DriGuy

I'm not diabetic, but 30 years ago, I started having light headed spells, usually at 10:30AM. On two occasions, I nearly collapsed. A doctor checked my blood a couple of times and told me my blood sugar was fine. But when he checked I was not having an episode.

I was telling a coworker about it, and she was not a doctor, but she was a diabetic and said, "I think you are suffering from low blood sugar." She let me borrow one of her blood testing kits and told me to check my sugar levels during episodes. Two days later I had one, and my blood sugar was so low that it failed to even register on her kit.

At that time, I was drinking heavily in the evenings, and my wife and I would have breakfast at a local coffee shop/bakery, where we would have coffee and doughnuts. This was the culprit. And by eating a more healthy breakfast, it nearly stopped the episodes. As near as I can figure, when I loaded up on sugars, my body would react by metabolizing my blood sugars to a point where I had far too little. When I quit drinking years later, the episodes disappeared altogether. To this day, I will never eat a stack of pancakes saturated with syrup. Like alcohol, maybe I could now handle it, but I just won't go there.

It's odd that the remedy for low blood sugar is to avoid eating high sugar foods. That prevents my body from getting carried away and over-compensating for too much sugar. At any rate, that was my experience, and I'm fine now.