Post prandial glucose levels

Hi! Did you test immediatel;y before lunch, following your morning testing? It could well have gone down in the meantime.

What I mean is your first one in the morning showed 6.1, but a few hours later - just before lunch, it may have been less than that. It may have been, say 5 - meaning that your 2-hr post prandial reading was in fact higher than before lunch. You need to test immediately before eating to get that 2-hr differential. I don't test all through the day, but yesterday, for example, my overnight fasting was 5.5, then later in the day, just before dinner it was 4.7.

The key is to test at least twice for each meal, the first before 1st bite, the second after 2 hours. Some people add in a test at 1 hour I their early learning.
Each test is a rough guide as many things not just food affect bg; medications, exercise, sleep stress to name a few. Different foods react over different times too, anything fatty takes a longer time, many report pizza taking 6-12 hours for example. Alcohol too, will be processed by the body first so a bg rise is delayed.

Best to instigate a good testing regime for a minimum of 2 weeks eating your normal diet and exercise, then repeat with 2 weeks going low carb to see differences in the patterns.

Yes it's a lot of pricks, but so worth doing. You will learn a lot

If you're testing first thing in the morning then not eating until lunch time, then you're likely to see a drop in your glucose as your body uses it up for fuel.

You should test immediately before eating and 2 hours afterwards to see how how the content of that meal affects your levels - and this applies to any meal where you want to view changes in glucose levels as a result of what you ate. And this may not change much, may increase, or more rarely go lower - see posts in the Reactive Hypoglycemia section of the forum.

And your first reading in the morning is often high as the body readies itself for the day. The waking reading is often the last to come down, often taking months. Mine, after 2 years still varies between 4.8 and 7.8

Pissouri Dave said:

Hi - I was diagnosed with T2 diabetes last week. Everything I have read indicates that I should expect my glucose level reading to go up after a meal. However, I am finding that mines goes down! Morning reading for example today was 6.1, took reading after lunch of a sandwich and it was 5.2 after 2 hours? Is this OK, normal or do I have a problem? I would mention that I am a UK expat living in Cyprus, where proper support and advice is difficult to get! Thank you for your help.

Click to expand...

I have once seen research presented by a 3rd party, that suggests it is a normal pattern for insulin resistant people. I haven't read or validated the research itself. I think I recall the graphs for insulin sensitive v insulin resistant subjects on 1-meal-a-day...

• insulin sensitive: plasma glucose spikes after eating, then trails to baseline where it stays until Dawn Effect in the morning.
• Insulin resistant: I think there was a rise then fall below baseline after eating, gradually recovering upward to baseline (in other words, fasting in insulin resistance can have the short term effect of raising blood sugar, I guess).
  • Note that longer intermittent fasting will lead to short term lowered blood sugar as you actually run out, and might eventually start to reduce insulin resistance long term.

I have learned a lot from a YouTube guy - Sten Ekberg. I don't want to encourage anybody to believe "some bloke on the internet" - and much of what he says might seem controversial, or contrary to common medical practice of the last 50 years - but as far as I can tell, he seems to be really on top of his game, and I've been unable to fault him (I always try to find contrary evidence for any extraordinary claims). I think he has a video on elevated fasting blood sugar and insulin resistance - that may cover it.

But if you are looking for explanation of the phenomenon, I don't recall seeing it explained, only observed and acknowledged. I think it may just be that insulin resistant people have a lot of glycogen sitting around, and as soon as the liver gets a hint of no inbound food, it starts dumping sugar back into the blood at an elevated rate (because it has loads, so it can!) which means your morning baseline is higher than it should be. Then the post-prandial do is just a return to what a more healthy baseline might have been.
Also, see Dawn Effect, if you are taking your fasting baseline when you wake.

I have viewed Sten Ekberg, and with my condition, he covers it better than most. However, if he ever had my version of the condition, he would still have the symptoms and probably still have the hypoglycaemia.
He refers to rh, not as a condition alone, like me, but most of the population who have been diagnosed had symptoms of RH, but it is only that, I repeat, not the condition itself!
An example of this is Gestational diabetes, there are very similar symptoms, but obviously not RH!
Another is post prandial hypoglycaemic syndrome. All the same symptoms, but they feel as if having hypoglycaemia, but actually don't go hypo!
Dietary advice is not bad, but he still believes certain glucose issues, such as needing some carbs, even supposedly healthy carbs, and fibre, but because his experience is what he has learned. But once, you get your dietary balance within ketosis right, your body will repair itself, fasting does help, but keeping blood glucose levels within normal levels consistently as much as possible, is how your body repairs itself!