Lower Blood Sugar After Eating Breakfast. Are Your Blood Glucose Levels Normal?

blood sugar drops after eating what's going on here I thought blood sugar was

supposed to go up after you eat let typically what happens but people with

insulin resistance working on reversing that insulin resistance can see some

really strange and paradoxical blood sugar readings so today we're going to

talk about that and sort it all out so that you know if you need to worry about

this or not coming right up

hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

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anything some people experience a drop in blood sugar a couple of hours after

they eat so we're going to talk about that real quick first they eat something

the blood sugar goes really high because they ate some high carbohydrate meal

their body makes a bunch of insulin because insulin is needed to guide that

glucose the blood sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cell and

there's a whole lot of insulin to deal with that high blood sugar emergency so

because of that large amount of insulin blood sugar drops very very fast and

oftentimes it results it overshoots and it drops too low

that's called reactive hypoglycemia hypoglycemia is when your blood sugar is

too low and it's called reactive because it's in response it's reacting to the

very high blood sugar that was there before so this typically happens when

people eat frequent meals when they eat a lot of carbs and they have pushed

their body into losing the ability to regulate blood sugar they have dis

glycemia their bodies don't know how to maintain blood sugar and these people

they need to top off their blood sugar every couple of hours this is typically

caused by high carb diets quint meals and what happens is every

time the blood sugar is low peep these people feel terrible they lose focus

they're irritable they're tired they're nauseous they can't focus and every time

the blood sugar is low their bodies have to make cortisol so this also results in

a stress response it's wearing on their adrenal glands and it's really not a

good thing so what do you do you even out your blood sugar over time by

adopting a low-carb high-fat diet with fewer meals to give your body a chance

to learn how to use fuel properly again but the main thing we want to talk about

today is the paradoxical response that people are noticing that blood sugar

stays high and then it drops immediately after eating so this is based it's

related to something called dawn phenomenon that we did a video on

recently and this is a totally natural phenomenon it means that during the

night your body the blood sugar stays relatively low and during the night when

you don't eat anything your body generates blood sugar through a hormone

called cortisol cortisol stimulates the liver to release glucose from glycogen

and therefore the cortisol rises gradually throughout the night to

maintain blood sugar but you need a little extra boost to get out of bed in

the morning so right before you wake up there is a spike there's a peak of

cortisol and growth hormone and glucagon so that you get that little extra jolt

to wake up to the cortisol increases blood sugar the cortisol turns off the

melatonin which is your sleep hormone and as a result it's perfectly normal

everyone has a little bit of a dawn phenomenon your blood sugar should rise

just a little bit however if your insulin resistant then that little rise

in blood sugar become a bigger rice because your cells are

resistant to the glucose and the insulin so the more insulin resistance you are

the greater the fluctuations the greater the magnitude of that dawn phenomenon so

a lot of people watch that video and they said yeah yeah great video I get it

but I'm still worried because I'm doing this fasting I've been going for three

days or seven days and my blood sugar still is just at a solid 170 hundred and

eighty what's going on here and even more confusing to them is that it stays

at 180 until they eat and as soon as they eat it drops not two hours later

like here but within minutes so this happens primarily to people who are type

2 diabetics or who are highly insulin resistant and here's what's happening so

remember we talked about how much blood sugar there actually is in the blood

okay so if you're writing at about a hundred and eighty then there's roughly

nine grams of glucose in the blood but then part of that is actually solid red

blood cells so we have to subtract approximately forty percent from that

because the sugar is dissolved in the liquid so if we have a blood sugar of a

hundred and eighty we have somewhere around five point four grams of actual

blood sugar so the body senses how much blood sugar is in the system as a whole

it's maintaining a certain level and the cells are resistant but there's no need

there's only a teaspoon of sugar floating around so the body doesn't have

to do anything about it it's not a threat it's not an emergency there is

not a whole bunch of fuel or sugar coming into the body so even though the

blood sugar rides at a hundred and 80 the body doesn't increase insulin

productions it's happy it's content it feels it has things under control it's

waiting for the cells to become less insulin resistant and then what happens

as soon as you eat something then the blood sugar drops maybe it drops into a

normal level maybe it drops to a hundred and forty or so but the point is it

drops from where it was sitting and it happens within minutes or maybe 20 30

minutes from eating so anytime that you eat you produce insulin insulin is a

nutrient sensor it's a storage hormone it doesn't matter what you eat you will

produce insulin now carbs produce a lot of insulin they

stimulate a lot of insulin protein stimulate a moderate a low to moderate

amount and fat stimulates a very very small amount of insulin but it still

produces insulin so if you eat a low-carb diet where primarily fat and

protein then you're going to stimulate some insulin but you're not adding any

new carbs to the system so you're on the right track but that little bit of

insulin that you produce is enough to bring the blood sugar down because you

didn't add any new carbs you haven't loaded up your system with a lot of new

carbs we want to think about this and understand what's going on that when you

eat something that food whether it has 5 grams of carbs or a hundred grams of

carbs it has to go through the blood into the cell just because you eat

something doesn't mean it's actually inside your body it's inside your

digestive tract it has to be absorbed into the bloodstream and the blood has

to deliver it to the cell and the bloodstream can only hold about a

teaspoon of sugar at a time so if you eat 5 grams of sugar 5 grams

of carbs it's no big deal it makes a little bit of insulin and that gets into

the blood it gets into the cell but if you eat a hundred grams now that food

that carbs have to get into the blood and then it has to pass through the

blood very very quickly because there's more carbs coming but if you're on a

low-carb diet there's no emergency you are just making a little bit of insulin

so you're not making your insulin resistance worse but it's enough to

lower your blood sugar so in other words there's nothing to worry about here

you're going in the right direction just to illustrate with this with with an

example I had a patient come in and he was very very pressure to take

medication they wanted him on both metformin and insulin and he says I've

had it with drugs I don't want to take that stuff I want to do something about

this and he was very very highly motivated says blood sugar was over 300

when he started so he went straight into a mostly water fast

he had some bone broth and and water and coffee and tea and so forth but

basically no nutrients except a little bit in the in the broth and in about a

week's time his blood sugar went from 300 to 170 and then it just sort of sat

there and he was still being pressure he told the doctors and say hey it's gone

from 300 to 170 and he said I'm on the right track aren't I and they said no

it's still too high and what I wanted to him to understand was that if it goes

from 300 to 170 you're on the right track but that hundred and seventy

represents a very very small amount of blood sugar there is hardly any

carbohydrate in the system and with such a low level of carbon

great the cells are burning through existing fuel stores and you're

reversing the insulin resistance you are slowly turning the cells around you're

getting them ready for new fuel but it's gonna take a good while so then as soon

as he had some bone broth it dropped to 140 and this proves the point that this

was not an emergency a tiny tiny bit of insulin brought it down because there

was essentially no new food there's a tiny tiny bit of food added but no

significant amount of food added to the system so his body continues to become

more insulin sensitive despite the seemingly high blood sugar so even

though his blood sugar was a hundred and seventy which seems like still a high

blood sugar which it is that 170 is a whole lot better it represents relative

to the 300 it represents a whole lot more progress than the number itself

indicates this is one of the most common questions that I've gotten after that

dawn phenomenon video so I hope this really clears up some of those question

marks if you'd like to learn more about how to get truly healthy make sure that

you check out our other videos on insulin resistance and dawn phenomenon