When I was first diagnosed I was hba1c of nearly 20. I had a massive shock and kick up the bum and managed to get rid of a stone and to get down to 6 with the help of metformin. I am now back up to 11 and have a blood test in 3 weeks and am starting to panic !! I walked 90 miles last month and after my daily walk it went down to 7 but up again the next morning!
Hi - I'm not sure what measurements your readings are in. HbA1c is a kind of average of your blood glucose over the last three months or so, and is usually reported as mmol/mol in the UK with normal range being 38-42mmol/mol. It used to be given as a percentage (and still is in the USA) with 6% being equivalent to around 42 mmol/mol.
Fingerprick tests (which you might be talking about) aren't HbA1c measures but take a snapshot of what your blood glucose is at the point of testing. They're normally reported in the UK in mmol/litre. Everybody's blood glucose varies throughout the day in response to a lot of things - food, exercise, temperature, illness, time of day: and it's normal for blood glucose to rise after eating, particularly after eating carbohydrates, because carbs are digested to glucose.
The issue for those of us who are T2 is how quickly our body's insulin is able to clear the glucose out of the bloodstream and into muscle cells for use as energy. As T2s we have a problem with this, and the glucose hangs around in the blood and/or is converted to body fat.
The thing is that you can't really predict what your HbA1c is going to be from the results you're getting from the fingerprick tests, because they test for different things, and you don't know what happens when you don't test- eg while you're asleep. I found the fingerprick tests to be most useful in finding out what the immediate impact of food etc was on my system (eg for me potatoes bad, pastry much much worse) and the HbA1c tells you what your overall progress is. At first I tried to use the fingerprick figures to predict the A1c, it didn't work.
The other thing to remember is that we are all in this for the long term. You might get a quick improvement, or you might get slow and steady decline in numbers. We're all different and will react differently. If you're no longer seeing test results of around 20 and have lost a stone, something's working.
