All Entries Tagged With: "blood glucose"
Why does drinking alcohol make someone with diabetes more likely to have a low blood glucose (hypoglycemia)?
When your blood glucose gets too low, your brain sends signals to your body to push out hormones that “tell” your liver to release glucose into your blood to bring your blood glucose up again. Alcohol interferes with those signals and makes it harder for glucose to be released from your liver.
What is the best diet for someone with diabetes?
First, let’s go over the basics. There are three main types of food: Protein, Fat, and Carbohydrate. Protein is essential to help us build strong bodies and muscles. We get protein from eating meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, and some vegetable proteins like soy beans (tempeh and tofu). We get fat from butter, margarine, oils, fatty meats, eggs, and in oily vegetables like avocadoes.
What does it mean when my fasting blood glucose levels used to be good, and now they are higher—but I am not doing anything differently than I used to?
I often get asked to see people with diabetes because their doctor is frustrated with them and has labeled them as being “noncompliant.” Let me say right here that I hate that term and try hard never to use it. It suggests that if these people had just done what their “perfect” doctor had told them to do (and so were “compliant”), then everything would have worked out perfectly! Very often when I talk to patients, it is clear that they are doing everything as “perfectly” as they can, and just as “perfectly” as they used to. But now it doesn’t seem to be working.
How long after a meal should you test your blood glucose?
How fast your blood glucose rises and how high it gets and how long it stays up after eating depends a lot on what it was that you ate. If you ate a jelly sandwich on white bread and washed it down with regular pop, your blood glucose would go up very quickly but would not stay high for long, so checking your blood glucose one hour after the meal would probably catch the peak.
Is it best to measure the blood glucose before or after a meal?
It depends what information you want to get. If you want to know how much fast-acting insulin to take before a meal, then checking your blood glucose immediately before the meal is a good idea.
Why can I eat the exact same thing two days in a row and get totally different blood glucose results afterward?
One of the hardest things to deal with when you have diabetes is learning to live with how unpredictable everything is. It is unfair that you can do the same things on two days and get different results.The
problem is that there are lots of things that you do every day that are imprecise and that you have very little control over.
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).
Why should I write the numbers down when the meter stores them all in its memory?
Call me old-fashioned if you like, but I don’t think that modern “memory meters” are as “cool” as a lot of people do. Sure, it is possible to download them and have some clever piece of software print out pages upon pages of graphs and pie charts, but I am not impressed with how helpful the information is. You can end up drowning in data but not knowing what to do with it.
Why should I keep testing my blood glucose when the numbers don’t make any sense?
You shouldn’t, especially if the results don’t help you to do anything differently. However, an experienced doctor or nurse should be able to help you. Here are some suggestions for you to try.
Why can I go to bed with a good blood glucose number, sleep all night, and wake up with a higher number?
This really baffles and frustrates a lot of people who have diabetes. Let’s say you did everything right, ate just the right amount of healthy food, took the right amount of your pills or insulin, and went to bed feeling good about yourself with a blood glucose that was 130 mg/dL (7.2 mmol/L), say.