Hi P1ckle,
It is rotten how one thing going wrong can be the trigger for so many more.
Stress, illness, injury, medication (both Steroids, Statins and others) as well as lack of sleep and lack of exercise can all raise your BG levels.
So it is difficult to figure out which things may be causing the current high levels.
Your treatment by the Health Care Professionals isn't unusual unfortunately. Most of us have had similar terrible advice .
What puzzles me is that you say that your BGs were well controlled until February but then in April you apparently already had some retinopathy and neuropathy. I don't see how it could have occurred so quickly. I wonder if it really was well controlled and thus when you were measuring your BG. Was it just before and then 2hrs after first bite of a meal( the best times for using control by diet)? Or was it first thing in the morning or was it just before bed?
You also say that Low Carb has not been helping so far which is a little unusual, though it is quite possible with everything else ganging up to give you higher BG. Eating between 1 and 3 decent sized Low Carb meals per day so that you don't feel hungry and don't snack between them gives a very good possibility of keeping low BG readings (post prandial) when on either no diabetes meds, or on Metformin alone. But note that it requires cooperation of HCPs when on Insulin or Glic since there is then the possibility of Hypos.
Don't starve yourself, because this will likely reduce your metabolic rate and make things worse in the longer term.
The idea that we diabetics should eat carbs with every meal and should eat more than 3 times per day comes from a proposed way of dealing with T1 diabetes way back before Insulin was available. It also made some sense for those on early forms of long acting Insulin because with that it was pretty much impossible to adjust the dosage to the actual meals being eaten. But neither of those situations has applied for a very long time!
The advice about fruit is just taken from the Eatwell plate and 5 A Day.- Neither of which had any evidence to support them for the general population and have both been demonstrated to be harmful for Type 2 diabetics.
Best wishes,
Ian