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Hi, I've just joined and a little worried about my Blood Glucose results.

S

Snowyshoes

Newbie
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3
I wonder if I can get some advice.

I'm 49, female and overweight. I had gestational diabetes when I was 35 - and vaguely remember something about it not being caught by the midwife due to the timing of the tests.

A year ago I felt I was in the realms of pre-diabetes due to some symptoms and poor eating habits. I immediately started fasting (eating one small meal once per day). My symptoms went and I lost some weight. I then started addressing some other health issues and started having a smoothie in the morning, and found I could not lose weight. By Nov/Dec just gone, I was exercising 90 minutes per day, a small meal and smoothie, and no weight loss. Hb1ac tests normal in July and Oct. I dropped the smoothie - and huge weight loss again.

I now have a blood glucose monitor. This morning I was 7.2, 30 minutes after waking and drinking only water. At 11am, (after 30 minutes exercise and coffee with milk) the reading was less than 1.1 so 'too low'. I had a snack in response and measured 7.7. 30 minutes after my evening meal, I was too low to measure. 60 minutes, too low to measure. 90 minutes 6.9, and 120 minutes 7.7.

I've been trying to get some answers on line - and finding it difficult. I've also sent off a sample today for a routine Hb1ac test. I'm prepared to go to the Dr - it's just I would like to know what I'm dealing with as my blood glucose seems to drop after eating and too high from fasting. Is there a gold standard of measuring device? Thank you for any help. Take care.
 
Snowyshoes said:
This morning I was 7.2, 30 minutes after waking and drinking only water.
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Some people find that exercise raises blood sugar as your liver turns fat stores to glucose for your muscles.
Better to take a fasting reading after waking & before any physical activity.
Ideally 4 to 5.4 would be considered normal, 5.5 to 6.9 would indicate pre-diabetes.

Snowyshoes said:
At 11am, (after 30 minutes exercise and coffee with milk) the reading was less than 1.1 so 'too low'.
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Eh . . . you typed this so obviously you're not dead.
Were your hand wet or are your strips out of date by any chance ?
That must be a false reading.

Snowyshoes said:
I had a snack in response and measured 7.7. 30 minutes after my evening meal, I was too low to measure. 60 minutes, too low to measure. 90 minutes 6.9, and 120 minutes 7.7.
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Yeah . . I'd be firing that meter over the hedge.
You don't take insulin I assume.

Snowyshoes said:
I dropped the smoothie - and huge weight loss again.
Click to expand...

You now know the secret, it's all about the carbs & not the calories.
High carb diets forces the body to produce high levels of insulin which causes weight gain which in turn causes insulin resistance.
It's a viscous cycle caused by our standard Western diet.
 
Yes, you wouldn't be alive let alone conscious with a reading of 1.1, and you're very unlikely to go too low at all (hypo is under 4) unless you're on medication.

So check the date on your meter's strips and/or get a new meter. (My meter occasionally gives me obviously erroneous readings but if I retest they are normal.)

And most smoothies are very high in carbs, so not good for T2 diabetes.

Welcome to the forums.
 
Thanks for the reply. It's 4.50am now - and I just took a reading of 6.2. So I am relieved I may not be hypoglycaemic, at least.

In reply to the other comments...I've checked and the monitor was new at Christmas, and the strips were in date. I'm prepared to accept it's faulty or my hands were wet, or I'm doing something it doesn't like! I will look at standardising the procedure & I'm about to run out of strips on my second day...so I would like more confidence in it and will look at a replacement (or indeed get one from the NHS if I can't resolve this myself). I have more strips due in the next day or 2.

The Smoothie - contained the following:- Avocado/spinach/water/oats/garlic/ginger/flax seed/apple cider vinegar/pea protein/seeds/banana/filtered water. The oats were...a tablespoon or two. I bought the monitor as I couldn't understand how my body was refusing to lose weight while doing 30-90 minutes per day exercise. I watched a TED talk on the personalised diet. I was intrigued about the smoothie somehow blocking weight loss by its ingredients, and I was hoping to reintroduce the smoothie after identifying what food source could be causing a spike (due to my individual microbiome (in theory)). I also have been seeing a nutritionalist who is adamant I shouldn't fast due to the blood sugar spike, and the smoothie was a good way around this.

I strictly haven't eaten any wheat products or added sugar since November 2020 (although have been careful for a year) and making my own chocolate out of peanut butter and coconut oil (and cacoa etc). So I have been closely monitoring everything. I keep waking up 3-5am and possibly under stress at the moment due to an exam 22/01. However, I've been meditating and exercising daily to try and manage all this. My meals are mostly oily fish, tufu, salad, beans/pulses, dairy.

I don't drink, and eat organic whole foods, exercise 30-90 minutes per day and take Vitamin D (that is the only additive I take). Possibly once a fortnight have a Chinese 'just because I want one'!

Thank you all for your input. I am extremely keen to resolve this through diet - I'm doing a BSc in Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine. So it's important to me to take responsibility. Although I will go to the Doctor when I have some clear data to back up what I need addressing. Which, at the moment, is a disturbed sleep pattern, and I 'feel weird' and can't lose weight without limiting my diet to one small meal a day (which is possibly disrupting my sleep and natural rhythms), and some above normal blood glucose readings (assuming the low ones are false readings). If I look at this through a Chinese lense - the more I get distracted from what I'm supposed to be learning about and getting more stressed. Although I am incorporating Traditional Chinese Medicine lifestyle and diet, but I really can't see what else I can do to harmonise my lifestyle. I'm doing everything I should be, and have been for a year. And now isn't the best time to engage with the NHS in something I can try to manage in the short term.

Thank you for reading and in advance for any responses or advice.
 
Oats, banana, legumes - they would all cause me to have high blood glucose levels.
I can manage to eat no more than 40 gm of carbs a day and see just at the top end of normal numbers of Hba1c - but I suspect that I am more sensitive to carbs than most people.
Carbs prevent weightloss because they cause insulin to be released and that effectively closes the door or rather seals the cell membrane, so what is in the cells stays there.
By reducing the carbohydrate the insulin response is also reduced and the cell membrane becomes porous - so weightloss is possible, and probably more exercise with less fatigue and also less hunger.
 
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/blog-entry/the-nutritional-thingy.2330/ might help a little with the low carbing. As for the smoothie.... With oats and the like in there, it's far from low carb. Oats are a starchy grain, and banana is a very high sugar fruit. About 20 grams of sugar worth. When you put stuff like that in a smoothie maker, you destroy the fibres that could have slowed the uptake of those carbohydrates down. So the moment you crush the ingredients and make them liquid, you're taking something that's already bad for your blood sugars, and giving it nitroglycerine: everything that could've slowed it down is gone, and it hits your bloodstream hard and fast. Bam, a high, hard spike. So that explains why rarely anyone here'd touch a smoothie maker. Beans and pulses are too carby for a lot of us to manage, though some get away with it. I'd say your meter'll tell you, but... Considering the meter you have is telling you you're dead half the time, I'd get a different one. Really, before you'd hit 1.1 you'd notice something was off, get confused, dizzy, pass out, get comatose, get dead. That doesn't happen if a person just exercises without insulin or something else heavy in the mix. I don't know if you use hand cream or sun block, but if you have that on your hands it will mess up your measurements too. (So could be it's not the meter or the strip's fault, but something's off. So don't trust ANY of the numbers, not the lows, not the mediums, not the high's, until you find out what's going on.)

You might be interested in reading Dr. Jason Fung's The Diabetes Code, and maybe watch his youtube video's. The guy's good.

Good luck!
Jo
 

Thank you so much. It really helps to know that it is worth screening out foods. I have to lay off the testing for a few days - I'm out of strips and it's not viable with the machine I got for Christmas to swab as much as I want. I'll stick to protein and the lowest carbs I can for a few days and then look again. I just have to keep safe until I can get past this exam, I will look at the links. Thank you.
 
diabetes makes glucose high, medication can cause glucose to go too low. Unless you’re taking diabetes drugs you wouldn’t have a glucose of 1.1mmol/l unless you have some obscure endocrine issue
 
Hello and welcome

Good luck for your exam- stress isn't great for blood sugars either.

You've had some great advice so good luck.
 
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