Are Holiday Treats Giving You Dropping Blood Sugar?

Ahh, the holidays! Friends, family, food, lavish desserts, candy dishes, chocolate covered everything and white sugar pouring like sands through the hourglass.

Have you ever stopped to think about what the cumulative effect is of eating all those sweets?

BLOOD SUGAR BLUES

There's no doubt that people overeat during holidays. It's almost as much of a tradition as the holiday itself. But overindulgence in sweets has its price.

Whether you notice it (at first) or not, sweets in pies, cake, table sugar and even high carbohydrate foods (stuffing, pasta and white rice, for example) take their toll. Your body has to handle and process the sugars. This causes stress.

Your body starts to sing the blues.

SUGARY SYMPTOMS

The most notable signs of eating too many sweets are lack of energy, shakiness, dizziness, a feeling that your world is blacking out when you suddenly stand up, slight headache, drowsiness, and a cold sweat. You don't have to feel all of these at once to be affected.

When you eat sweets, your body goes to work. Your pancreas injects a hormone called insulin into your blood stream to remove the sugars. When this happens quickly, your blood sugar drops and you start experiencing the symptoms.

Simple sugars — the kinds in sweets — create the most problems.

They make your pancreas work extra hard. If the problem is chronic — you eat too many sweets and your pancreas is overworked — the result can be diabetes.

Millions of people are riding the edge of creating diabetes because they eat a constant diet of refined sugars.

ALTERNATIVE EATING PLEASURE

Watch yourself.

As crazy as it may sound to a sugar-holic, once you wean yourself off sugary treats, you don't really care if you eat them ever again.

This is because sugar is addictive and by removing the chemical you remove the urge to eat more and more. In the least though, you can eat consciously.

This means that instead of eating everything in front of you, you can pace yourself so that by the end of the night you aren't regretting what you've done. Be aware of what you eat and don't eat too much. Instead of taking a slice of two pies and two cakes, try a sampling of each. Don't add sweetener to your coffee.

Dr. Vic Shayne