E31: The Blood Sugar Roller Coaster They Forgot to Warn You About

Crashing, craving sugar, and exhausted by 2pm? Learn how blood sugar affects energy, hormones, and midlife fatigue.

Do you feel fine one minute… then suddenly exhausted, craving sugar, or completely overwhelmed?

You might not need more willpower. You might be on a blood sugar rollercoaster!

In this episode of Unmute Your Midlife, we break down how unstable blood sugar impacts your energy, mood, cravings, and hormones—especially in midlife.

You’ll learn:
 • Why you crash mid-morning or mid-afternoon
 • The connection between blood sugar, cortisol, and hormones
 • Why cravings and “hanger” are biological, not a discipline issue
 • How skipping meals and coffee habits affect your energy
 • Simple ways to stabilize your blood sugar without extreme dieting

If you’ve been feeling tired, foggy, irritable, or stuck in a cycle of cravings, this episode will help you understand what your body is actually asking for.

Midlife is not about trying harder.
It’s about supporting your body smarter.

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Transcript

The Blood Sugar Rollercoaster

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Let me ask you something. Have you ever felt totally fine? And then all of a sudden you needed some sugar or some food or something like right now. You get that um that sweaty feeling. You get shaky, you get irritable, you you can tell you're crashing. You you start to get a little hangry, or maybe you just need a nap. You're not hungry, but you're so incredibly tired. You don't think you're gonna be able to get through the day without a short nap. And you might even think, what is wrong with me? The answer is nothing. You're not lazy, you're not lacking discipline, you are riding the blood sugar roller coaster, and nobody warned us about this one either. Welcome to Unmute Your Midlife. I'm Joyce, a nurse-turned midlife strategist. This is where midlife gets explained and standards get raised. Think of every episode like your strategic briefing. You'll leave knowing exactly what to observe, what to adjust, and what to implement next. Midlife is not a decline. It's a leadership test. So let's begin. What the blood sugar roller coaster feels like. Let's uh go into great detail so you can recognize it. This might look like crashing mid-morning or mid-afternoon, having these really intense cravings, especially for sugar or carbs. Feeling hangry, that's that hungry, angry feeling just out of nowhere. That's why they always joke to the husbands. They tell them keep plenty of snacks on hand for her. Brain fog energy spikes that are followed by complete exhaustion. Sometimes you'll see it as waking up at 2 or 3 a.m. and not being able to go back to sleep, and then feeling like wired, ready to roll, but also tired at the same time. A lot of times women don't connect this to blood sugar. They think, oh, it's my hormones, or this is just stress, or maybe I need some coffee or caffeine. And while those things can be connected, blood sugar is often the missing piece. Okay, what's really happening in your body? I want to keep it simple. When you eat carbs, your blood sugar will go up and then your body will release some insulin to bring it back down. The insulin is actually a great tool, magnificent thing that your body does. The insulin goes and plucks those molecules of glucose out of your bloodstream and tucks them away, usually in your fat cells. The fat cells are like factories to store anything that could harm your body. That's one of the many things they do. Now, if you are needing energy, then it might go to the areas of the body that can use it, that can break it down, that can put it into action. But anything excess is going to get stored away. That's how it normally works. But what happens if you are not getting enough protein, if you're eating really heavy carbs, really heavy sugar, or you're skipping meals altogether, or you're experiencing a whole bunch of stress and you're trying to substitute good nutrition with caffeine, those sort of scenarios are gonna give you spike crash, spike crash, spike, crash over and over. When you crash, your body starts to think that you need energy now. So it will trigger these intense cravings or this sense of irritability. Some people even struggle with some anxiety. And of course, because you need some energy, you're gonna experience some fatigue. It's not about willpower, it's not about discipline. This is just your body trying to survive the spikes and drops. So now let's pivot a little bit here and talk about why this gets worse in midlife. It's because this is where a lot of things shift. Your estrogen starts to fluctuate, your cortisol changes, you have less muscle mass a lot of times, because we've talked about this before. The lack of estrogen ends up resulting in a decreased muscle mass. You've got a higher stress load because of being in the sandwich generation, because of work stress, because of physical stress. You just have more stress load at this age. And then sleep disruption. Almost every woman going through midlife is going to have some problems with sleep disruption. But all of those things, all of those factors affect how your body handles its blood sugar. So the things that you used to do in your 20s and 30s to keep your energy up, those aren't going to work the same for you now in your 40s, 50s, and 60s. You're gonna crash faster, you're gonna crave harder, and you're gonna recover slower. And so you might start to think your body is betraying you, but it's not. It just needs a different level of support now. Most women get stuck in this loop. There's a very uh common cycle. I've done it before. I see my coworkers doing it. You get up and you don't have food for breakfast, but you might grab a coffee or an energy drink. Then you get to work and somebody's brought donuts. So you grab a donut. Or you think, I'll just run over to the food cart or cafeteria and get something quick. Well, most of the choices there are not gonna be high protein, high fiber. And then when it comes to lunchtime, you're gonna eat something light, or you're gonna eat fast food, or you're gonna skip it all together. Then comes the afternoon crash. Around two or three, you just think you can't go on anymore. So, what do you do? You grab another energy drink or cup of coffee or candy bar or something, some fast carbs to get your energy back up. So you're setting yourself up for that spike and drop and spike and drop. Then you might eat a big dinner or get a late night snack before you go to bed, and then rinse and repeat day after day. Every time your blood sugar spikes and crashes, your nervous system gets more dysregulated, your hormones get more stressed, and your energy gets more unstable. And then you start to get down on yourself thinking, I just can't get it together. But let me call this out very clearly. This is not a discipline problem. It's not a lack of willpower, it's not a lack of motivation, it's not even you being bad with food. This is a physiological response to an unstable blood sugar. Your cravings aren't the problem. Your cravings are the signal. It's the signal your body is sending you to tell you something's not right. Now, if you would like to get off the roller coaster, we're gonna do some simple shifts to stabilize the system. Because I am not a big fan of going to great extremes. Extremes don't last. They give you short-term results, but you can't usually maintain them long term. So let's stick with simple shifts that will stick with you for the long haul. Number one, start your day with protein. You can have your coffee if you want to. You can even put sugar in it. But before that, I want you to give yourself something stable. You need something that has protein and fiber. You can do a shake, you can do eggs, you can do a smoothie bowl, whatever floats your boat. But you need protein and fiber because this is going to reduce the crashes, it's gonna stabilize your energy, it's gonna calm your cravings. And then after that, you can have your cup of coffee and you can even put sugar in it. Second thing, don't skip meals. I know you're busy, but skipping meals is just gonna give you big crashes later. Even a small meal is better than nothing. Even those little lunchable trays, you know, they come with the meat and cheese and crackers. Don't eat the crackers. But the meat and cheese, I know the cheese has fat, and I know the meat is full of preservatives, but that is still a better alternative than skipping a meal or eating fast food. We're not going for perfection here. We're going for best choice out of our options, right? Uh, the third thing is carbs. You do not have to cut your carbs, but you need to pair them with a protein or a fat because that will slow down the spike, the blood sugar spike. It'll keep your blood sugars more stable. You know, they're gonna go up and down a little, but what we're trying to avoid is the spikes up and down. Okay. And be careful, number four, of the coffee trap. It's very tempting to grab a coffee or a diet coke or an energy drink when you feel like you need a pick-me-up. But when you take that in on an empty stomach, you're just creating blood sugar chaos. So try to try to avoid the energy drinks, period. I'm not even gonna say anything about Diet Coke because some people say it's fine, some people say it's full of chemicals. That depends on your goals, your choices. The coffee, if you could wait and pair it with food or delay it until after food, that would be better. Fifth thing, notice your patterns. Instead of judging yourself, start observing. When do you crash? When do your cravings hit? What did you eat before those things happened? When we can track our patterns and observe them and glean some insight from them. This is how we rebuild trust in our body. Because up until this point, if you're going through all these changes that you don't understand that you didn't get properly prepared for. And so you're starting to not trust your body. That is totally normal. Happens to most of the women I have talked to. But our goal is to rebuild your trust in your own body with good, stable habits. Big picture. This is what I want you to take away from this. You're not failing your body, and your body's not failing you. Your body is responding exactly how it was designed to. It's reacting to the unstable fuel, the changes in the hormones, stress, the inconsistent input. But once you understand how it all works, you can stop fighting yourself and you can start working with your physiology. I mean, it's kind of amazing. The body is like a machine. If you just give it the right inputs, it's going to give you the performance that you're wanting. But the next time you feel that crash, instead of thinking, oh, I just need to be more disciplined. No, no, no. Say, oh, that's my body saying it needs some support right now. That little mental shift right there, that is where things start to change. Now, if this episode raised your standard, good. Go implement it. If you're ready for structured implementation, unmute your midlife is where we do this kind of work. You can schedule a free unmute session to added by the best plan for you. And while you're here, click on whichever link to video pops up for more awesomeness. But I'll be back with more new stuff next week. Thanks for listening.