With managing sugars, our biggest worry is making sure we avoid hypos. And if we do get them we want to catch them fast, deal with them and make sure that the few hours after we’re stable and in our target.

We can do that by using the charts to see what we did last (blood test? bolus? eat?) so we can decide what to do next. We can spot patterns and trends. And we start to develop a sense of how long our insulin is active for.

We don’t wait for hypo awareness to tell us we need to test. We estimate how active our insulin is and test within a two hour window. Probably sounds like it’s too much work. But once it’s a habit, you just do it fast so you can get on with everything else you’d rather be doing.