If you have got diabetes it is very important to learn the different way your body reacts to rising and falling blood glucose levels. You need to be aware of the symptoms you show when you are too high or too low so you can act as quickly as possible.

Practice

Try to guess the level of your blood glucose before measuring it. This way, you find out how your body feels with different sugar levels. Although different patients will have a different feeling in response to the sugar level, your own feelings and symptoms are almost the same. You can practice recognizing the subtle symptoms of a low blood sugar level for example. The more you do this, the more confident you will feel to anticipate your body’s feeling to low sugar levels.

It’s hard

The fact is that noticing a change in feelings or symptoms when your sugar level is high is not easy. For example, it can well be the case that you feel good with a temporarily high glucose level of 17 mmol/l, but then feel bad at 12, because of a lack of insulin.

If you use alcohol or drugs, recognizing the feelings and symptoms of abnormal sugar levels is even harder. It’s difficult to guess if you are hyper or hypo when you are drunk or on drugs. So, this is not really recommended!

Try to recognize the ‘feeling’, and then confirm by measuring. It will take some time before you master it, but it is certainly worth taking the time.