Hi Irishmist66. Thanks for the tag
@Nicola M .
First thing I'd do is encourage you to read the posts on these forums - try the Success stories, and the "What Have You Eaten" threads where people talk about what worked for them and what their day to day patterns are like. You also need to think a bit about what you want to achieve or work towards - eg is it reducing blood glucose levels? coming off medication? reducing symptoms? losing weight? combinations of these?
It also depends on where you're starting from - you'll probably have a recent HbA1c - that and earlier ones will show you what your current trend is.
The main thing, though, is finding what works for you. There's very little point trying to follow what someone else does if it's simply not working. I'd be wary of the stuff you read on the internet setting rules and giving instructions to follow. Even if they worked for the other person, there's no guarantee the pattern will work for you. For example, I aim for around 20g carb/day - sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. It works and has worked for me, although willpower is a requirement. It's an extreme reduction in carbs, and not everyone feels comfortable living with that. If you can't follow it long-term, it's probably not for you.
All digestable carbohydrate turn to glucose in the body. Our T2 problem is a combination of too much glucose and inefficient insulin, so the low carb aim is to reduce the amount of glucose coming in, so that your insulin has a better chance of dealing with reduced levels, less insulin needs to be produced, and your body has a chance to become less insulin resistant - which is a benign cycle. Carbohydrate appears in food in various forms as both sugars and starches, so as well as sugars in the obvious things like sweets, biscuits, fruit and cakes, there's starchy carb in bread, potatoes, rice, cereals, grains, pasta, etc.
So a start would be to reduce or eliminate foods like those I've mentioned above, to reduce the amount of glucose coming in. That can be helped enormously if you use a glucose meter regularly and keep notes of what happens before and after eating meals - the normal pattern is to test immediately before first bite, and then two hours later, It's NOT about seeing how high you go. After two hours your system should have cleared most or all of the excess glucose from your system and stored it - in the liver, or in muscles, or as fat. that's what you're testing - how efficient your system currently is. If the second test is within 2mmol/l of the first, and not above 8.5, that means your system can currently cope with the level of carb in what you just ate.
You also have to recogniose that your liver will be doing its best to keep your blood glucose at the levels you've been at. This means that sometimes you might see BG levels you can't really explain by what you've eaten - this often happens in the early morning. It's just the liver trying to do its job. It takes time to change.
My suggestion would be that you make a start by looking at what you're currently eating, and work out roughly the level of carb you're eating: then look at how you might reduce or substitute some of that for non-carb items. Testing helps you see how well that reduction/substitution works.
Does that give you a start? The thing to do is to keep asking questions, about anything you're not sure of. We've all started somewhere.
