A Normal Blood Sugar Level

What is a normal blood sugar level? A healthy blood sugar level? Your head spins just wondering about those questions and how they affect you, so I did some research to find out what a healthy, normal blood sugar level was and how I needed to change to keep it there. (Well really it was to see how little I could change). Pre-diabetic conditions are nothing to let slide. My numbers weren’t perfect, but where did they need to be. A little research showed this about a normal blood sugar level:

• Pre-breakfast (fasting): 80-100 preferably anything less than 100.
• Before a meal: Less than 110
• Two hours after a meal: Less than 140
• Bedtime: Less than 120

Those numbers are in milligrams per deciliter or mg/dL. This number means the concentration of a substance (glucose) in a specific amount of fluid (blood). It also a measure of how well your body uses insulin to regulate the amount of glucose in the blood.

So my numbers were within normal blood sugar levels, but they were kind of toward the high side. Further testing was available to see if there was a problem or the start of a problem that needed correcting, but blood draws aren’t my cup of tea. I did a little more research to find out what exactly was going on and where the glucose in my bloodstream was coming from.

When you eat, your body turns the food into glucose which enters your blood stream and then insulin is released to cause glucose using muscles and other parts of the body to absorb it for fuel. When the numbers are too high it often means you have become insulin resistant, or your body is resistant to the effect of insulin on lowering the level of glucose in your blood. Diabetes of one form or another is the resultant disease from not producing insulin or resisting its effect on glucose in your blood.

Things start getting a little more difficult to follow with insulin resistance now part of the equation in achieving normal blood sugar levels. Insulin resistance is probably the main culprit in most of the difficulty in keeping your blood tests looking good and what causes insulin resistance? Visceral adiposity, says the article, a fancy way of saying a fat gut, is part of the equation in creating insulin resistance and causing the body to need to release more insulin to get the same glucose absorption that happened before the resistance started.

So if insulin resistance is a problem, it seems that what a person would really want is to be insulin sensitive, or have a body that responded quickly to the smallest amount of insulin necessary to let the body’s tissues absorb glucose. It’s fairly obvious how a person gets to be insulin resistant. Overweight, poor eating habits, sedentary lifestyle, Wow, that describes a lot of us.