I've had a genuine mince-pie conundrum today.
Four months ago I was having to limit any carb-heavy foods to less than 10 grams to avoid very high bgs. Back then I'd also noticed I could compensate for overdoing the carbs, within reason, by going on walks straight afterwards.
Over the last few weeks the post-food exercise effect seems to have been getting even better.
Over the last few days I've been recklessly overdoing the carbs and calorie counts, getting up to around 4,000 a day with 300g carbs. Compare that to some days 4 months ago where I was having 20g of carbs and 900 calories a day.
Yesterday I didn't have any exercise to compensate for the carbs.
This morning I woke up with a bg of 7.1, which was high as expected - I can get it down to about 5 to 5.5 when I'm disciplined for the last month or so.
This morning, I decided I needed to get mince pies out of the house as I had become addicted. Naturally I did that by eating the last box. I ate 4, then did less than an hour of sawing wood, really not that huge amount of exercise as most of it was standing around working out which bits to saw next. Then I ate another 2. About an hour after that I thought what an idiot I've been - it's before lunch and I've already eaten about 250g of carbs, and mostly in 2 single sittings of very fast intake.
So I took a bg reading, expecting it to be well over 10, to teach myself a lesson. It was 6.6, at less than 2 hours after the last rapid intake of 80g of carbs.
I was stunned, and I'm thinking that either:
1) The 3 stone weight loss in 3 months, combined with making my body deal with lots of carbs over the last few days, has had an amazing effect on my ability to process carbs, provided I do a bit of exercise
or
2) Mince pies have become a magical food for me.
This really is a conundrum. I confidently expect I'll be back to my full-on diabetic self tomorrow and be frustrated that I can never repeat the results again, but it's a remarkable thing to have just experienced and given me the encouragement to carry on with this weight loss. And climb back down from 4,000 calories a day of course, and reduce carbs again, for a time, as I've definitely been heading in the wrong direction for a few days, though the exercise has stopped me gaining weight - I appear to be on a plateau.