This is my first post here. I thought I would begin with a slightly "technical" post.
First a brief introduction. I am Rad Warrier. Rad is short for a long Indian name "Radhakrishna" which is the combination of the names of Lord Krishna and his beloved Radha. Some brief details of the surname Warrier can be found here.
I was diagnosed as a type 2 diabetic almost 7 years ago in October 2005. The only diabetes medication I take is Metformin - 250 mg in the morning and 500 mg in the evening. I keep my glucose and lipid levels under fairly normal levels most of the time. I think I will not be mistaken for a low carber - I eat relatively a good amount of carbs and manage to keep my BGs under what is generally considered as normal levels through portion control, exercise and Metformin.
Now on to the "technical" discussion. I have posted this with slightly different wordings in other diabetes related forums too.
I had a chance yesterday to peek into the rather strange ways of my digestion and liver dumps. I knew beforehand that yesterday was a relatively slow day when I could be at my work desk most of the time. So I decided to look into my post lunch BG levels in more detail. My post lunch readings seem to show that digestion is not a "linear" affair in my case, and also that my liver has a mind of its own when dumping glucose into the blood stream.
See my BG levels after lunch in the attached picture. I have shown the time in minutes because I could not log the BGs in neat half-hour intervals because of the demands of the work place. At 20 minutes after lunch, I get a peak at 6.7 mmol/L (121 mg/dL.) All that rice, vegetables and yogurt that I ingested cannot digest so quickly, especially in the presence of a large amount of fiber. I suspect the filling of the stomach with lunch somehow stimulated a liver dump. The BG then dips to 5.7 (103) at the 40 minute mark. The glucose from the liver dump together with the glucose reaching the blood stream from the slow digestion of the lunch caused a good insulin response from the pancreas and this caused the dip in the BG. I think glucose flow into the blood stream from the digested food slowly began increasing which prevented the BG from further dipping and hence it remains at 5.8 (104) at the 70 min (a little over an hour) mark. But then digestion picks up, the flow of glucose into blood stream increases significantly as compared to before and the BG goes up to 6.6 (119) at the 100 minute mark and to 6.7 (121) at the 130 minute (a little over 2 hours) mark. I think this elicited a good insulin response from the pancreas, and the BG dips to 4.4 (79) at the 3 hour mark. After this, I had to be very active, going up and down the stairs several times, walking fast etc. All this effort probably caused a small liver dump that raised the BG to 4.9 (88) at the 4-hour mark.
The above is my explanation of the "kinky" behaviour of my BG after lunch. I would appreciate it if you could offer an alternate explanation for the post-lunch behaviour of my BG. I have to add that I believe my meter is fairly accurate and this batch of strips to be pretty good because I "calibrated" my meter at my laboratory blood draw and the meter reading was higher only by about 0.2 mmol/L (approx 4 mg/dL) than the lab BG result. I have "calibrated" the meter during past blood draws at the lab, and the meter readings were pretty close to the lab results during those times.
Regards,
Rad