Recently told I am prediabetic -

[Kickylol]

So the last time I checked my blood was in 2021 and the Hba1c was 35 mmol. Recently I was on holiday to India, two weeks ago and decided to do a full health checkup there. The hba1c came as 5.8/40 and the fasting blood sugar came to 6.1/110. The doc told me I am predibetic and should control my diet. I was shocked! I know why this has happened as I had a series of injuries in the last 4-5 months (hamstring/shoulder/lower abdomen) etc as part of my workout and was not training properly for past few months and Ofcourse was not watching my diet. Also since a week before the test I was eating a lot of bad carbs and sweets as part of the holiday plus a wedding there. I know it doesn’t affect hba1c too much but maybe the fasting.

My family (except mom) are all diabetic. Younger brother, all aunts and uncles on maternal side. Dad died of cancer about 35 years ago in his 40s but he wasn’t diabetic. So in reality, I am an eligible candidate for diabetes if I don’t take care of this.

Now, I started my low carb diet and I’ll check again in 3 months. also ordered my testing strips. I am pretty confident and determined to get it back to normal. I am otherwise a pretty active person - weight training plus kickboxing 6 days a week, but I am going to add a bit more walking in this routine.


But my question is why does UK NHS and this site says prediabetes is when the hba1c is between 42 mmol and 47 mmol whilst every other place in the world says 38 mmol? It doesn’t really matter as I know I need to take care of my blood sugar, but curious.

Also another question, lchf diet is highly used in this site, but nobody really talks about the total calories. Even on lchf diet if you don’t watch your calories, you’ll not loose weight/gain weight? Any thoughts on this too?

43 M(44 soon). 77kg/174cm. Lean muscular build.

Thank you.

 

[catinahat]

Welcome avijender
Congratulations for being pro active and determined to do something about it.
Different countries have different benchmarks for diagnosis, a Hba1c of 40 put you right at the top end of normal in the UK.
Exercise is fantastic if you can do it, but the main problem is that you are starting to have difficulty using the glucose that comes from the carbohydrates in your diet.
When we cut carbs , obviously we are cutting calories so we increase the amount of protein and healthy fats to make up the difference.
Counting calories is entirely up to the individual, most of us don't feel the need to.
We eat as few carbs as possible , as much non starchy veg as we want and enough protein and healthy fat to keep hunger at bay. If we gain weight that we don't want we just dial back on the fat a little. If we lose weight we don't want to lose, then we increase our fats a little.
The reason low carb works so well is that when we eat carbs because we can't use the resulting glucose very efficiently, our blood sugar level is higher than it should be so that glucose gets stored away as fat.
We are still hungry because the glucose hasn't been used to feed us, so we eat again,
Carbs = high glucose, fat storage and hunger,
Without carbs our bodies use fat and protein for energy, we don't store it we burn it.

 

[Outlier]

A purely personal take on this is that for almost all my adult life I existed on 500-800 calories per day. I was permanently ravenous and often bad-tempered. A small increase in food would result in weight gain.

Since being diagnosed T2 diabetic, I have changed to a ketogenic diet, am never starving the way I used to be although I do feel hungry when the next meal is due (I eat once or more usually twice a day), am well within the desirable weight for my height, and don't count calories at all - I eat when hungry and stop when I've had enough. Having done the calorie thingy for so many decades, I know I handsomely exceed what is held up to us as a desirable calorie intake.

Others will differ in their experiences, but I feel so much better since I ditched the calorie counting.

 

[Kickylol]

Thank you @catinahat and @Outlier

I've got a question if you don't mind - how long after a meal should I test to see if the food I've eaten is not spiking my BG?
For E.g - Yesterday I had some red rice along with broccoli and kale plus some baked chicken. After about 60min when I checked the reading was 4.7. But today after eating a whole meal roti ( same kale and broccoli) plus air fired chicken after 45 mins it was showing 8:1. After 90 mins it was 5.9

The thing about yesterday - before the meal I did some heavy leg session at the gym for about an hour.

I am just trying to find a pattern, but I am unsure how long after the mean I should be checking. Thanks in advance.

 

[catinahat]

There are no hard and fast rules but the usual advice is to test somewhere around 2hrs after your first bite.
The reason for the 2hrs is that someone who is not diabetic, will usually find that their blood sugar levels will have returned to the pre meal level within 2hrs.
Our goal is to keep our levels as close to normal as possible so that's what we aim for.
Of course this can vary even for non diabetics depending on the meal, some foods take longer to digest but the 2hrs is a reasonable time to aim for.
Having said that though, it's your test, if 2hrs is not convenient for you, you could test at 90min. It's more important that you are consistent, it would be difficult to compare meals and results if some are done at 90min and others at 120min.
And if you are really curious about how you react to a certain meal or food, you could test before eating, then at 45 or 60min and then every 30min until your levels have returned to the baseline range.
You would use quite a few strips and probably have sore fingers but you will learn how high that meal takes your blood sugar and how long it takes it to come back down .
For me it's just as important to avoid short lived spikes as it is to be back to baseline in the 2hrs.
Anything that causes our blood sugar to spike will also cause a spike in our insulin levels, high insulin levels cause our insulin resistance to get worse, I try to avoid anything that will send my levels above 8mmol.
Low sugar levels = low insulin = improvement in insulin sensitivity

 

[KennyA]

Thank you @catinahat and @Outlier

I've got a question if you don't mind - how long after a meal should I test to see if the food I've eaten is not spiking my BG?
For E.g - Yesterday I had some red rice along with broccoli and kale plus some baked chicken. After about 60min when I checked the reading was 4.7. But today after eating a whole meal roti ( same kale and broccoli) plus air fired chicken after 45 mins it was showing 8:1. After 90 mins it was 5.9

The thing about yesterday - before the meal I did some heavy leg session at the gym for about an hour.

I am just trying to find a pattern, but I am unsure how long after the mean I should be checking. Thanks in advance.

Elevated blood glucose levels cause physical damage. So the principle is to avoid not only the high levels, but less high levels that last for longer, even if they never spike the way that the short-term ones do.

Personally, I would prefer to have a single reading of 11 that fell to 5.5 really quickly than a series of readings of 8 or 9 that lasted six or seven hours. But in practice I eat to avoid both of those situations.