Hello everyone,
I've been tinkering with my carb levels lately as I am transitioning into maintaining. I've not had much problems with my experiments, thankfully. I have slowly raised my carbs and tolerated it fine. However, it seems when I attempt to cut back a bit I experience crazy blood sugar disturbances. Symptoms (which I believe are all symptomatic of a "hypoglycemic episode") include poor ability to concentrate, irritability symptoms (impatience/intolerance for others especially), emotional disturbances/moodiness, a feeling of anxiousness/nervousness, and a physical jitteriness/shakes/tremors. Additional symptoms which follow the aforementioned cluster of hypoglycemic symptoms are digestive troubles, headaches, sleep disturbances (trouble falling asleep, excessive sleeping once asleep), and a profound feeling of fatigue/muscle weakness. The most troubling symptom is the cluster of hypoglycemia symptoms during and shortly after my meal. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about.

I will be on 50 carbs average for a week, and be pretty much fine. Then I'll have a few days where my carbs are high, say 65 or 60 grams. Then when I cut back from this to say, 45 grams, I experience crazy crazy crazy blood sugar! Initiating of eating, irregardless of frequency (several small meals or 3 or 4 well rounded, it doesn't matter), size (gum or a small snack can sometimes do it), or carb composition of meals (15 grams messes me up just as much as steak and broccoli) I will experience hypoglycemic symptoms shortly after or during eating.

Hypoglycemia in response to eating sounds totally contradictory, doesn't it?

The only theory I can come up with is an excessive phase one insulin response caused by exposing my body to higher carb levels for a couple of days. Due to being on so low carb for so many months, my phase 1 insulin response has become smaller to adapt. By slowly raising carbs, my body learns it needs to produce a larger phase one response to deal with it (a sign of insulin resistance). Fortunately my phase one insulin response is still good (I am not diabetic), so when I expose my body to higher carb levels it "learns" that it needs to make the phase one response bigger next time. However, should I go back down to low carbohydrate meals later on, I still release the insulin which my body "expects" is needed. This then causes the perception of falling blood sugar and the hypoglycemic symptoms upon eating.

If this theory is correct, then dropping my carbs a bit and keeping the levels stable day to day should avoid the problem. Also it means something good and bad. The good news is I probably am not close to developing diabetes yet, as my phase one is obviously in good working order, meaning I don't run high sugars post-prandial (a feature of diabetes is very poor/weak phase 1 insulin response relative to the cellular resistance resulting in high post-prandial sugars). The bad news is that I probably have relatively bad insulin resistance, as a disproportionately high amount of insulin release is needed to deal with relatively small increments of additional dietary carbs (which is why such a small change in carb levels produced big changes in insulin production & sugar metabolism regularity).

Like I said, all this is just theory... if anyone else has experienced or heard of symptoms like mine and found a concrete causative origin, I would *really* appreciate your feedback! I've been searching usenet groups & the internet, I can't find any information about expression of hypoglycemic symptoms related to meal initiation. Most of the info seems to deal with reactive/relative hypoglycemia in response to a high carb meal which forces a high phase two response, or absolute hypoglycemia as is seen in IDDM patients. Neither of these situations seem to fit what I am experiencing.