Blood Sugar Update - How's it Going?

 Well, it's been about a month since I've started working towards managing my blood sugar with diet and exercise, and I'm happy to share that I have something to share! Yeah, for a while there it looked like I wasn't going to learn anything. God is good and He opened my eyes to a few bends and quirks that I think I'll be able to use to continue to improve things.

 I say continue because I can honestly say that it looks like things are doing better already! The following graphs show a time range (typically 3 weeks) of data put onto one graph. 

 This first graph shows my blood sugar without any diet or medication to mediate it. The yellow bits at the top are when I went over the target range. The graphed values are pretty wide meaning that I had a pretty big range of "averages."

 The second graph shows my blood sugar on a double dose of Metformin. Turns out I'm allergic so while this graph is quite a bit better than the first one, continuing this treatment wasn't a viable option. I'm also not a candidate for any of the GLP-1 agonists because of complications with my Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes. So, I had to try to figure out how to handle this Prediabetes bugger without pharmaceutical help. My doctor encouraged me to look into a Low GI diet and incorporate exercise as possible. She also recommended that I see a nutritionist to help me make sure I'm incorporating all the nutrients I need to in my diet.

 This final graph compiles all the data from the last month of me working to control my blood sugar with diet and exercise. Now I'm not a doctor, but it looks to me like I did better than the Metformin did! I've been learning so much about how to balance my food to balance my blood sugar, like incorporating more protein and fiber. My nutritionist challenged me to get 100g of protein in a day, and most days last month I blew that out of the park! But I was still getting varied fasting glucose readings in the morning. That's one of the important benchmarks so I knew I needed to get that down. A spreadsheet was born and I started tracking every factor I could think of: how much exercise I had done, if I'd had alcohol, how late my last meal was and how many calories and carbs it had, my overall calories and macronutrients from the day before - I tracked it all for a month. After a while, a pattern began to emerge, and I was surprised. The pattern actually began on our trip to Las Vegas because we were eating out for dinner so my overall calories for the day was quite a bit higher than my average at home. In fact, these were the first times I had gone over 2,000 calories in a day. And you know what? On those days my fasting glucose was lower! 

A Gordon Ramsay Pub meal that helped me learn about higher calories leading to lower glucose.

 So I purposed to eat more. But I wanted to do it well, eating healthy things not junk. I was making a smoothie and wanted to add more calories so in went a scoop of peanut butter! I had also noticed the large hump between breakfast and lunch. My blood sugar wasn't coming down between these two meals because I just kept snacking. My breakfasts were so small that I was hungry again quickly so I'd have a little snack, then I was hungry again quickly. With all this information, I decided I would adjust my eating pattern. I would shoot for a breakfast and a lunch between 400-500 calories and then a dinner around 750 calories. This would allow for a snack or a little treat at bedtime if desired. I followed this pattern for a week or so before seeing my nutritionist again this week. She suggested that I tweak it so that my lunch is my larger (750 calorie) meal and dinner is smaller because I have less time after dinner to burn it off. That was yesterday and I can't say I've wrapped my head around it yet. You see I cook for dinner so it's natural to have that be the larger meal. She suggested that I eat a lunch sized portion at dinner and save a dinner sized portion for the next day's lunch. That makes sense but I'm not quite there yet. I'll keep working on it and we'll see what comes.

Walking with my dogs and my husband after dinner

 As I mentioned in an earlier Wellness Wednesday post, I've also been working to incorporate exercise into my routine. I've managed to get moving after about two meals per day. Dinner is usually my best, where it's easiest to make myself go take a walk or something. On days where I go to the Y for a yoga class, moving after breakfast is easy, but on other days I seem to get sucked into what I'm doing at my desk and don't get to it. Lunch is a toss up with me sometimes moving and sometimes not. But, I'm sticking with it and I'll keep trying to do better. I'm definitely seeing improvement in my blood sugar spikes after meals where I incorporate exercise so it's worth working on.

Here's the Thing: I definitely don't have it all figured out yet, but I'm making progress! Things are looking better and I have a few ways to keep improving. The only downside is that losing weight doesn't look like a realistic hope with trying to eat more rather than less.