Cheers - No I've been diabetic for over 20 years and to be honest have never got to grips or understood it fully. Im a doctors says this is wrong with you take this pill and thats it. From time to time I go on quests like this and read all these posts and I see people taking about this but honestly have never understood it and been scared to care. Its just a number to me. I get up take the meds - eat - sleep and repeat. I know its a path to failure but it is all so overwhelming I cant cope or bear with the every hour / every day ./ every week / etc being on top of this or that or you cant eat this or that or it clashes with this train of thought or medication.
Hi, I think the first step is understanding what you're dealing with. This should have been explained years ago but the medics, in too many cases, just chuck metformin or something else at the problem and don't bother any more.
Your HbA1c is a sort of average of what your blood glucose has been doing over the last three months. It's a bit more weighted towards recent weeks so not an exact average. The fingerprick test is a snapshot of what your blood glucose is at that moment - could be on the way up, the way down, or stable - lots of things affect it. In my case it's not only food (although that's the main driver) but illness (up) high outside temperature (up) alcohol (down) etc. If you test you blood glucose before and after eating you can work out what raises your BG unacceptably and then cut that thing out. It will be some sort of carbohydrate, but not all carbohydrates have the same impact on everyone. I have a huge reaction to pastry or cereal, for example, and hardly anything to kidney beans and chickpeas.
High blood glucose is important because higher than normal levels start to do real physical damage to your nerves, kidneys, eyes, etc. These days they won't diagnose T2 diabetes until you hit the level (48 on an HbA1c reading) where eye damage starts to become less unlikely. Many people have already had symptoms for years at that point.
When I was diagnosed I'd been having diabetic symptoms for about ten years and there was a choice between all that getting worse and stopping eating carbs. It really wasn't an option to go on the way I was, and I cut almost all carbs (I take in about 20g/day now). No medication. I also ditched all the "healthy eating" advice the NHS and media push at you - that stuff is all about eating carbs and fruit, which is what made us ill in the first place..
It will be two years in December, and in that time I have put my T2 into remission, lost +20kg, six inches off my waist, and got rid of almost all the symptoms. The foot tingling is still there but is about 5% of what it used to be. Others on this forum have made much bigger reductions more quickly.
The choice is up to you. There is a way of making your diabetes much less of a problem for you, and it does require some willpower and giving up things we like (if we didn't like them, we wouldn't have the problem in the first place). This forum is a good source of advice and support, and I'd recommend reading some of the "success stories" . Best of luck.
