Blood sugar regulation is one of the most important functions of your body and it’s one of the most important ingredients in staying healthy, preventing chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancers and you don’t want to get to a point where you need to inject insulin or take medications to lower your blood sugar.

So I’m going to give you three different ways to lower your blood sugar fast without taking any more pills, without taking any medication or doing anything too extreme.

So first blood sugar. Where does it come from and why do we need to manage it?

Every time we eat food, especially carbohydrates, but even proteins, we break down that food into its little components that we can use as energy. We absorb it and we convert it to blood glucose. This is one of the currencies of energy that we have in our bloodstream to then turn that into energy. So we need some blood glucose in our bloodstream.

So, where the problems can happen? Why does blood sugar get higher?

Well, blood sugar gets high if you are insulin resistant. Insulin is a hormone. It signals your body, your cells, to take that blood glucose out of your bloodstream and take it to the cells where it needs like your muscles, your eyes, you know whatever it might be.

Most tissue needs glucose to make energy and what can happen over time, whether it’s due to stress, not living the right lifestyle or eating too much sugar, well, insulin doesn’t work as efficiently.

Your body stops responding to insulin and there’s a reason why. If your blood sugar is constantly high and it just let all that blood glucose enter your cells. It would destroy the cells. It would cause damage. So there’s a reason why there’s insulin resistance. So we want to make sure we manage this blood glucose.

We want it in a nice tight window. You know if you’ve ever checked your fasting blood glucose. You want it between 70 and 90. You don’t want it too low. You don’t want it too high. You want to keep that window nice and tight. So, pre-diabetes people are those who have blood sugar levels above 100 constantly. If you’re diabetic, you might have seen 200, 300, 400, that the higher that goes, your fasting blood glucose that can start resulting in different issues.

You know when you have diabetes, it can damage your kidneys, it can damage your nerves and your feet. That’s when we get diabetic neuropathy. There are a lot of issues with high blood glucose.

Now, how do we lower that blood sugar fast? Are you know one of the first-line therapies for high blood sugar?

EXERCISE AND MOVEMENTS

And don’t be afraid of that word exercise, I’m not talking about running a marathon. I’m not talking about going to do CrossFit, doing some extreme athletic event that you are not prepared to do. Movements can include taking a walk, going up and down the stairs etc.

One of my aunts was diagnosed with diabetes as well. She started a habit of after eating, she would do a gentle walk on a treadmill and she would walk until her blood sugar got into a safe range. The range where she wanted to. Right, so something as simple as walking 20 minutes, 30 minutes can help.

And if you do have a blood glucose meter, you can check the changes in your blood sugars before and after exercise and you will see the effect. Once you see the cause and the effect, you’ll see how important movement is to lowering your blood sugar. So whether you’re starting from the couch or whether you are maybe working out once a week, try walking 20 minutes a day before you eat, after you eat and see what happens to your blood sugar.

ADDING FIBRE TO MEALS

The second thing that you can do to start lowering your blood sugar fast is adding a little bit of fibre into your meals right.

If you’re used to eating white bread, crackers and chips, one of the fastest ways to prevent a rise in blood sugar is to add some fibre into your meals like celery or broccoli. There’s a reason why vegetables and fruits have benefits to improving blood sugar. It’s because when you have some fibre with the meal, it slows the absorption of blood glucose and slows the rise of blood sugar after a meal.

You don’t have to change everything overnight. But a little bit of fibre and vegetable, something like celery with almond butter is good, right? That’s one of my favourite snacks these days and you will feel full longer and it’ll prevent some of those cravings.

SLEEP

The third way to lower blood sugar fast, and this is going to sound a little counterintuitive, but the single act is a way to control cravings. This is a way to lower stress. It is a way to give your body a chance to heal, is sleep. So some of the highest rates of chronic disease, diabetes, heart disease, cancer are found in one of the biggest studies looking at nurses and health care workers who worked overnight.

They work a swing shift, they worked the graveyard shift. Not getting enough sleep at the right times will decrease your insulin sensitivity, raise your cortisol levels, throw off your circadian rhythm. Our hormones cycle with the day and night cycle.

So a lot of people who don’t get enough sleep regularly are more prone to high blood sugar and diabetes. Whether that is because of your own doing or you’re working late, or you got a lot going on or whether your job mandates that you have to work overnight work.

Just know that there’s a trade-off to doing these things and when it comes to your health, what’s more important, your health or your job, right? I know it’s not always easy but you have to then consider what price are you paying for? Having that type of lifestyle and what type of lifestyle do you need to? Keep your blood sugar in check.

INTERMITTENT FASTING

I’ll give you a bonus one. Number four. So you may have heard that intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding and what this really means is giving yourself a period of time regularly where you’re not eating.

So some of the worst advice that I see with that anyone with diabetes is to eat more frequent small meals throughout the day. But what happens when you’re eating small meals throughout the day is you’re getting this blood glucose spike every few hours!

I understand maybe the logic that went into that. So if you’re eating a big meal, your blood sugar goes up really high. So why not spread it out? But this doesn’t take into consideration what someone is eating so your blood sugar won’t go as high.

If you’re having a little bit of fibre, you’re having low glycemic index foods. Foods that won’t raise your blood sugar. The body wasn’t designed to be constantly digesting. It takes a lot of energy to digest food and your body needs a period of time to process and heal.

So a simple way to implement intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding is to close the window when you’re actually eating.

So here’s one way to put it, have 12 hours between the last bite of food that you eat and the first bite of food you have in the morning. That means if you finish eating at 7 p.m., the next meal you want to have at the earliest is 7 a.m.. And you can even widen that window a bit. So from 7 p.m. maybe you eat at 9 a.m. and then you start putting all these things together.

Maybe you go for a walk before you have your first meal today, that first meal is not just hashbrowns but you have hashbrowns and you have some vegetables with those hashbrowns.

And make sure you get a good night’s sleep before you start your day the next day and you will find that, when you combine these tips together, you will manage your blood sugar much more efficiently.

It seems pretty simple but this is giving your body the right conditions it needs to lower blood sugar fast. The symptoms that we experience are messages from our body that something is not right and we need to correct those conditions in order to to be healthy and, in this case, manage your blood sugar.