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False Hypoglycemia

I have been recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, i guess about 2 months now. During the summer I continued to run cross country, and after about 2 weeks I figured out how to keep my levels up enough for practice. Now that school has started my whole routine has changed. I've changed from practicing at 7 in the mornign to 3:45 in the afternoon, and first I couldn't practice, but then I got the hang of it and my levels were conrolled. Now all of a sudden when I'm running I start to begin to have the symptoms of a low, but when I check my level I'm in the 120-160 range. I feel sometimes worse than a normal low, and my symptoms are more pronounced than before. I was wondering if this had happened to anyone before, and how they adjusted their routine to fix the problem? Thank you so much!
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Avatar universal
It's taken me a while to respond but thank you! What you said makes a lot of sense and im trying to take in more protein to see if that will help. I'm about to get on the pump with a constant glucose monitor which should help also. Again thank you!




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Avatar universal
it sounds like you need to take less inslin
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My advice comes from experience as opposed to any doctor related advice, so I suggest keeping that in mind.  I developed T1D when I was 4 and have had it for 25 years now.  From what I understand initial low blood sugar symptoms (that is the feelings as your sugar drops, rather than the symptoms that come about after suffering low blood sugar over an extended time) are a hormonal response your body puts out to tell itself your sugar is dropping and to do something about it.  Those initial signs - the shakiness, the disconnecting feeling (almost dream-like disconnect) sometimes cold sweat, etc, can result from other things as well.  From a diabetic standpoint, anytime my body has a SIGNIFICANT sugar decrease over a short time (even if it is from 130 to 75 and I don't drop further) my body can read that drop as a hypoglycemic episode and put out the same warning signs.  Similarly, if I am extremely tired, extremely scared or anxious, etc, the hormonal responses my body puts out are similar enough to what happens when my sugar drops that I can confuse them.

As to what to do about the symptoms?  Unfortunately, if you don't have low blood sugar, there isn't much you can do.  Your body went from a time of tightly controlling its own sugar level to you doing manually and it will never be exactly the same.  In some ways, it will take your body awhile to not mistakenly send out warning signals if you are just dropping and not having low blood sugar (of course this is a double edge sword - if you have too many lows your body may stop warning you altogether and then you have more serious problems)  

For exercise in general, protein is always a good bet because it slowly releases sugar into you over a prelonged period of time and doesn't tend to cause massive lows or highs (with moderation of course and you do want to aviod high fat proteins because fat is a killer on the sugar)  Anyway, eating something in low fat protein a bit before you run may help if the problem is a non-hypoglycemic drop in sugar because it will help keep your levels more stable.

If it is simply a case of something with similar symptons? Being tired, anxious, etc.. ? Unfortunately there isn't much you can do.


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