What Your Meter Tells You About Your Eating

We have all read this, but have you really tested this? Eating to your meter can be very beneficial in helping you manage your blood glucose. For those with type 2 diabetes and on oral medications, this is a philosophy you almost must adopt to manage diabetes effectively. Counting carbohydrates is even more important so that you learn how to manage the food intake to get the greatest efficiency from your diabetes medications.

The medications you are taking will only manage so many carbohydrates effectively and then you start to lose control. This then becomes more important to know what your blood glucose meter is telling you about the quantity of food you consumed. Using your meter also can indicate which foods you need to severely limit and which you can consume or may need to eliminate altogether from your menu.

This is your reason for supporting my previous blog here for having extra test strips available after diagnosis and for other times when you are having diabetes management problems and need to figure out what may be wrong with your menu selections.

On limited test strips, eating to you meter may be very discouraging because you do not have a lot of information to guide you. That is one reason, I suggest that if you can afford it for a few months, buy extra test strips. The extra testing supplies will give you confidence in your carb counting and portion of food intake. It will also make it easier to determine what foods are best left off the menu.

There are various plans discussed for those on limited test strips so you will need to work with what works best for you. A food log after diagnosis is also an aid that many people just do not understand the need to keep. I can attest to how many times this has told me why my postprandial blood glucose levels were higher than they should have been and what I did not do. The important part is not lying to yourself, but keeping accurate logs.

Knowledge is power, and therefore knowing what each test is telling you, watch for trends in fasting blood glucose levels and use your meter to learn more from pre-meal testing to tell you about your prior meal. If you can afford extra test strips for a month or two, learn that you do not want your preprandial and postprandial readings to increase more than 40 mg/dl if possible. You should also develop an exercise regimen with your doctor's approval to help get your blood glucose numbers to become the best for you.

If you do have trouble with managing your blood glucose levels, give insulin a consideration and study about it before the need arises.

Read a couple of other articles about eating to you meter here and here.