Today morning when I woke up at 6.00 AM I checked my blood sugar as usual, it was 171, i was expecting it because last night I took 7 inits lantus insead of 8 units because I was little careful that hypo do not occur again like last morning. So I took correction dose of 1 unit Humalog and went for walk. After freshen up my self when I checked my sugar again at 8.25 AM, I was astonished to see it was 317, I gain checked It was 324.
This was very weird blood sugar number and I took then my morning dose increased by 4 units that is 12 units and then took my breakfast.
This is most weird number which was beyond my expectation. Could u please tell me the reason. or able to tell so spike in blood sugar numbers in fasting blood sugar
is is safe to take exercise duration to 20 mintues as a rule of thumb when you are nit in mood to prick your finger 2 times more time more before and after exercise Usually my sugars go down after exercise
When I started paying attention to diabetes more, I would test twice, like 15 minutes apart to see what it was doing. If it was 171 and going up, maybe correct harder? It can be a very fine balance but I don't usually run up that much from cardio activities like walking/ running/ bicycling.
It could be a number of reasons....and most importantly YOUR reaction....I've learned over 12 years that if I had a twin exactly like me, diabetes and all, we wouldn't react the same way. That being said, your lower Lantus injection could account for some raise. With that much exercise, your body could have kicked in more sugars to give you the boost you needed, or it could have been a fluke in your system. If you had several days of those kinds of numbers, I'd check out with doc or diabetic educator as to a reason. When those t hings happen, high or low, I check at least until it's back to a normal range for me. And yes, unfortunately, as much as I hate to say yes, you might have to stick yourself more often than normal times. How have you been doing since then?
These high numbers and given the data provided; high spikes like that are due to the liver nailing it through the roof.
The scenario for me is that the lantus and humalog may have caused your blood glucose go low and below 70. AT that point the liver/brain go into operation and throw glucose on the fire.
If the liver is signalling properly on the blood insulin, it should not shoot the blood glucose through the roof. If it is not it does. Your high fasting number is suggestive of a strong dawn phen effect in am suggestive of some issues.
I believe as indicated you will need advise from a Doctor/CDE and possibly some more readings as acidrock23 advises as well as adjusting dosages after assistance.
Exercise can raise numbers when there is food in gut /intestine and exercise helps speed it along. Usually exercise lowers blood glucose and if it goes low enough it triggers a liver glucose add event which if liver signalling off raises the blood glucose too high giving the appearance that exercise raises the blood glucose,
Yes. But it does depend on a few things though. If I have a CGMS on and I know my interstitial tissue though as if that's pretty high on BG, even with the finger tests being lower than it, than your liver when you push yourself will hike it up. When the interstitial level is low, even when finger blood is ok, pushing myself tends to shove it through the floor.
It does depend a lot also on how hard you push yourself which is the trigger for the liver. If I'm plodding along banging in the mileage, relatively consistently and stress free my BG goes down at a consistent rate and as such easily balanced off energy drinks. Throw in a hard sprint and boom, it's through the roof usually dumping the intersisial level very fast...which gets regained later on which needs.
Waking high in the morning, the so called Darn Phenomenon (DP) plagues many of us. And correcting a morning can be a bit different than a post meal high or a fasting high during the day. It is more complicated. Overnight as our bodies clear insulin, our morning blood sugars can roar as our livers dump out glucose. And we can require a serious correction to get back on track as our bodies are out of kilter. And fasting or exercising in the morning may make the situation worse. Bernstein actually recommends against morning exercise for this reason. If you awake with an exaggerated DP, exercise can trigger a scream to your body for "more energy." But you already don't have the insulin to take up the circulating glucose, so more energy simply makes your liver dump more glucose and you can see an alarming rise. We are warned to not exercise with a blood sugar > 250 mg/dl to avoid this same situation.
So, the takeaway. A single unit correction, making up for "missing" basal may be way insufficient to correct a DP high. And second, yes exercise in the morning, particularly with DP can cause high blood sugars for many of us.
I found best approach was to keep calories/carbs low in am and get out and walk. My waking am BG was 238 and after 1.8 miles wlaking I would see BG drop and after 2 miles ; the BG was down to proper levels. This was routine and every am for 2 years.
Finally; I found for me - others may not that metformin 500 mg dose at 10:00pm and another dose at 12:00am would arrest this mess. Some folks use a shot of basil insulin. That did not work on me.
I have watched the numbers seriously for over 5 years and almost 2 years on a cgms.
This is a great explanation and great advice. I’ve also found that depending on the exercise there is a different effect on my BG - because of the physical stress on my body, lifting weights sometimes will raise my BG. And if I start with a high BG it almost always goes up even if I’m running, for the reasons described here. So I try and either way til my sugar is down a bit, or if that isn’t an option, take a quick bolus before starting the exercise.
It’s a whole lot of trial and error, and it is absolutely always different for every person, so just watch what’s going on and listen to your body/BG and you’ll figure it out!
The other thought is that dependingho w long and hard one exercises, one can seewh at is being described. The muscles are loaded with glucose so it will take some time yo burn down that sufficiently in the muscles to see any draw on bloodstream glucose so during that time the blood glucose could easily be going up.
I would not wait 2 plus hours to see if a correction dose worked on a high bg. And yes, if your bg is on the rise then exercise won't help. I don't have any clue why you spiked except to assume that reducing your basal caused it. When you have high bg, it is best to resolve that before you exercise, and certainly before you eat.
If you do not exercise, the only thing the body can do is store the excess glucose.
If one's intestines are outputting glucose from digestion, yes it is hard to get it down but I have watched on cgms and watched it go down and then slide back up as the intestine output continues.
The exercise is not a waste as it really gets rid of glucose. That will have to be done in any event unless ones goal is to gain more weight.
Yeah, tough to say. I've had this happen a couple of times. The last time was after a 5K morning run where I headed out with a BG around 170ish. This would normally be a comfortable starting point and I might even have to take a glucose correction at some point during the run, depending on how fast the pace was. I was shocked to come in with a BG in the 300s.
Sometimes, there's just no rhyme or reason and, you just have to chalk it up to diabetes gremlins. In fact, I wouldn't even think about changing basal rates or anything else due to a one off occurrence. I'd have to see a consistent pattern over at least 3 consecutive days, or a number of occurences in a short time period, before I'd consider a change in regimen.
A note on exercising with high BGs. You really only have to worry about exercising with elevated BGs if you have high ketones as a result of the high BG. Acidosis due to high ketones is bad enough, but exercise is just going to make the acidosis worse.
As long as you have insulin on board, exercise can drop your BGs from the 300s a lot faster than insulin alone. You just have to be careful to really monitor your BG if you're going to treat a BG in the 300s with both exercise and insulin.
There is nothing easy here as you indicate and I would not want to give that opinion/impression.
I believe these exceptions while on the outside seem spurious; happen for very important exception processing going on in the human digestion system/body. a pain in the butt - you bet.
For me; whenever my blood glucose went sub 70 and brain /liver decided to add glucose, I reliably got the whole dam liver buffer. Blood glucose would shoot vertical to max on the caveman machine to 511 and droop back to 278 to 311.
Absolutely nasty. I watched this on a dexcom system 7 and it could not follow the peak but did show the average readings to 311. In the end the best answer was in fact to use some insulin and walk hard.
Another case that caused this and FHS makes a valid point, every time my blood glucose was falling at end of digestion; and I fed in a small snack; I would see the blood glucose on cgms stop falling - stall flat and suddenly shoot vertical. Fingertips were always on caveman machine and cgme from 140 to 200 and as such any liver add activity seemed totally uneeded.
I repeated this test many times and was fully repeatable. What in hades was the body doing? Must have been some sensor in the gut/intestine signalling Liver/brain of a possible low glucose situation in that area.
Thanks to everyone supplying their experiences and what they found helps!
i would check to see if you're having a rebound high, dropping low (even if it's a little low) in the middle of night and then waking up high then going higher. Rebound highs are really awful.
Increasing your basal morning dose by 4 units is a huge increase..but I don't know how much you take? Exercise typically will not raise blood sugars that high. Something isn't right, sounds like basal.
If I exercise without breakfast, 90% of the time my BG is going to go up by a lot. For me it’s not the exercise, but dawn phenomenon as someone else mentioned. DP can come in lots of forms. Many people get it in the early dawn hours and BG goes up often starting at about 4:00 AM. For me usually m BG is pretty stable until I get up, but once I get up it will start rising immediately (except when it doesn’t…). If I skip breakfast, I usually have to take more insulin to keep my BG down that I would if I ate breakfast.
Also remember before you make a lot of changes is that you should wait to make sure you see a pattern. For most of us with Type 1, no insulin regimen is perfect every day all of the time. You do your best to find a regimen that works most of the time. And for the days that it doesn’t work well, you correct and move on. And when you have a bunch of days that don’t work we’ll, then you look for a pattern and adjust your regimen.
Yeah, and I don't want to make it sound like these occurences themselves are spurious. There has to be an physiologically based explanation for readings in the 300s after exercise. Certainly, if you can have a verifiable explanation you can, ultimately, work to avoid these occurences.
I'm as curious about these things as the next person but at the end of the day, though, I'm still just the Red Queen. If it becomes an ongoing situation, I'll chase after it.
Yes, it can happen. I usually wait till 2 hours after my meal to check it again. My doctors have always told me that. Then again, there can be number of reasons why your sugar was still high as well.
Folks, the few numbers one reads on caveman fingerprick machine are spaced about and does not reflect the actual path your body took to get where your last reading taken is/was.
Unless you are checking every 10 to 15 minutes or using a higly expensive cgms with sensor, the path your body took to where you ended up is unclear.
Digestion cannot raise blood glucose very fast unless you ingested honey and more likely the liver is culprit adding glucose. The reason is why and what triggered that.
I workout regularly and I know that I cannot go into any sort of workout (strength, cardio or both)with an elevated BG. Anything over 170-200 and the exercise itself will spike my BG even higher. I had never been told this by my endo or educators but after the first time it happened I googled it and sure enough it happens. This explains the cause pretty clearly: http://www.joslin.org/info/why_do_blood_glucose_levels_sometimes_go_up_after_physical_activity.html
If you exercise in a fasted state your liver will spill glucose to feed your muscles. That glucose needs insulin to get into the muscles. If you don't dose for it, your BG goes up.
I was regularly working out in a fasted state (I was doing Intermittent Fasting)and I had to test every 15 mins. and dose insulin throughout the workouts.
