Finger prick tests

Hi @Minsh1 & welcome to the forum

The link below may help you a little with testing even though you aren’t new to diabetes, it has the NICE guidelines for testing about halfway down

Minsh1 said:

Hi,
I’ve had Type 2 diabetes since 2019 and have always struggled with controlling my bloods.
I got diagnosed and developed a sweet tooth!

I was told NOT to monitor my bloods and I don’t generally suffer any side effects of having diabetes so it’s been a struggle.

I’ve finally been given a monitor to do my bloods but what happens next?

When should I be taking readings?
How many times a day?
What should my levels be?

I’ve not spoken to the doctors yet I thought I’d sign up and see what you guys do.

Thanks for the help!

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You need to think about why you test. When we eat carbs, they are converted to glucose and that glucose passes into the bloodstream. Peak blood glucose is usually roughly 40-60 minutes after eating. The issue with glucose is that we need some to function, and if there's none in food our livers will make it, but glucose in high concentrations for lengthy periods damages nerves and capillaries.

Once in the bloodstream, the glucose should be dealt with by our insulin response to the food, and stored in the muscles or liver, or ultimately as bodyfat. That whole process should take about two hours, sometimes more, sometimes less, so that after the two hours your BG should be roughly close (within 2mmol/l) to where you were before you ate. This is the reason for taking a baseline test before eating and then again at +2 hours. You're really testing how efficient your insulin response is to the food you ate, rather than "how high you go".

The issue for T2s is that typically we have a poor insulin response, so the glucose hangs around in the blood longer and at higher concentrations, because it's not getting into muscle and liver stores. This risks damage to the body. Some people cope OK with low glucose loads from food, but not with higher. Some people cope better with some types of carbohydrates than others (I am OK with beans and legumes, for example, but definitely not pastry). There's no way of knowing which foods do what to your BG unless you test. Once you identify what foods (these will be carbs) raise your BG unacceptably, you can reduce or eliminate that food from what you eat.

Blood glucose levels going up and down after food is perfectly normal, and happens to non-diabetic people as well. This short paper shows how non-diabetic people reacted to various meals with greater or lesser carb content. As it's an American paper the values are in mg/dl - see the attached graphic to convert these into the mmol/l used in the UK.

Mark Rawlinson said:

HI, can I ask please ? You say you were given a monitor who gave it to you ? If Diabetic nurse or Dr they should tell you when to test (also show you how to) If you need more strips and lancets do it via surgery as they are free. I test first think in morning and 2 hours after main meal, however it looks like it could be more soon as I may be going on a second insulin. Try and change white to brown with bread and rice ( I stopped using rice and hardly if ever use pasta) prefer brown breads to white anyway

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Channging from brown to white doesn't affect the level of carb the food contains. The only sure way to assess the impact of a food on you is to eat it and test. I would be extremely wary of advising someone what to eat on the basis of my own experience as we do not seem to react to the same carbs in the same way.

Unfortunately the food manufacturers are very clever at distraction - they want you to buy what they produce, whether it's actually good for you or not. And we've been schooled for years that brown and wholemeal carb food is "healthy". Not in my case.