Hypoglycemia or calorie deprivation: a focus on food

Trigger warning: Talk of eating disorders, restrictive eating and eating enough calories for minimum function.

I’ve struggled with hypoglycemia-like symptoms for years — more years than I can remember. My doctor finally diagnosed me with hypoglycemia and recommended eating every two to three hours, or eating when symptomatic. The odd part is that I don’t experience my symptoms except for when I’m active.

Even light housework can make me sick to my stomach, dizzy, weak, and shaky. So, I dutifully did as my doctor asked and monitored my symptoms based on when, how much, and what I ate. The final score? It doesn’t seem to matter. What I eat or when I eat hasn’t had an effect on my symptoms one way or the other.

So I got to think about Shaunta’s recent journey to eat enough for her body and wondered whether my problem is not hypoglycemia, but calorie deprivation? After all, these symptoms are very close to what many eating disorder (ED) patients, including myself, experienced when not eating enough. When I was eating 300 calories a day, I was often dizzy, sick, weak, and shaky.

The thing is, I’ve been in recovery for three years. So why are my symptoms not improving? Well, having thyroid disease means that I am often too tired and sleep through meals. It also means I’m rarely hungry, so I often skip meals; one to two meals a day is pretty normal for me and I only average 1,400-1,700 calories on a day when I’m eating a solid three times. So if I’m eating fewer calories than that from less than three meals a day, then it’s not unreasonable to think something might be connected here. Especially lately, as my diet has only gotten more restrictive. Not only am I vegan which, let’s face it, is naturally pretty low calorie, but I’m also gluten free and have recently been put on an extremely restrictive autoimmune elimination diet. So even when I’m not skipping meals because I’m asleep or not hungry, I’m skipping meals because I just don’t know what the heck to eat!

I’m cautious about bringing this up to my doctor though because he’s, well, a fatphobe and obsessed with me losing weight. When he put me on the autoimmune elimination diet he was convinced the “pounds will just melt away,” even though I have not lost a single pound and I’m pretty sure I’ve gained a few. Maybe because of the hypothyroidism, maybe because my body is perpetually stuck in starvation mode because I’m not feeding it enough, maybe because genetics have stubbornly put my set point squarely at a size 22 and 280lbs. I’m not sure.

What I do know is that I love being active. And that doesn’t always mean going to the gym, although I do love that too. But I also love gardening and walking with my son and redecorating and fixing things up and cleaning (yes, when I’m in a good mood, I love to clean), but these are all things I cannot do when I feel this sick every time I try to accomplish anything. Doing the dishes shouldn’t make me feel like I’m going to hit the floor or make my stomach churn. It’s gotten unbearable.

So, I’ve committed to eating five times a day. I don’t want to count calories, not even to make sure I’m eating enough, because it’s triggering and, well, let’s face it: a pain in the ass.  If eating five times a day doesn’t work, then I’ll count whatever I need to, but first things first. Eat solidly throughout the day.

I want to give a special shout out to Shaunta for going on her wonderful food journey to eat enough to nourish her body because if she hadn’t, I may seriously have never thought to do the same. Eating very little has been my way of life since I was 15 years old (I’m almost 29 now so, wow, 14 years). It’s almost unthinkable for me to eat up to 2,000 calories or more a day!

I was on a diet once where I had to fluctuate between eating 2,500 calories a day and eating 1,000 calories a day. Let me tell you, for me personally, eating 2,500 was tough, even though I was only a vegetarian at the time and not vegan. I felt like I was constantly eating and constantly full.

I may not need that much to function or make my symptoms disappear, but whatever I’m eating now just doesn’t seem to be enough. But here’s where I need your advice: should I keep this experiment secret from my fat-hating doctor? Or should I tell him flat out that I think I’m eating too little and watch his head explode when I say I want to eat more?