The Big Shopping Hypo

I know that I’m not the only person whose sugars crash to the floor doing the big weekly food shop, sometimes it happens while doing other types of shopping but I’m going to focus on the food shop today because of what happened a couple of weeks ago. 

We all know that activity lowers blood glucose levels but even though I’m on my feet I don’t really classify food shopping as activity. I shop like it’s a saunter: up and down the aisles methodically, with a list, collecting our staples. I’m not like Tracey Ulman in “They Don’t know about us” (80’s reference)

Tracey Ulman

Tracey Ulman

However, I’ve been doing it for many years and I’ve learned to reduce insulin significantly beforehand to avoid a low in a potentially expensive place of treatment! Flash to an image of me consuming the entire contents of my kitchen during a low, now imagine I’m in a grocery store!!!! Shudder! All is fine and dandy and stress free (in non Covid times) until I get to the checkout. Maybe it’s because my arms don’t usually get that kind of workout or I’m trying to keep up with the speed at which the cashier slides my produce down? I seriously don’t know what it is about food shopping that causes sugar levels to plummet. 

Sometimes, we shop as a couple and even though I end up walking the aisles twice or thrice as much with armfuls of food, walking back and forth through the middle aisle doing the Wimbledon head movement many times trying to find my husband with the trolley. (I have no idea what his strategy is!) But, my sugars don’t plummet as much. 

Thankfully the hypo from a couple of weeks ago I had caught early because of my glucose sensor, so before I moved to the grocery packing side of the checkout I was gobbling a couple of glucose tabs. By the time I got to my car, I only had mild symptoms: the sweats. I didn’t have any confusion or the shakes, but my levels were still dropping so I had another couple of glucose tabs just to be sure, to be sure and had to wait until my levels came back up to above 5 mmols. Remember Don’t Drive Under 5! This took about 20 minutes or long enough to create an Instagram story!

One of things I do when I have a hypo is to try to determine a possible cause and a strategy to prevent one the next time. I know that I had changed the time of day I do the food shop and it was also the beginning of a heat wave in Ireland which didn’t help. I tend to be more sensitive to insulin when the temperatures increase. So the following week I had a bit of a dip in my levels but not until I got home and the ice cream was in the freezer. 

Helpful Hints

For people who care about someone with diabetes

If you are reading this and don’t know how low blood sugars affect people with diabetes I would love for you to read this helpful page from Diabetes UK. I would also like to point out that hypos are part of our lives with diabetes despite everything we do to prevent them, they still happen. 


For People with Diabetes

If you are a person with diabetes who would like to learn more about preventing hypos, here are a couple of resources to explore.