Taking BG levels. Why bother?

stephen1974 said:

Unless someone can provide me with: if my bg is 10 and I eat X what will my BG be? answers then i'd just as soon not stab myself repeatedly every day.

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The only person that can provide you with those answers is yourself, as no two diabetics are the same.

And the only way you can find those answers is infact to stab yourself several times a day, this then becomes meaningful data upon which you build your individual plan and way forward.

The alternative if you're unlucky is you keep taking the tablets, eventually end up insulin dependant whilst progressively getting worst.

You might find this video explains why and how you should be testing and how to use the information you gain from it:

Keep a log of the times and what you have eaten. This helps to point out any foods that spike your levels. Next time cut down on that food or try something different. You'll get to the stage where you won't have to stab so much as you will have a better idea of what certain foods do to your BG.

You need to work the pattern out for yourself, I am afraid.

The best way is to get a notebook (or App) that allows you to record blood glucose level, and what you ate.
Then you test before eating, eat, wait 2 hours, then test again. And write it all down.
If the food caused your blood glucose to rise higher than the guidelines, then you know there were too many grams of carbs in that food.
And next time you can adjust food type and/or portion size accordingly.

Over time, you build up a picture of how your body reacts to certain foods in certain portions, and you get to tailor make a diet perfectly designed for your body, and your diabetes.

Here are the blood glucose guidelines to aim for, to start with.
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes_care/blood-sugar-level-ranges.html
Some of us fine tune things a bit more, once we have got the hang of it, but that takes a bit of time.

Your reaction is the random factor - we all react to carbs differently, so your meter is showing you what cannot be calculated, your reaction to a meal.
After a while eating low carb meals you will sort out what makes your BG levels rise, and what is going to lead to safe levels. Anything which raises your BG levels by more than two whole numbers should be either reduced or avoided.
Over time, if you stick to low carb then your situation should improve and your reaction to foods be reduced.

Are you diabetic or prediabetic?

Well for me, very early on, testing showed me that what I'd been advised to do was not going to work. I had a VERY small portion of mini-wheats with milk, and saw my BG shoot up. That's when I started to realise that for me carbohydrates were bad. I had a similar reaction a couple of weeks later to something with pearl barley, especially as I'd followed the recipe regarding portion size and there was way too much. For me I continue to test, though not quite the seven times a day. I see things change that I can't always explain, but at least I'm reassured that I'm generally doing OK. My 3 months HbA1c confirmed I'm on the right track, and I want to continue testing to show me I'm not drifting. I have to keep my BG down to avoid complications, so I want to know I'm doing just that.

Maybe it's the Engineer in me, but I feel I can't control what I'm not measuring.

And as if to prove a point, I realised how bad I've been this evening. I know beer is bad, really bad. But measuring has shown me that I can occasionally have a couple of lagers without it being massively bad. This evening I had a couple of ales rather than lagers, and even commented that one of them tasted quite sweet. 9.5 before dinner. That's way up on my usual levels. So the point of testing was proved, I won't be doing that again any time soon.

as @JohnEGreen once posted. "Having a BG monitor won't cost you an arm and a leg, no having one might"
Enough said?

Tanks for the mention @walnut_face and I stand by that. As to the ops question the numbers obtained are not meaningless nor random they equate to the amount of sugar present in your blood and that is governed to a great degree by what you have eaten so as has been said you test and correlate the numbers obtained with what you have eaten and that is test before eating then a set time after and a set time after that normally one hour after that's when you normally would have peaked and then one hour after that when hopefully your level should have returned to a normal or near normal level.

Then by adjusting what you eat you may gain some control of your condition.
There are many here who will do their best to help you make sense of it all
Best of luck and I hope you manage to figure out what is best for you as an individual.

John

The numbers are not just random – they are quite closely correlated with what you have eaten and your level of physical activity. There’s no black magic involved, it’s a simple correlation. However to discover the relationship you need to record what you have eaten and your BG results over a period of time. Just doing random tests, as you seem to have already discovered actually demonstrates nothing.

Testing is a pain in the bum, or finger but you really don’t need to do it a several times a day once you’ve got a handle on how your BG trends go. The main thing you need to discover is what foods you can eat without pushing up your BG level and also how your longer term average BG is trending. My suggestion is to test before and after just ONE MEAL a day and rotate the tests through breakfast, lunch and dinner and take a note of what you ate and take notice of how the food affected your BG.

I’m not a medic, so regard my suggestions as such, but the strategy has worked for me.

Dave

stephen1974 said:

that taking my BG levels is pointless

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If I never had tested multiple times to work out a pattern, I would not have been able to reduce my bgl and hba1c and also knock 10 kgs off of my weight.

As the old saying goes "your body your choice", but I strongly recommend that you test more although you feel it's a pita.

I don't think you need to test multiple times a day. Once you have established your morning fasting levels, you can check the effects of various type of food. Once you know that certain types of food don't spike your levels there is no need to keep checking this.

If your levels are high (10 is high) then I would be concerned. The ideal is to have fasting level between 4 and 7 and not go above 8.5 two hours after eating. What you eat will have a profound impact on your blood sugar levels and it can take some major changes to your diet to keep blood sugars low.

Several years ago, I tested only when I got up and two hours after breakfast. I ate the same thing in the same amount for breakfast every day, except I changed either the type or the amount of carbohydrate. I also ate breakfast at the same time everyday. In this way, over time, I figured out how my blood sugars were affected. After figuring out breakfast, I only tested before lunch and two hours after lunch following the same protocol. Then on to dinner. Once you know how your body responds, if you are type 2, there is generally no real need to check multiple times a day. I now check when I get up and sometimes later on out of curiosity.

For completeness - while diet (especially carbs) and activity levels are the biggest factors, there are other things which jack BG up as well, over which you have limited control. These include:

- stress, lack of sleep, infection, circadian rhythms.

Knowing that these things increase BG helps to do what I can to mitigate them, but given they are not entirely within my control, helps me to relax a bit about e.g. my BG steadily climbing across the morning when I'm in a demanding situation. It is what it is. I control the things I can control, as best I can.