I went out to a much looked forwards to friends lunch party yesterday. There were 10 of us there and the host had gone to a lot of trouble. I was determined to enjoy and not worry. Took an insulin guess, ate lots of yummy delights, plus 3 large glasses of wine and a gin and tonic. Took a slight correction 2 hours later. In actuality, my levels were better than the previous 2 weeks of low carbing, food weighing, restricting myself trying for perfection. The CGM showed hours of a steady line with few peaks. Makes you think.
Continued in that vein today with pastry entombed salmon, more red wine, a chocolate eclair and an Ameretto! The CGM is still steady as she goes.
Good points, well made, Becca.
One of the things which I learned early on was that an important aspect of T1 wasn't avoiding carbs as such, it was managing the rate at which they were absorbed.
That's a fairly basic point of T1 management which is often missed.
I'd be slow to eat a bit of dark Belgian chocolate cheesecake on an empty stomach, but have it at the end of a meal of, say, Baxter's Scotch Broth, bit of toast spread with goat milk butter for dipping, then a main of grilled lamb chops and steamed veg, then the cheesecake, the amalgam of fats, proteins, complex and simple carbs combine to buffer the absorption of simple carbs, so it's relatively easy to pre-bolus a bit for the fast absorption of the toast, the barley in the broth is slow, like oatcakes, so will smooth things out, and maybe a 2u addition just before the cheesecake for it's simpler carbs, even though it's fairly fatty anyway which'll aid in slowing down absorption. Net result: not much of a drama.
Yet, low carbers will just see a massive 80g (30 soup, 10 toast, 40 cheesecake) and call it a nightmare, without appreciating the interplay with the fats, longer chain carbs and some sensible bolusing.
Like you, I've had lots of remarkably steady cgm traces after meals like that. Of course, it might just be that our sensors are broken!
