All,
You can tell me if this is a stupid question.

Why test BS levels first thing in the morning, surely it makes more sense to test before and after meals to see how your body deals with processing what you’ve just eaten?.

Ideally – as long as you have enough strips – you do both. Testing around meals (I do before, 1 hour after, 2 hours after and (if hour 2 is higher than hour ) 3 hours after. You are correct – that is a better measure of how you are responding to food. I use those tests to tell me if I need to cut out foods that create an undesirable response.

The test first thing in the morning is a better test of whether you are making progress overall. Fasting blood glucose, drawn first thing in the morning (and for many of us continuing until mid-day), is the last thing to decline when you start getting your BG under control. So when you see it going down you know you are making progress. On the other end, it’s one of the early warning signs for diabetes (and a repeated high fasting blood glucose is one of the criteria for a diabetes or prediabetes diagnosis).