Hi
@nabilla - welcome and congratulations for taking the step of getting in touch.. it's a bigger thing than I was able to do for months, and just being able to throw thoughts into a safe space and get a pile of support from people going through the same thing was invaluable.
I had a similarly confusing entrance in to the world of Diabetes. I was cutting down on drinking, and doing more exercise, and counting calories religiously. After three hard years of this, I was finally at my ideal weight, and had only taken a blood test as part of a regular post 50 check up. I couldn't have been more surprised to take the call that my blood sugars were dangerously high, and the short version is that it took eight months before I got fed up getting no cohesive answers, that I started to learn for myself what I needed to do to help.
One critical thing that I went through, and sounds like you are too, is that I kept tripping up over whether I was LADA, or actually Type 2 (I realise you are neither and prediabetic, just hold for a second...) - I couldn't really make sense of it; they both presented with too much blood sugar, but one seemed to be more linked to auto-immune failure or some mechanism that nobody could explain that had to do with my pancreas... I felt that I was somewhere trapped in the middle...
What I realise now, is that we tend to think of Diabetes in relation to Glucose, when it's really all about our hormones being out of balance. As a way of wrapping your head around it, we have a control mechanism that is stuck in high gear. There are lots of ways it can start, but when it gets going, the effect is to make the situation worse. The key driver for storing energy is insulin, and of course I'm describing insulin resistance. You may already have had some explanations as to what this is, and it is complicated for sure, but a simple (and safe, meaning based on good science) way of thinking about it is that too much of a good thing leads to resistance to that thing - could be insulin, coffee, exercise, but also anything like alcohol, nicotine, heroin for that matter.. you need more to have the same effect).
A high blood sugar level means that you are needing to produce elevated insulin in order to clear it out of your blood. We are designed to do this, because we are not evolved to deal with lots of sugar in our blood, and historically there wasn't much to deal with at any given time. So, once is fine; over and over, we slowly start to develop resistance to the insulin that is clearing out the sugar. Over (much longer) time, that leads to increasing blood glucose levels, and can then lead to many other outcomes, only one of which is T2DM.
The good news is that the initial need for that insulin is the need to clear out sugars that result from food (not just eaten sugars, but starches which break down quickly into sugars) - and that the reverse is true; many people have great success in reducing insulin resistance (prediabetes) by reducing the need for the insulin in the first place, by reducing the carbs (read sugars and starches) and replacing them with healthy fats (by which I mean anything other than seed oils). Fats do not require insulin to digest, indeed we as a species have a wonderfully complex system of controlling them.
Where you take that is entirely up to you - I would thoroughly support the suggestion to use a CGM, as it's the only way to know for sure what your body does with any given food. You will have your own thoughts on diet, and what you like... try to think of this as the start of a journey of stripping away what you've been told about diet, and understanding yourself better..
You are already doing a fantastic job of looking after yourself - this is bound to feel like too much, but most of that is (in my opinion) because most of the prevailing guidance is wrong and unhelpful. You are closer to being on the right track than you think!!
