Reversibility?

A whole chicken breast and all that every hour? Are you serious? Or are you eating small portions? First off, lentils are fairly high in carbohydrates and may be causing the main problem. I know my system is very sensitive and the smallest thing can give me a few days of goofiness. I tried eating lentils once for about six months and never saw any improvement at all, it just made me a little better, and then worse and never got any different. What kind of lettuce are you eating? Iceberg I bet, which has nearly no nutritional value and is generally worthless. No fruit? You need to be eating some fruit. Avocados? You may be eating too much too soon. I always recommend eating no more than once every two hours. Once every hour seems pretty dang extreme. Have you tried spreading it out to this time? You're most certainly eating too much, that would be my first guess as to the problem. How much activity are you doing through the day? If you're a guy, 1900 is hardly enough. I lift weights and such and I think i'm getting around 4000 calories a day. You need to probably add some more fat to your diet and definitely a bit of fruit, as well as possibly increasing your protein intake. How much protein are you eating a day? I'm going to guess not enough. Now for your questions:

1. I'd say you're not doing much of anything. Two years and what seems to be not enough result is too long for me. You should see some pretty decent results in no longer than four months and then much better health by about a year. If you're still having runs of bad days and weeks (!) after two years, you're not doing something right. I'm under the opinion that this condition is not completely curable in the sense that you won't be able to eat cookies and cake every day again (maybe once every two or three weeks), but it is very manageable to the point where you hardly notice your symptoms or are able to easily deal with them when they come on, progressively getting better and better. You may be able to have a small glass of wine or something here and there, but "a couple of drinks" is probably out of the question.

2. Home readers are useless for low blood sugar. They only accurately gauge high sugar readings and don't capture the levels we need to worry about. What were the readings you were getting when you were feeling your worst?

3. Don't bother listening to anything your friend has to say. Hypoglycemia differs for everyone. You may only be having a sugar drop from 80mg to 60mg every hour or two, which is techinally not low based on current medical opinion, but for you that might be disastrous. I know that my sugar was dropping about that much every hour, which would set me off pretty bad. It depends how your body uses glucose and how easily your brain is effected by any dropping. Some people are fine for an hour or two, whereas others may feel like garbage within only 30 minutes of eating. You can't compare yourself to anyone else.

The one thing that does kind of concern me is that you said that your symptoms are not consistent, even when you're eating your best. First off, my guess is that you're not doing something right. When you say "eating consistent," does this mean you have days where you go gorge on general tso's chicken or something? If so, you're never going to get better doing that and that's probably the main problem if you're gorging on badness now and then. I need to know in detail your total diet before I tell you what you're doing wrong. The tumor thing is nothing to be scared of, if you have it, it would mean you have some benign lumps on your pancreas that are causing it to shoot out insulin. However, if you have this, you will essentially never have any good days. Your symptoms will remain constant regardless of what you eat, and in fact you can eat anything you want if you have this. Most people who get this end up eating a ton of candy throughout the day until they find out it is a tumor, because it causes a pretty much continuous release of insulin. You wouldn't have problems eating badness if you had this.

I actually do feel much better than I did about a year and a half ago. I've improved steadily. I just have these periods were the symptoms come back for a few days or weeks - on and off. That’s why I wonder if i'm just controlling the symptoms.

I used to eat every two hours or so, and eating every hour has helped quite a bit. Lentils have a very low glycemic index and load, much lower than other beans, and I only have two or three fork fulls an hour. The chicken breast I eat is about the size of a thumb or two. I don't think the calorie intake is a problem. There are many studies on restricted calorie diets that show they increase lifespan and quality of life.

I used to have a slice or two of grapefruit and occasionally some raspberries. Sometimes they gave me problems, sometimes they didn't. I'll be trying some avocados though.

What you and other people on this forum describe sounds exactly like what i've been dealing with. However, I don't think this is entirely a low blood sugar problem but a problem using the sugar. That's why we are so sensitive to slight drops in sugar.

Even during my worst symptoms I would get readings off the sugar meter around 100, 110, 90. My diabetic friend gets much lower readings at times - in the 40s and 50s. He only gets strange symptoms when his sugar gets down in the 40 range.

I have to mention that aerobic exercise makes a big difference, especially running. I've had to stop running consistently for the past few months because of pain i've developed in my feet. But when I can do two or three miles I feel great the next day. Back when I was running a few miles a day consistently I felt practically cured - no symptoms. I even got away with a couple of drinks at night. I've tried other things like riding my bike and weight lifting, and nothing compares to running.

So how bad are the symptoms when they return? The first post seemed to suggest that you were doing pretty bad at these points. Glycemic load is not the importance for hypoglycemia, total carbohydrate consumption throughout the day is. That's what I meant. 160g isn't that much, but getting it from something like lentils, which stimulates the pancreas more than green vegetables, could be causing a problem. But you don't seem to be eating enough for this to occur. It sounds like you could possibly be not balancing out everything enough. Do you know your total vitamin and nutrient intake? If you're eating only about two thumb sizes of chicken per hour, that would seem to equal out to no more than 1/2 a breast per day, which is not enough. Hypoglycemia is quite simply only a problem with reacting to sugar, it has nothing to do with using sugar because everything you eat is converted into sugar, it's the speed at which it is converted throughout the day that matters. If we couldn't use sugar at all or had problems with this, we'd be having way more difficulty. About the monitor. The problem is that you were reading when you were having the bad symptoms. If you had taken it before that, you may have noticed a difference. It's kind of hard to understand, but basically, your brain is getting screwed up (as well as your body) after the drop in sugar. Thus, you're reading it when it's beginning to return things to normal but has yet to readjust. And again, don't compare yourself to someone else. Sure, maybe he gets that low, but you may only go 10mg per hour, but for you that may be disastrous. That's pretty good you can run, I can say that generally any exercise is good. For aerobic I do kung fu, which is great, moving all four limbs most of the time and not effecting the joints as much. Weight lifting balances sugar, so I usually recommend it. But, yet again, everyone has different results and reactions to things. How much activity are you doing other than running? It would seem pretty crazy if you can do a lot more including running a few miles per day on only 1900 calories. Are you sure you're eating enough? I guess the main thing I wanted to know was your basic day-to-day diet as well as how bad the symptoms are getting when you get them. I wouldn't say you're just controlling the symptoms, simply because you have to remember that you probably, depending on your age, have about 20 years or so of bad food that you need to overcome, and it's not going to happen in a short amount of time. But if you're getting a week or so where you're feeling bad, that seems strange to me. Every now and then, if I happen to try a new herb that I find out later wasn't a good idea, I may feel bad for three days maximum, but that's it. Generally i'm fine and i've never had a run of a week or more of bad symptoms in a long, long time. So, I need to ask, how bad is it getting? What symptoms are you still experiencing?

The main symptoms i've always had are: a spaced out "brain fog" kind of feeling, sleepiness, and draining fatigue throughout my entire body. Sometimes I get all the symptoms at once, sometimes separately. Like I said before, the symptoms have gotten much better over the past year or so, but I still get periods of about a few days to two to three weeks were the symptoms come on for a few hours during the day. Sometimes it skips days and I feel fine one day, bad the next, etc.. It's probably something in my diet that I don't notice.

There are perfectly healthy people who get glucose tolerance tests, which show that they become hypoglycemic after high sugar intake, but they have no symptoms. This is part of what makes me think that these symptoms are more than just a drop in sugar. Something else is going on.

I went to my doctor today, told him about how i've been doing, explained to him my diet, and I asked him if he thought this was still reactive hypoglycemia. He said no - something else is going on. I don't know what, but I plan on getting some more tests done.

Well, let us know what happens. I myself wonder this sometimes, but then again I was tested for everything under the sun so I can't think of anything else it could be. Again, don't base what you're experiencing on anyone else. I don't care and you shouldn't care if people have signs like that. In fact, I read a good article that proves that that theory is wrong, but I need to find it if you're actually interested. It was apparently some old form of testing they did back in the day that they thought "proved" hypoglycemia didn't exist. Here it is, I believe it's in this one somewhere:

http://www.Surviv ediabetes.Com/sugar.Htm#sugar

how extreme are these symptoms? Are they almost dehabilitating? How long do they usually last? When you say you feel good one day and then bad the next, or whatever, how many hours in the bad days are you feeling bad and how extreme is it? Post your diet.