So yesterday my mom comes up to me and goes, “How about you take your Metformin 3 times a day instead of twice a day?” Her logic is the two 500mg (regular, not ER or anything) pills I’ve been taking, one with breakfast and one with dinner, don’t seem to be all that effective (though my spikes aren’t as bad), so I should take a third pill sometime in the middle to spread it out more evenly throughout the day. This logic does make sense to me but… as it is I pretty much prescribed this Metformin all on my own after a strategic visit to the Emergency Room, and while I’ve had some non-problems with gas it hasn’t been tragic or debilitating. I’m a bit worried that upping my dose will make the side effects from the occasional funny sounding fart to running to the bathroom like my life depended on it.
Which brings me to my miracle tea. I got a hold of two different teas last week. One was Doctor Cinnamon Tea and another was Sugar Controller Herb Tea. I’ve noticed since I’ve been drinking a combination of those teas with breakfast and dinner, my sugars have improved. The tea doesn’t really bring it down all that much, but major spikes haven’t been an issue. In fact, yesterday morning was the first day that I didn’t drink the tea with my meal and my sugar ended up going from 236 to 337 (I know, high, I’m making progress I promise). I drank the tea soon after I tested and an hour later it was steady at 336 even though my dinner had been fairly high in carbs. Than this morning my fasting sugar was 223, which is a record low for me. I think it’s safe to assume that this tea is helping quite a bit and over the past few days my fasting sugar has been going steadily downward (279, 236, 223, etc.)
I have a visit with an endo scheduled in about a week and a half or something. Should I just stick with the dosage of Metformin I’ve been using until then? I’m inclined to do that and stick with my miracle tea, though I am down to one bag of the Sugar Controller and I won’t have more for a few days. If it weren’t for the potential side effects I’d just take that extra pill without question because at this point I’ll try anything that has a chance for success. I know this is a bit of a no-brainer, but I wanted your opinions anyway in case anyone had a particularly good argument for me upping the dose. Also has anyone else tried these teas and had good results with them?
I have taken metformin for close to a decade, but not for diabetes. I’ve taken to help with a genetic condition called “congenital hyperinsulinism” (CHI), which is basically the exact opposite of diabetes. I had taken a medication called diazoxide for years and I wanted to stop that because of the side effects. We found that metformin helped me avoid the really scary episodes of hypoglycemia caused by CHI and made them slower to start and more managable. In my case, metformin never lowered my blood sugar, but rather changed my body’s response to all the excess insulin I was producing. For me, it has been a life saver because it kept me off the diazoxide full time (diazoxide has some unpleasant side effects, although I still was sometimes taking it whenever I was doing something that could cause a scary low) and has now likely prevented me from becoming a full-fledged diabetic (I’ve been officially told that my beta cells are likely “dying out” because they’ve been working overtime for so many years).
Anyway, it sounds like you may need insulin or an oral medication that actually lowers your blood sugar, something metformin doesn’t really do. Those are some scary high numbers, so you definitely need to get to your doc ASAP!
I convinced my doctor to let me take my metformin 3 x per day. I take 3 x 850 for a total of 2550 mg. I don’t take it with meals but have experimented with the dose to take it at the times of day that I tend to spike. I take it right before bed, when I wake up around 7 am and again mid morning 10:30 am. If I miss that mid morning dose I will get a late morning liver dump. Since metformin works in the liver , not the pancreas it helps prevent your glycogen from being converted to glucose ( liver dumps). Most of us who take metformin find using it with a low carb diet and exercise will help you lower bgs after meals. I now try to aim for 110-120 after meals. Metformin makes you sensitive to your own insulin you make, so your insulin resistance is controlled.
I agree your bgs seem very high. 1000 mg of metformin is not enough to bring them down . What kinds of foods are you normally eating. I tend to eat no more than 20 carbs per meal and absolutely not processed or boxed foods. Many people need insulin in the beginning to bring down their bgs in addition to the metformin.
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The tea is not keeping your blood sugar down. Something else is at work. Not saying you shouldn’t drink it, but please don’t fool yourself into thinking it is doing anything good for your blood sugars all by itself. Your numbers are still pretty high, IMHO.
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Don’t change your metformin dosage without consulting with your doctor. It’s not designed so that you can raise or lower your dose depending on what you eat. Maybe it ought to be higher, but its important to consult with the doctor first before changing it. After all, if your BGs were really excellent you wouldn’t just lower the dose or stop taking it.
Tell the doctor you want to up the dose and see what he/she says.
Good luck
Terry
Hi Winter,
With numbers that high, you clearly need some other type of treatment. Hopefully the endo will start you on insulin or try something new. Metformin does not seem to be cutting it.
Ask the endo for tests about how much insulin you produce (c-peptide test) and to test for antibodies (GAD antibody test). Many people with type 1 or LADA are incorrectly diagnosed with type 2. You should have these tests in order to know more.
Hope that the visit goes well and you can get your numbers under 200 with some other treatment!
Wow your fasting and post prandial blood sugars are very high. You may want to request a GAD antibody test to make sure you are not actually LADA/Type1.5. If you are going to the endo in one more week I would just stick to your current regimen and see what the endo thinks. It does not seem like Metformin is the right treatment unless it needs to be combined with another oral med. or you are not producing much insulin and may need to be put on insulin.
Have you tried either of these teas then? I haven’t really been able to find any information on them and I was just curious on if anyone had tried them. I don’t think I’m fooling myself or anything… in fact I hadn’t been expecting to see any changes at all, but literally when I started taking the tea, I was able to eat a bit more freely because the major scary spikes just didn’t happen. My diet has not been changed drastically, nor has my exercise regime. The only change has been the tea.
Of course it’s completely possible that this is just a coincidence and I just happened to start taking the tea right when the Metformin decided to stop being a butt and start doing its job. I was laughing with a friend earlier telling her it’s probably some kind of shamanistic placebo effect. I mildly believed it would work, so it did have positive results even if it was a dud tea. If that’s the case, I’ll take it! I’m okay with that so long as I see results.
I decided not to take that extra Metformin in the end. It was just an idea really. Desperation births many of those. Everyone’s been very alarmed by my sugars, but I promise they really are going down. They’re just going down very, very slowly. This morning my sugar was 207 and just before dinner it was 188. I am seeing improvements. But… I mean is my sugar supposed to be going down faster than this? That doesn’t seem healthy at all. I had been thinking that if they went down too fast, I would react as though I were having a hypo. As it is since it’s going down so gradually, I’ll kind of feel a little low sometimes but otherwise I feel pretty great right about now. Plus my sugars used to run between 400-500 everyday for god knows how long not even a month ago, so I thought I was making good progress…
I’m definitely going to ask for the tests when I get to see my endo. There’s a lot of Type 2’s on my mom’s side, but my dad is a Type 1 and I did have a couple of thyroid issues when I was younger, which I’m pretty sure means me actually being Type 1 or 1.5 is just as likely as me being a Type 2, although my recent lowering glucose numbers have made me wonder a bit. I suppose we’ll see when I get there.
Oh I’ve heard that too, and I actually tried using cinnamon for a while. I think I ate more cinnamon in one day than most people have any business eating. I didn’t notice any negative effects but…no positive ones either. If there was any change in my sugars then, they weren’t significant enough for me to notice. At the very least it’s delicious.