What can I do to feel better?
Changing your Diet
Avoid Alcohol
Alcohol, like sugar, contains nothing but calories. It has no nutritive value at all and moves very quickly into your blood stream. This affects your blood sugar very suddenly, and there is a corresponding drop in blood sugar as the alcohol leaves your system.
The problem of maintaining a constant blood sugar level is common to both hypoglycemics and diabetics. For diabetics, the insulin injected must compensate for the food and drink consumed. An old friend of mine, an insulin dependent diabetic, once told me why he avoids alcohol.
Roy said, "It’s a challenge to figure out how much insulin I will need to match my food intake and the amount of exercise I do. I have a routine that includes a standard, no sugar diet, and lots of exercise every day. I plan my food so that I eat the same amounts at the same times of day, and I get my bike out for an hour every evening. And I don’t drink – it’s just too difficult to get the insulin right to compensate for it."
In diabetes, you can control your sugar level with injected insulin—in hypoglycemia this is not possible, and if you eat and drink foods that play havoc with your blood sugar level, you just have to live with the symptoms. It’s much better then, to avoid the booze and the feeling rotten that comes with it.
Keep in mind that many medicines also contain alcohol. One woman told me that she even had trouble with her allergy shots, and found out that they contain alcohol! She had to find an alternative way to deal with her allergies.
Switch to Complex Carbohydrates
All foods sit on a continuum that relate their sugar content to how fast they are used in your body. This is called the Glycemic Index. We’ll explore this more in another article, but a quick introduction here.
In order to keep your blood sugar constant with as few peaks and valleys as possible, you need to slow the rate at which your body converts your food to the various kinds of sugar used and stored in your body. The best way to do this is to eat foods that, in addition to supplying all the right components of nutrition, burn very slowly.
Since the goal is to slow the rate at which your food is broken down, it is important to avoid fast burning, high glycemic foods (starting with sugar), but also including refined foods. This includes white flour, white rice, and other refined and polished grains and seeds .