Day 13 – The While Blue Yonder (2/13/10)

Starting Blood Sugar – 127 (The past few days my blood sugar has been in the low twenties the past few days.  Starting to become a little concerned.)

Food For the Day:

• Breakfast – Homemade French Toast, 2 pieces of bacon, 2 eggs.
• Lunch – Didn’t have breakfast until about 11 so had a late lunch around 3 to 4
• Dinner – For Valentine’s we went to The Inn of the Seventh Ray (where we were married).  I had a vegan duck, some vegetables, a chutney sauce, chocolate ganouche cake, and…..a glass of wine.

Ending Blood Sugar – 105 (More on this in the analysis.)

Exercise:

None

Analysis:

Well, there’s only one real topic to talk about here, and that’d be dinner.  More importantly than dinner, is probably my first piece of alcohol since I was diagnosed with diabetes.  Before I started the diabetes classes, I thought that alcohol was just a super concentrated from of carbs.  Something that had to be avoided mostly because it had no real nutritional value and would shoot up my blood sugars.  However, come to find out, I was pretty far off base.  Alcohol prevents your liver from producing sugar, so you actually see a tremendous drop in your blood sugar levels after consuming alcohol.  As the alcohol is digested, they start to rise back up.  One of the dangers of alcohol with diabetes is that the drop in blood sugar causes diabetics to become hypoglycemic and extremely tired, so driving is extremely unsafe (I’m sure being drunk doesn’t help the cause).

What was interesting tonight was it was the first time I was able to notice and review these effects on myself.  The teachers of the class were right, after a few sips of wine, I started to get extremely tired, which has happened to me in the past when drinking.  Afterwards, when we came home, I fell asleep extremely fast, and slept for about four hours.  I then tested my blood sugar, and found it to be extremely low for the time and meal that I had.  Now typically, if my blood sugar is that low, I’m supposed to eat a late night snack to compensate for the low blood sugars.  Another thing I learned in the class was that if I go to bed with very low sugars, my body will compensate and have my liver shoot out glucose, consuming muscle/fat in the process.  This is the reason that at times I’ve seen almost no drops or actual rises in my blood sugars the next day.  However, since alcohol might be playing a roll in my low sugars, and I don’t feel hypoglycemic, I’m going to withhold on the snack and see where my sugars are tomorrow.  This will be interesting…

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