Hi doingmybest and welcome to the forums
I found a meter to be really helpful. The normal recommendation is to test immediately before eating at then two hours after the meal. The reason for this is that the first reading gives you a baseline: and the second reading then shows you how well your system dealt with the glucose produced by digesting your meal. If the two hour result is within 2 mmol/l of the first one, and not above 7.8 mmol/l, your system coped adequately with the glucose load in the two hours between tests.
The second test is therefore NOT "to see how high you went". Everyone's blood glucose will rise as carbs are digested and glucose is transferred to the blood. The high point is likely to be within the first hour somewhere. It can be worth once or twice testing at 30 minute intervals to see what happens, or to try out a constant glucose monitor which will give you the same sort of information. However, the two hour test is the important one.
Many people also test first thing in the morning. There is however "dawn phenomenon" which is where our livers dump stored glucose (ie glucose not directlt from food) into the blood stream, as fuel to get us going. This can often be the highest reading of the day and is usually the last reading to come down. The liver may have got used to you running with higher blood glucose levels, and it's doing its best to get you back up to those levels. You can't really affect it, until the liver learns that the new "normal" is a lower BG level. Livers are slow learners, and mine took months to adjust.
So the morning reading might not therefore be typical of the rest of your day.
When I was first diagnosed I tested a lot - far too much, actually. These days I test before and after a new food or food combo (eg I tried the SRSLY low carb wraps this week, and tested around those), and occasionally do a random testing day as monitoring. I don't think a single test in isolation tells you all that much.
Finally - all monitors have an acceptable allowable error of 5%, 95% of the time. So (for example) a set of results of 5.7, 6.0, and 6.3 are close enough together to be essentially the same reading. And maybe one in twenty will be way off. I once had a pre-meal reading of 13 or 14 which was a bit of a surprise - immediate follow-ups were low 5s, so maybe it was a bad strip or whatever.
best of luck. This forum is an excellent resource.
