How to best check for your blood glucose

Hello everyone,

I get asked a lot of questions about how to best check for blood glucose. What we do at Diabetes Management Centre is ensured to teach our patients how to monitor their blood glucose and secondly how to interpret those readings they get.

Check blood sugars in pairs.

The best way to test for your blood glucose is to do it in pairs. What do I mean? Find below a picture of our blood glucose monitoring tool. It has columns for date, before meals, 2 hours after meals and a 4.00 a.m sugar reading.

Testing in pairs simply means if you do a before lunch sugar reading, it is best to pair it with a 2 hours after lunch reading on the same day. This should be applied for the rest of the day. It does not mean you have to test for all three meals everyday but the day you do test, do it in pairs.

What are the benefits of blood glucose testing in pairs?

Testing in pairs is beneficial as it allows a patient to determine the effect of his meal to his blood glucose. If one did a blood glucose before bed and paired with a fasting blood glucose it will show them a lot about his overnight medication, meal, and level of activity if any was done. Learning to interpret you blood glucose readings and acting upon them has been proven by research to improve overall diabetes control.

Remember you should always act upon any trends you find that are out of ordinary, if this is something you are not comfortable in we can teach you how to do it.