglycemia (BG spikes then plummets quickly after eating) so the fastest way to bring down my BG is eat something or have coffee with fats and a tad of protein powder2
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I used to not only delay eating, but all consumption, until after the drop, so NPO (nothing by mouth) from waking until my glucometer could prove to me that there'd been a decrease and/or reading under 100. However, my diabetes educator/mom pointed out that hydration is our best non-insulin weapon against unhealthy BGs (something about the way that your kidneys take care of excess sugar when you use the facilities). Furthermore, I become really dizzy, emotional and confused when such a sudden drop happens regardless of what the meter reads, so the only way to deal with that is food and drink/something by mouth.0
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I'd be waiting a very long time sometimes if I did that! My normal fasting isn't much under 100 and if I have even a mild illness it's around 110. Your liver can keep your sugars above 100 without any food.I used to not only delay eating, but all consumption, until after the drop, so NPO (nothing by mouth) from waking until my glucometer could prove to me that there'd been a decrease and/or reading under 100. However, my diabetes educator/mom pointed out that hydration is our best non-insulin weapon against unhealthy BGs (something about the way that your kidneys take care of excess sugar when you use the facilities). Furthermore, I become really dizzy, emotional and confused when such a sudden drop happens regardless of what the meter reads, so the only way to deal with that is food and drink/something by mouth.
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Thanks everyone!
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I read through this thread last night, and since I'm waking up with high numbers, I decided to try to delay eating to see if I BG dropped. Surprisingly, about 30-40 minutes after waking up, I was super hungry, but my BG had gone up 16 points. Evidently delaying food won't work for me. My next experiment will be eating a high protein breakfast with little or no carbs.2
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I read through this thread last night, and since I'm waking up with high numbers, I decided to try to delay eating to see if I BG dropped. Surprisingly, about 30-40 minutes after waking up, I was super hungry, but my BG had gone up 16 points. Evidently delaying food won't work for me. My next experiment j80Z6TaMLZsHeRFI7TCTxg&source will be eating a high protein breakfast with little or no carbs.
Keep us posted on your research!
Bear in mind that variables - even the ones you're aware of - are very difficult to control in n=1 self-experiments.
(After having been unable to replicate several reactions I thought I was sure of, I figured either I'd been wrong, or I somehow wound up in someone else's body.
)
My "lesson" has been to repeat any experiment with a potentially-significant outcome....
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So far, two days in a row, my post-breakfast reading has been lower than my fasting after a low carb breakfast. The readings are still high, though, just not as high.2
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FYI, here's an interesting article by Chris Kresser on the effect of intermittent fasting on cortisol levels (and, accordingly, on BG levels). For some people with cortisol dysregulation, eating every few hours is, oddly, more conducive to normal BG than fasting.
https://chriskresser.com/intermittent-fasting-cortisol-and-blood-sugar/1 -
So far, two days in a row, my post-breakfast reading has been lower than my fasting after a low carb breakfast. The readings are still high, though, just not as high.
Yep, that happens to me too. Cottage cheese in particular is like a magic trick for lowering my blood sugar - apparently whey protein causes more of an insulin response than other proteins, and will actually lower blood glucose for some people.2
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