at 60YOA had my first blood test of any kind thanks to obamacare. tested at 134. i was surprised since i have no symptoms i am aware of.
retested a month later at 126 after mild, mild dieting. meaning i lowered calories but not carbs and lost a few pounds.
i exercise alot, 4-5 times a week , 60 minutes on elliptic or 60+ minutes mountain biking.
still i am likely 20+lbs overweight.
so my question: what’s the real life difference of 126 BGL and say 125 or 124 and technically
pre-diabetes?
if i did some real LCHF dieting would i go down a few more points?
any comments would be appreciated.
finally i did a little sleuthing to figure out how much carbs i would burn in typical exercise event. i am not sure this is accurate but: working form EXCARBS website and figuring carb burn rate percentage of total calories burned during exercise and divide by 4 cal/carb to get an average of around 50 carbs burned per exercise event. is this a real method to determine additional carbs i can consume on LCHF to have a net carb consumption of 50/day?
ex: do elliptic for 60 minutes with 40% of time at carb burn rate = 600cal x.40/4 = 60 net carbs burned.this means i can eat an additonal 60 carbs on exercise day.
There are several tests that help a doctor diagnose diabetes. Fasting blood glucose at 126 mg/dL or above is one of the tests that would raise the question about whether you have diabetes. S/he might also do a hemoglobin A1c test which gives them more info about how much glucose you are exposed to on average. The doctor could also order an oral glucose tolerance test.
The two blood sugar readings you cite are not uncommon in people without diabetes so it makes sense that you would not feel any symptoms at these levels. Gluco-normals will often wake up in the 70-90 mg/dL range. I would be interested in what your blood glucose is 1 hour after starting to eat a normal sized meal.
Many people spend decades of their lives with levels like that without ever becoming a “full blown” diabetic… that said it certainly warrants keeping an eye on and probably some dietary changes as well (specifically carbohydrates) seeing as how it sounds like you’re already pretty physically active. Those numbers there are all well within the margin of error… 124, 126, 134 are all essentially the same number for practical purposes… all in the slightly elevated range but not emergency levels. Would be worth investigating how high you’re getting after meals and what your A1C is at…
thanks for the input. couple of comments in the FWIW dept.
doctor ran the test as part of larger panel. came back at 134 so he ran it again.
in the interim i did the research so was better informed.
at a reading of 126 he tore off a script for metafornin and pushed me out the door.
i had suggested to him that i was in a highly stressful period as well. he assured me stress had nothing to do with diabetes, which i think is untrue.
While Metformin is a relatively safe drug, I would want a little more testing before I added any drug to my daily routine. Your doc may be right but an A1c could confirm or disagree with the fasting BG.
Stress does exacerbate most human ailments. Your doctor is probably right, however, about stress not being the central element of your symptoms. Did he even give you a diagnosis? He’s treating you like a type II diabetic. What if you do have diabetes but instead it is slow onset type I? Metformin won’t help much in that case and will waste your time.
Did he do a c-peptide blood test? The c-peptide protein is a marker for native insulin production. T1Ds will have a low number and most T2Ds will not.
The fasting blood sugar test is a lagging indicator of diabetes. Typically when your fasting blood sugar starts to go south your ability to deal with meals that contain carbs has been gone for a while. Your doctor should have ordered an A1c test and he should have referred you for diabetes education. I had a similar story when I was diagnosed with my doctor dismissing my diagnosis as really not much of an issue.
this guy is a PCP and he did not very explicitly say i was diabetic. it was i who read up on diabetes, and seeing that my # was close to pre-diabetes #'s, , decided to diet. the diet i used was carbo friendly. i think as suggested from ADA website or one of those sites that suggest whole grains, etc are heart friendly.etc.etc.
so i showed 126 and AiC of 6.6, both #'s on the boderline of pre/diabetes and a result of a month on a high carb , lower calorie diet.
he did not suggest anything about late onset T1 and wanted an additional consult, i guess an education session. when he tried to give me metafornin, i balked, not wanting to start on a long regime of medication if there were alternatives.
unfortunately he dropped obamacare in 2017 so i am in limbo until i find and visit a new PCP.
On a LCHF diet for last month diet i didn’t drop that much weight. and while it does help with satiation, eating nothing but eggs and meat isn’t all that terrif, taste wise and convenience wise.
since this is last day on with my existing HCP i went ahead and got another BGT. i won’t know results till next week at which point i won’t have a doctor.
so i was wondering if it shows a drop of say 1-4 on BGL and .2-…5 A1c (as a result of the last month of LCHF diet) , what should i make of it?
While everything said here is good and should be carefully considered – and follow-up with an endo is the way to go – it’s a good thing you’ve started on metformin. Even if your condition is marginal, its a very safe drug that has other beneficial side-effects besides just helping with glucose sensitivity and suppressing hepatic glucose release.
To get a better idea of how advanced your diabetes may be, try doing a BG profile after consuming a fixed amount of “fast” carbs. Say, drink 30g carb of apple juice (starting fasting, of course).
Then, take and record your BG every 15 minutes for the next 3 hours. What this looks like will reveal a lot.
This is known as an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT), and is something you can pay a whole lot of money to have done in your doctor’s office, or you can do it yourself on the cheap as I’ve described and basically get the same information.
Phenomenal… if just changing your diet results in perfectly healthy numbers like that you’re lucky. Keep an eye on it though and minimize processed carbs (meaning anything that’s gone through a machine at any point in its journey from farm to plate, cereal, rice, pasta, grains). With some luck this might not become a big issue for you
To me those sound like the perfectly normal blood sugars of a 60 year old. The margin of error of the meter is insignificant. Your A1C is a little bit elevated into the “diabetes range” and that warrants checking probably at least annually. If continued exercise and improved diet can bring that down a bit that would be a good thing. If it continues to rise after you’ve made some changes, some interventions with medications may be in your future (wouldn’t be surprised at all to see them prescribe you metformin even now). and yes you just like almost every other American would surely benefit metabolically from a better diet. Others will be along shortly to tell you all sorts of doomsday scenarios about how you might actually have type 1 diabetes and the sky could be falling and everything else…
), post the results, and we’ll help you analyze it.