Grief, Upheaval and Blood Sugar
During a bereavement, a diagnosis or a crisis, the goal isn't optimization. What to hold and what to let go.
Most advice on this site assumes an ordinary week. This one is for the periods that aren't.
What actually happens
Cortisol rises, and cortisol instructs the liver to release glucose. Numbers can drift upward with no change in eating.
Sleep is disrupted, which reduces next-day insulin sensitivity directly.
Eating becomes irregular. Some people can't eat, some eat constantly, and both are ordinary responses.
Everything else stops. The walk, the shopping, the cooking, the appointments.
So the numbers move for physiological reasons and behavioral ones at once, and neither is a failure of character.
What to hold
If you keep three things and let everything else go, keep these:
Eat something with protein in it, regularly. Not a plan, not a shape — just food, with protein, at intervals. This is the one that prevents the crash-and-collapse cycle when everything else is difficult.
Keep taking your medication. This is the one that matters clinically, and it's the one that most commonly slips during a crisis. If you're not managing it, tell someone.
Get outside briefly if you can. Light and a small amount of movement, without a target.
That's it. Everything else can wait.
What to let go, deliberately
Optimization. This is not the time.
Tracking, if it's adding pressure rather than information.
Weighing yourself.
Any restriction. Under-eating during a difficult period makes everything harder — mood, sleep, energy, glucose stability.
Guilt about any of the above. A period of worse numbers during a bereavement is a physiological response to circumstances, and it does not undo what came before.
The things that help and aren't food
Let people cook for you. When someone asks what they can do, this is a real answer and most people are glad to have one.
Accept the freezer meals.
Tell your doctor what's happening. It changes how they interpret your numbers and what they suggest. Clinicians take this seriously and are rarely told.
Coming back
When you're ready — and that timing is yours — the way back is the same as after a holiday. The next meal, with protein in it. No compensating, no restarting, no penance.
The structure doesn't expire and it doesn't hold a grudge.
Try this week — if you're in the middle of something: protein at intervals, medication taken, and let the rest be as it is.
Education, not medical advice. If you are struggling to cope, please speak to a doctor — grief and depression can look similar and one of them is treatable.