What should my glucose level be? Glucose Chart
- Last updated November 17, 2017
Blood glucose levels give you an indication of whether your blood sugar is too low, too high, or just right. Tracking these levels is important if you’re managing diabetes or simply striving for optimal health because maintaining healthy levels helps reduce your risk of many common, life-threatening diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.
On the ketogenic diet and in general, glucose testing is a good way to identify foods that significantly trigger blood-sugar spikes in your body. Blood sugar responds quickly to food, and peaks about an hour after a meal. Generally speaking, you don’t want your blood sugar to spike more than 30 mg/dL from your baseline, and ideally your blood sugar should return to baseline within 2 hours; if it doesn’t, you may be having an insulin response to that food and may want to consider reducing or eliminating it from your diet. With this knowledge, you can direct your diet away from foods that adversely affect your glucose levels and more toward foods that work best with your body.
Learn more about glucose testing for sleuthing out foods here.
The chart below is based on pre-prandial readings, or before eating.

The chart is great.
But it would also be good to have information about the timing of fasting blood sugar levels.
For example, information about what levels should be (1) within an hour of rising and then (2) two to four hours after rising could be helpful for those of us with the melatonin receptor risk allele. My understand is that our receptor takes longer to “wind down” in the morning and that it takes us longer for our insulin to kick in, even if we’re not pre-diabetic. So apart from the higher risk for diabetes, my understanding is that this would mean that our morning fasting glucose levels are somewhat higher in any case.
I could have this wrong. But I have the risk allele. Occasionally my fasting blood sugar is in the 80s. But usually my fasting blood sugar is in the high nineties in the morning, and then comes down in a couple of hours.
On the blood glucose chart it only goes up to a 10.0 equals 180. It doesn’t go higher than that. I am a brittle diabetic going to try keto ( with my Physicians permission and support).
I’m trying to set up my meter but my bs was a 20.3. I don’t know what that means on this meter.
Don’t understand where the bands begin and end on the graph. where is number in the band?
Omg, I HATE THIS METER (though I paid for it, so I’m determined to figure it out). I’ve wasted DOZENS of strips (primarily glucose) on error readings, I do the trouble shooting, but I think my monitor is funky. I just checked my blood sugar and the monitor worked (miracle) but just said ‘HI’… and literally nowhere on your site does it say what that means, numbers wise. Everything refers to ketones, when I’m specifically looking for info on glucose readings. I hate this stupid thing. #frustrated
So my question dealt with numbers. I am assuming that my numbers from 64-91 glucose basically said that yes I am in ketosis correct?
What does optimal mean when I’m fasting for 6 days water and tea only
Only had before eating. What about all the other times
at what point do you get a lo reading on tje glucose meter side of it?