Greetings gentlemen -

I was diagnosed in February, with an A1C of 9.9, and fasting BG of 280. At the time I weighed 340 lbs. I don't know about you, but the Dr did not tell me much in that first appointment other than my A1c was dangerously high, and to set up an appointment with a dietitian. I will say up front that I have done some reading since then to try to make sense of things, and I recommend highly that you have a talk with someone who has CDE (as in Certified Diabetes Educator after their name).

I still consider myself a newbie, and like dbacksfan46, I travel for a living. Not a trucker, but I spend 50-70% of my time on the road eating at restaurants, with an extremely high-stress job. Not a good thing for a diabetic, but it is 30 years too late to change things now...

The good news is that I am starting to figure things out for me. In June, my A1c was 6.2, and my BG was 135.

dbacksfan46: FWIW, your blood glucose is a measure of the amount of sugar in your blood at the time the reading was taken. It is useful to you in making decisions about eating and exercise, but only gives you a general feeling for how you are doing long term. The A1c is a long-term measure of your health overall - more or less an average. It gives you a much better picture of how you are doing overall, and what your prospects are for what the doctors call "long term complications".

I have other terms of those "complications" that I won't use here, but we are talking about things like going blind, losing a foot or a leg, being on dialysis, heart attack and stroke. In other words, not a pretty picture. The good news is that it usually takes a while for the "complications" to show up after you have been a diabetic. The bad news is that clock usually starts long before you are diagnosed (in my case, quite likely I was more than 5 years into the clock when I was diagnosed).

So a fasting BG of 135 is not good (that would be more like 80, if I understand it correctly), but not awful either. My fasting BG tends to run between 140-170, personally. However the A1c of 9.5 is the real bad news.

Basically, an A1C reading over 7.0 means that you are looking at "complications", and you cannot be sure when the clock started on you diabetes, so you need to figure out how to stop it. The really god news is that it can be done, and if you caught it soon enough it can be done without insulin.

my blood sugars are largely under control and i attribute this largely to my exercising, which has helped me tremendously despite struggling to eat the right things (hence my joining MFP).... i'm not quite sure how it works, but for me the exercise seems to have a similar effect to constant use of a blood sugar regulating medication, and exercise has not only brought my sugar levels down, but has also stabilized my sugars from going as high or as low as they would sometimes get in the past....