paulos
Member
- Messages
- 6
- Location
- Luxembourg
- Type of diabetes
- Treatment type
- Tablets (oral)
- Dislikes
- Not being healthy, UKIP
My endocrinologist has prescribed Freestyle Libre 2 24/7 blood sugar monitoring to keep a tight check on my rather out of control blood sugar levels. I'm already taking metformin, Jardiance, Ozempic 1 mg/week, and 14 units of Toujeo long acting insulin/day but on my last blood test my HbA1c was still too high at 8% (the acceptable range according to the laboratory who do my blood analyses is 4 - 6%).
Since I have been on 24/7 monitoring I have kept a close eye on the foods that cause my blood sugar to go up and, more to the point, to stay up. I started eliminating the ones that I could see were causing a problem. I had expected to see sugary foods causing the most problems but not so - for me it seems to be starchy foods that are the real problem and most of all bread! The bread where I live is excellent being very similar to French bread but it seems that I must forego that culinary pleasure! The 2nd food that I have to avoid is chips (the only form in which I eat potatoes) and finally rice; although plain white rice has a bad reputation for causing blood sugar spikes, for me it doesn't seen so very bad; nothing like as bad as bread or chips.
Completely eliminating just bread from my diet has reduced my HbA1c from 8% at the last blood test to 6.9% (the latter being the calculated estimate of the LibreLink Andoid app that reads and processes the data. OK this is an 'estimated' HbA1c not a measured one but I am confident that it is moving in the right direction.
With Freestyle Libre 2, blood sugar readings from the mobile app are automatically uploaded to the cloud and can downloaded from there to a PC. The raw figures are actually not of very much use as you may take 10 readings one day and only 3 the next. However, I take a lot of readings as the process is 'prick free' and costs nothing, unlike using test sticks! What I wanted was an average reading per day so I sucked the downloaded CSV file into a MySQL database that I created for the job and reprocessed the data with SQL to give me a daily average blood sugar reading. The results were quite startling! Over here in Luxembourg, they use a different unit for blood sugar so I have converted my figures into UK units.
The red line is a trendline showing the general direction of things and the little spike on the far right hand side is my birthday (blushes) when I completely ignored sensible eating and drinking for a few days to the severe detriment of my blood sugar control!
I should I guess emphasize that I have no idea if eating bread impacts other folks blood sugar levels the way it does mine, so you need to verify the effect of limiting bread consumption for yourself!
If your doctor won't prescribe the Freestyle Libre 2 system for you, maybe consider paying for it yourself. In one month you should be able to see what does and doesn't cause your blood sugar to spike or to plateau and adjust your diet accordingly and the cost of 2 Freestyle Libre 2 sensors (each lasts a fortnight) is around £100 - money well spent if it saves your health or your life!
Since I have been on 24/7 monitoring I have kept a close eye on the foods that cause my blood sugar to go up and, more to the point, to stay up. I started eliminating the ones that I could see were causing a problem. I had expected to see sugary foods causing the most problems but not so - for me it seems to be starchy foods that are the real problem and most of all bread! The bread where I live is excellent being very similar to French bread but it seems that I must forego that culinary pleasure! The 2nd food that I have to avoid is chips (the only form in which I eat potatoes) and finally rice; although plain white rice has a bad reputation for causing blood sugar spikes, for me it doesn't seen so very bad; nothing like as bad as bread or chips.
Completely eliminating just bread from my diet has reduced my HbA1c from 8% at the last blood test to 6.9% (the latter being the calculated estimate of the LibreLink Andoid app that reads and processes the data. OK this is an 'estimated' HbA1c not a measured one but I am confident that it is moving in the right direction.
With Freestyle Libre 2, blood sugar readings from the mobile app are automatically uploaded to the cloud and can downloaded from there to a PC. The raw figures are actually not of very much use as you may take 10 readings one day and only 3 the next. However, I take a lot of readings as the process is 'prick free' and costs nothing, unlike using test sticks! What I wanted was an average reading per day so I sucked the downloaded CSV file into a MySQL database that I created for the job and reprocessed the data with SQL to give me a daily average blood sugar reading. The results were quite startling! Over here in Luxembourg, they use a different unit for blood sugar so I have converted my figures into UK units.
The red line is a trendline showing the general direction of things and the little spike on the far right hand side is my birthday (blushes) when I completely ignored sensible eating and drinking for a few days to the severe detriment of my blood sugar control!
I should I guess emphasize that I have no idea if eating bread impacts other folks blood sugar levels the way it does mine, so you need to verify the effect of limiting bread consumption for yourself!
If your doctor won't prescribe the Freestyle Libre 2 system for you, maybe consider paying for it yourself. In one month you should be able to see what does and doesn't cause your blood sugar to spike or to plateau and adjust your diet accordingly and the cost of 2 Freestyle Libre 2 sensors (each lasts a fortnight) is around £100 - money well spent if it saves your health or your life!
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