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Originally Posted by TonyaW  Thanks...can you give me an idea of what you were eating to deal with the hypoglycemia. I can't seem to get my numbers above 110 even with the grain. Is that bad?
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I don't think 110 is bad. I don't think 100 is bad. Do you feel good at those numbers? I'd say to aim for 90 or above, although that's a fairly arbitrary number. My thinking is that it will give some room for falling without going too low, and I'm guessing you feel pretty OK at that number, since when you talk about feeling bad and checking your blood sugar you talk about 60 and 70. In fact, I'd say go for feeling good. Different people have different levels where they feel good. It's up to you to figure out where you feel good and how to get there.
What did I eat? I feel that breakfast is very important for getting the day off to a good start. I had black beans almost every morning while pregnant (and for quite awhile after). The beans seemed to help me hold a good blood sugar for quite awhile. I added a lot of fat to them, too. I would make refried beans with plenty of ghee or coconut oil. I would eat them either with ground meat mixed in or with scrambled or fried eggs. I often had fermented veggies with my breakfast, too (I don't know if that helped or not).
I also ate a fair amount of hummus with veggies (esp. carrots). Early in the pregnancy I ate it with corn chips, but once the nausea was over I gave those up. They weren't really very good for my blood sugar. I also liked chicken salad (I always add plenty of minced or grated veggies to mine, like carrots and peppers and onions), and boiled eggs or egg salad.
I ate lots of coconut balls for snack (this also saw me through the big hunger of exclusively breastfeeding a 10 mo. old). I make these by mixing in a food processor:
Coconut cream concentrate
Coconut oil
Shredded coconut
Honey (not a lot)
Stevia (a tiny bit)
Vanilla
(If you want exact amounts I can look them up -- I wrote it up somewhere). I then pour that out into a bowl and refrigerate. When it's solid, I remove from the fridge and let it soften enough to scoop into balls. I roll the balls in toasted shredded coconut. I find these addictive, but in a good way. They work really well for keeping me going.
Another good snack was apple slices with nut butter or ghee (butter would be better, if you tolerate it). Broth was good, too.
I almost always have meat and veggies for dinner, in some form or another.
For bedtime snack when pregnant (and then nursing), I found that homemade coconut milk ice cream was really good. I make it with very little sweetener (so that I can barely detect any sweet, and most other people probably wouldn't detect it), and a few raw eggs. Then I serve it with chopped nuts or coconut flakes, and good raw, local honey drizzled over top. It's about a teaspoon or so of honey. Not a lot. It helps with my allergies and helps me sleep. Anyway, that combination of fat, protein and carb worked well for me.
For me, fat was (and is) at least as important as carbs.
Keep in mind that this is what worked for me, and everyone is different, so you'll need to experiment to see what works for you. And in experimenting, keep in mind that you want your food to stay with you for awhile in order to keep your blood sugar steady. You don't want to eat a quick digesting carb by itself, since it will spike your blood sugar and then you will drop.
: It was completely unexpected and I was reading online last night that hypoglycemia is a problem for some pregnant women. I plan to speak with my midwife and do any necessary testing to make sure I don't already have gestational diabetes. But my feeling is that the low blood sugar is a result of the pregnancy and that is why I got so hay wired recently.
: No wonder you've been peeing more! What a happy turn of events; going from thinking that you have diabetes to learning that you're pregnant instead.
