Looking at getting a meter soon. Once I've researched more about levels and what to expect. I don't even know my results from the doctors yet so a meter wouldn't really serve a useful purpose until I know where I'm coming from.
There is obviously much more for me to learn. I have read about certain sugar free treats such as some wafer biscuits from Sainsbury's. The nutritional information states 60g carbs and 0.5g sugar. That now confuses the hell out of me. Not that it's the type of thing I would have but are they good or bad for diabetics??
This is definitely a massive learning curve
A meter is useful from day one. It gives you a different set of information from the HbA1c. What a meter (either a fingerprick glucometer or a CGM) does is tell you what's happening right now, so you can use it to see how well you deal with various foods. As others have said, with a fingerprick meter you test before eating to establish a baseline, and then test again at the two hour point. The CGM is essentially constantly recording, so you get the same info.
Between the two testings your blood sugar will have risen in response to carbs (assuming there were carbs in what you ate). Under this system, you are NOT testing to see how high you go. You are testing to see how well your insulin system dealt with what you ate, and ideally your system will have returned you to baseline, or close enough, after two hours.
If you want to see the peak, out of curiosity, you'll need to be testing in the first hour or so after you eat. A CGM will show you this very clearly.
Real example: I take a reading - 5.4mmol/l. Drink a small cafe latte, no sugar. Within 20 minutes BG is 8.6 as the lactose in the hot milk is absorbed quickly, digested to glucose, and hits the bloodstream. After one hour it's 6.0 as most of the additional glucose has already been managed: After two hours it's 5.3. Conclusion: I can have a small cafe latte in the knowledge that at present my system can handle it.
If your Sainsbury's wafer biscuits are 60g carb - is that total carb per packet, carb per 100g, carb per biscuit, or something else? The "of which sugars" you can safely ignore - it's something food manufacturers are allowed to use to make their products seem better for us than they are. All digestable carbs are converted to glucose, so that's the figure you need to be looking at. Once the glucose is in your blood, it doesn't really matter where it came from.
The key thing is to be able to understand how much carb you're actually taking in. 500g of something that's 7% carb is 35g of carb. 10g of something that's 25% carb is 2.5g carb. Both content and quantity matter.