--it's not unusual for it to be recommended that hypoglycemia and insulin resistance/impaired glucose tolerance be treated similarly, as hypoglycemia that is not caused by a tumor of the pancreas or some other strucutural disorder--that is, hypoglycemia that happens in reaction to nutrient intake--is often consided the first sign of insulin resistance.

What seems to happen is that the body had started to experience trouble getting glucose past cell walls and has begun to upregulate the amount of insulin it produces to do that, but since this is an early stage, and the feedback mechanism is not exact and has a time lag, the body will often overproduce insulin in a "first spike" to a relatively small amount of glucose being introduced to the bloodstream, resulting in glucose levels being driven down below normal "fasting" levels for that person. Such a sharp drop in glucose levels can often be experienced as the "sugar crash", and typically happens 1-3 hours after eating a meal that is substantially glucose/sucrose/fructose, even if the actual amount of total sugar ingested in not huge. People can experience this on a pint of strawberries as easily as they can on two pieces of lemon pie.

The general advice on this has been to follow a sort of Zone-like diet, with small, frequent meals involving carbohydrate, protein, and a small amount of fat (to keep the glucose from emptying too quickly into the blood stream), as well as to stay away from simple, non-fiber, processed carbs in favor of "raw" ones--the broccoli instead of the bread. Of course, some version of this advice is often given to diabetics, as well; it's two sides of the same coin, in that this kind of post-meal hypoglycemia is often a precursor to more serious insulin resistance/impaired glucose tolerance.

Now, those who by testing show severe fasting hypoglycemia (fast of 12 hours or more) usually have a more organic problem, as mentioned above, such as an insulin secreting pacreatic tumor that is not much affected by the ups and downs of blood sugar levels and eating. In most people, including those with post-meal "reactive" hypoglycemia, a fast will, at least for a day or so, result in a stablilizing of sugar and insulin levels as the body first uses liver glycogen stores, and then fat stores, to keep vital processes going.

See:

http://www.endotext.com/guthormones/...econtents4.htm

http://www.indegene.com/JIACM/indJIA...glycaemia.html

www.emedicine.com/med/topic1173.htm

http://www.lef.org/protocols/prtcls-...prtcl-042.html