Weekend blood glucose spikes

I'm not diabetic, but have been monitoring my blood glucose of late in an effort to understand my present state of health.

Overall, things seem pretty good, save perhaps for a strange pattern I've noticed with my blood glucose during the morning at weekends.

I exercise every weekday morning. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I have a small breakfast (usually porridge) followed by some free weights exercise, followed by the second half of my breakfast. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I do some cardio (normally 20 minutes jogging) before breakfast. Of course I see my BG rise after eating in both cases, but rarely to levels that are particularly surprising.

However, I normally have weekends off from exercising of a morning, so I just wake up and have breakfast soon after. Since I have started exercising regularly during the week I have noticed that my BG spikes very high (for a non-diabetic) on weekend mornings, often rising to 9 or 10. Indeed, this morning after a breakfast of beans on toast (420kcal; 25g protein, 49g carbs, 12g fat, 12g fibre) my BG was 10.4 within half an hour and stayed there for another 20 minutes or so before slowly dropping.

I understand that insulin sensitivity is quite low just after waking up, but as a non-diabetic (recently had fasting BG and HBA1c done; both normal), I shouldn't be seeing levels that high at all, especially not with a breakfast like that which is pretty light compared to what I have often eaten in the past without a problem. A walk seems to bring BG back to normal relatively quickly, and then it seems fine for the rest of the day, so is this just to do with my body being really sluggish about secreting insulin of a morning? Has my exercise regime during the week caused some alterations, such that when I don't exercise of a morning I see unusual patterns such as this?

snowy_barks said:

That seems quite a spike.

What is it after 2 hours? If it is still high, >8.0mmoL, then it may be worth while getting a Glucose Tolerance Test done. You could be sitting at the "pre-diabetic" levels. If your GP isn't interested then you can always get one done privately, I paid about £50.

I had annual medicals for years and they never picked up any sugar in my urine, generally as I tend to skip breakfast so my sugar levels were never elevated during the medical. Then a few years ago they did pick sugar up, sent me for Hb1AC test, which was normal and said there was no problem. I wished I had known more then, as I went a few more years before finally being diagnosed by the Tolerance Test.

If you can catch the problem early then it makes things a lot easier and can avoid complications.

I have controlled mine with weight loss and low carb, I do not take medication.

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I can't be sure what the 2 hour levels were (it had come down into the 8s not long after the hour mark (still high for a non-diabetic), but then I went for a walk and didn't take a reading for a while afterwards. The strange thing is it is just those weekend mornings where I'm seeing these big spikes. On weekday mornings when I'm doing one of the exercise routines I mentioned in my original post, I don't see it spike that high. Nor do I have any issues later on in the day at the weekend; I had pretty much the exact same meal later that same day as those high readings and saw nothing unusual there. It seems that for some reason, on those rest day mornings that either my insulin sensitivity or secretion is unusually low.