Welcome to the forum
@Andy426
Sorry to hear you are a bit disappointed with the information you’ve had so far
Many new members find it can be really helpful to keep a brutally honest food diary for a week or two. Note down everything you eat and drink, along with a reasonable estimate of the total carbohydrate content in your meals and snacks - it doesn’t have to be gram-perfect, the nearest 5-10g is fine. It might sound like a bit of a faff, and will involve weighing portions, squinting at the fine print on packaging, and possibly looking up things on the internet, but it will give you a really good idea of which foods are the main sources of carbs in your menu. Once you can see which meals or snacks are your ‘big hitters’, and where carbs might be unexpectedly lurking, the process might also suggest some likely candidates for swaps, portion reductions, or using lower carb alternatives (eg celeriac or swede mash, or cauli ‘rice’).
Then if you decide to go for a BG meter, you can check immediately before eating and again 2hrs later, and adjust the portions of the carbs in your meals to aim for a meal rise of 2-3mmol/L or less.
Once you’ve built up a bit of a mental database of the sources of carb that suit your metabolism you can drop back to more of a maintenance frequency of BG monitoring. But keeping meal-rises down to low levels can allow your average BG to drop back down gently and gradually which is easier on the fine blood vessels and nerve endings.
If you are carrying extra weight, then getting that down can be another powerful management strategy as it can increase insulin sensitivity, and some research suggests people can have a ‘personal fat threshold’ above which their organs begin to struggle and below which they can recover.
If you would like a good overview of T2 diabetes, to add to the knowledge you’ve already picked up, members here frequently recommend
Maggie Davey’s Letter and Gretchen Becker’s book
T2 Diabetes, the first year, which you can work through gradually and will give you a solid starting point.
You might also find the Diabetes UK Learning Zone a really useful resource. Lots of bite sized modules you can take at your own pace. Look at the orange tab in the main menu.
