That to me looks like a completely usual range of fluctuations, especially if measured with a glucometer (opposed to a CGM), all of which have a 10-15% margin of error.
I wasted some money and tested 2-3 times each time, posted value is average between those measurements, so a bit less unlikely to be wrong.
All your readings seam totally normal in fact fantastically good , I think most of us would call a spike after a meal as going from a bg of 4 to a bg of 12 and higher !
I guess with type 2 prediabetes situation is a bit different, a lot of guidelines I saw say you should avoid jumping more than 2-3 mmol higher than your baseline, as spikes like that can contribute to increasing insulin resistance. And you should avoid staying in 8 - 11 mmol and higher as you can start getting some damage to your blood vessels\kidneys.
To be honest, everything apart from your waist measurement now sounds perfectly normal to me, but I freely admit this is far from my area of expertise (and I probably shouldn't comment
).
Will comment that you can't expect your glucometer to be perfectly accurate, they are allowed to be +-15%.
Maybe your weight loss has done the trick??? Or maybe your figures were just messed up by covid....
I must say that my taiwanese glucometer is fairly consistent and accurate (compared with lab results) in 4-6 mmol range, and starts getting big differences in measurements higher than that. I always double or triple check if result is high or unexpected.
Also remember that fats & protein can be converted to glucose over the longer term.
Hope this puts your mind at rest as your readings are super healthy
I see that there is actually a kind of lack of evidence of glucose variance in healthy people. Most studies say that they don't spike to 11 + mmol, but I saw at least 2 people spiking higher than that after eating bananas or drinking cola. There also seem to be anecdotal evidence that some people don't go higher than around 6 mmol even if they eat lots of fast carbs, and some thin healthy people need 1/3 cups of rice to go to 7 mmol.
There is that study which is cited pretty often about non-diabetics being in >7.8 mmol range only for about 30 mins a day. But the thing is, afaik, their meals weren't accounted for, even some diabetics or prediabetics can eat carbs like buckwheat with fats and proteins and stay below that point. Averaging different generations with different eating habits doesn't sound like the best idea to me, young people may eat fast food and spike to 8-9 mmol and elderly people can eat some light food and stay in good range, or it could be totally vice versa. 30 minutes is still pretty significant, a person with normal metabolism needs significant amount of fast carbs to go that high. Maybe that's the effect of sugar drinks. Thank god I am fine with aspartame taste.
Also there is a concept that you should return to "baseline" in 2-3 hours after a meal, but what is baseline? Should you be close to your fasting level after a meal, or is it okay for it to be 0.5 mmol higher? Average healthy person's glucose is 5.4 mmol in that CGM study, which implies that either they spike pretty high a few times a day, or they stay in 5.x mmol glucose range for a good portion of day time instead of going back to fasting 4.x. There are also things like biphasical glucose curves like stated in
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6300703/ and even triphasical, those things aren't studied at all.
And let's get pizza for an example, I think type 1 diabetics know that pizza can cause spikes delayed by multiple hours after consuming it. Pancreas is a reactive organ, not proactive, so should pizza cause delayed spike in healthy person? Probably, but I didn't find anything about that.
There is also not much information about normal glycemia -> insulin resistance -> prediabetes -> diabetes transformation, except for excessive fat tissue causing most of those problems. But not every fat person has prediabetes or diabetes. There seems to be a kind of fat mass threshold for each person, and that threshold if reached will get you into troubles with glucose. There are also different types of prediabetes, some people have normal fasting glucose and spike very high, some people have both high fasting and postprandials. If your glucose is high before eating it will also go somewhat higher after eating than compared to problems with postprandials only.
Obese people often get troubles like high blood pressure and heart problems, all things combined that can give you erectile dysfunction, and from the point of nature and evolution, with ED you are useless. Could diabetes be one of the triggers to make you stop poisoning your body with excessive energy and fat tissue, so you can serve your evolutionary purpose? Maybe, still not very well studied. For type 1 we know that it is an unfortunate coincidence with autoimmune reaction, different autoimmune reactions are not uncommon because our bodies are very difficult mechanisms in which errors happen sometimes.
I also see how I spike higher after eating chefburger from kfc than after eating chocolate. Chocolate is considered as one of the faster carbs to raise your sugar, tho they have some fats. And that chefburger is supposed to be a mix of fats, protein and carbs, carbs being a bit more prevalent, but still. And I guess that those fast food restaurants (if you can call them that) inject their meat and maybe buns with maltodextrin for it to taste better. Maltodextrin has an average glycemic index of 120 (!!!!!!!). I ate 12 sushi rolls with rice and my blood sugar was still lower (6.9) in 1 hour than it was after kfc food. That stuff is just simple posion and should be avoided at all costs, especially for your kids and young people like me.
With former fat-nutrient-phobia, which afaik was partly fueled with help of fast food and snacks companies, I guess you can see that they tried for a long time to make us think that their meals aren't so bad. But with current keto fashion we see that following low carb diets actually help you lose a lot of weight and stabilize some of your chronic condition, tho high fat diets can be hard for folks with pancreatitis and EPI problems.
Also medical institutions avoid testing your insulin and c-peptide if your fasting glucose is fine. HA1C is sometimes tested, insulin is the last test to do if you have some abnormalities in your results. A lot of people get their type 1.5 misdiagnosed because of that as well. And guess what, fasting glucose is actually the one which raises last before making you full-blown diabetic. Insulin resistance can preceed that for years or even decades. They also made a number "2.7" for HOMA-IR, while you should aim as close as possible to 1.0. I really think sometimes that most doctors aren't very interested in treating insulin resistance and prediabetes, and those conditions are MUCH easier to revert and control. Diabetics with advanced stages give a good monthly income for pharmaceutic companies and also pay some money for endocrinologist, podiatrist and opthalmologist visits.
Thanks for reading my Ted talk. I am really baffled how such serious condition is studied and acknowledged by many doctors.
Re: waist measurement - different body types put weight on in different places. It's possible to be lean all over except for the midriff, or to carry weight on other areas (bum, tum, thighs, shoulders) but have a middle well within the so-called preferred range. BMI is a blunt instrument, and only a theory. You are the one who can judge whether you need to lose weight and if so from where. We are all individuals. Good luck.
I still have XL size of clothes and belly fat. It seems that, like usually, the belly fat is the last to go. Measured today's morning it while fasting, it was 96 cm already. It probably can vary a bit, 98 cm measurement was actually taken 2 weeks ago. I think that my lean body weight is somewhere around 70 kg, I don't really have much muscles except in my legs (because for overweight/obese people leg day is every day, hehehe)