Day 9: Come On, Get Some Sleep

Day 9
August 16, 2011
Wt. 259
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 174
Blood Pressure 138/93 59 bpm.

Come on, get some sleep

See what a little public crowing about success will get you. This morning’s glucose level was up to 174. I think that this up turn has two sources. I was working on stuff last night and stayed up until about 3:30 and along about 2 a.m. I had an apple.

There has been a lot written about sleep patterns and type II diabetes. Some studies suggest that the less sleep the body gets the more likely it is to develop type II and once type II has taken hold lack of sleep can have an even greater impact on morning glucose levels.
A University of Chicago study looked at the sleep patterns of 160 men with type II and found that on average less than a quarter of the men in the study slept for at least seven hours a night and only six percent got an average of eight hours sleep. The researchers found that as the number of hours of sleep decreased the men’s hemoglobin A1C levels tended to increase.

Those hated test strips I mentioned in my first blog are just snapshots in time. They give you an idea of where you are at any given point in the day when you do the test. I’ve found there is a bit of lag time, maybe 20 to 30 minutes between what the strip shows and where you are. The A1C test, however, provides more of a cumulative picture of how your are doing.

An October 9, 2005 Washington Post article on the effects of sleep depravation reported on several studies that indicated that the lack of sleep activates a number of stress hormones. Studies conducted by the University of Washington, Columbia University, the University of California at San Diego and the University of British Columbia all indicated the damage lack of sleep could do to the human body.
The various studies showed that human evolution has adapted us to sleeping for seven to eight hours at night and that missing sleep seems to activate a number of stress hormones that affect appetite suppression and increases the level of glucose in the blood.

The researchers speculated that for humans the only reason to be awake is hunger and danger but that modern society has provided us with all sorts diversions that keep us up into the small hours and then demands we rise and shine and go to work. Millions of years of evolution have not adapted us for a change that has only been a part of our lives for the last hundred years or so, and the body reacts as if there is some danger near by and makes sure it is ready to fight or run like hell.

A sleepless night or two once in a while is probably not a bad thing, or at least no worse than having a bowl of ice cream once in a while. But done on a daily-or nightly basis- it can be disastrous.
The studies show that people with the least number of hours of sleep are the most likely to develop one or more of the killer diseases, cancer, heart disease, type II diabetes "There's absolutely no reason it should be limited to breast cancer, and it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to people who work night shifts. People with disrupted sleep or people who are up late at night or get up frequently in the night could potentially have the same sort of effect," said Scott Davis of the University of Washington who reported on the results of a study on sleep deprivation and cancer risk.

A while back there was a study that said it was best if people slept in dark rooms. No lights of any kind. That means turning off the LED on the clock radio, the little blips of light on the TV and stereo, the monitor lights on computer screens and so on. I don’t know about that, but I suspect that late night on the computer or watching TV into the wee hours could qualify as a bad thing.
So as much as I hate to do it, I’m going to add yet another rule and put it into effect tonight.

Rule 12. Go to bed early. Don’t squander sleep time on watching old movies or bopping around the internet. Make sure the room is dark-no artificial lights.

The upside of this rule is that if I am asleep, I am not likely to eat an apple at 2 a.m..
Looking forward to nice low numbers tomorrow morning. G’night all.

More to come.
Jim