So is it important to keep blood sugar under 6 when not eating?
Is it important to keep it as steady as possible? Is it ok if it fluctuates between 3.5 and 6 when not eating?
What should I do (if anything) if it goes under 4?
What can I do if it hits 8?
Should I exclude all food that makes me go above 8?
Thanks so much! I haven’t had any information from my GP just that I’m diabetic 2!
Hi Talya2022
I'm a T2 on no medication, so you need to read this with that in mind. I think my answer to a lot of your questions would be "it depends" on the context - was it a reading two hours after eating? a first thing in the morning reading? etc. There are two big sources of the glucose in your bloodstream - one is food and the other is your liver. The problem is that while you can generally control what you eat, you really have very little chance of doing anything short-term about your liver. It will change, but livers seem to be slow learners.
A lot of things can provoke your liver into making your blood glucose rise and fall - apart from food. Heat, exercise, illness, time of day, adrenalin/stress - there's a long list. My fasting BG eventually came down under 6 after several months on VLC: that was just my liver taking time to adapt.
I'd be really surprised if I didn't get daily BG fluctuations (I'd think 3.5-6 would be OK) when not eating, for the reasons above. Normally when my BG goes low my liver just dumps some extra glucose, I don't need to do anything. This happens to me most mornings about 4-5am.
I also don't think I particularly need to do anything if I get a BG reading of 8, but again it depends. I know that a small milky latte will take me from 5.4 to 9.5 in about 20 mins. I'll be back at 5.4ish after an hour. I think that's OK for me.
The point about me testing is not to see "how high I go", but to establish how quickly my system deals with the added glucose in whatever I ate, and returns me to baseline. That said, if I wasn't back within two points of where I started and below 7.8 after two hours, I'd think seriously about totally dropping whatever food it was.