Over the last few weeks, I’ve been on my life improvement kick, but I need to look after my health too. So when the opportunity to monitor my blood sugars came up, I jumped at the chance.
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Just to give you some context for this, I’m heavily pregnant and was REPEATEDLY tested for gestational diabetes over my last two pregnancies. In fact, I’ve been tested so many times, I have no veins left in my arms and the hospital has had to start using my hands and wrists to draw blood. Out of all the tests I’ve had done (and there have been a lot of glucose and blood tests) only two have been borderline. Do I consider myself a diabetic? Nope. So to prove my point, I carefully watched my blood sugars and kept a food diary for a week.
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What was the plan?
Over the course of the week, I had planned to track my meals and test my blood sugars during the day. When it comes to gestational diabetes, there is a very small margin that is acceptable. Before a meal, the range is 4-5.3mmols/l. And one hour after a meal, the result is expected to be under 7.8mmols/l. Now, if you know anything about diabetes, you will be throwing your hands up in the air because they are ridiculously small margins. For a non-diabetic, the range before a meal is 4-5.9mmols/l and 90 minutes after eating is 7.8mmols/l, and the acceptable ranges change depending on the type of diabetes that a person has. I was a care assistant for years and I’ve helped people test their blood sugar levels. I’ve seen people with readings of 19mmols/l and not bat an eyelid at that. I’ve also seen people sit in the pregnancy diabetic clinic and watching them eat chocolate bars and guzzle soft drinks when they are supposed to watching their diet so it is incredibly frustrating for me to deal with this.
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How did it go?
This has been one of the strangest experiments that I have done so far. There is nothing like repeatedly stabbing yourself in the finger with a needle to test something you can’t see. Now, before I go on, I should tell you that these tests can be manipulated very easily by drinking plenty of water. With this in mind, I spend part of the week drinking extra water and the other half drinking normally (including fizzy drinks). No matter what I did, my bloods remained within the ranges but when I didn’t have the extra water they were at the higher end of the acceptable scale but still coming in within those tiny ranges. Keep in mind, I was eating ice-cream after my dinner and some biscuits with a cup of tea in the afternoon. When I included the extra bit of water during the day and before going to bed, my bloods looked like they barely moved and rarely went over 7mmols/l after eating.
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Will I try to keep this going?
I think it’s safe to say I’m not an actual diabetic with how my results came out but it was really interesting to see how drinking even a little bit more water changed and manipulated the results. For the rest of my pregnancy, I will have to keep checking my blood sugars because the hospital is making me. Plus, I have all of the gear, I may as well put it to good use.
What do you guys think? How do you keep an eye on your blood sugars? Or is this something that you monitor at all?