Daily Food

Hi,

My 6 year old daughter has been t1 for 2 years. We eat pretty low carb, as we find it less stressful and easier on the blood sugars!

Her typical meals would be:
Breakfast- scrambled egg and bacon; cream cheese pancakes with sf syrup or LC granola with Greek yoghurt

Lunch- Lidl protein roll with filling and veg sticks; edamame pasta with tuna; omelette; cold meats, cheese slices, veg sticks, nuts (ie plate of stuff!) or cheese and bacon muffins with veg etc.

Dinner- fat head pizza; chicken dinner (no potatoes); salmon and veg; spaghetti Bol with edamame pasta; chicken curry and cauliflower rice; carbonara with edamame pasta; chicken pie made with fathead pastry; chilli and cauliflower rice etc etc

We basically just swap out the high carb stuff to help with the spikes.

Garymurday87 said:

can someone post me their childs weekly meal plan,

would love to see how jacks compares and maybe get some good ideas of what we can adjust to try and bring his numbers down

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Hi there,

We do not follow a strict plan. We decide on the meal depending on his BS before the meal, whenever we can. If his BS is in the higher range, then he would have something with less carbs, eggs, meat, fish, veggies that are low on carbs.
I tried to introduce some a low carb diet, but it hasn't worked that well. So, instead of taking away the carbs, we only replaced the simple carbs with the complex ones, or those with low glycemic index.
Pumpernickel bread or other whole grain, preferably rye based instead of the regular white bread. (never less than 4 slices of bread per day, or about 100 grams of bread - some 40grams of carbs)
Parboiled rice, for example, though rich in carbs has a little effect on my son's BS.
When my son is desperate for cereals, I do not deny him that pleasure, but I mix his cereals with a handful of chopped nuts.
Fruits, usually as a snack, a banana before physical activity, but mostly berries, green apples or pumpkin. These work well for my son. Hope this would help a little.

Garymurday87 said:

how does your food prep work then? do you test his BS and for example if he is around 5 you know he can have a slighly more carb orientated meal. do you test him again just before his meal incase his isulin requirements are slighly different ?

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Hi,

In the morning he is usually between 5 and 6. Breakfast does not require to much of a preparation really, and to allow him not to go low whilst school, he would have 50-60 grams of wholegrain bread with low carb jam or marmalade or peanut butter and a cup of milk, or again the same amount of bread for a cheese and ham sandwich, or a similar variety, with some greek yoghurt. It could be cereals in the morning, that I mix with chopped nuts, walnuts most often. The snack between breakfast and lunch is either a piece of fruit (green apple most of times) or a granola bar. This gives us plenty of options not to have the same breakfast every other day.
We are blessed to have the grandmoms in the vicinity, so there is always lunch that would be meat or fish , with the addition of some potatoes, beans (preferably red), parboiled rice and plenty of salad (rich in green pepper and cucumber). No bread for lunch to make room for carbs from the veggies.
Again a snack between lunch and dinner, which could be more carbs if there is a physical activity that afternoon. Dinner is similar to breakfast, but if his numbers are higher, we would then opt for eggs and anything that is richer in protein and has less carbs.
We very rarely make corrections. My son is on 2 units of novomix in the morning and 2 in the evening. We might give some novorapid in case his numbers are high before lunch.
A bit of snack before bed only if his BS is six or less.
Keeping the fridge full most the times and the fact that grandmothers cook lunch every day helps quite a lot. No juice. No sweeteners of any kind, we just got into the habit not to have them in our diets.
This kind of approach has worked well for us, keeps his numbers between 4 and 8 most of times. He might have a reading of 10 once a day or once in 2 days. Occasionally he hits a 3-4 day streak of numbers between 4 and 8.

He has a libre, so we know at all times what his numbers are.

Hope this wasn't too boring.

justadad said:

He has a libre,

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Justadad, thought I'd mention that if he's ok with libre, there's a new toy out called a blucon nightrider. It's a small transmitter which is popped on top of the libre sensor with a sticking plaster or armband and then transmits readings every five minutes to a phone app called xDrip+ . The reason it's worth considering is that xDrip+ allows you to calibrate against bg tests to iron out sensor inaccuracies and also gives hypo/hyper alerts. There's also predicted lows - if you enter food and bolus amounts, it makes a reasonable stab at predicting where that'll take you and indicate a predicted low in x minutes. So you're basically getting full on cgm for a one off cost of £100 for the transmitter. Not waterproof so needs to be taken off for showers but not a big deal for the advantages it gives. There's also ways to get it to send results to other phones for remote monitoring but I've not looked into that.

I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and am very happy with it. Great for avoiding night hypos.

Blucon can be bought here:
https://www.ambrosiasys.com/

https://m.facebook.com/ambrosiasys/?locale2=en_GB

xDrip+ can be downloaded here:
https://github.com/NightscoutFoundation/xDrip/releases

Thanks @Scott-C. I did take a look at it, and looks interesting. It basically turns the libre into a proper cgm. Did you get yours from a UK dealer?

justadad said:

Thanks @Scott-C. I did take a look at it, and looks interesting. It basically turns the libre into a proper cgm. Did you get yours from a UK dealer?

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No, I pre-ordered it from their website. It's a very small start-up company which doesn't have distributors.

The guy who set it up used to work for the libre makers, Abbott, and then seems to have seen a niche for himself and set up Ambrosia Systems.

I think the company is well intentioned but you'll maybe gather from the posts on their twitter/facebook that they've been kinda overwhelmed by the logistics of delivering a product worldwide - it seems shambolic (they don't seem to have realised until the last moment that to sell in Europe needs a CE mark!) but, at the end of the day, I got mine.

The company is very definitely a San Francisco start up - head office is a rent-an-office space in Market Street, SF, and the registered office is a suburban house in SF, so there's always a risk in buying from that sort of that set-up: they're well intentioned but good start-ups with the best will in the world fold.

But if you take the risk and get one, I can't fault it. Their in-house app, LinkBluCon, is rubbish, don't bother with it. But pairing it with the much more established and reliable xDrip+ is beautiful. Many dexcommers use it in preference to the official dexcom app.

Again, it's a bit of a leap of faith: xDrip+ is an offshoot from the charity Nightscout which was developed by parents of T1 kids who wanted to keep an eye on them. They trust it.

I trust xDrip+ too. I've been in the T1 game for almost 30 years, so I'm not a fool in this. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and am happy with it.

Below is a screenshot of it waking me up at 4am with an alert set at 4.4, it kicked in when it got a 4.3 reading, bg test read 4.2, then I take 5g, and trotting back up towards 5/6. Nice.

Provided I calibrate a couple of times a day, readings are normally only 0.2 or 0.3 out against bg tests. Dexcommers say that it's much more reliable than libre. Probably is, but only because it's calibrated. Running libre through blucon and xdrip+ allows me to calibrate in the same way as dexcom.

All in all, it's a pretty neat way of getting cgm through libre.