Beat Midday Dips: Energy Management for High Achievers
I know you’ve felt it: three hours after your last meal, your concentration crashes, grumpiness flares, your hands shake, and all of your being shifts to single-minded focus on what you could eat. What if you didn’t have to face massive dips in your energy and become ravenously hungry throughout the day?
Freedom. That’s what balancing blood sugar brought me. I was no longer plagued by moodiness before meals. No more bleary mind. The anger, trembling, and weakness vanished. Just like that. With all that energy freed up, I became more focused—and happier. I later learned that blood sugar instability can affect dopamine levels—yikes! Dopamine plays a role in making humans feel reward and pleasure, and in many other brain functions, from sleep to memory.
What’s Going on with Hypoglycemia?
Hypoglycemia is what happens when you don’t have enough glucose in your blood stream to fuel your cells. Having too much wreaks havoc too—other than diabetes, over time high blood sugar levels cause brain cells to shrink and entangle.
Biohackers are always talking about monitoring glucose levels. In fact, it is pretty easy to influence blood sugar levels so they don’t go too high or too low, keeping at a happy medium where you have the energy you need when you need it.
How It Works
When you eat, your body converts food into blood sugar (glucose), and as blood sugar rises, your body kicks into energy-making mode: the pancreas secretes insulin to relay the glucose into your cells. You get a jolt of vitality.
Fast-digesting carbs cause large insulin spikes followed by deep, rapid dips in blood sugar. Not what you want. Do this too often and after a while, the whole system goes haywire.
When there isn’t any blood sugar left, your body can kick into fat-burning mode so you don’t feel a dip in your energy, if your body is adapted to using fats as an alternative energy source.
If you eat a carb-based diet, without any long periods without carbs, you never reach that state, and when your blood sugar drops too low, the body goes into a panic state. This is hypoglycemia.
It usually happens late morning and mid-afternoon, particularly if you have a carb-heavy breakfast or lunch.
What You Can do
Shift carb intake to the evening. Eat protein and healthy fat, with some veggies, for breakfast and lunch. This is a mini version of a cyclical keto diet, which enables metabolic flexibility.
Reduce carb intake. If you count, aim for 100 to 150 g/day, ideally from low-glycemic sources like root vegetables, berries, apples, honey.
Eat healthy fats. Replacing carbs with healthy fats (nuts, eggs, avocados, etc.) can help stabilise blood sugar.
Eat protein before carbs. It helps to naturally stabilise blood sugar and served with carbs helps to slow down digestion and prevent large blood sugar spikes.
Eat fiber. The higher the fiber content, the slower the release of sugar.
Add MCT oil. Combining healthy fats with carb-containing foods helps to lower the glycemic response, stabilizing blood sugar.
A Personalised Approach
The thing is, like just about everything else, our blood glucose response is highly individual. For instance, a banana could give you a smooth dose of energy, while the same banana could cause a huge glucose spike in someone else.
So, to avoid the afternoon slump, it helps to track how you react to food. Here are two possibilities.
Keep a food diary. The idea is to write down what you eat and how you feel right afterward and 2 hours later. Really, write it down, because we all forget afterward. The effort brings greater awareness. Mix up your meals. Try different combinations. Write it all down. After a week or so it becomes pretty clear what works.
Use a blood sugar monitor. If you have access to a glucometer, measure you blood glucose in the morning in a fasted state (somewhere between 70 and 100 mg/dl), and with that baseline, test right after a meal and then two hours after a meal (look for an ideal of 90 to 115 mg/dl). Again, write it down.
Top Hacks to Keep the Energy Flowing
Add cinnamon to your morning coffee. Coffee can raise blood sugar, and cinnamon will help move it along into your cells.
Exercise in afternoon. Extra bonus points if you do high-intensity interval training.
Sleep helps blood sugar regulation, and constant blood sugar helps sleep. It’s win-win.
Light exposure. It takes less than a week of circadian rhythm disruption to damage blood sugar regulation. Get out into natural light morning, noon and evening and beware of artificial light as many as 4 hours before bedtime.