Blood Sugars after skipping a meal

Usually if I skip a meal at breakfast or lunch later my blood sugar will be high. Even though, before my number was a great levels. I’ve always wondered why it was that caused the high blood sugars. Does anyone know? Or have alike thoughts?

My first thought would be that you might need more basal. I’d say ask your doctor to learn how you can check that for yourself.

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Evelyn @EvieFire , this is not unusual at all. Your body needs insulin 24 hours every day even if you don’t eat and possibly more so if you engage in exercise. Just the way the body operates. One of the principal reasons for your glucose levels to rise is the natural response to getting up - your sleeping body generally doesn’t need too much energy to operate muscles, but when you get out of bed your body senses your muscles asking for fuel so glucose stored in your liver is dumped in your blood to feed the need. Of course, without added insulin your body [any body with diabetes] isn’t able to draw the sugars out of the blood to feed the muscles. Along with the “dumping of glucose” into your blood, you also get a “shot” of steroid adrenalin which increases your BG / BGL as you exercise. Kind of a long answer - let me know if you need more information.

As Susan @srozelle said, increasing your background / basal insulin is one way to avoid this phenomenon. I don’t recall how you manage your diabetes - pump or MDI so I really can’t offer a path for you. If you often skip breakfast AND use an insulin infusion pump [any kind] you might want to consider creating a Profile/Pattern for these days, and activate it before you go to bed.

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Same thing happens to me! Like Dennis said just normal response to waking in the morning. In fact, I like to work out in the morning before I eat because I know I likely won’t drop low (of course there’s the rare exception or if I wake up high I usually like to correct and then eat so I’m not battling highs all day and then workout later). I’ve found it’s best to roll with it and then find whatever works best for you be that exercise, bolusing and eating something small so your body knows you’re not in starvation mode, or increasing background insulin. I typically don’t notice a rise like I do for breakfast if I skip lunch but I also don’t frequently skip lunch as I’m usually pretty hungry and I get hangry easy :joy:

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A different possibility, since you said this can happen with EITHER skipped breakfast or lunch it seems you may have gone low as a result. Our bodies are well tuned to avoid disasters, so when bg goes too low the liver and other tissues release stored glycogen, a storage form of glucose to get you back to a healthy level. It always (or almost) dumps too much since there doesn’t seem to be ay finesse. It IS views as an emergency by your body, after all…

Suggest you run a trial: don’t eat a meal then check your blood glucose level often, perhaps every 15 or 20 minutes after that. If you go low in relation to the missed meal and then go high it proves it.

Then you would need to have less insulin before the skipped meal which is simple if you use an insulin pump, but trickier if you take 2 speeds of insulin in each shot.

I decided long ago to avoid trouble by not skipping meals. Been doing so for 65 years and still going strong at age 71.

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Very different for me. If I skip a meal my blood sugar remains flat. If I skip 2 meals it remains unaltered. We’re all different. My A1c is 6.3 - T1D 50 years.

Hi Jim @JimMcWilliams , I don’t remember your diabetes management mode from your prior posts.
Do you use an insulin infusion pump? If you use a pump, you certainly have figured out your insulin needs and have done a great job setting programmed basal rates. Congratulations!!!

Thank you. Constant tweaking for the first six months. G6 & Tslim X2

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