Taking My Health Into My Own Hands (Cuz My Doc Certainly Isn't All That Helpful)

After a month of tracking my glucose levels, I've learned a few things, the most important being I need to have something sweet in the evenings. An orange. A fruit smoothie. A vegan chocolate chip cookie. When I don't, my glucose dips with each consecutive morning after not having something sweet, the monitor showing my glucose going lower and lower. While I never went below 79, I was inching lower each morning after not having something sweet the evening before. So now, I make sure I have fruit or a smoothie with dinner. Every now and then I'll have an orange juice mid-day just because.

While I don't think a month is long enough to really know if my glucose levels were the culprit for the tachycardia, I have felt so much better. The weird feeling I'd been experiencing when the tachycardia was happening has not happened. The waves of heat that would wash over me, causing me to peel off my sweatshirt or sweater even though my house is at 65 degrees haven't happened. I only had one moment of tachycardia, and it lasted less than a minute.

A few weeks ago, I also saw my primary doctor and had blood work done. Before I had the blood drawn, she and I talked for a bit about the tachycardia. I told her about me buying a glucose monitor and checking my glucose level every morning. She seemed a bit surprised that I had taken this upon myself. I then asked that I have all of my hormone levels checked. She doesn't think I have a hormone issue, so she didn't order a hormone test other than the typical thyroid, which came back in the normal range. Even after the blood test results came back and my asking again for a full hormone work-up, she won't. I honestly don't understand a doctor refusing to run some tests to rule things out. If the tests come back as normal, great. We can then consider other possibilities. Even my gynecologist said no to doing some hormone tests. As did my cardiologist. Three docs refusing to run what seem to be pretty standard, normal tests. Good grief.

So now I'm reading as much as I can about tachycardia and what might be causing it (which, from what I've found, can be a hormone imbalance issue), and I'm making the changes that I can do myself. I've cut out all added sugar, which isn't hard because I'd pretty much already done that. I went through all the foods I have and checked ingredients for any and all sugars, especially high fructose corn syrup. I threw out crackers -- high fructose corn syrup. Seriously. Why do crackers need to have high fructose corn syrup. I just bought a new jar of peach jam. Guess what? High fructose corn syrup AND sugar. I can donate that to the food pantry at work. I'll keep my vegan chocolate chips. The one sweet I will allow myself is the vegan chocolate chip cookies I make. They are just so good.

Another area of what I eat that I'm adjusting is protein intake. While I don't know exactly how much I was getting on a daily basis, I'm pretty sure it was below 50 grams. For my height and weight, that simply isn't enough, especially since I'm lifting weights and increasing my cardio. I decided to add in a plant-based protein powder, which gives me an additional 40 grams of protein a day. I've only been using the protein powder for a week, but having it between meals has been a gamechanger. My energy throughout the day is so much better. I'm hoping this isn't a psychological thing and is an actual physical/biological thing and continues. I'm loving the energy.

All in all, I do think I'm making positive progress. I'm feeling so much better all the way around, and I'm really hoping it's from the changes I've made. 

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