New to carb counting.. what about snacks?

[diabetic_tigs]

Heya,

Ive just started carb counting, I did a course run by my hospital a few years ago on this, but at the time did not find it very helpful so as a rebellious teenager stupidly gave up on it pretty quickly :roll:

Im getting on ok with it now, been trying superly hard for the last 3 days as I decided that now im 22 i really do need to get to grips with controlling my sugars. Its been going pretty well, especially today when I woke up at 2.6 but successfully managed the hypo, with my sugar peaking an hour later at 9 but quickly coming back down to 6.6 afterwards.

Im now at 7.2 and its not quite time for my tea yet (i was late waking up today so everythings a bit out of sync) but Im super hungry and wanting to snack on something that will fill me up, but not push my sugars up. I was thinking of having a couple of rich tea biscuits - literally just 2, but Im not sure what to expect in terms of how this will affect my blood sugars. Ive also heard cheese is good in terms of not raising sugar levels, but im trying to stick to a low fat diet so not too sure about that one.

Any suggestions on what works for you?

thank you

 

[leggott]

What about sugar free jelly, pieces of cold flaked fish, cold chicken and hard boiled eggs, all of which are carb free. You may be able to have a few crackers,or small amount of feshly made popcorn or a handful of raspberries / strawberries which may not raise bg by very much, but the only way of knowing is by eating some and testing later to see if there has been any increase.

 

[hallii]

Nuts, especially almonds.

H

 

[MegaMan]

1 rich tea biscuit has around 8g of carbs. You need to work out your ratio, how many units you need for 10g of carbs.

Example my needs are 1.2units per 10g of carbs. I can’t give .? On my pen but with 2 rich tea biscuits I'd give myself 2 units

Like leggott said you will not know exactly how it will affect you sugar until you test. So test before you eat it, then 2 hours after. From the results you will see how much your sugars have gone up then be able to work out how much insulin you will need next time.

Hope some of this helps

 

[diabetic_tigs]

Thanks for that, my current ratio is 1.5 units per 10 g of carbs, but its a bit hit and miss at the moment.

 

[susieg]

Nuts, especially almonds.

H

Do these include salted nuts? i.e. peanuts, cashews etc... ?

 

[the_anticarb]

..or you could have a carb containing snack and inject for it - inject on half your usual ratio though or else you could find it impacts your readings later. You may need to test a bit more regularly if you use this approach to see what ratio works for snacks.

 

[AndyS]

hi tigs,

Don't forget that your ratios may change depending on time of day and activity levels.

The only way you will find out is by recording everything with brutal honesty, food, insulin, exercise, sugars and then working backwards. As well as your insulin ratio you also need to figure out what the carb and exercise does to your sugar level. In my case I take a known amount of carb and watch the sugars for a few hours. Or exercise I will do 30 minutes on treadmil or bike and measure that. (sorry in advance I am going to launch into some ugly maths but I promise it is not that hard)
I beleive the current wisdom for working out what your Insulin effectiveness is you need to add all your daily insulin intake (fast & slow acting) then divide 100 by this number.
For me this is 100/50 so 1u insulin gives me -2mmol/l.

For example:
If you start at 6mmol/l and had 20g of carb (thick slice of bread say) and you assume your ratio is 1.5u / 10g then you would take 3u.
So you would be expecting 10g CHO - 3u Insulin = 0 Change in BG

Let us say that >2 hours later you test and find that your sugars are at 8mmol/l then you would assume that you didn't have enough insulin, or to think another way, too much carb for the insulin.
So we end up with something like 10g CHO -3u = 2mmol/l.
We want to get the sums to equal zero but we are being rather bad with the maths and assuming all units are the same. SO time for some really dodgy maths:
So we remember that we worked out insulin effect using 100/(Total Daily Insulin Intake).
No remember I found that for me it was 1u = -2mmol/l so we can balance easily by adding that extra unit.

So 20g CHO - 4u Insulin = 0mmol/l change (Note this is calculated and based on assumptions. You will need to always monitor carefully when you try applying this)

Now we have worked out that in this instance we should have really used 4u instead of 3u. Let us now work this back the other way to see what ratio we should have used to start with.
(this is the easy bit)
To get our new ratio you need to get it back down to 10g of CHO so in this case just divide by 2 so we get
10g CHO - 2u = 0mmol/l

So from that we can see that our new ratio is actually 2u per 10g.

I know the maths in this is really ugly since we are not respecting the units of anything but if you break it down it is fairly simple and gives you a repeatable and methodical way of working out what your ratios should be.

Note that you shouldn't really do this based on a single reading. There are too many other things that affect it. I tend to use the averages of at least 3 readings for the same meal / time of day.

So back to snacks. If your ratios end up high then you probably need to correct.
I usually go with things like cheese or ham, tuna eggs that sort of thing. As you may notice it is all either high fat or high protein. It seems that you have to balance the scales somewhere and if you take carb you will be nailed with fat in most cases.

Good luck, hope you come right soon.

A

 

[KazV1]

Ive been told that any snacks in between meals that are 10g of carbs or less, do need need an insulin shot.

 

[AndyS]

Lindt 90% cocoa chocolate comes out fairly well.
I only tend to eat a single square but it is that strong that is often all you need.

I tend to say anything below 4 or 5g I can sneak through as it will only reaise BG 1 and a bit mmol/l