Madam_teacup said:
Hi all.
I've posted before with another question but here's something I can't make sense of and I need your help.
I'm type 1 and have been for the last 7 years. Honestly I haven't been the best diabetic in the world. I've always taken my meds but when it comes to testing my sugar levels my record is spotty at best. Recently, I've started testing on a regular basis again. It's been two weeks and my problem is this: I take 34 units evening and morning, I eat regular, healthy meals but my levels have been weird -at best. Although I've been careful not to eat anything sugary, I've found that my sugars have remained high. I do exercise, I walk 2 hours every day, I have had hypos since raising my insulin but I'm at a loss to explain what's going on.
My question: Is anyone else going through this? And does anyone here have an explanation or know something I could do to help my sugar levels even out?
I'm honestly reaching the end of my tether with this, I'm lethargic a lot of the time and getting really frustrated with this. When I didn't look at my glucose levels or become as conscious with my eating as I am now, I felt fine, not tired at all and now I'm tired and annoyed :evil:
My diabetic nurse is on holiday for the next week so I'm here for help. Thanks for reading my rant. :silent:
Hello Madam_teacup (great user name
) . . .
Your Post rings a bell with my previous experiences . . . I am T1 for 13 years.
On a low-carb diet I was able to keep fairly good control over my levels, but I frequently got highs that I just could not understand. This was baffling and frustrating - and also very de-motivating, as I felt like I was getting no reward for doing the correct things.
Are you patient/organized enough to be completely boring and obsessive for about 4 weeks?
If so, you could try something that eventually paid off for me:
Reduce your meal choices down to an extremely small number. A very small rota of about 3 or 4 of your regular meals. Before eating, take a photo of your meal. Write down everything that you do, and everything that you eat (including the weight of each item). Remember that if you really don't know what is causing your high levels, then nothing is too far-fetched to consider; it really could be anything*.
Based on the results of the first few days, you may be in a better position to judge if these very few foods are causing problems for you or not. If you stick to a very small number of foods, and change just 1 or 2 things each day, you may be able to pinpoint specific things that are related to higher (and lower) numbers. Then of course you could start to take away/add things to the rota, based on actual results.
When I did the above, I found several things that surprised me. A number of foods that I had always eaten without really thinking (because I had simply assumed that they are good for me) actually were a cause of high blood-sugar levels. I won't mention them here specifically because I would not like to pull this thread off course. The point is that different foods can have different results in different people, especially considering the huge number of different factors (genetics, age, interactions with other foods, interactions with other illness, interactions with exercise, hormones, stress, etc, etc) that are involved. I believe your best weapon is to gather as much information as possible regarding the specific foods that you eat, and what results these tend to have
on you. Then you have the data to analyze. (Yes, I'm a nerd :roll
.
After going through the above process I was able to take several offending foods completely off my menu. I also learned in the above process that the effect of the size of my meals on my blood-sugar is not a 'linear' relationship. A large meal has a greater effect than a small meal, of course. But I found that the line connecting these 2 points on the graph was not straight . . . it was more like a 'stepped' line, where a very small increase in the amount of certain foods
could cause a disproportionally large increase in my blood-sugar levels.
Adding a magnesium supplement to your diet might also be something to try. A magnesium deficiency prevents Insulin from working correctly**. If you have a magnesium deficiency from your diet then adding a supplement can have a big effect; if you do not have the deficiency then adding a supplement will have no (positive or negative) effect.
I hope these suggestions might be helpful for you.
Regards,
Antony
* Just as 1 example of the "it could be anything" theme . . . for years I suspected that coffee affected my blood-sugar levels, but I could never pin down this theory. I like a black coffee (no sugar) or two in the evenings, and while it was not an obvious relationship, there often seemed to be a connection between more coffees in the evening, and higher blood-sugar levels the next morning. After I bought a water-filter for my kitchen, this relationship between evening coffees and morning highs was completely severed. I now understand that there is something, no idea what, in the local tap-water (at my home, but not at my workplace) that has an effect on me . . . an additional water-filter seemed to fix that.
**
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12537988
This is just one of dozens of studies/articles that will come up if you search "magnesium insulin".
