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Morning Sugar Spikes after Getting up

V

vaverma

Newbie
Messages
4
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Tablets (oral)
Hi All,
Recently I bought CGM and I have noticed that morning sugar doubles up within 1 to 2 hour from the time I get out of bed.
Yesterday, I got up with 80 and within one hour, it shot to 156.
Today, I got up with 110 and within 2 hours, it shot up to 220. (I didn't sleep properly in the night and it affects my morning sugar always)
After that it starts decreasing.
I am on medication.
I know about Dawn phenomenon but not sure why it increases by 100%.
Any idea why this happens and is there a way to manage this?
 
Welcome @vaverma
You already know about the dawn phenomenon so basically that's what's happening, your liver is releasing some stored glucose.
It's not something that happens only as you wake in the morning, if your blood sugar levels have been high for a while you will have lots of glycogen stored away.
Your liver will take any chance it can to use some of it, if you haven't eaten in a while, any exercise, stress, emotional or physical, will cause a liver dump.
The time you jumped from 110 to 220 seems a little excessive, I wondered if you checked that level with an old fashioned finger prick test, it could easily have been a rogue reading.
The testing methods available to us are not as accurate as we would like, and results that are way off are sadly more common than you would think, it always pays to double check any results that suprise us
 
Thank you @catinahat
I didn't do glucometer finger prick testing. This is a good idea to validate in case of wayward readings.
My observations are based on 2 days of readings.
I will observe for few more days and see whether this is a regular occurrence.
 
vaverma said:
will observe for few more days and see whether this is a regular occurrence
Click to expand...
If you think about it, any time your levels rise without you eating, that glucose hasn't just come from nowhere, it was always in you, hidden away in your liver where no current equipment available to us can see it.
All that has happened is, that glucose has moved from your liver into your blood where you can see it and more importantly use it.
There's not much you can do to stop your liver doing it's job, and if it's reducing the amount of glucose in your body why would you want to.
If you focus on reducing the impact on your blood sugar levels from your meals, eventually your liver is not going to have so much stored glucose to get rid of. The liver dumps will never stop completely, that's just how we work, but the severity of the Dawn phenomenon will reduce.
 
I think this is enlightening for me. I will focus, as you have mentioned, to reduce BSL from meals.
 
Liver dumps like this happen for everyone and will continue to happen.
The difference for those of us with diabetes is that our body does not react to the liver dump with the appropriate insulin dump which is why we see the BG rise.
As someone with Type 1, I cannot change this. I can only inject more insulin.
My understanding is that someone with type 2 may be able to reduce their insulin resistance which will minimise this rise.
 
vaverma said:
@catinahat
I went through your blog link. Very useful info.
I also decided to visit other pages but sadly they are in dutch.
Click to expand...
Alas I can't claim any credit for the Nutritional thingy blog, that is the work of another forum member @JoKalsbeek , who is indeed from the Netherlands.
I have a link to her blog at the end of my post simply because it's so helpful especially to new members
 
vaverma said:
@catinahat
I went through your blog link. Very useful info.
I also decided to visit other pages but sadly they are in dutch.
Click to expand...
You're not missing out on anything, they're just scribblings, not diabetes related. I studied journalism, was a bit of a writer/journalist/critic. Sometimes I still wanted to fling something out there, so I made the blog. These days I just stick with keeping friends and family apprised over on Facebook, and I type up some stuff here.... But that's just all old babbling from when I still bothered to write material, just because I loved doing it.
 
You can reduce the effect - large quantities of exercise deplete the liver's glycogen stores and people report subsequently reduced dawn phenomenon in the following days. This is presumably a combination of the hepatic glycogen depletion and higher muscle insulin sensitivity (i.e. they will use and/or store blood glucose more readily). Hepatic repletion (horrible word) takes time (24-48h are reported) with higher repletion rates for high carb diets (i.e. this is what athletes should do, not talking about diabetics.)

There is therefore a decent chance that the combination of exercise (to deplete glycogen stores) and low-ish carbs post exercise (to slow the repletion rate) would reduce dawn phenomenon. I'm not sure how long it could be kept going though as the amount of exercise required to deplete the liver is quite large and adaptation appears to take place, whereby the liver produces less glucose/at a lower rate during exercise. It would be an interesting experiment to try if I could organise my life well enough!
 
If you were running with high blood sugar levels for some time prior to diagnosis, then your liver will be trying to raise your levels back there. Eventually the penny drops, and the Glucose output will drop, to match the newly learned lower level being the norm. In the mean time, it's a good thing, as it's depleting the stored Glucogon, which provided your carb intake is low enough, will not be refilled.
 
 
I registered for this forum solely to tell you that this explanation was eye opening, I was frustrated getting mad thinking I have eaten nothing and waiting to eat till blood sugars dropped in the morning but being very hungry because I would wake up in a decent range but then my blood glucose would jump to a 20 or 30 points and now it makes sense! Also helps me to understand why when commuting home from work in the evening I will have eaten nothing for hours and only drank water but my blood glucose spikes! Stress from the drive, my liver is just doing its job.
 
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