Hi
11.1 is higher than you would like but as a one off reading it is nothing to be overly concerned about other than obviously working to bring your levels down so that you don't get levels quite that high. If it gives you some perspective, high 20s-30smmols/litre BG readings would be potential emergency/dangerous levels.
Similarly your 8.7 waking reading is a bit higher than is ideal. You would be aiming for 4-7 ideally.
It is important to understand that BG levels vary quite a lot throughout the day and night due to a whole host of factors including food and exercise which are the main players, but hormones and stress and illness and the ambient temp and the time of year etc... all have an impact. Generally we recommend testing just before eating a meal and then 2 hours afterwards. The food you eat causes your BG levels to go up and your body then responds by producing insulin to bring it down again. With diabetes that insulin response can be slow or not enough or your body can resist using the insulin, so your levels come back down more slowly than they should and perhaps don't come down far enough.
Carbohydrates break down very quickly and easily to release glucose into your blood stream and usually peak within that 2 hour period after eating and may be starting to come down at that point. You are looking to keep the rise in BG caused by the food to no more than 3 whole mmols more than your premeal reading at the 2 hour point. So if you were 7.2 before the meal and you went up to 10.8 two hours later you had more carbs than your body could cope with. If you work on reducing the carbs so that the rise is less than 3mmols, the premeal readings will gradually start to come down and eventually your levels will come down into the normal 4-7 premeal range..
Not sure how much you know about food and nutrition but there are 3 main food groups that we get nutrients and energy from...
Protein, Fat and Carbohydrates.
Many items of food contain more than one of these nutrients so meat and fish and eggs and cheese have almost no carbs and are mostly protein and fat. Grains and all the products made from grains (flour, bread, pasta, couscous, breakfast cereals etc) have a small amount of protein and fats but a lot of carbohydrate. Similarly potatoes and other below ground veg are higher in carbs and so is fruit because it contains fructose, a sugar, which is carbohydrate, so those are the foods that you need to restrict in order to control the height to which your BG spikes.
Exercise can cause your BG levels to go up or down. It depends on the type of exercise and how fit you are. Even if it pushes your levels higher in the short term, it will bring them down over the longer term. I usually find that it will lower my BG over the next 24 hours but the effect can last up to 48 hours, so exercise is good at helping manage diabetes but it can be confusing if you are looking for instant results and see a rise when you were hoping for a drop. Generally, low level exercise over about 40 mins will drop your levels.... a walk or gentle swim or bike ride.... that sort of thing. Exercise which causes muscle burn and sweat and heavy breathing will usually push levels up in real time, but be beneficial over the longer term. A combination of both can be really effective.
So looking at the foods you mention, toast and potato wedges are high carb foods, so those are the things that you would look at reducing the portion size if your levels increased by more than 3mmols 2 hours after eating them. So if you had 2 slices of toast, you could just have one but have more protein and fat with it..... so more cheese or eggs or meat or fish, but less bread and also incorporate some veg if you can, like some salad or leafy green veg or cauliflower. Or you could find a loaf of bread which has less carbs per slice. That might be a seeded wholemeal loaf. I know that a standard medium slice of wholemeal bread is about 15g carbs per slice (which is equivalent to about 3 spoons of sugar as far as your BG levels are concerned. Warburtons do a 400g wholemeal (No added sugar) loaf which is just 9g carbs per slice. Granted the slices are slightly smaller but still reasonable. So a sandwich made from 2 of those instead of 2 normal slices is only 18g carbs as oppose to 30g carbs, so you lost 1/3 of the carbs just by using a different bread for your sandwich.
I know that will all seem quite complicated at first, but once you start to look at the nutritional labels of the foods you buy (this will usually be in very small print on the back or side of the packet), start keeping a food diary and testing before and after meals and including those test results in your food diary, you will start to see how it all works and which foods cause you the most BG upheaval and that can be quite individual.
I hope most of that makes sense, but if not, let me know what you don't understand and will try to explain it better.
Having a clear and quite disciplined testing regime and keeping a food diary with your before and after results should help enormously.
