1 week in T1D

Petershilly said:

Hi, I’m struggling to lower my bloods as they are between 9-18.. I’ve been eating healthy and lowering my sugar/ carb intake but still no joy. I’m only a week in and still haven’t found might right lantus and nova intake either.

How long does this normally take to settle down??

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It does take some time to find the right doses, this is perfectly normal!

The only way to find out how much insulin someone needs is by trial and error. This means they start you out on a relatively low dose and very slowly work your way up to see what happens.
Some diabetics need less than 10 units a day, others need over a 100. Best to start on the safe side: imagine needing only 2 units but taking 30 and having to try to eat against that!

Do you have regular contact with your diabetes nurse to go over your numbers and doses?

Remember, diabetes is a marathon, not a sprint!

Petershilly said:

Hi, thanks for the info it makes sense.. I have good contact with my DN and feel happy with what I’ve been told to do. Everyday is a school day.

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It sure is!
Making notes, just like in school really helps! Logging your blood glucose along with your food and possibly the carbs in your meals and exercise will make it easier for you and your DN to find out the right doses and making sense of how your diabetes works.

Antje77 said:

It sure is!
Making notes, just like in school really helps! Logging your blood glucose along with your food and possibly the carbs in your meals and exercise will make it easier for you and your DN to find out the right doses and making sense of how your diabetes works.

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This is right. Carb counting, testing, dosing, and logging is the thing you have to do to figure out how you manage this thing. Activity will also help. It’s not easy, but it has to be done.

Try to do- and eat the same things every day for a week. Same thing and the same amount. Alter only how you dose for it, and test before and after to see the effect. This will test how you deal with your short term insulin.

Basal testing is probably the next step for how that stuff is supposed to carry you through the day.


I’m hoping they educated you on what these insulins do, and why we need them. I’m never convinced of this. So here’s my simple explanation: insulin is an escort. It delivers food to either hungry cells OR storage. Short term- or fast acting insulin does this job for the food when you’re eating.

But the body really runs on food supplies that it’s stored in the body all day long. This is where long acting- or basal insulin comes in. As the body redistributes the food that the body has stored it still needs the long acting- or basal insulin to deliver it.

So remember- insulin is an escort. If we don’t have it the energies we eat and that enter into the blood stream and never be escorted out to where it’s needed. Without this escort we would have high blood sugar.

Petershilly said:

Hi, I’m struggling to lower my bloods as they are between 9-18.. I’ve been eating healthy and lowering my sugar/ carb intake but still no joy. I’m only a week in and still haven’t found might right lantus and nova intake either.

How long does this normally take to settle down??

Click to expand...

For me, it took about a month for that phase to settle... 3 years in, things are still "settling" and I'm doing minor adjustments to some things all the time. (Lunch appears to be the current meal which is causing me pain on the ratio front. It's been all over the place since March, I thought I'd got it back to pre-Lockdown 1.0 levels when I returned to the workplace in September, but it's decided it wants to be different. Basal has, however, returned to pre-Lockdown 1.0 levels and as I'm still in work for this one, I'm hopeful that will stay the same.)

As the others have said it is all normal. In the beginning you can eat to your insulin to help bring numbers down but as you get more adjusted you will start dosing for what you plan to eat.

Use this time to learn as much as you can. Diabetes uk website has a learning centre which is useful also google the hypo programme which will teach you a lot of what you need to know about hypos (these scared me a lot at first). Download the carbs & cals app, log all the carbs you eat & how your body reacts to them.

Think in terms of months & not days. It took me about a month to start coming in range, another month to test my insulin doses, then a month figuring out the carb to insulin ratio of each time of the day. 4 months in my insulin overall has decreased & I can change how much I take depending on what I plan to eat plus stay in range 80% of the time. Bertie online help you with the maths/ science of carb counting & bolusing.

I’d also recommend reading Think like a pancreas by Gary Scheiner. I enjoyed reading about his diabetes journey & learned a lot.

Hi. To help get your Basal right you can fast for a few hours having tested before and after. If the Basal is about right there should be no change. It BS rises you need to increase the Basal and vice versa. The Basal is there to balance the continuous glucose output from the liver. You need to be carb-counting for the Bolus and hence adjusting it for each meal. You probably need to find the best ratio for you by trial and error.