Diagnosed - advice welcomed

MrsA2 said:

All those signs are good. Seems like what you are doing is working.
When is your next hba1c due?

Remember that all though food (carbs) has the biggest effect on bg so do about 40 other things including :
Quality and quantity of sleep, or lack of it
Duration and intensity of exercise, or lack of it
Stress
Illness
Medications
Hydration levels
External temperature (weather,)
And many more.

All of which, in multiple combinations, can have an effect.

For example I'm currently in an ongoing situation of stress and my bgs are at least 2 points higher than they'd usually be.

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Paul_ said:

Let's ignore the waking results for this, they're often inconsistent and there's a limited amount you can do to affect them in the immediate term.

Your data shows:

1) Your diet is working and the food you're eating isn't placing your insulin response under stress. You're consistently returning close to your pre-meal reading for the 2hr post-meal reading, which is ideal.

2) Your pre-breakfast readings have reduced from an average of 10.5 - 12 in early November, down to 8 - 9 for the last 10 days or so. This is positive and the trend should continue downwards if you maintain your diet/lifestyle changes. It just takes some time - have patience.

3) Your dinner readings have reduced from a average pre-meal of around 8.5 - 9.5 down to 7 - 8. Again, this is positive and heading in the right direction.

4) If you don't already track your food intake, from experience then I'd recommend doing so. You have the odd meal here and there where your 2 hour post-meal reading hasn't returned as close to your pre-meal reading as is ideal. Nothing outrageously high, don't get me wrong, and it's well within what could potentially be a testing meter margin of error. However, if you've had a higher carb meal than normal leading to one of those results, tracking carbs in meals would help identify "offending" meals/foods or portion sizes.

Overall though, you're doing great, keep up the good work! It's a marathon, not a sprint, so try to maintain the mindset that individual results aren't important by themselves. It's not a competition with your last result, instead it's all about improving result averages over time, which in turn will improve your hba1c.

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Paul_ said:

All sounds good, in my opinion you're doing all the right things, many of which mirror the overall approach I took at a high level to reduce my hba1c.

When you're riding high with blood glucose levels, my understanding of various articles (and input from other members here) is that your body kind of acclimatises to those higher BG levels. It thinks it needs levels that high to sustain normal function. As such, as your levels drop due to diet and lifestyle improvements, your liver gets the signal to dump glucose into your system to top you back up. That's also why I originally said there's little you can do to directly improve waking BG readings. It takes time for your body to acclimatise to the lower BG state, realise it doesn't need to boost your levels with liver dumps, and for everything to settle down. Even on keto levels of carb intake for 5 months now, my waking readings are still often anywhere between 6 and 8 mmol (higher end when my inconsistent/unpredictable dawn phenomenon rears its head). The rest of the time I'm between 4.5 and 5.5 before and after meals now, having lost a significant amount of weight and maintained keto levels of carb intake for 5 months. On the way to where I am though, I saw results like you're seeing, where they dip down some days, but then go up. My advice here is that if you look at your results, the averages are coming down week on week, so look back again in 2-3 weeks and you'll hopefully see the same compared to the numbers you're currently getting. I get it though, I'm not the patient "wait and see in a couple of weeks" type either!

Basically, my post here is just a long way of saying don't get disheartened and keep at what you're doing!

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