Hello all im new and hoping to get some advise from people in the know.
I'm 37 high Bmi under active thyroid and currently 24 weeks pregnant I've been suffering really bad fatigue and after breakfast Monday I had what I can only think was a sugar crash I needed to sleep 1 hour after eating!
This started my head whirling I've also got thrush even though I take strong probiotics.
I got on Google as you do and gestational diabetes comes up which I am due to be tested for nearer to 28 weeks. So I try to contact midwife phone off to request an earlier test send a message also no reply.
So I decided to buy a glucose monitor and had a few goes yesterday testing one hour after eating reading as follows
7.8 mmol 1 hour after breakfast
7.1mmol 1 hour after lunch
6.1 mmol 1 hour after dinner I then tested again at 90 mins and reading had gone up to 7.5 mmol after reading something suggesting 90 minutes to 120 minutes after eating better.
Then fasting number this morning 6.2 mmol. I'm at the hospital this morning so will dicuss but can anyone tell me do those numbers look too high? Should I be concerned about the increase after the 1 hr point last night? I'm worried now all 1 hour readings were wrong.
Thanks for reading my rambles
Hi and congrats on your pregnancy! As Diakat says, noone can really diagnose you here but if you are worried and can't have your Glucose Tolerance Test pulled forward, you could eat with caution and not do what I was doing right before I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes - I had horrible cravings for sweets and was eating ice cream before bed
As far as your numbers look, it does depend what you ate to get to those numbers. If they are high carb meals, they look within the targets I was given after diagnosis here in Australia:
2 hours after meals aim to be back under 6.7 mmol.
They didn't tell me how high my spikes at 1 hour post meals should go but from my experience of becoming more and more insulin resistant as the pregnancy went on, if my 1 hour spikes were 8.0, 9.0 or 10 mmol (which I saw a couple of times), then my 2 hour would often still be above the 6.7 mmol. But 1h spikes up to 7.8 mmol I keep hearing are acceptable. Apparently over 7.8 mmol is when damage to our cells starts happening, but if it happens for a few months in pregnancy only, it won't be the end of the world. For me, no matter what I did, my morning fasting levels kept climbing so I ended up on insulin.
As far as your morning fasting reading goes, they'll let you know when you do the GTT but for us in Australia they brought the fasting levels for pregnant women back to 5.1 mmol, I guess to help more people. My GTT fasting result was 5.1 mmol and that's what got me the diagnosis. But that was with 75 grams of glucose. Different foods will do different things so unless you try doing a morning fasting test at home with 75 grams of glucose, it won't necessarily give you a valid result. Plus the home metres are not as accurate. I took my home metre in for my follow up GTT and each result was a good 1 mmol higher than the blood results the lab took. So your morning fasting level of 6.2 mmol may not actually be as high as that.
In any case, it makes sense while pregnant to eat as if you have diabetes and at least limit your carbohydrates to some extent. And if you read around on this forum, you'll find a lot of contradictory advice, especially what the diabetes educators will tell you is okay to eat while pregnant... They told me WeetBix breakfast cereal was okay but I found that would give me spikes above the targets and so I would avoid all processed food and just focus on your meats/fish/eggs, dairy if you can tolerate it or at least natural full fat yoghurt and hard cheeses, plenty of vegetables (but not too many potatoes), and small amounts of fruit only - most here recommend berries of any kind as a low carb fruit. And just watch your portion size - that's something I still struggle with - I was always nibbling!
In the end though, filling your plate with 1/4 carbs , 1/4 meat/protein, 1/2 vegetables is not a bad way to go while pregnant. But steer clear of all the obvious sugary things, and even the less obvious things like meat pies and chicken nuggets (I once ate each of those and saw the 10 mmol spike at 1 hour! I might as well have eaten cake!).
If you want to try a more extreme approach, Lily Nichols (google her) has a book and some interviews on youtube discussing why a very low carb / even ketogenic diet makes sense in pregnancy. You have to watch your electrolytes though - it's easier to get dehydrated on keto, especially when breastfeeding, which is what I was doing. But keto is a fantastic way to lose the baby weight fast, but again, you will also be losing fluid in general, so when I tried reintroducing carbs at about 2.5 months postpartum after I'd lost most of the baby weight (10kg), I found 3kg came back within days as my body started retaining fluid again (which meant I was more hydrated too though).
Here's one interview with Lily Nichols:
And aside from the diabetes recommendations, here's a movie I saw recently which is for everyone:
"That Sugar Film" this is the only one that hasn't been taken down for copyright:
All the best with the rest of your pregnancy!
