Every Three Hours: Hypoglycemia and Writing
As I write this, I am hungry.
It’s not because I haven’t eaten. In fact, I know exactly what I’ve consumed, when I consumed it, and how much longer I have until this hunger — which is thin, but persistent — becomes intolerable. Then, how much longer before the hunger becomes dangerous. I know so much about my hunger, its temperaments and what to do about — and yet I sit at a computer screen and I try to push through it so I can put words on a page.
This is my routine every single morning: I wake up, I eat something that has at least 15g of protein in it, and then I sit down to write. I write as much as I can without worrying about spelling mistakes because I know that I only have three hours — though more like two hours and a half — before I will need to eat again.
I have reactive hypoglycemia. Most definitions of hypoglycemia describe it as a deficiency in blood sugars; it’s usually associated with diabetes, but it doesn’t always happen concurrently. In my case, I don’t have diabetes, so my hypoglycemia is reactive and without a known origin. It looks similar to how most people experience hunger, since all hunger is basically low blood sugar. Fasting hypoglycemia is when someone experiences symptoms eight hours or more after not eating. When anyone doesn’t eat for that long or longer, they run the risk of passing out — one of the more obvious symptoms of hypoglycemia.
For me, my low blood sugars happen every 3–4 hours. And what most people don’t seem to understand is that I must eat food every 3–4 hours, no matter if I ate a large meal or a small one. My blood sugars will crash, like clockwork, no matter what. Even if I’m not exhibiting hunger as most people tend to — through a grumbling belly or shaky hands — my blood sugar has still dropped. I’ll be unable to concentrate, and feel moody and lethargic. Some foods will cause this to happen more often, and the swing will be even worse than before. My hunger becomes hanger, and intrusive thoughts seem to dominate. And I can pass out if I’m not careful.
The cure is simple and complicated at the same time: eating. But eating carefully and regularly, which like I said, is more complicated than it sounds.
I’ve had this for years. But my family doctor never wanted to treat it seriously because she mistook it for an eating disorder. My need to be so precise about what I ate and avoiding certain foods looked like dieting — especially without the diagnosis of diabetes.
When I dropped weight, along with this strange eating pattern, it seemed like textbook anorexia nervosa. At 15, I was put into treatment and gained some weight — but I was still struggling with food. I was eating the cake people told me to have because I didn’t need to diet, but then feeling terrible (both mentally and physically) after the fact.
Each time I brought these negative feelings up, wondering if something else was wrong, all my symptoms were treated as psychological. From ages 15 to 21, I maintained a mostly consistent weight, even being overweight for a large amount of time, as I continued to be treated as if I had anorexia nervosa. No other option was given.
American culture dictates that women must care about what they eat, then it punishes them for caring about it. The very beauty industry that demands stick-thin figures then demonizes those women for caring too much about how they look.
I knew all of this; I’d read The Beauty Myth cover to cover, along with Reviving Ophelia and Joan Jacob Brumberg’s history of eating disorders called Fasting Girls. In and out of treatment, I’d done the self-care and worked though my hesitancy against all things fatty.
I was not “sick” anymore — if I ever had been — but I was still treated as if I didn’t understand my own body. Everything was all in my head; I was gaslit about my own food choices and my body.
The real work in untangling these associations came in understanding that I may have never had anorexia in the first place; that my first doctor had been wrong and maybe, just maybe, there was something else wrong with me that wasn’t my fault.
Once I switched doctors, he took one look at my symptoms and blood test results, and gave me a quick nod.
“Oh yeah, this is classic reactive hypoglycemia. I’m setting you up with a dietician.”
She encouraged me even more. Use your body as a clock. Figure out what foods make it feel better. And protein, protein, protein. I was encouraged to care about what I eat and then, subsequently, to care about myself again. It still took me an entire summer of convincing myself that caring about what I ate was not dieting, nor was changing my diet a symptom of anorexia. There was nothing wrong with me, except that I almost always needed to carry a Power Bar with me if I leave the house for more than two hours.
But that, like anything else, was manageable as soon as I knew.
I link my hypoglycemia with my writing because I started taking my writing seriously when I was in the hospital for anorexia. I’d tried to use it as a redemptive tool; if I could become the next Marya Hornbacher with my memoir, then maybe I could free myself from the demon that was my eating disorder. When I realized my demon wasn’t real, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to write. I found that when I sat down, the words still came to me, but I was bothered by a different kind of demon: hunger, hunger, hunger.
I may not have had an eating disorder, but my body still demanded attention. It still demanded food, like clockwork, every 3 hours. I knew I could still write — but my hunger, my brain fogs due to carb overload, and my inability to concentrate if I’ve pushed myself too far — affected the writing process the most.
I grew frustrated with myself for not being able to produce as much as some of my colleagues at graduate school, especially when they seemed to treat eating as a side-task. Like Ken Robinson says, everyone in academia wants to see themselves as just a brain, constantly thinking and producing ideas. I had to be a body, so viscerally, and I resented people around me for not needing to take Power Bars with them wherever they went, or not needing to work at home because they couldn’t always anticipate a “bad day” when my crashes would throw me off-kilter.
When I read from Benjamin Hardy’s article that we only really get three hours of good work done a day, I instantly related to it. I knew that the eight-hour work day was bunk, but more than anything, I knew that three-hour rule intuitively through my body’s clock. When I wake up, I work — but I only get three good hours in if I’m lucky. Then I must eat, and start something else. My mornings, full of protein — but not too full or I’ll become sluggish and not focus — are when that work happens.
In order to accomplish that, in order to let go of the myth of the writer who lives and breathes words all the time, I had to accept my body. I had to listen to it when it was hungry, but also understand that my fogginess meant hunger. That my sudden sadness meant hunger. And that even blurred vision meant hunger. My trembling hands on the keyboard were not a sign of weakness, but a sign of hunger; a sign of being human.
I had to learn again, not only how to survive with hypoglycemia, but thrive through writing about it.
And now, I should probably go eat.
