Insulin resistance blood sugar levels?

[B17_Fan]

Hi all.
I have pcos and insulin resistance.
Just a bit concerned at the moment.
Yesterday for lunch I had 2 slices of granary bread with Marmite, 2 go ahead crispy slices, half a rich tea biscuit, 1 munchie and a cup of decaf tea.
I took my metformin, which I've been on for a week.

About half an hour later I was falling asleep (which is quite the norm for me)

Felt rubbish, so it was an hour and a half after eating that I checked my sugar levels.
My mum is type 1, so I used her machine.

Anyway, my blood sugar was 9.5.

Just thinking that with insulin resistance, usually my sugar level is on the lower side.
I'm trying to lower my carb intake, so I don't know why it went so high.

I can't find anywhere online what the sugar level range is for insulin resistance.

I Went for a 45 minute walk after checking my sugar level. When I got home, it had gone down to 6.0

Can anyone give me any advice on this matter?
Thankyou

 

[Brunneria]

Hi and welcome.

I am afraid that all carbs turn to glucose in the bloodstream. So your lunch yesterday of bread, crispy slices, biscuit and munchie was just about all carbs. Only the tea wasn't. And if you had milk in that, then you also had carbs in the milk.

So basically once your body had digested all those, you experienced a blood glucose high, followed by a drop. I suspect if you had tested your blood glucose earlier, you would have seen very high levels.

If you want to avoid that experience repeating over and over again, then I am afraid that you need to change your lunch to foods that offer more nutrition and fewer carbs. Cold meat, salad, cheese, hummus, crustless quiches - that kind of thing.

Insulin resistance is mainly caused by the body being exposed to too much insulin. Rather like if we listen to loud music all the time, we go a bit deaf. So we turn the volume up. And go deafer. So the more insulin we have pumping around our bodies, the more resistant we get to it. Hormones like those in PCOS make it worse, but the main reason the body produces so much insulin is because we eat too many carbs. Cut the carbs, and the requirement for insulin reduces. Once that has happened for a while, we become less insulin resistant.
Jason Fung explains it very well here, in his blog
https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/insulin-causes-insulin-resistance-hormonal-obesity-x/

Unfortunately, there is no home test for insulin, or insulin resistance, and we cannot judge them from our blood glucose levels.
However, it is a general assumption that people have insulin resistance if they have: poly cystic ovary syndrome, are overweight, especially if that weight is carried around their middle, have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes, and/or experience blood glucose levels above normal.

Having normal blood glucose levels does not rule out insulin resistance. Nor does the absence of any of those symptoms. This is because the body has a very strong coping mechanism where it will try to maintain normal low blood glucose levels for years before those symptoms develop. This means that it pumps out more and more insulin to try and keep blood glucose normal, and blood glucose only starts to rise when that system starts to fail.

 

[B17_Fan]

Hi. Thanks for the reply.
I'm trying to eat as much low gi as I can, and I believe granary bread has the green light.
Got a book about the gi diet.

I don't know if the crispy slices are OK to eat, but I thought they were a good option as they have fruit in. Quite healthy I thought.

I get shaky if I don't eat regularly and I do get tired a lot.

So do you think 9.5 is just because of my insulin resistance?
Wouldn't be prediabetes?

 

[Brunneria]

Well, brown/granary bread is lower GI than white bread - so it is suggested for low GI diets.

But granary bread still has a lot of carbs in it,
This one has 17.5g of carbs per slice (and they aren't 'Thick' slices)
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=254944133

While white bread has 17.9g of carbs per slice (again, not 'thick')
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=256174499

So they both have virtually the same effect on blood glucose.
The only benefit of the bread being brown is that it has more fibre and takes a few minutes longer to digest. The same amount of carbs still hit the blood stream and still end up as glucose.

I have PCOS and insulin resistance, and I spent a long time testing out different foods and their effects on their blood glucose.
I found 'low GI foods' were useless to keep my blood glucose low and I ended up just cutting them from my diet - at which point I felt much better and my blood glucose and insulin resistance improved a great deal.

All those 'low GI' carbs can be replaced by other foods. So if you need to eat regularly you can pick other things like cheese, pepperami, very dark chocolate (which has very little carbs in it), nuts, seeds, and similar. They tend to be much more filling and satisfying, and you wont get hungry so quickly, or crave carby snacks so much.

The best thing to do is look at the nutrition value on the back of the food packaging. Ignore the sugar content, and look at the carbohydrate content. It is all the carbs that affect your blood glucose, not just sugars. If you click on the Tescos links I posted above, you can see that every product has a Nutrition table, even veg and meat. So it is easy to see where the carbs are coming from, and then avoid the ones that are high carb.

Here is a link to the Tescos webpage 'Go Ahead' range so you can check out the carb content in them.
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/pro...ox=go+ahead+slices&newSort=true&search=Search
I wasn't sure which bar you ate, but generally those 'healthy' bars have a lot of carb and sugar, and are low fat. Which means that the carbs digest quickly and have a fast effect on blood glucose (with a knock on effect on insulin resistance).

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

 

[Resurgam]

Unfortunately most of the advice given about what is healthy to eat is totally at odds with what a diabetic or many others require. Carbohydrates will raise your blood glucose no matter how you're them.

 

[B17_Fan]

Well, brown/granary bread is lower GI than white bread - so it is suggested for low GI diets.

But granary bread still has a lot of carbs in it,
This one has 17.5g of carbs per slice (and they aren't 'Thick' slices)
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=254944133

While white bread has 17.9g of carbs per slice (again, not 'thick')
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=256174499

So they both have virtually the same effect on blood glucose.
The only benefit of the bread being brown is that it has more fibre and takes a few minutes longer to digest. The same amount of carbs still hit the blood stream and still end up as glucose.

I have PCOS and insulin resistance, and I spent a long time testing out different foods and their effects on their blood glucose.
I found 'low GI foods' were useless to keep my blood glucose low and I ended up just cutting them from my diet - at which point I felt much better and my blood glucose and insulin resistance improved a great deal.

All those 'low GI' carbs can be replaced by other foods. So if you need to eat regularly you can pick other things like cheese, pepperami, very dark chocolate (which has very little carbs in it), nuts, seeds, and similar. They tend to be much more filling and satisfying, and you wont get hungry so quickly, or crave carby snacks so much.

The best thing to do is look at the nutrition value on the back of the food packaging. Ignore the sugar content, and look at the carbohydrate content. It is all the carbs that affect your blood glucose, not just sugars. If you click on the Tescos links I posted above, you can see that every product has a Nutrition table, even veg and meat. So it is easy to see where the carbs are coming from, and then avoid the ones that are high carb.

Here is a link to the Tescos webpage 'Go Ahead' range so you can check out the carb content in them.
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/pro...ox=go+ahead+slices&newSort=true&search=Search
I wasn't sure which bar you ate, but generally those 'healthy' bars have a lot of carb and sugar, and are low fat. Which means that the carbs digest quickly and have a fast effect on blood glucose (with a knock on effect on insulin resistance).

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Thankyou SO much for writing to me. So nice to hear from someone in a similar position to me.
It all makes sense about the bread and the go ahead. (It was crispy slices forest fruit and I had 2 of them)

What do you eat instead of bread?
I'm quite a fussy eater, and I live on high carbs to keep my energy levels up.

I went to the dietician and told her I have weetabix, a glass of fresh Apple juice and cup of tea for breakfast. She said it was a good breakfast. But I don't think it is.
I've been adding all bran to the weetabix but wondering whether I should just have all bran on its own. Do you think that's a good option?

Look forward to your reply

 

[Brunneria]

The thing is, you have been diagnosed with pcos, and (as I understand it) you have not got either pre-diabetes or diabetes.
So I am guessing that you are younger than me (I am 50), and are much less far down the insulin resistance road than I am.
That is a good thing.

What happened to me was that I found I needed to go lower and lower carb as time went on - starting in my late teens - and because of the way my body works (I have other stuff going on as well as pcos) I gradually got more and more insulin resistant, moving through pre-diabetes and into type 2 diabetes.

By cutting the carbs, and keeping the insulin resistance down as much as possible, I feel much better now, and usually have normal blood glucose levels.

So with luck you have caught this early enough to prevent further deterioration, and you won't need to go as low carb as I do.

Basically, I avoid low and high GI carbs in the form of bread, rice, potato, pasta, root veg, biscuits, cakes, sweet fruit, fruit juices, sugar and so on. I eat lots of salad, vegetables, the less sweet fruit like berries, meat, fish, eggs, cheese, and healthy unprocessed fats.

To save you some time, have a look at this link. It is a list of low carb foods. If you pick foods that you like from this list, and avoid the carby stuff most of the time, you will probably feel MUCH better.

http://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/a-few-asking-for-low-carb-food-lists.96321/

Here is some info on how people with pcos have been found to respond well to a low carb diet. That is certainly my experience too.
https://www.dietvsdisease.org/best-diet-pcos/