Be Better Then Yesterday

No piece of advice could be more obvious, but it’s easily overlooked in the hustle and bustle of daily life. If you don’t know what your blood sugar is, you can’t hope to keep it at a nondiabetic level.


According to the National Institutes of Health, which funded the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial, it was once standard practice to check blood sugar a single time each day. That landmark study raised the standard to four.
But four checks a day, while better than one, can miss a lot. If you want tighter control, try six or eight checks a day. That’s right: Take your blood sugar every two or three hours when you’re awake, and definitely check overnight. You might be surprised to learn where your numbers go.


This can be a costly prospect for some people. You can only do what you can afford. But almost everyone can try the extra checks for a few days or a couple of weeks, and that information alone will be helpful. You’ll learn how your body reacts to different kinds of food. You’ll find out how long it takes your body to absorb insulin.
This is your baseline information. This is the stuff you have to know. The best technology and the most extensive education don’t make the slightest bit of difference if you don’t know what your blood sugars are most times of the day.
You also might want to consider a continuous glucose monitor. This device gives you a constantly updated blood glucose trend line and can alert you if your numbers rise too high or fall too low.

Ultimately, you can blame no one else for your health or your decisions. Diabetes is a disease that depends on the choices that we make, day in and day out. The decisions often seem small and unimportant. But over time, they accumulate and mark the progress of the disease.

Do we stay healthy, monitoring our blood sugars and food intake, consulting with our healthcare professionals? Or do we let these healthy behaviors slide, with the understanding that we’ll always have time to fix it later?

We don’t have time. We have to address our health now.

That doesn’t mean we panic, and it doesn’t mean that we can’t ever have a chocolate bar again. But it does mean that we must take real responsibility for ourselves.

Ultimately, if you take responsibility for your disease, the other seven tips here should follow naturally. They’re all about taking a commonsense approach to a challenging situation and improving it bit by bit and day by day.

You won’t be perfect. But you don’t have to be. You just have to be better than you were yesterday.