The goal for the morning blood glucose is to be less than 130. High blood glucose levels in the morning can be caused by a number of factors, such as not taking enough diabetes medication, too much snacking at night, or eating a supper high in carbohydrates.
In order to figure out what might be causing the problem, it’s important to get some blood glucose readings before and 2 hours after supper. If a person is eating a reasonable amount of carbs and/or is taking the right medicine their blood glucose levels should not rise more than 50 points from the pre-supper reading as compared to the 2 hour post-supper reading. If the post-meal readings are high, it usually indicates more medicine is needed at supper time.
Also it’s a good idea to check the blood glucose before bedtime and then the next morning. Do this several times—a rise in blood glucose numbers overnight without snacking is usually a sign that more medicine is needed either at supper or at bedtime. The reason blood glucose can go up overnight even without food is because during fasting states the liver makes glucose and without enough insulin to help regulate it, the liver does not know when the body needs less glucose to be made.
You want to think of it like a water faucet that leaks. The insulin is what can turn the faucet off and without enough insulin the faucet (liver) continues to leak (not literally of course but figuratively). In this case, more medication is needed to help the liver stop overproducing glucose. Certain diabetes pills can help do this and so can longer acting insulins, such as Lantus, Levemir, or NPH.