what to do when your blood sugar spikes
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If you alive with diabetes, you know that blood sugar spikes are normal and expected. Food, exercise, stress, hormones, insulin and other medications and a one thousand thousand other variables make day-to-twenty-four hour period glucose direction incredibly challenging. It'southward inevitable that you'll be riding both the highs of hyperglycemia and the lows of hypoglycemia, from time to time.
But why, exactly, are claret sugar spikes bad for you, and what can you exercise to help preclude the onset and frequency of loftier blood sugars?
This article will outline the precise reasons why high blood sugars are bad and what you can practise to help foreclose them.
What Causes Blood Sugars to Spike?
Blood sugars spike because there'due south too much glucose in the bloodstream and not plenty insulin to aid the cells properly absorb it. For people with diabetes, this can happen for a plethora of reasons, including simply non limited to:
- Likewise little insulin taken at mealtime
- Miscounting carbohydrates
- Hidden carbohydrates in sauces, creams, or liquids
- Missing a dose of insulin
- Using expired insulins
- Drinking excess caffeine
- Recently switching insulins or their dosage
- Sickness
- Steroids and other medications
- Recovering from an infection or surgery
- Using a temporary basal for do and and so not exercising equally long or as difficult as predicted
- Stress
- Hormones
- Pregnancy (tin cause both high and low blood sugars)
- Irresolute insulin resistance
What Makes Blood Carbohydrate Spikes Bad?
The primal to good diabetes management is to achieve stable and in-control claret sugar levels, however yous and your intendance team accept divers your targets.
While this is not possible all the time, avoiding every bit hyperglycemia likewise as you can is of import.
If you have lots of constant, curt-term claret saccharide spikes, y'all may experience a college incidence of diabetes burnout and low, struggle with anxiety, experience sleep deprivation, and take unstable mood swings.
You may also suffer more oftentimes from headaches, weight fluctuations, and take trouble adhering to a schedule with an do routine, work, school, or social commitments with others.
This can also negatively affect your relationships with your family and friends, contributing to feelings of loneliness and isolation. Y'all may also get a false sense of success if y'all have an HbA1c test that comes back low considering the HbA1c test is merely an average of the previous three months' blood sugars, so it is possible to have a "good" number that is merely an average of a lot of highs and a lot of lows.
Another pick for evaluating blood sugar success, if you're using a continuous glucose monitor, is tracking your time in range (TiR). Work with your care team to found what per centum of time they would like you to fall into a certain claret saccharide range, and try to maintain that percentage and better it over time.
What About Long-Term Hyperglycemia?
If you lot experience long-term hyperglycemia, the higher levels of glucose in your blood can damage blood vessels that evangelize blood, oxygen, and other nutrients to your vital organs. This contributes to poor circulation and literally starves parts of your body of the blood and nutrients they need to survive and thrive.
If your vital organs are starved of these crucial elements, it can pb to centre disease (atherosclerosis), stroke, kidney disease, a weakened immune system and the inability to fight off infections, erectile dysfunction, retinopathy and nervus harm, especially in the lower limbs and anxiety. Diabetes is the number one cause of lower limb amputations in adults in the United states, and the number of amputations amongst adults with diabetes is on the rise.
Over many years, chronic high claret sugars tin lower life expectancy in people with diabetes, and tin can even crusade premature death.
Keeping your blood saccharide levels close to normal tin avoid about of these complications.
Piece of work with your medico to find the best range that will work for you, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), typical blood carbohydrate targets are:
- Before a repast: 80 to 130 mg/dL
- 2 hours after a repast: Less than 180 mg/dL
How to Best Prevent Claret Saccharide Spikes?
While blood carbohydrate spikes are an inevitable role of life with diabetes, taking these steps can help mitigate and reduce the incidence of them in your life:
- Exercising regularly
- Eating a lower carbohydrate diet
- Using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM)
- Using an insulin pump
- Taking insulin 15 minutes before you swallow
- Avoiding foods with added sugar
- Increasing your fiber intake
- Avoiding refined carbohydrates
- Maintaining a healthy weight and BMI (talk to your doc about this)
- Using a food calibration to appropriately measure carbohydrates
- Switching from sugary beverages to only water
- Getting more than slumber
- Trying salubrious habits like yoga and meditation to manage stress
- Increasing your insulin to saccharide ratio
- Increasing your correction factor/sensitivity factor
Following these strategies, like incorporating more than low sugar foods and practise into your daily routine, can help prevent blood sugar spikes that can exist dangerous to your health over the long haul. Most of these good for you habits also take the added benefit of improving your overall wellness as well.
Always work with your doctor and care squad before irresolute your insulin regimen, diet, or exercise habits.
If y'all have prediabetes incorporating these habits is a great way to preclude the onset of type 2 diabetes. If you already have diabetes, they tin besides prevent worsening insulin resistance.
High claret sugars, while a part of everyday life with diabetes, can be dangerous in both the brusk and long term, and preventing excess hyperglycemia will go a long way to improving both the quality and length of your life!
What strategies have you incorporated into your life to help prevent and mitigate high blood sugar spikes? Share this mail service and comment below; nosotros love hearing from our readers!
Source: https://www.diabetesdaily.com/learn-about-diabetes/understanding-blood-sugars/is-my-blood-sugar-normal/high-blood-sugar-hyperglycemia/why-are-blood-sugar-spikes-harmful/
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