22/05/2022
Balancing Blood Sugar
Maintaining a stable blood sugar throughout the day can really improve cravings, especially for sugar.
When we eat any meal containing carbs, our body breaks them down into monosaccharides, glucose (sugar) being one of these. The sugar enters the bloodstream, and the pancreas detects higher blood sugar and sends out insulin. Insulin binds to a cell and allows sugar to enter the cell and be turned into energy. Without insulin, sugar cannot get into the cell.
Once carbs are consumed, they get converted to sugar in the blood and this causes the pancreas to secrete insulin to control the uptake of sugar into the cells. If too much insulin is secreted, there will be a big dip in blood sugar, known as hypoglycemia. It is during these hypoglycemic episodes that the body has an increased craving for sugar. The reason is simple, it is trying to balance out the state of low sugar in your body. You have some sugar and the cycle repeats again in an hour or two. And if you do not have sugar, the body secretes stress hormones to keep your sugar levels balanced.
As we can see, this is not a sustainable solution. We want to get our body better at balancing blood sugar on its own, so that it does not need food to do it every hour. Remember, our ancestors would regularly go without food, sometimes even for days at a time. If we needed sugar every hour to balance this out, we would not have survived as a species for very long. Our bodies can balance blood sugar.
How Do We Balance Blood Sugar?
There are plenty of natural treatments out there to improve your blood sugar balance.
First off, we must make sure our bodies are sensitive to insulin. To improve sensitivity, we can:
Exercise
Extend our overnight fast to at least 12 hours
Less snacking throughout the day
Becoming fat adapted
Secondly, we can ensure that our food leads to as small a spike in blood sugar as possible. Dietarily, we can:
have a higher fibre, lower sugar meal
Fill up on the good kinds of fats
Eat slowly and chew thoroughly
Thirdly, make sure we have enough of the following nutrients, they are all necessary for sugar metabolism:
Vitamin D
Chromium
B vitamins
Zinc
Magnesium
Vitamin C
Fourthly, look at reducing or removing sources of stress in your life.