I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in early November and was prescribed Metformin. Initial dose was 500mg at night, then twice a day building up to what I was told was the therapeutic dose of 2000 mg a day.
I managed to get to 3 tablets a day but cannot tolerate 1000mg together so spoke to my diabetic nurse and am taking 1 x 500mg three times a day. However I feel constantly nauseous and do not want to eat at all. I cannot imagine how I will feel on 4 tablets a day.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
I had exactly the same issue with metformin - it was the constant nausea and loss of appetite that made me miserable rather than the other, perhaps more common issue affecting the other end of the digestive system.... although the world did fall out of my bum on more than one occasion. My less-than-stellar diabetes nurse cheerily told me that the loss of appetite would ‘help me lose weight’.
However if you drastically reduce your carbohydrate consumption then there is a good chance you can reduce or remove your need for medication altogether. I halved my dose from 2000mg to 1000mg after 3 months, then again to 500mg after another 3 months and now I don’t take any, and my BG is around 34. But I also found that I could tolerate 1000mg very well so obviously for some people there is a threshold above which they can’t go.
Prescribing Metformin appears to be a black art which is very much up to the prescriber and appears to bear no relationship with the diagnostic HbA1c level. If you look around this forum many members are on less than 2000mg a day - I believe this is the
maximum therapeutic dose, not the minimum, so perhaps something to discuss with your GP.
