Welcome to the forum
@Jules0660
Congrats on your weight loss! And great that your BP and cholesterol are on target.
When it comes to giving your diabetes mangement strategies an overhaul, it’s best to make changes to your menu and activity levels gradually - partly because they need to be sustainable long term, but also because very rapid and sudden changes to blood glucose levels can actually cause problems with some parts of the body including eyes and nerves.
One of the biggest questions is often ‘what can I eat’ and while there are obvious things like cakes, biscuits, sweets and sugary drinks that you will be wanting to cut right back on, you might be surprised how much *all* carbohydrate affects your BG levels, including rice, pasta, bread, pastry, grains, cereals including ‘healthy wholegrain’ ones, along with many fruits.
The tricky thing is that blood glucose responses to food are highly individual, and it can be impossible to say which forms and amounts of carbohydrate will ‘spike’ your BG without checking for yourself with a BG meter.
You can check before and 2hours after meals, noting what the differences are. That way you can identify any carbs that rapidly or significantly increase your BG levels. Then you can experiment with varying the type or reducing the amount (sometimes just having things at a different time of day makes a difference).
If you are interested in using a BG meter to find out how different foods affect you, you may find
test-review-adjust by Alan S helpful.
One of the most affordable meters members here have found is from SD, and has been recently updated to the
SD Gluco Navii which has
test strips at around £8 for 50
For a bit more background information, the ‘useful links’ thread is a mine of helpful information -
useful-links-for-people-new-to-diabetes
Members here frequently recommend Maggie Davey’s Letter and Gretchen Becker’s book, as very helpful starting points.