If you have ever found yourself in a situation where you’ve been starving, hypoglycemia is most likely more familiar to you than you would like. However, you can actually develop this problem even if you eat meals on a regular basis.

For some people, their overabundance of insulin can trigger their blood to absorb their sugar rapidly, and still want for more. Unfortunately, just as it is possible to have too much of a good thing, it is just as easy to have too little of it. This is a bizarre sort of seesaw, as your blood sugar and your insulin levels should ideally be in a state of perfect balance.

The bad news is, this is often not the case. Sometimes your body just does not quite respond as you would expect (or like), it to. The good news is that short-term hypoglycemia has no lasting effects on your brain or your body. Unfortunately, in many people’s cases the tendency is genetic, and needs to be kept from being harmful through carefully moderating their diets. But of course, there is the additional bad news in that long-term hypoglycemia can:

• impair your mental faculties
• reduce your ability to control your body, and
• even cause you to lose consciousness and slip into a type of coma

Your body needs to use all of the sugar it gets, after all, and not using it well causes problems.

Hypoglycemia can also be a warning sign of an illness that is based in one of your internal organs. There are ample occasions in which hypoglycemia acts as a sort of signal that a worse ailment is present.

For instance, the over-production of insulin that we talked about earlier is officially known as hyperinsulinism.

You may also have an insulin-secreting pancreatic tumor, or an adrenal insufficiency. You may even have hypopituitarism, in which the pituitary gland may not be producing enough of one or more of its hormones to maintain your body’s internal balance.

While it may not be the worst thing that can happen inside your body, hypoglycemia is a fairly serious issue to have. Consider that it is essentially your body shutting down, just because it lacks the sugar it needs. Consider that the manifestations of this ailment are fairly large and frequent. The hypoglycemic person tends to be:

• shaky
• anxious and
• nervous

They also tend to have heart palpitations, and heart problems such as tachycardia and palpitations, as well as feeling cold, clammy and having pallor.

A person having andrenergic manifestations can also feel warmer than might seem reasonable, as well as having a:

• headache
• nausea
• intense hunger, and
• the simultaneous “pins and needles” feeling that people report

Once you know how to spot hypoglycemia, you’ll know to just deal with it yourself and move on with your life.

It is possible to have low blood sugar levels without having diabetes. After your doctor checks your records and suspects more than Type 2 diabetes, he will order blood tests to measure your blood sugar and insulin levels, plus any other chemicals that play a part in your body’s energy use.