Welcome to the Sweet Spot!

Your weekly dose of practical tips, real talk, and encouragement to help you lower your blood sugar and feel better in your body, one simple step at a time.

Hi there Reader ,

I have mentioned to you that you already fast every single night, whether you notice it or not. I've been thinking about that again because my own glucose reading caught me off guard one morning. Nothing unusual happened the night before. A plain dinner, lights off around 10pm as normal, and still a number I didn't expect.

Most of us treat a morning glucose number like a grade for the night before. High number, bad dinner. Good number, good dinner. It feels logical. It is also incomplete. What happens overnight depends on more than what you ate. Sleep quality plays a role. So does an illness you're fighting off, stress you're carrying, when you last took your medication and how well it's working right now, how much you moved that day, and your own hormone rhythm, which none of us can see or control directly, especially if you are a woman. Plenty of people see their glucose climb in the early morning hours simply because the liver releases stored glucose to help the body wake up. That climb can happen after a careful dinner and a full night of decent sleep. It happened to me.

I bring this up because I've watched people quietly punish themselves over a single reading, cutting out foods they love or skipping breakfast the next day as a kind of penance. It usually backfires into more frustration, not less. One number is data. It's not a verdict on your evening.

Try this for three mornings. Before you do anything else, write down your glucose number and one word for how you slept, poor, okay, or good. Add a short note if anything unusual happened the day before, a late meal, a stretch of high stress, more activity than normal. By day three, stop asking what you did wrong and start looking for the pattern. That pattern is what tells you whether to adjust timing, mention something to your prescriber, or just relax about a single number the next time it surprises you. I've done this exercise myself more than once, and it's usually sleep or stress, not dinner, that turns out to be the bigger story.

What's one thing besides food that you suspect moves your morning number the most? Hit reply and tell me.

Let’s make this week one where you enjoy your life AND take care of your health.

You've got this 💪
Stephanie
​The Diabetes Maven

P.S. Next week I'm walking through the four questions I ask before anyone changes their eating window, especially if insulin or a medication that can cause lows is part of the picture. I'm also building something for October to help you go deeper into meal timing and glucose awareness. More on that soon.