I use the same meter and strips. The strips are expensive as hell. Do you think its worth it to keep going with them in my situation? or would a cheaper option be reliable enough considering my life isnt depending on them?
All good quality test strips are pretty expensive.
I know you're not diabetic, but I'll discuss things from a diabetes viewpoint and you can apply it to yourself as needed.
Unlike type one diabetes, which can kill you in twenty minutes flat, type two and generally insulin resistance is a slow killer, it come on slowly,it gets worse slowly, and harms you fairly slowly, until it gets quite bad. It's terrible for you, don't get me wrong, but it moves fairly slowly in most people until late stages, then it gets really bad really fast.
So, if your diet is stable, and your medication is stable, it's fairly safe to just keep everything normal for a few days, test the hell out of yourself for a full day of eating and medication, and then stop testing for 3-6 months then repeat.
Unless you do something out of the ordinary like eat a bunch more or less carbs than normal. Then you should test a few times just to be safe.
The only real danger with type 2 is that unlike getting worse, it can improve very quickly, so if you are taking insulin, and if you eat a lot healthier for a few days, (less carbs) your standard dose of insulin could become lethal.
And you are taking insulin, so if you decide to stop eating all that rice you probably want to start testing again while you stabilize yourself to a new setpoint, but if you don't make changes and keep the same food, at the same times, and the same bolus of insulin, you can probably stop testing for a few months at least, and then do another full day of testing and see if anything's changed, and if it has, it will probably only have changed a bit, and you can readjust, and go back to testing sporadically.
So yeah, you don't have to test constantly if you are in a groove, and don't change anything.
The warning signs for full blown type two diabetes are hungry, thirsty, sleepy, and pissing like a racehorse, and they come on slowly too. At my worst I had blood sugars in the 30's and didn't actually feel bad, just thirsty and kind of pleasantly sleepy, and I thought I was pissing so much because I was thirsty and drinking so much fluids.
I have two other things to mention. Someone mentioned Fasting insulin tests. Testing insulin directly would be a great thing if we could do a finger prick for a dollar like BG but no, we can't it's much more expensive and difficult and we can't. A fasting insulin test will figure out pre-diabetes five or ten years before an A1C will show it.
I'm not sure it will be helpful for you, because of the Metformin, insulin and berberine you're already on, those seem like confounding factors.
Also, you mentioned you have a history of diabetes in your family, and your Dad got diabetes after a surgery, and you think his treatment gave it to him?
Respectfully, I disagree, that's not likely, it would be like saying he ate bacon five times in the last month and that's probably why he got a heart attack. Like Atherosclerosis, Type 2 diabetes takes a long time to develop.
There are only a few drugs that can push you over the edge to insulin resistance, (Olanzapine, and other anti-psychotics is the one big class that is common and does it) but even that takes years to go from completely normal to full blown diabetic.
More likely he was on the edge or already diabetic, and the tests before or after surgery just caught it. Catching diabetes in a blood test is a good thing, not knowing and letting it ravage your body while you walk around feeling fine is the nightmare.
