When you eat foods that release glucose into the blood stream to quickly, your blood sugar rises rapidly. As far as the body is concerned, this rapidly rising blood sugar is a potentially dangerous and damaging situation, so the body produces a surge of insulin that brings the level of sugar in the blood back down. This surge of insulin however is a bit like doing an emergency stop in a car, its dramatic, it lacks control and balance. The effect is often that you then ‘undershoot’, and the level of glucose in your bloodstream drops too low, thus depleting the brain of the fuel and energy it needs to make its essential chemicals. If you carry a tendency to be low in a particular brain chemical you can immediately aggravate that problem, every time you have low blood sugar.

This is called reactive-hypoglycemia

In this low blood sugar state, whatever you carry an emotionally is more likely to come to the surface. You may experience being irritable, have difficulty concentrating, you’ll probably experience food cravings particularly for carbohydrates and sweet foods, it can therefore adversely affect your weight control. Any depression, anxiety and addictive behavior you have a tendency towards may come to the fore.

So it’s absolutely essential to balancing brain chemistry to have totally stable blood sugar throughout the day. It’s also all very desirable to have stable blood sugar control because reactive hypoglycemia is a risk factor for: -

developing diabetes later in life,
developing heart disease,
and stabilising your blood sugar also gives you great physical stamina.

The old-fashioned way of looking at sugar in the diet involved talking about what were called good carbohydrates (whole-meal) and bad carbohydrates (refined-carbohydrates). The modern -and much better ways- to look at what to eat to balance your blood sugar, are:-

the glycaemic index diet,
the glycaemic load diet,
and the zone diet, which kind of ties it all together.

These systems are in fact quite simple, but have sometimes been made confusing particularly by the popular press.

In my practice I guide a person through these systems, firstly eliminating the foods that destabilise blood sugar, and secondly understanding how to manipulate protein and oils to positively stabilise the blood sugar.

In addition to prescribing dietary changes I use exercise, relaxation, mediation, and supplements when needed to improve blood sugar control.

If ones overall health is poor, following years of bad diet, lack of exercise and bad stress it can sometimes take many months or even over a year to stablise the body’s blood sugar control.

Regular exercise is important and may be essential to successful treatment.

Someone people repeatedly trigger flight-or-flight stress responses from their adrenal glands, which result in surges of sugar and ‘self-generated’ reactive-hypoglycemia. When this is the case training the nervous system how to deeply relax, and quickly come down form a stressed to a none-stressed state can be one of the keys to successful treatment.

There are two ways that stress in the mind can over stimulate the adrenal glands:

Directly through what is called the autonomic nervous system and the way to balance this is whole body

Or hormonally through what is called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and the way to balance in this is

In addition to diet it is often necessary to use supplements at least in the beginning to speed up the process of establishing stable blood sugar.