Royster, don't be too alarmed about getting freaked, fear, alarm, confusion, disinformation, and misinformation, and conflicting information is the norm with this stuff,... it's pretty common to everyone, especially when just diagnosed.
k
The solution is to take your time, read widely, get informed, and apply some common sense and judgement to what you read.
Try to compare sources and assess their validity and reliability, and be wary of accepting personal anecdotal comments as automatically being relevant or appropriate to your personal situation, think for yourself.
The good news is, and I'll bet that your G.P. or diab nurse didn't emphasise this to you, if you do the right things, you can do a lot to reduce and improve your type2, and get closer to non diabetic blood glucose levels. and above all else, the most effective way to achieve that goal seems to be to lose excess weight, all of it, but do that in a controlled and sustainable way.
Don't go crazy and start starving yourself, because that's as harmful as eating too much, because some of the excess glucose that your body can't excrete is stored as glycogen which can be quickly converted back into glucose if your blood glucose level drops too low, that's what happens when people exercise strenuously and haven't eaten enough beforehand, but they are metabolising the glycogen and turning it into energy.
If you fast for about 8 hours, for example when you are asleep, as expected your blood glucose level will fall, but if you keep fasting much beyond that, your body will start to convert stored glycogen back into glucose, and counter intuitively, although you haven't eaten anything, your blood glucose levels will rise and reach too high a level.
So without becoming an obsessive zealot, figure out what you should eat, and how much of it you should eat per meal, and what you should avoid or reduce, and reduce your portion sizes and have 5 or 6 smaller meals, and no more pie and chips or huge curry or 6 pints down the pub.
Whatever you eat, you need to focus on portion size and on eating foods that are as slowly digested as possible so that your system has less glucose to deal with in a given time period.
Those are the issues that the glycemic index and the glycemic load try to address.
Start to read food labels, it's pretty startling how much sugar is in foods and beverages, either naturally or added, and it's added to almost everything, check out a tin of baked beans for example and compare the sugar in that, ( in the sauce mostly ), with the sugar in a can of coke, compare things like cow's milk and wholebean soy milk as well, some of the sugar levels in various foods are very surprising and unexpected.
It's about quality as well, try and junk most processed foods and eat more home made stuff, especially fresh produce, and a wide range of it, try new things, and forget this notion of it's about abstinence, it totally isn't, it's about change and substitution, and I guarantee you that for every item you cut out or cut back on, there will be ten items that you can replace it with, and you'll probably end up with a more enjoyable eating regime, and there is lots of reliable nutritional advice and cooking info on the net and in the library.
Keep it in proportion and perspective, and figure out what's a suitable diet for you, and that sure isn't a frittata made with twelve eggs as one of the regulars on here has been advising several people to eat, nor is frying your food in lots of butter, as people have also been advised to do.
This explains HbA1c and the numbers
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/what-is-hba1c.html
This explains self testing and the numbers
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes_care/blood-sugar-level-ranges.html
These two links will tell you much of what you need to know.
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/blood-glucose/how-to-test-blood-glucose-levels.html
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/
This Diabetes UK video gives a pretty good explanation of what diabetes is.
