morning reading

Set up a spreadsheet and then do a running average of your fasting blood sugar over 7 days. You'll get fluctuations naturally and also due to the inherent range of accurate of the meter you are using. With the spreadsheet you'll get a flatter range and you can spot trends.

Does anyone have an example of a spreadsheet suitable for blood glucose recording as I am useless with computers !

If you use an iPod/ipad there is an excellent app which plots all you data in a graph, with averages etc.
Otherwise, open excel on your PC and use the wizard feature.
Simply make a few columns, with date, time, meals eaten and reading.
Enter your readings and use the average feature, or use the sum feature and add the data.
Then divide this figure by the number of entries.

Failing that, write them all down, add them up and divide by the number if entries.



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You may well be seeing the "Dawn Phenomenon".

As humans are waking their livers pump out a bit of extra glucose to get things moving. In non-diabetics, this is taken care of by the normal insulin response. In diabetics, either the insulin response doesn't work properly, or we have insulin resistance - or both! - and our blood glucose continues to rise a little.

If it's due to insulin resistance, as this lessens (which for overweight people it should, as we lose weight) then the morning fasting reading comes down. Don't worry about it too much - unless you often get into double figures.

Any infection, eg a cold, can push BGs up as well.

The before/2 hours after eating figures are more relevant. Though I still like to do a fasting test - it reminds me not to go on an eating binge today! :lol:

Viv 8)

I agree it could be dawn phenomenon, but even aside from that, I wouldn't get too hung up over small fluctuations like these (easy to say, I know!). I think for a start most meters only have an accuracy of within 10-15%, which alone could easily account for small ups and downs. I definitely wouldn't take the view that your blood sugars are "rising" based on these readings. I very rarely even bother with first thing in the morning readings - to me they are actually the *least* useful of all. And FWIW I don't think 5s and 6s are bad anyway - when I was first diagnosed I was getting 8s and 9s in the early mornings.

Just for info, my lowest readings are almost always the pre-dinner ones, providing I've not eaten during the afternoon. Maybe you could switch to doing a pre dinner reading and then you could augment that, if you wanted to, with a two hour post dinner to see what effect your dinner had.


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Sorry, just realized you said you were already doing that. Well, I'd just drop the morning altogether. It would seem obvious that a "fasting" glucose would be the lowest of all, but it just doesn't work like that. Or if you want to test three times a day, do a 2 hour post breakfast. Breakfast is often the hardest meal to get right!


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