The past few weeks have been intense. I have been really busy in work, there have been a few things going on outside work, and I’ve just come down from a week-long migraine. I haven’t been looking after myself as much as usual. In particular, I have been doing way less cardio than usual, and there has been a bit of comfort eating thrown into the mix.
My blood glucose has been a little higher than usual, but nothing too untoward, until last night. The combination of a long working day, relative lack of cardio, a late carb-heavy meal, and the dregs of a migraine meant my blood glucose was 10.7 mmol/L1. That is the highest it has been since I got out of hospital.
Now, like any sensible person with two masters degrees in physics, I have a spreadsheet that I use to keep track of my blood glucose readings, and I use this to help me put my readings into context. Here is a histogram showing my evening blood glucose readings.
You can see last night’s reading, way out there on the extreme right. This tells us that this reading is anomalous for some reason. If I saw this histogram without any additional context, I’d probably assume there was some sort of experimental error and ignore that particular data point. However, I know this unusual reading was caused by a set of unusual circumstances, some of which were out of my control, and some of which weren’t. In particular, last night I didn’t really do any cardio after dinner, and I suspect that is the main driver behind this high reading.
I don’t want to lose the great progress I’ve made since diagnosis, so I’m going to use this data to change my behaviour. Even if I eat late, I am always going to do some cardio after dinner, even if it is just a 20 minute walk.
- I tested again, 40 minutes later, and it was down to 8.8 mmol/L, which is still high for me, but is in range. I did another test this morning, and got 6.5 mmol/L, which is normal to slightly high for me in the morning, so this high reading was clearly a spike rather than anything else. ↩︎