Check your blood sugar (or CGM) before bed.
Avoid eating lots of food close to bedtime. For diaTribe writer Adam Brown, the key to staying in range overnight is low-carb, early dinners, with no snacking after dinner. Consider eating less food at night and taking more basal insulin to cover your evening meal.
How High Blood Sugar Impacts Sleep. The symptoms you may experience with high blood sugar at night could make it difficult for you to sleep, including falling and staying asleep. Depending on when you eat prior to bedtime, your digestive system may wake you up at odd hours.
The Dawn Phenomenon
If you have diabetes, your body doesn't release more insulin to match the early-morning rise in blood sugar. It's called the dawn phenomenon, since it usually happens between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m. The dawn phenomenon happens to nearly everyone with diabetes.
Answer From M. Regina Castro, M.D. If you have diabetes, late-night snacks aren't necessarily off-limits — but it's important to make healthy choices. Late-night snacks add extra calories, which can lead to weight gain.
Conclusion. High glucose levels at night or glucose spikes at night happen for a variety of reasons. While a late-night carb-heavy meal is often the main accused, it also happens as a result of the Dawn Phenomenon and the Somogyi Effect.
Pomegranate juice is said to help lower blood sugar levels within 15 minutes of drinking it.
Dietary changes, exercise, and many other things can eventually help you decrease your blood sugar levels. However, this process is not immediate. The only way to lower blood sugar immediately is to take insulin, administered by the doctor, or to take potent supplements, which will react within 3-4 hours.
Research suggests that moderate consumption of red wine could have health benefits for those with type 2 diabetes. A glass of red wine with dinner may help lower glucose levels, reducing the body's need for insulin. This occurs as the liver, which produces glucose, must first handle the metabolization of alcohol.
Try to go 10–12 hours each night without eating, Sheth said. For instance, if you eat breakfast at 8:30 a.m. every morning, that means capping your nighttime meals and snacks between 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. each night.
Midday naps appeared to compensate for lost sleep at night, and reversed associated negative health effects, such as poorer blood sugar control. Those who slept for six hours or more were also found to have better sugar control, compared with those who got less than five hours' sleep at night.
At bedtime blood, sugar levels should be between 100 to140 mg/dL to avoid any diabetic complications. The blood glucose levels chart for women shows the normal blood sugar level readings should be between 100 to 140 mg/dL at bedtime. It should be >70 and <100mg/dL after fasting.
Missing Meals? Avoid Dangerous Blood Sugar if You Have Diabetes. Skipping a meal is typically no big deal. But if you're a person with diabetes, skipping meals or a lack of meal structure could result in dangerously low or high blood sugar levels.
Try to eat more of the following: oats, pasta, rice (particularly basmati or brown varieties), wholemeal, granary and rye breads, wholegrain cereals (e.g. Shredded Wheat, Weetabix, Porridge, Branflakes), wholegrain crackers, fruit, vegetables and salad, beans and pulses e.g. lentils, butter beans, kidney beans.
A good rule of thumb, Moyer says, is to eat within one hour of waking up. It is optimal for people with diabetes to eat carbohydrates that contains fiber. Carbohydrates that contain fiber are digested and absorbed slower than those without.
The dawn phenomenon leads to high levels of blood sugar, a condition called hyperglycemia. It usually happens between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. The cause of the dawn phenomenon isn't clear. Some researchers believe the overnight release of certain hormones that happens naturally increases insulin resistance.
Most diabetic patients wake up almost every night at the same time, around 3 pm, not by some noise or anything else, but because of the sudden spike in the blood sugar level. It can happen due to two reasons - the Somogyi effect or the dawn phenomenon.
The dawn phenomenon
In the early hours of the morning, hormones, including cortisol and growth hormone, signal the liver to boost the production of glucose, which provides energy that helps you wake up. This triggers beta cells in the pancreas to release insulin in order to keep blood glucose levels in check.
Avoid eating high sugar foods and drinks a night before the test for sugar not to spike and one gets a normal glucose test.
Not eating may give you a headache. And if you fast for more than a day or so, your body may not get enough of the nutrients it needs without supplements. But the biggest danger of fasting if you have diabetes is that your blood sugar levels could go dangerously low (this is called hypoglycemia).
The result: a quick spike in blood sugar. If you have type 2 diabetes, this means taking sugary drinks — such as regular soda, sweet tea, and even juice — off the table and replacing them with low-sugar and sugar-free options, including water.