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High Blood Sugar In the Morning

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kalkara

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I was hoping that perhaps you could offer me some advice please.

I have recently been diagnosed with diabetes type two, albeit not a severe episode.

I am trying to manage it through diet and have lost one and a half stone - from 16 and a half stone to fifteen with a view to hitting 14 and a half. I am a male and six feet tall.

I have also increased my cardio work, having always been an active rugby player and reduced my alcohol intake, which was not heavy anyway.

I am finding that when I do my own readings, there has been a slight drop and during the day and evening are within the normal range.

However, first thing in the morning, having not eaten all night, I sometimes wake with a reading of 140 or 8 and I spend the rest of the day trying to lower it. I have heard of the dawn phenomenon and tried my readings at around 2.30 am and they are normal, i.e. below 110. The effect is in the morning I feel very lethargic and sluggish.

My doctor is not familiar with this part of diabetes and I was wondering whether my morning reading is normal or nothing to concern myself about or whether there is something I could do to correct it. The previous days food intake does not seem to effect the reading; I have had a good diet and hit high in the morning and had a heavy drink session and hit normal.

Any help/advice would be very gratefully received so I can lose this awful morning feeling.
 
Hi kalkara, welcome to the forum and well done on your weight loss.

Type 2 diabetes does not come in varying degrees, you either have it or you don't.

Perhaps you could let us know a typical food intake of a day and your readings.

There may be some foods that are affecting you later than when you take the readings. Sometimes the reading can be fine 2 hrs. after a meal but it may be higher after three hours. Starches are the main culprits, bread, potatoes, rice, pasta etc.

A good site to look at is phlaunt.com/diabetes There is a good explanation of the dawn phenomenon there.
Keep looking around the forum and come back with any questions you may have.

Catherine.
 
Hi, I am fairly new here too. One of the things that I have learned is that alcohol does cause your blood sugar to drop so that may explain why it is lower after you have had a night out.
There is lots of great advice here...welcome :)
 
Thank you for your responses.

I get what you mean, I either have it or I don't. I have to get my head round the fact that I do!

I was really hoping I could control it by diet, but even after three months of hard work in that department and the weight loss/increased exercise it appears not likely. Well to me anyway.

In answer to your question Catherine, I have cut carbs right down; initially too far I think, but even now I eat within the required range. I eat significantly smaller amounts of everything and now have no need to snack between meals etc. As a result my weight has dropped, but not my readings.

I usually wake up with a reading of 120 to 140 - 140 being 8. When it is that high I feel awful, like today. After a porridge breakfast it is usually 120.

In all my times of reading I have only been under 110 being 6 twice before a meal although always I am way under 140 two hours after - normally 125 being 7.

I mainly eat fish with plenty of veg. Rice and pasta is minimal if ever and small amounts. Potatoes too. I have noticed a link between drinking and a low reading the next morning. I feel better hung over than not!!

Thanks again and any advice etc would be very gratefully received. I had another blood test today and await results, prob next week. As much as I don't like taking pills, I am inlcined to ask for some.

Thanks again.
 
What I would emphasise is that it is not a competition and we are all different. Someone could eat and drink exactly the same as you every day and yet their readings would be either higher or lower.
Our responses are different and only by repeatedly testing can we begin to learn what is right for us as individuals.

The alcohol will lower your blood sugars. It is not an ideal solution for lowering your readings as alcohol brings it's own problems. Moderation is the key and red wine has a good following on the forum.
Try balancing the porridge, instead of a portion of carbs, add some flaked almonds, (protein) and some berries and see if that lowers the reading. Yoghurt is also a good way to add some protein

Keep reading around the forum, there is loads of advice and use the site I mentioned earlier.

Hope this helps,
Catherine.
 
Hi Kalkara,

Follow Catherine's advice and you won't go far wrong! I see that you are quoting BS in mg/dl so I wondered in what part of the world you are based? The reason I ask is that most of our members are UK-based so our advice tends to be around health services, medications and regulations that are specific to the UK.
 
Dawn Phenomenon is difficult. I don't get it at all but if I overexert myself in the morning my BG will jump up.

Your pancreatic beta cells produce insulin to dispose of the glucose from the carbs you eat. At the same time your pancreatic alpha cells release glucagon to tell your liver to release stored glucose back into your blood. The total amount of glucose in your blood is only around 5g so the two systems dont have to get very far out of phase for your BG to double, or worse.

This tends to happen in the morning, cortisol is produced to wake you up and this produces a glucose dump to give you energy. In normal people this is covered by a similar dump of insulin. Sometimes you can tweak your system with an appropriate amount of breakfast carbs, just enough to generate enough insulin to shut down your liver. Sometimes it works better if you have something like nuts and red wine last thing at night, or a small amount of carbs with fat before going to bed. Can be very difficult to control and may take a lot of experimenting before you find something that works for you.
 
Thank you for that. That was very helpful. Think I will try that. Is it worth considering a protein shake late at night which will fit in nicely with my training?
 
Sorry to jump on your thread Kalkara but I have also noticed that reducing my carbs greatly seems to have no effect on my readings and I cannot get below 6. I ate not carbs for 2 days and my BS reading was between 7 and 9. I am stumped by this now, but as others have said I am just going to have to keep on experimenting and hopefully find something that works.
 
kalkara said:
Thank you for that. That was very helpful. Think I will try that. Is it worth considering a protein shake late at night which will fit in nicely with my training?
Click to expand...

Try it and see, different people get different results.

Then there are odball things, my FBG is almost always below 5 but this morning it was 5.6. My breakfast should have taken me to 5.8 - 6.3 but I was at 7.6 after 1 1/2 hours. No clue as to what suddenly set that off.
 
I notice that this post is rather old, but I found it when looking for others suffering with high blood sugar in the morning - so hopefully others will too.

I was only diagnosed a few weeks back and at that stage my sugar levels were a disaster. I have managed to lower these to (usually) under 6.0 with metformin, diet and excercise. However, my morning levels are usually higher (6.8 - 8.7). I tried a bedtime snack and taking the metformin a bit later in the evenings but no real effect.

Now, being a bit of a fat boy, as I am, I have a tendency to snore and (to be brutally honest) dribble and sweat whilst sleeping (no, I am not a hit with the ladies). So I started to wonder if my morning sugar level problem is dehydration! I also used to avoid drinking much in the evenings as when my levels were bad I was peeing many times per night and this is exhausting. So I have started to drink 500ml of water with my bedtime snack. Since this, my levels have been much better in the mornings: 4.7 - 5.3. It is still early days, but I would suggest that if you are a snorer that you consider dehydration as a possible cause of high blood sugar in the morning.
 
Like BorisKarloff says I suffered the 'every 2 hours toilet break' during the nights, so when I stopped having drinks after 6pm this was remedied but AM BG readings climbed, so back to drinks later in the evening - but when my morning fasting readings climbed I was given 80mg Gliclazide to take in the evening as well as the 500mg Metformin thrice daily, this worked for awhile but my Lab averages still climbed from 6.8 to 7.2 and last week it was 8.8 so I was told to increase the 80mg Gliclazide to 1.5 tablets {120mg} in the evenings but after a week it doesn't seem to be having any noticable affect.
I also sweat badly during the nights & awaken many times with a very dry mouth, so dry that I cannot speak sometimes.
I very rarely get down to 5 these days I am mostly 8-14 these days, but notice that when I consume an orange or two in the evenings my morning BG is elevated.
 
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