Is your blood sugar sabotaging your mood and your health? Health coach Suzy Glaskie shares her own experience of getting off the blood-sugar rollercoaster.
WORDS: SUZY GLASKIE. IMAGES: SHUTTERSTOCK & KAREN STANILAND-PLATT FOR IMAGE OF SUZY.
Do you regularly hit an energy wall, say around 11am or 3pm, when you can’t think straight and get irritated easily?
Before I retrained as a health coach in my mid-40s, I was up and down throughout the day and regularly felt starving (even though I was eating constantly). I’d suddenly turn white as a sheet, get very shaky and go from mild-mannered to hangry, cranky and unable to think properly.
What I failed to understand throughout all those years was that it was actually my food choices that were creating this rollercoaster. The toast or cereal I ate every morning was, in fact, setting me up for an entire day of crashes and cravings.
The good news, though, is that we can get ourselves off this rollercoaster once we make some small switches to our diet. The first thing to remember is that you need protein with each meal. Once I switched to eggs for breakfast, my whole day transformed. Because the protein and good fats help to stabilise my blood sugar, I was able to concentrate the whole morning for the first time in my life. It was a revelation.
Managing your blood sugar is even more important for those of us in perimenopause and menopause, when fluctuating hormones make your cells more resistant to insulin. That means your system has to work even harder to manage blood sugar.
Many women see their blood sugar levels rise and fall during this period of their life, leaving them more vulnerable to type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Plus, higher blood sugar levels are linked to weight gain and fatigue. This is something I think about a lot because my own family is riddled with type 2 diabetes – my maternal grandma died at the age of 54: that’s just a year older than my current age.
TESTING TIMES
I was able to see for myself how I react to different foods when I road-tested a blood glucose monitor. Two Weetabix and half a banana was my go-to breakfast for many years. It was fascinating to see how it gave me a huge spike and left me feeling nauseous with hunger a couple of hours later. Leek and potato soup with a huge hunk of bread was something I’d frequently buy for my lunch when I worked in PR. I tested out its effects with my own homemade soup. It was delicious – but pretty disturbing to see what it did to my blood sugar. No wonder I often zon
