Oh goodness, can you help?

It is unfortunately a lifetime commitment trying to stay on track. Every couple of months I stock up on strips and I will test upon waking and before meals and 2 hrs after meals and it gives me a good indication of what my BS is doing. This is great for working out which foods are having an effect on your BS and those that your body can tolerate. I personally get my HbA1c test done every 3 months so I know I am keeping everything under control as a lot can change in a year.

@4ratbags is correct, in the early stages concentrate on pre meals and post meals two hours after. This is the only way to see if you can tolerate the food or combination of foods you eat. If you are above 2mmols after the two hour reading, then there is some part of what you have ate that is raising your blood glucose levels to high and needs removing from your intake. It is usually carbs or sugars.

Eat to your meter.

Reduce your carbs and sugars.
Reduce your plate size.
Increase your exercise.

@lizzy@ The trouble with testing once a week, say first thing every Saturday morning, is that you might be tempted to be "good" on Fridays (I know I would be) and possibly a bit less good on other days. The glucose monitor, which you have at home, will just tell you how much glucose is in that particular bit of your blood at that moment. OK, if you have binged all week, there will have been little recovery time and the reading will be higher than if you have been fairly good all week, but it is a spot reading.
Can I suggest that you do before and 2 hours after meals for a couple of weeks, so that you learn about how different foods affect you. You will then really know what to avoid. You can then go on to occasional spot checks, just to make sure nothing is going madly wrong.
Sally

Try this. Although this site is careful about recommendations about blood testing they do give the figures you should try to achieve.

http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes_care/blood-sugar-level-ranges.html

If you don't want to do a lot of testing, you can set up a pattern that will still form a good picture. When I was first diagnosed and started to get it under control (a long time ago now) I was initially advised to take one or two tests each day, but at a different time each day on a rolling pattern, so that after a few days I had one reading per salient time period of the day - and that builds up a pattern for the entire day.

So, day 1, I might test on waking, then 2 hours after breakfast, day 2 I might do before breakfast and before lunch, day 3 would be 2 hours after lunch and before dinner. etc. etc.

If you want to know more detail and the effects of particular foods, you'd need to test more often than that, but maybe try this for a week and see what sort of numbers you're getting.