5 Reasons You Should Balance Your Blood Sugar

When people think of high blood sugar or irregular blood sugar they automatically think of diabetes. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Roughly 90% of the population is living with too much glucose in their system. If you are one of my clients, you would know how much emphasis I put on incorporating daily strategies to ensure we don’t have glucose spikes and therefore glucose crashes.

Wondering if this applies to you? The 5 most common symptoms of irregular blood sugar are:

Uncontrollable cravings

Feel out of control when it comes to food? Balancing your blood sugar may drastically help you. Contrary to popular belief food cravings have less to do with willpower than actually balancing your blood sugar. This is due to glucose dumps (that usually occur after a glucose spike or from skipping meals) activating the hippocampus, caudate and insula, or more simply put, the part of our brain that is responsible for cravings.

Dysregulated hormones:

When we think about hormones, we generally think of our sex organs and sex hormones, but what is missing from this thinking is how interconnected insulin, the hormone that controls blood sugar, is to sex hormones like oestrogen and testosterone. High insulin levels communicate to the ovaries to produce more testosterone. This overtime can cause facial hair, acne, weight gain/fluctuations and PCOS like symptoms. Additionally, high insulin levels also lower sex hormone binding globulin this is pivotal to hormonal health as SHBG is a regulatory hormone and helps control the amount of sex hormones available to the body. I.e. oestrogen which can contribute symptoms of oestrogen excess like sore breasts, fibroids, heavy/painful menses and PMS.

The energy rollercoaster:

When your blood sugar is all over the shop your energy will follow - cue the energy rollercoaster. You’re up and then you are down, you crash after meals or you may have a 3pm slump and then have a surge of energy into the evening. Sound familiar?

When you eat something sweet or carby without protein or fat you have a rapid rise in your blood sugar levels and then a crash 1-2 hours later. This leads to hunger, fatigue and mood swings. What is actually happening when you have multiple glucose spikes throughout the day is, you are damaging the cells mitochondria which is the powerhouse (aka where energy is produced) overtime we fatigue the mitochondria and our energy response becomes poorer and therefore we become more fatigued which can lead us to rely on sweet, carby foods or coffee for energy which causes more glucose spikes feeding into a never-ending cycle.

Acne:

When you have deregulated blood sugar it causes the body to release insulin-like growth factor 1, a hormone that manages the effects of growth. Having excess IGF-1 in your blood can cause your oil glands in your face and body to produce more sebum, increasing the risk of acne and inflammation. Additionally, insulin like growth factor 1 also increases the number of circulating androgens in the body. The rise in androgen levels can trigger a process of higher sebum production, changes in skin cell activity, inflammation, and colonisation of the hair follicles by a bacteria causing acne.

Still need convincing to balance your blood sugar?

Ageing:

The more glucose spikes you have throughout the day can directly cause collagen damage in the skin due to a process called glycation. In this process, elevated levels of sugar can attach to proteins in the skin and create oxidative molecules. These molecules are called advanced glycation end products. The process of glycation results in cross-linking of these fibres, which means they become more brittle and less resilient. Our bodies also lose the ability to repair collagen that's been glycated. This ultimately results in a loss of elasticity and in turn accelerates sagging and wrinkling of the skin. Glycation also happens internally to our organs which accelerates overall systemic ageing too.

Want to look and feel younger, have better energy, less mood swings, be more in control of food craving, have a better period and better skin?

Well it’s pretty important to balance your blood sugar!