I was told 3 weeks ago that I had prediabetes. I have brought a glucose monitor and have been testing my blood 4x daily. I have found that this has kept me motivated to not eat junk food.
I can only afford to buy testing strips for 4 tests per day. I am currently using these at 6am before breakfast, 12 before lunch, 5pm before dinner, I'm before bed. I can increase to maybe one or 2 more but it is difficult because of work. I dont want everyone knowing.
My question: should I be testing before or after meals? If I allowed 6 strips per day, what times should I test?
If the cost of strips is an issue, you want to test your meals. If there's stuff you regularly eat, like, the same breakfast 4 times a week, check what it does to your blood sugars. Test before the meal and 2 hours after the first bite. If it goes up more than 2.0 mmol/l, the meal was carbier than you could handle and you'll know whether to adjust it or no. Check it a few times, see if there's any consistency there. Same with lunch and dinner. If you
have to ration your strips that might be the way to go, because right now you're just getting numbers that don't actually tell you anything useful. The carbs in your meal affect your bloodglucose. And that's what you want to know about; how bad is it, do you spike, is it improving etc. Testing before a meal without a follow-up to see the difference is just.... A waste. As for testing first thing in the morning, again,
if you have to ration strips, skip it. (I'm going to get in trouble for saying that, but hey.... Living on a budget means hard choices). In the morning you get a glucose dump courtesy of your liver. It gives you energy to start the day, it's called Dawn Phenomenon. And that number is the last one to come down, as the liver is a bit slow on the uptake. It takes a while for it to empty its stores and get clued in that your numbers should be lower.. Will probably be high half a year from now. So disregard that until you've got a routine going where you cut carbs and want to see whether your fasting blood glucose is coming down yet. Same with evening testing.... I know, the mantra is test, test, test, but if you can't afford it, choices have to be made. I poured a thousand euro's into strips that first year of diagnosis, and though it may have been the best money I could've spent, it did make an undeniable dent in our finances. So if you can get a meter with cheap strips, wonderful, but if even the cheap strips are too much of a financial burden.... Just go with the stuff that tells you the most.
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/blog-entry/the-nutritional-thingy.2330/ might help too.
Best of luck!
Jo
