Going to bed frustrated

OK,  I was patting myself on my back after dinner.  Made good choices all day today. My after dinner number was 108, real good for a diabetic, no meds, right?  Well, was on computer in the chat room until after 12 am, so around 12:45 I take my bs, it is 126.  I have not eaten anything after dinner, nada!  I do not understand this stuff.  Also did not  have carbs earlier today, so do not know what is happening.  So, I am going to bed without eating a snack and see if I wake up with good numbers.  Or is the Dawn phenonomen already working, and like my morning numbers it would go down if I eat something?  I see doctor in a couple of weeks, however, he is an internist, and not even my regular doctor at that (maternity leave).  My last ACI was 6.6, up a little from the last time 6.1.  However, I have been sick for a while, so I am not being too hard on myself.  I think he is going to try and get me to take oral meds, but I still do not want to do that yet.  I do have good numbers all day IF I make good choices, and I am doing that more and more each day.  Everytime I make a bad choice, and I suffer the higher numbers, it really makes me pay attention.  Ok, done venting, going to bed.  Take care everyone, I am sure you will not see this tonight, LOL.   Donna

Donna,
If you stop and think about how long your intestines are and how long it takes for foods to move through them you may understand this a bit better. Each food we eat has to be broken down in the small intestine. Some foods are so fibrous that they don't get broken down at all and show up in the stool looking much the same as the way they went in. (Think corn.) Other foods dump their glycemic load quite easily and spike the sugars a lot. All of the foods you eat all day will affect your sugars for the next 2 to 24 hours depending upon the mobility of your GI tract and the food's glycemic load.

Orange juice will give you a spike right away. A small orange will need hours to get thru the tract and some of the little orange pieces may not even get digested. The orange will be putting out fructose through the whole digestive tract so it may be raising sugars long after it's eaten. This is why vegetables are so important to diabetics. They contain essential nutrients, have fibrous cell walls to slow their absorption time and lead to level sugars.

This doesn't mean that you should stop eating fruit, just be sure that your fruit is taken with some protein and fat to accompany it on its GI tract trip. The body works well when things are in balance. 1/2 an apple with peanut butter is a good example. Fructose, nut protein and nut fat (good monounsaturated fat ) make a great snack combo. And I disagree with the above post. Eating small meals all day long and having your bedtime snack is a good way to keep sugars level and hunger down. Skipping your evening snack will cause the brain to panic when the sugar levels drop overnight. It runs on pure glucose and demands that its needs are constantly met. If your BS drops the brain orders your liver to convert some stored glucogon (a kind of supersugar that the body makes and stores for emergencies)into glucose and dump it into the bloodstream. Your brain doesn't know how long it will be without food so it reacts as if you maybe won't be eating for a while. Add to this the fact that it normally does this anyway to prepare for the morning food search and you have high morning sugars.

What I would do if I were you is to take my waking sugars each morning and then take another reading before one other meal each day, alternating meals. This is what my doc had me do when I started on my Lantus. AM check and then pre- dinner one day, AM & pre-lunch the next, AM and pre bedtime snack the next and so on. I recorded these on a little chart until she saw that the overall pattern was pretty good and I had my meals figured out.

It's not just the individual readings that should direct your plan but the overall pattern of foods vs. sugars that you need to become aware of. Perhaps take fewer readings for a bit and just start averaging them out. And be sure that if you are doing post-meal readings you are taking them two hours after a meal. In normals a 2 hr. postprandial reading would be about 110. Diabetics who are not medicated will often see 125 or so... Then at this point you can do some exercise (a couple of flights of stairs?) to enhance the movement of the glucose into the cells and lower insulin resistance.

Hope this helps.

Donna,

I also struggle with Dawn Phenomenon- I can go to bed with a BG level in the 70's and will wake up at 120 unless I eat a snack before I go to bed.  I tried exercise right before bed, not going to bed until my BG was down to pre-meal levels; taking extra metformin at night - and nothing worked to reduce that AM level until I started eating. 

I have been traveling for the last 10 days and my best AM number occurred after I ate a very late (10PM) dinner that included plenty of carbs, protein and fats. I expected to wake up at about 150, but I was only 81!!!!!(my usual is 92-98). There have been other posts here where folks ate fries or burgers in the middle of the night and woke up to excellent numbers. (Not that I am advocating eating burgers or fries to solve the problem!)

Jeannie gave you some excellent suggestions- I generally drink a glass of 2% fat milk with my bedtime meds- it has protein, fat, and carbs- and it keeps my stomach from wrenching up from the metformin.

sandy