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Testing specific food items

Alec G.

Member
Messages
10
Type of diabetes
Prediabetes
Treatment type
Other
Need a bit of help if possible. Got my lancet, got my meter, got my provisional low carb one week menu.
Absorbing the wisdom of fellow members, I want to check my choice of foods to see if they are good/bad/ugly for my personal chemistry.
In my current ignorance I am thinking this should be the procedure:

a, Several hours after a meal you can do a test.
b, Immediately prior to eating the specific item, say a large egg, you test.
c, Two hours after the food, you test, 2 points or under pre is good.
d, Repeat the test on this specific food item 3-4 times to confirm pattern / findings.

My questions are:

1, What is the time interval between eating to do an accurate test?
2, How much of the specific food do you need to eat? I suspect this will be the portion size I have planned on my menu.
3, Is there any benefit of testing at 1 hour then at the two hour mark. Will any patterns appear etc. with this additional information
4, While not officially diagnosed yet, I suspect that I have had Type 2 for some time. I have tested a number of times over past week and
all the reading are well out of the 'norm' 8-10. Having just started on the low carb diet I suspect my readings will be quite chaotic for a while, until my body adjusts.
Obviously this is individual, but what is a rough 'ball park' time scale for things to stabilse somewhat. Not really the actual levels (this will clearly be more long term),
but the actual consistency of the readings.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, for my own situation and I also suspect it my well assist other newbies as they start their journey.

Fair winds and calm seas wherever your journey may take you. Alec
 
1. I’d say whenever you are back to the pre food/meal value you can try another test.
2. Your typical portion would be my chosen quantity
3. Yes. It’s likely to show a higher point if you are interested how high you go but remember everyone goes it. It’s how far and for how long that matters. If at 2 hrs you aren’t back at baseline then you can continue testing to see how long it does take you if you like.
4. Within days/a couple of weeks you’ll start to see improvements in the before readings if you are choosing foods that dont raise you too much. Within a couple of months there should be noticeable improvements. Some people have gone from above 100mmol to under 40 hb1ac in 3 months. Now not everyone does (I dropped 10 points in that time for example) but a few sure do. Depends on where you’re starting from, wheat your weight and activity are doing and how insulin resistant you are. The last reading that comes into line is the morning fasting one and that can take many months not helped if you get dawn phenomenon.

Don’t forget to keep records (numbers pictures readings etc) of you food and your body. It’s very motivational and useful to have those to look back on.
 
Hi Alec
1/ if you mean when can you eat again after testing one meal or food, that depends on what the meal was, how long it takes you to deal with the carbs in that meal. A meal of bacon and eggs for example contains virtually no carbs and will barely register a rise on your meter. After an hour if there is no meaningful rise you could eat something else if you have room for it.
A bowl of porridge on the other hand could send your levels high and keep them elevated for some time. It wouldn't be practical to attempt to test anything else until your levels are back to somewhere close to pre porridge values.
2/ it makes sense to test the amount or portion size that you would normally eat
3/ yes of course, it's your test do as many as you need to get the info you are trying to learn. If you really want to understand your reaction to a certain thing, you could test every 30min until you return to the base level, this would tell you how high your level got, how quickly it got there, and how Long it took to clear the sugar from your blood. You could even turn your data into a graph if that's your thing.
4/ this reality is a how long is a piece of string question. We are all different, have different metabolisms, body weight, levels of insulin resistance.
Low carb can be really effective for some who see their sugar levels and hba1c fall within a few months. For others the progress is much slower. You will probably see the quote "it's a marathon not a sprint" repeated quite often. Your insulin resistance has probably taken years before it got to the stage where your sugar levels got elevated, it's not something you can fix overnight.
 
@Alec G.
Remember too, that although food is the biggest contribution to bg levels, so too can other things affect it such as
Sleep, quantity and quality or lack,of
Exercise, duration intensity, or lack of,
Medications
Illness
Hormones
Etc etc
Finger prick testing is brilliant and useful but it is a rough guide. Don't get despondent if , say, a meal of cheese on toast registers differently one day to the next. It's repeated testing over time that shows patterns
 
Thank you friends.

HSSS, I do love a nice spreadsheet. In the last week I have created one for: daily weight, meter results, meter results for specific foods, specific food nutrition tables (not easy: Asda , Sainsburys, Tesco and the rest of the internet food nutrition labels vary greatly for the very same 100g of food item, how? is my question), and a week low carb menu based on the tables.
 
Alec G. said:
vary greatly for the very same 100g of food item, how? is my question
Click to expand...
Different food manufacturers add things to their product that others don't. You have to become super vigilant to avoid their trickery. They often sneak sugar in by using other names for it, usually anything ending in ose is just sugar by another name.
Or you could just stick to real food, there's no list of ingredients on steak, chicken, broccoli and cabbages
 
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