In the years prior to my diabetes diagnosis, my blood glucose tested in normal range, and I did not have diabetes. It’s not like I’ve always had LADA diabetes but just didn’t know it. On the contrary, I got bloodwork done that showed a normal fasting blood glucose. I even did a finger prick blood glucose test at home, which showed normal results.

Yet, I seemed sensitive to sugar.

If I ate too much candy, I felt terrible. This was always the case, even as a child. So I always self limited how many sweets I ate. I didn’t understand why people would want to eat so much sweet stuff. It made me feel icky.

One morning I drank orange juice and felt very weird afterward. I avoided orange juice after that.

Potato soup made from Yukon Gold Potatoes prompted a similar experience.

What did the orange juice and potato soup have in common? They likely caused my blood glucose to rise quickly, and my pancreas probably didn’t produce enough insulin to keep up with it. But, I’ll never know for sure, as this was the pre-diabetes me, who didn’t test blood glucose.

I started feeling icky after exercise. At this point, I bought a blood glucose meter, because I wanted to know what was happening. I felt like my blood glucose was probably dropping fast, but it tested at a normal 90 mg/dL. (In hind site, I know that a single reading doesn’t provide rate of change measurement. I would have had to tested again in 5-10 minutes.)

Supplements for Managing Blood Glucose

In these pre-diabetes years, I didn’t have insurance, and I was a big fan of supplements. I still think some supplements work surprisingly well, but would never recommend them as a first line of treatment for diabetes.

In my pre-diabetes years, I found some positive results from Chromium Picolinate which is described as an “Insulin Co-Factor” and is supposed to support healthy glucose metabolism. It just “made me feel better,” but it didn’t prevent the LADA Diabetes.

I also found a remedy in Sugar Balance & Women’s Tonic Tea during my time of the month, as the hormones from my menstrual cycle effected my glucose levels. Read more about this: Menstrual Cycle and LADA Diabetes and Insulin Sensitivity

When the LADA Diabetes arrived, I didn’t recognize it at first. I was really thirsty and peeing a lot, and then I had an aha moment when I realized those were signs of diabetes. That’s when I tested my blood glucose to find it was in the 300s, and I sought medical treatment. Today, I am alive thanks to insulin. I write about my experiences on my insulin pump life blog.

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If you want to read more about my story, check out my blog post on The Stages of LADA Diabetes.

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