Diabetes is all about Blood Sugar management. It is very important to have a good guide that provides you all the data you need. So I’ve been searching all over the internet and with all the information I found, I came up with this chart.
There are some health institutions that classify pre-diabetes starting from 117 mg/dl. However the majority considers 126 mg/dl the treshold for pre-diabetes. There are institutions that break up the values according to age, diabetes, exercise time etc. Personally, I like to keep things simple without getting lost in the forest of information available on the internet.
There are two types of measure units according to the glucometer that you are using: mg/dl and mmol/l.
The A1c or HbA1c, in other words “glycated hemoglobin” or “glycosylated hemoglobin”, is the a 3 months average of your blood sugar. It is only measured by medical lab tests. Why do you do only once every 3 months the A1c test? Because glucose sticks to the hemoglobin in your red blood cells (glycation) and these have a lifespan of 2 to 3 months. The test counts these pairs of glucose/hemoglobin cells.
Remember: your before meal measurement should be more or less the same as the 2h after meal value. Your morning/fasting numbers should be under 126 mg/dl or 7 mmol/l. If they are higher, it is probably because of the “dawn phenomenon“. Other causes can be: a carb-rich diner, injecting less insulin, forgetting to take the medication, sleeping while digestion not finished. Please, do pay attention to the emergency values!
Your goal is to be in the blue zone!
If you want to find out more about when should you measure your BS, please read this article.