There are several recurring themes that crop up time and time again amongst the Reactive Hypoglycaemics who apear on the forum - and my personal experience as an RHer confirms these are very common.
They include:
- a great deal of anxiety and distress about changing the way of eating
- general life anxiety and depression
- physical and mental experiences that are (or resemble) panic attacks or episodes of anxiety
- fear of hunger
- fear and helplessness overwhelming any belief that things may improve in future
- absolute terror that life is going to carry on in its current unbearable fashion
See? I just described what you are going through, didn't I?
If you have a read through past threads in the RH section you will find that nearly every RHer rocks up to the forum with a variation of the above.
Those of us (who do have RH) find that by making the dietary changes necessary to control our blood glucose, most of those fears/anxieties and symptoms fade away as our RH comes under control and we begin to come out from under the smothering blanket of stress hormones.
- worth remembering that every time an RHer has an RH episode, their entire body is flooded with huge amounts of stress hormones, because it is those stress hormones which kick the body to release emergency glucose from storage in the liver in order to bring the blood glucose back up.
So it isn't just blood glucose fluctuations that an RHer has to deal with. It is blood glucose AND being swamped with Fight or Flight hormones almost every time they eat.
Just as a comparison, it would be like a 'normal' person going through their day in the sure knowledge that sometime during the day they will have a near miss car crash, or fall downstairs, or narrowly miss a brick falling off a building - with the attendant shocky adrenalin surge and shaky recovery period. Every day. Several times a day. As a result of eating a snack, or their lunch sandwich, or a bowl of cereal. Sounds dramatic? Well, that is because it IS!!!
So please, cut yourself some slack. The emotional state in which you find yourself is NOT lack of moral fibre, or cowardice, or insecurity, or any one of a hundred other things - it is a perfectly understandable consequence of spending months or years on a rollercoaster of stress hormones (and blood glucose spikes and drops) to rival the experience of a War Correspondant in the middle of a long term bombing campaign.
The good news:
- If you do have RH, and
- If you do manage to cut the carbs and increase fats and proteins and veg and salad,
then you will start to feel better soon. And sleep better. And feel more confident.
As for transitioning to a LC diet... If you don't like cooking, then buy sliced cheese and ham, and have that for breakfast. Or buy some low carb granola from one of the internet suppliers, like Amazon. Then get bags of salad, pots of coleslaw, cold meat, egg mayonnaise, tomatoes, cucumber etc, and have them for lunch.
For dinner, tell us which supermarket you shop at. Nearly all of them have a few low carb ready meals which can just be thrown into the oven and eaten with microwaved veg.