Hi Brian. Several things that you can fiddle with. Let's start with the easiest! Swap out your blueberries for strawberries! Strawberries have much more fisetin, a natural flavonoid like quercetin, but especially helpful for blood glucose control.

Now the snacks. Opinion is split on the benefits of snacks. They don't seem to work for me, quite the opposite. Instead you can raise your carb guidelines for meals.

Exercise. Here's the thing, if you do too MUCH exercise your diabetic liver may not know when you stop so it keeps releasing glycogen for some hours. That's what happens to me, I walk an average of about four miles a day, but if I walk more than about six miles in one walk I find my blood sugar elevated 20-30 points for hours afterwards (I've seldom gone the next step and exercised enough to run out of glycogen and go into ketosis, have to ask someone else about that!). I think it's probably net positive when you exercise "too much" but it will likely raise your next pre-meal reading.

When you have that beef stew for lunch, was this from the refrigerator, left-over stew for a day or three after made for dinner? Do you know about resistant starch? Some normally bad carbs left in the fridge overnight knit themselves tighter, become "resistant", and raise your blood glucose much less, and can even cover for additional carbs you eat at the same time. But I can eat small amounts of white potatoes most times without huge problems. Works for bread, too, hope you keep yours in the fridge.

Why do you need to drop the metformin? You're on a modest dose. I've been taking 1000mg twice a day with the goal of keeping my numbers below "pre-diabetes" ... and also letting me cheat my diet a little at the same time. Actually I'm going to try cutting back the metformin a little, see how that works. Consult your doctor with the Januvia but you might try a little more metformin, fwiw. I take the regular, not the ER.

What else? Well, in my case, it seems that beef and milk fat aggravate my blood glucose, I presume by increasing insulin resistance. Eat more chicken, maybe some salmon. Try eating less cheese. A little whole-milk yogurt now and then is one of my cheats.

About avoiding carbs at dinner to try to address morning reading - doesn't work for me. I too generally have my highest reading in the morning, after generally a twelve-hour fast. Go figure. Many things you eat may take more than twelve hours to digest fully so I think the morning reading (already high from wake-up cortisol or something) depends more on total carbs and balance, not just the last meal.

Let's see, one last thing: Nuts! Now, there is a whole subject of fats, aka essential fatty acids (EFA), you know the omega-6 and omega-3 and omega-9, that you want to keep in balance. There is also short chain and long chain, saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly-unsaturated. And a few other dimensions. Now there is no simple path from EFAs to blood glucose - but there may be some complex paths. Anyway a few nuts in your diet seem to provide a good mixture of all these features and I believe helps balance out all the blood glucose systems.

You didn't state your A1C level or your later-day blood glucose readings, if any. I test three times per day, before each meal. My pre-lunch is usually lowest, my A1C has varied mostly below but sometimes barely above 5.7. Of course YMMV, diabetes is nothing of not highly variable case to case, behavior to behavior. Best wishes!