paul a carr said:
hi smidge thanks for the advice got a meter im around 4 to 5 before a meal and around 8.7 to hours after.i test before breckfast and im around 5 .i think thats ok.i havent been told what its surposed to be my nurse dosnt realy want me to test myself.
Your before meal figures are very good and would suggest your diabetes is in quite an early stage. However, given how good the pre-meal figures are, the post meal ones are rather high. This would suggest that you are having too many carbohydrates in your meals at the moment. Ideally, it would be nice to see your post meal readings be no higher than a point or two above the pre-meal. This is exactly why regular testing is so important, and your diabetes nurse is, quite frankly, wrong. If you, say, only tested once a week, when you woke up, you could be forgiven for thinking that you didn't have diabetes at all, as your fasting figures aren't really indicating a problem. And yet, all the time, your body would be suffering the effects of high post meal blood glucose because you are ingesting too many carbs for your body to handle (a non diabetic would not have regular two hour post meal readings of 8.7, no matter what they ate).
So, although your pre meal readings are better than mine (I've hardly ever managed a 4, the lowest I get currently is around 5.5 - 6.0), my post meal readings are also around 6.0. That is because I have cut right down on carbs, and you need to do the same if you can. As for how to do that (and its unlikely from the sound of it that your diabetes nurse is going to be much help, if she doesn't even want you to test) - you need to get a book that tells you the carb values of different food (Collins Gem Carb Counter is great), look at what you're eating and make changes. A good start would be cutting out breakfast cereals, fruit juice, white bread, chips, potatoes and pasta, as well as the obvious sugar, chocolates, cakes and biscuits. BUT there's lots and lots of things you can eat - meat, chicken and fish are all carb free, most vegetables, salads, nuts, butter, oils. By testing after each meal, you can learn what level of carbs your body can cope with, you don't have to cut them out completely, although cutting right down will probably help you lose some weight. As for how many carbs per day to aim for, that's an individual decision and depends on how drastic you want to be and how much weight you want to lose, but you could aim for 100g initially and see how you do. I eat under 30g, but that's fairly hard core and you have to be quite committed. However, I have lost 12kg (23lb) in under four weeks, and reduced my sugars from 8-9 to 5-6 in that time.
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