Fatigue is common feature of diabetes. Some people may experience temporary feelings of fatigue, such as being tired after meals. Other people may have chronic fatigue which means that they feel constantly tired through the day.<\/p>\n
Fatigue can affect the ability to carry out physical or mental tasks.<\/p>\n
Fatigue can introduce problems at work, at home and can have knock on effects on diabetes management, such as if it presents a barrier to doing exercise, holds you back from preparing healthy food or taking medication and blood tests.<\/p>\n
Low-carb can help towards reducing some aspects of fatigue and many people report that eating low-carb helps them to feel more alert and able to think clearly.<\/p>\n
Causes of fatigue<\/strong><\/p>\n There are number of factors linked with diabetes that can cause fatigue, these include:<\/p>\n Blood sugar levels and fatigue<\/strong><\/p>\n Too high and too low sugar levels are each associated with fatigue.<\/p>\n Having sugar in the blood is one of the ways the body gets energy. You might think that having more sugar in the blood makes you more energetic but that\u2019s not actually true.<\/p>\n In fact, your body needs the right balance of sugar in the blood; not too low and not to high either.<\/p>\n When blood sugar is too high, it may reduce oxygen available to the brain and muscles leading to tiredness. Another reason is that higher levels is linked with higher inflammation, which means the body is trying to heal itself and can lead to tiredness.<\/p>\n When blood sugar is too low, the body has too little fuel for energy which typically results in tiredness.<\/p>\n Glucose is not the one way the body can get energy from its blood. It can also get energy from ketones which are produced when the body breaks down body fat.<\/p>\n Low-carb, and particularly very low-carb \u2018ketogenic\u2019 eating, encourages the body to break down body fat into ketones. Fasting can also bring on this effect.<\/p>\n Low-carb and fatigue<\/strong><\/p>\n Many people have found that low-carb has helped them to feel much more energetic.<\/p>\n People that have been struggling to get their sugar levels under control commonly talk about having brainfog. Then, after starting low-carb, report having more alertness and clarity of thought.<\/p>\n Some people, in the early stages of low-carb, feel more tired. This can happen if the body adapts to using ketones rather glucose from the blood. This is temporary and if you persist with low-carb, you can expect your energy levels to get much better.<\/p>\n Research into low-carb and fatigue<\/strong><\/p>\n What does research say about low-carb and fatigue?<\/p>\n Fatigue can be caused by a number of different factors and can also be difficult to define so it can be difficult to design research studies into fatigue.<\/p>\n One study from 2006, looked at different levels of carbohydrate for breakfast and how this affected people\u2019s fatigue.<\/p>\n 68 students took part and the researchers tested breakfasts of 15, 30 and 50 grams of carbs. The researchers found that the higher the carbohydrate, the more likely the students were to be tired afterwards.<\/p>\n Whilst the students did not have diabetes, the researchers noted that those with lower glucose tolerance were more likely to get tired following carbohydrate than the students that were very responsive to insulin.<\/p>\n References:<\/em> Fatigue is common feature of diabetes. Some people may experience temporary feelings of fatigue, such as being tired after meals. Other people may have chronic fatigue which means that they feel constantly tired through the day. Fatigue can affect the ability to carry out physical or mental tasks. Fatigue can introduce problems at work, at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2365,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"class_list":["post-2363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conditions"],"acf":{"post_private":true},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2363"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2370,"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2363\/revisions\/2370"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lowcarbprogram.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC2905388\/<\/em><\/a>
\nhttps:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/17176639<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"