Sorry to hear you’ve not got any support groups nearby - but we are happy to offer all the virtual support and camaraderie we can in their absence!
Having friendly folks around who are facing the same challenges every day can be a real help and encouragement, plus a source of ideas, tips and possible strategies you may not have thought of.
🙂
Sorry to hear you’ve not seen much impact from your dapagliflozin yet, but don’t rush. It can take time for meds to build up, and where you’ve perhaps been running high for a while, it can be easier on the fine blood vessels in the eyes and nerves for your levels to come down slowly and gradually.
Dapagliflozin is one of the SGLT2 Inhibitor class of meds, which encourages the body to wee out excess glucose, so you might expect to see increased desire to urinate.
Lots of forum members looking for a bit of a bit of a ‘diabetes reset’ have found it can be helpful to keep a food diary for a week or two. While there are obvious things like cakes, biscuits, sweets and sugary drinks that you will want to cut out straight away, you might be surprised how much *all* carbohydrate affects your BG levels, including rice, pasta, potatoes, bread, pastry, grains, cereals and many fruits. It’s not that you have to avoid all those things entirely - but getting portion sizes right for your body’s individual tolerances.
If you fancy the food diary idea brutally honest! Note down everything you eat and drink, along with an estimate of the total carbohydrate content (not just ‘of which sugars) in all 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 and natural sugars might be unexpectedly lurking, the diary might also suggest some likely candidates for swaps, portion reductions, or using lower carb alternatives (eg celeriac or swede mash, or cauli ‘rice’).
We have a few members who have had varying degrees of success with Dapagliflozin / Forxiga. You might find these threads interesting?