Although you've already been encouraged to keep rigorous control over blood sugars and document them daily through glucose logs and food and exercise diaries, once you're pregnant, diabetes control expectations skyrocket.
Here's a picture of what the recommended Blood Glucose goals for pregnant women look like, according to my doctors.
Fasting: (that's your first finger stick, right after you wake up)
Under 95 mg/dL
Pre-meals, similar to fasting:
100 mg/dL or less
1hour after you eat:
under 140 mg/dL
2 hours post meal:
under 120 mg/dL
Notice something different? Yep. Those are pretty significantly lower than your pre-pregnancy guidelines.
Women adopt many strategies to reach these goals. Some limit their carbs to under 45 grams per meal (a recommendation of my doctor) to make sure that they don't overload the system, but still get some of the carbs that are necessary for baby's good neurological development. For this reason, I was cautioned against going on a low or no carbohydrate diet, especially during the first trimester.
Other women continue to eat as they'd like, but really up the insulin. Given that diabetes in pregnancy is a fluid issue, women will likely have to reset their insulin to carb ratios and correction factors very frequently. I'm changing things on a weekly basis at this point, 16 weeks. More on that later.
I found that overeating or having a second portion of anything that wasn't salad or vegetable significantly raised my post-meal blood glucose values, especially after dinner which then carried over through the night. So, I now try to concentrate on putting dinner away when I'm full, with the promise of some dessert if I'm hungry later.
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