hi colin. The best advice I can give you is to start a diary and log down each meal, with carb, fat and protien content. Test before you eat and them one hour and two hours after finishing the meal, and write the results in your diary against that meal.
You will find when you have the same meal again it will have the same effect i.e your blood sugars rise 3mmol after one hour and then drops back to the pre meal level after two hours. Whenever you have this meal thereafter you willknow the effect and won;t need to test.
Doing this will quickly build up a list of regular meals where you know the effect, and you will only need to test when you try something new or alter a meal size etc.
Set yourself a target max bm level and use your meal list and test meter to control your spike level after food. I aim at never going above 6.8 mmol after a meal, but this is a very tight target, you could aim for something a little higher and reduce your target level as you get better at control. This could take a few months.
Don't worry to much about your fasting level when you wake up. This is normally the last thing to come down and controlling your blood sugars during the day particularly the latter part of the day will have an effect on this.
You will find some of the others on the forum will have a slightly different strategy, but will have the same goal.
Hope this helps
