I just got my latest A1C back. I am so happy I could almost cry!
All my extra hard work, monitoring, and low carbing is super paying off! I feel super validated by what I’m doing. I’m not having serious lows (they are easily caught with regular testing / avoided with regular eat times).
First Pregnancy A1C at 6 weeks pregnant was 5.3!
My last A1C - 8 weeks ago (@ 11 weeks) was 5.1!
Today’s A1C is 4.6 at 19 weeks!
However I do have keytones. The morning urine (non-fasting) was +++. Last time (a month ago) it was Negative. Will have to read up on this, I guess. Doctors may not be too happy with this. But I am presuming that keytones, in the face of normal blood sugars shouldn’t be too much of a problem…
You should see a dietist.not your endo.
There are many info about it, you should read about pregnancy: forget about diabetes for a while.
Look for examplehere (link)
Carbs are important to your health in many different ways. Cutting them out could lead to discomfort, if not serious problems. You need 65-70 carbs a day to stay healthy, but you also need to make sure those carbs are high in nutrition to make them work best for your pregnancy.
Many low carb diets also limit the amount of milk products you are allowed. This is particularly unhealthy because calcium is incredibly important when pregnant. Lack of proper calcium can cause weaker bones in the infant, raised levels of lead in the blood, and low calcium intake may be involved in the development of hypertension during pregnancy.
In the end, the key to good pregnancy health is good choices. Make sure that you are eating a variety of nutritious foods, and are not depriving your baby of the energy, minerals and vitamins that carbohydrates provide.
Ketones + normal blood sugar are not a problem but things get more complicated when pregnancy is factored in.
Coincidentally, Jenny Ruhl’s latest blog post is on blood sugars in pregnancy. Here’s what she wrote about ketones:
The challenge during pregnancy, of course, is to lower blood sugar without going too low because hypos can also cause problems for the fetus. In addition, the solution that works so well for non-pregnant people--cutting way back on carbs--raises issues.
Very low carb diets raise the concentration of ketones in the blood. This isn't a problem when we aren't pregnant--most of our organs can run quite happily burning ketones. But because ketones are usually produced when humans are starving, it is very possible that fetuses produced when the mother is in a ketogenic state may end up with environmentally-produced permanent changes to their genes (epigenetic changes, to use a technical term) that will predispose them to gaining weight once they are born, because ketones may signal the forming baby that they are being born into an environment of scarcity.
The fact that ketogenic diets downregulate T3 and slow the thyroid in non-pregnant people raises the question about whether a ketogenic diet might also have a negative effect on the baby’s developing thyroid.
So it’s generally considered to be best for pregnant women to lower their blood sugar as much as possible by cutting back on carbohydrates but to keep their carbs over the threshold (anywhere from 60-100 grams a day) where glycogen is depleted and the concentration of ketones in the blood and urine rises.
(BTW I’d take the BG numbers in the survey she quotes with a healthy pinch of salt.)
