What am I supposed to do with all the blood glucose information from my meter?

There are three main reasons for checking your blood glucose level. The first is to look for overall patterns of when your blood glucose is running high or low. There can be a lot of variation in the blood glucose level at a particular time of day (like first thing in the morning, for example). But the weekly average of those numbers is a very stable and useful thing to look at. If the average level of blood glucose in the morning, taken over a one or two week period, shows that the blood glucose is too high, then it means that something needs to be changed in your treatment plan to improve the situation. The specific change will depend on the type of diabetes you have and what treatment you are taking.

In a similar way, if the blood glucose levels are always too low at lunchtime or too high at bedtime, this pattern will suggest specific changes that you can discuss with your diabetes health care team. The second reason to check your blood glucose is to make connections between how you feel or what you did and the blood glucose level. If you feel dizzy or sweaty or peculiar in some way, it is very helpful to check to see if your blood glucose at this time is too high or too low. If the blood glucose is normal when you feel peculiar,
then it is likely that the symptoms are caused by something else. It can be useful to check your blood glucose one or two hours after eating a particular food or after doing a particular amount of exercise to see what effect it has on your blood glucose level.

The third reason to check your blood glucose is to use the information right then and there to make a change in a dose of diabetic medicine. Many people with type 1 diabetes will check their blood glucose before every meal. They will use the information to decide on what dose of fast-acting insulin to take to cover that meal. If the blood glucose is in a normal range (70–100 mg/dL, for example), they might take a certain dose of insulin, but if it was 101–140, they might take a higher dose. If it was even higher, they might take more insulin still. This variation in dose is sometimes called a sliding scale or a pre-meal algorithm.

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