Hi Newbie from Northern Ireland

[lisani2003]

Hi I am new to the forum but was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes nearly 5 years ago.

I am Lisa and from Belfast though i lived in Derby until I was 34 years old ( I am now 54).

I am looking for a bit of advice from those who may know ...... I have been doing blood glucose measurement with Testing Strips for the last few days as I felt a bit headachy and it has been high with regard to guidelines. For eg, when I woke this morning it was 12.7. it was 9.7 before lunch and then 14.7 two hours after lunch ... I am on slow release metformin - 3 tablets in the evening - does this slow release drug give you spurious readings ?

Thanks in advance

 

[Inka]

Welcome @lisani2003 🙂

Could you be coming down with an illness? That can push your blood sugars up.

Apart from the Metformin, what dietary changes have you made and what are your normal blood sugars on a daily basis for comparison?

 

[grovesy]

I take mine in the evening and don't usally have spurious readings unless something else is going on. Perhaps the headache is a sign of something brewing.

 

[rebrascora]

Hi and welcome from me too.

Are you new to home testing? Just wondering if these are the only finger prick tests you have ever done or if they are higher than you would normally get?
Do you know what your HbA1c reading usually is and your most recent result? I imagine if you are on 3x Metformin daily that your HbA1c is probably not borderline.
What did you have for lunch? A rise of 5 whole units as a result of lunch suggests there were too many carbs in it for your system to cope with.

As others have said, what dietary and lifestyle changes have you made to manage your diabetes?

Whatever carbohydrates (sugars and starches, natural and added) we eat get broken down into glucose and absorbed into our blood supply. As diabetics, that glucose gets stuck in our blood stream, either because we don't produce enough insulin (usually Type 1) or we are resistant to it (usually Type 2). Significantly reducing the amount of carbs we eat is the most effective thing we can do to lower our BG levels and enable our bodies to cope.... short of injecting insulin.

 

[ianf0ster]

Hi @lisani2003 , As rebrascora says, T2 diabetes is an intolerance to the arbs in out meals. So a rise in your Blood Glucose from before lunch to 2hrs after lunch almost certainly means that particular lunch was very bad for you because it contained too many sugars, starches, carbohydrates.

The standard government dietary advice might well have been designed to kill us. It was lots of Fruit, Whole grains and Root veg that gave me T2 Diabetes in the first place even though I hardly got overweight at all.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Welcome to the forum @lisani2003

Sorry to hear that you’ve been seeing some elevated BG readings recently.

Are these out of the ordinary for you? Hope you aren’t sickening for something

As others have said, a very effective way to use BG strips is to check your own individual response to different foods, and then use the results to make some tweaks to your eating plan so that the readings before and 2 hours after meals are closer together (ideally not much more than a rise of 2-3).

This blog post gives a helpful framework
Test, Review, Adjust by Alan S

Good luck, and let us know how you get on!