By Jeremy | March 24, 2016 |

Many diabetics say their blood sugar won’t behave, and that they’ve tried everything. No matter what they do, they lament, their readings get high or low, or seem to just jump up and down and make no consistent sense. If this is you, then I feel your pain. But if you’re having problems keeping your blood sugar in a generally good range then you haven’t actually tried everything. Packing for a long trip. Because if you had, you’d have found your answer(s) by now. Most things affect diabetes. It’s not just a matter of balancing food and insulin. So you need to play around with things in your life – both minor and major – to figure out what your own requirements are. Sometimes, to “fix” your BGs, big changes are necessary. Whether you make them or not is up to you and your present circumstances, but diabetes is a reflection of your health and stress levels. What’s good for diabetes is generally good for your life in general: proper food, exercise, sleep, etc. Don’t shoot the messenger!Factors that may be affecting your blood sugars Go through this list and see if each point is totally under control in your life. Have you experimented freely with them all to see what the effects are? Be honest! Silly Walk exercises in Montenegro. Exercise Exercise can bring down blood sugar at times, or raise it at other times. If you haven’t eaten enough to give yourself the energy you’re using during exercise, your body may dump some glucose in your bloodstream. Hey, it’s trying to help! Timing of exercise matters, as does type and frequency. Your body can get used to whatever level and type of exercise you’re doing, but until it does your BGs will likely be strange. Just check often and be careful. If your BGs are bad, have you tried eating at different times in relation to your exercise, or increasing or decreasing your exercise? A choice to make in Slovenia. Alcohol Again, alcohol can lower blood sugar – even hours later – or raise it. One night of moderate drinking may have nospecial effect on you, or it might make your blood sugar low or high, depending on every other factor at play. But drinking regularly can just make things a mess. High blood sugar is often the result. One of the many benefits of diabetes is the awareness of your health it gives you, and the tendency it inspires toward making healthy decisions. Alcohol is poison anyway; diabetes says, “Drink moderately if at all!” If your BGs are bad, have you tried completely quitting alcohol for an extended period (weeks or months), then adding it back slowly into your life to see the results? Instant nap in the Czech Republic. Sleep Sleep is of way more importance than most diabetics realize. It’s not only important to get enough sleep, but also to avoid too much sleep. Your body knows when it wants to wake up, and it may have nothing to do with your job or your alarm clock. Personally, when I wake up “naturally” – not by the clock – my blood sugar seems to be better all day long. If I wake up at6:45 am for some reason, even on my day off, and think, “I probably could get up now, but it’s too early. I’ll go back to sleep.” is when breakfast and everything else makes me high all morning. Waking naturally – whenever your body wants to, and without using an alarm clock – is, I believe, the healthiest way to live. Ideally, none of us would have alarms to wake up, or even clocks visible from the bed. If you have a regular job that makes this difficult or impossible, that’s too bad, but fixing this could do wonders for starting the day out with better BGs. It could change your life. If your BGs are bad, have you tried different sleep patterns, or had an extended period when you could wake up naturally, and then actually gotten up no matter what the clock said? Food face at breakfast in the Åland Islands. Types of food Eating mostly carbs (like I like to do) can seem to sort of condition you to be high. It’s as if insulin gets tired of fighting and lets the carbs have their way. Thenone day you eat a small, regular lunch, take the usual insulin, and end up at 280 afterwards. You can re-train yourself to replace carbs with other things. I like to eat salads every day made of frozen vegetables I thaw out in the microwave; I add cashews and tomatoes and olives and cheese to it, and it’s all pretty low-carb and healthy in several ways. Plus I eat less rice or noodles or whatever I’m having. It makes diabetes much easier to predict. It takes a lot of personal responsibility to change your eating habits, even a little. But if you’re a diabetic and you’re testing and injecting all the time anyway, you’ve developed all the responsibility you need. Just do it. No whining or going back. If your BGs are bad, have you tried altering the timing and types (and freshness) of the food you eat? Getting Mad! in Norway. Stress Everyone knows stress can raise blood sugar but few seem to do anything about it because it’s too hard to know what to do – or the necessary changes are toodrastic. But work stress and family stress and everything stress are all toxic, so doing what you need to do to get rid of them can only be a positive thing. Getting out of stressful situations can be hard work (i.e., stressful in and of itself) but worth it. I’m an advocate for drastic lifestyle changes when necessary. Health is priority number one for a diabetic. Job, house, city not working out for you? Change them. Figure out what you need, and be honest and open-minded. Stress can be anywhere and the less you have, the better your BG will be. If your BGs are bad, have you made big changes in your lifestyle and sculpted your life to be what it needs to be to work best for you? Good BG on a Lithuanian morning. Put it all together None of the blood sugar-influencing factors are isolated. Sleep is different depending on when and what you ate beforehand, and whether you had alcohol or exercise, and how much. Et cetera, et cetera. Harmonizing all of the things in your own life will leadto consistently good (if not perfect) blood sugar readings, and you won’t miss whatever it is you gave up to get there. Being honest with yourself Some changes are simple, while others take a lot of dedication. Many diabetics with blood sugar frustrations try very few things, or try a couple of half-assed changes (and fool themselves that they really put in the effort). Worst of all, they just get used to having bad BGs and don’t notice them so much anymore. (They will later on, shudder.) But the changes are worth it. When asking yourself what you can do to bring your BG levels in line with what you want (say, between 70 and 130 mg/dL before meals), be honest. Have you really given X your best shot? Is Y more of a factor than you think? The phrase “I’ve tried everything, and nothing worked!” cannot possibly be true. Having reasonably good BGs is quite possible, and you can even do fun stuff (like travel the world!) while doing so. You just have to work to understand your own personaldiabetes and your own psychology. High in Poland: They can’t all be winners. What led to this one? Improper sleep and food and stress, in different amounts. What else? What factors have you found that affect your blood sugar levels? Did you experiment to see how changing things might affect you? What have been your results? Share this page :)