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First time on a Forum

Bella72

Newbie
Messages
1
Location
Buckinghamshire
Type of diabetes
Type 1
Treatment type
Insulin
I am wondering if anyone out there can help me, I have never consulted a forum before so I really don't know what to say. I was diagnosed type 2 almost 9 years ago and this changed to type 1 about 18 months ago. I try and follow a low carb diet.... some days things are brilliant and other days even if I starve myself and only eat protein I have really high readings 15+

I take novorapid and tresiba. I have just attended a 5 week course at my local hospital and things where going well apart from hypos to now the opposite. One other thing which I do no understand is alcohol I was always advised that alcohol will lower my blood sugars but it always make mine really high the following morning. I was out the other evening and had a fillet steak, salad and sweet potato ( oven cooked) fries and a couple of glasses of wine...this morning I wake up at 16. I have taken a correction dose and now just waiting to see what will happen. I am getting myself very very stressed, depressed and tearful and just do not know who to turn too and feel consumed with everything.. I have tried speaking to the nurses but a lot of the time unless you get the same one their opinion changes and I don't know who to believe anymore. Can a point come whereby insulin simply does not work any more as I am beginning to feel like this. Thank you and any help, advice or guidance would be very much appreciated
 
Hi @Bella72

If you are only eating protein then that's probably what is raising your BG. You only need a certain amount per day and the excess will be converted to glucose. If you are trying to avoid carbs then fat would be a better energy source as it has minimal effect on BGs.
 
Hi @Bella72 Welcome to the forum

Firstly well done on getting yourself onto this course and educating yourself, however please don't feel defeated, it's easy to feel this way simply because the meter isn't giving you the result you are hoping for. In whatever reading you get there is always a reason behind it so see it as further education in learning how to achieve the result you want. If you get repeated results after taking insulin then change your cartridge or check your injection site for lumps, however as I too enjoy a steak and a few glasses of wine I too understand that next morning I also get the same results as you.

Eating out can be a bit of a minefield, so in respects mentally I have to just give myself a night off and accept the following morning it may not be the result I want, this is normally based on a few things.. The time I eat, generally I try to eat early in the evening, so by the time I go to bed I have a result minus quick acting that I can then correct for, so 2-3 hours after eating. However when I eat out I am eating late at night and over a few hours so get to bed late too, what is misleading at this point is that if I am say at 8.9mmol/l then i'll only take a small correction, however a steak would normally mean slow transit in digestion as well as fat from other foods, which means I am still absorbing glucose from my food when I am asleep so then I too can wake up high. I don't tend to worry about a couple of glasses of wine as I don't bolus for alcohol and as long as I eat carbs then I am covered from going low. However with eating out you don't know how the food has been prepared, how much fat has been used and also my carb estimation can be a rough calculation so the final result can be a difficult one to predict. What I always do when I eat out is judge from the menu what the potential carbs are and so when I place the order I will take say 50% of my bolus, then when my food arrives and I can see the plate portion I take the extra bolus.

Eating out really should be considered relaxation time, getting it as near to right as possible is obviously a successful night for a type 1 diabetic, however accepting that sometimes this may not work shouldn't ruin your night out, just try to learn from it or accept that once in a while it may not work
 
Thanks @robert72 - I should of also added it depends on the size of the steak too ! As I have to inject for protein too, if you're eating low carb then you need to consider a bolus for the steak also
 
Hi All
I am diabetic 27 years and this is the first time I have heard of taking bolus for protein, this has never been mentioned to me through all the meetings with health professionals and the local NHS 'Buddie' Group I attended for Carb counting, Wow.... could you give me some information on this?
Thanks a million.
 
hi @Soplewis12

You only need to consider it if you are eating larger amounts of protein. It happens through a process called gluconeogenesis and it's a much slower rise than seen from carbs, so you may need to split-bolus for it. Also much more noticeable if you are low-carbing.
 


Hi!

I'm a type 1 diabetic and I was diagnosed 5 yeara ago! I'm a student so alcohol is a good friend of mine When we go out, I eat a good meal around 2 hours before goinb out, so that I have plenty of time to check levels before going out. What kinds of drinks do you like? There are a lot of drinks that are better than other for diabetics like Desperados. The best ones that contain low carbs. I find that wine doesn't agree with me so I never drink it.

Every night out I will always have mixed drink for example have lemonade with something to keep my levels balanced and avoid having a hypo. I never drink drinks such as WKD and VS because they are full of sugar and drives me crazy .

I find that doing a bit of excersise helps with keeping levels moderate. Even if you start off doing 30 minutes a day it does make a difference!

Hope this helps
 
I find that I have to take some short acting insulin for pretty much anything I'm eating, possibly not necessary for pure fat but who really wants to eat that?

Once thing that happens when we eat is that the liver dumps glucose in anticipation of our normal insulin response, but as we are diabetics the normal insulin response does not occur and instead we get the rather plodding imprecise version that we inject.

So, if I just ate a steak and salad I'd still bolus for it, just not very much.

@Bella72 - you should not be starving yourself on a low carb diet; the idea is that you replace the carbs with fat and protein which will make you feel full up.

For your meal out you had a fillet steak, salad and sweet potato fries. Sweet potato has about 20g/100g of carbs so that meal would be around 30 carbohydrates. Did you bolus for that amount?

Fat doesn't matter; ignore it for the moment. It's the hardest thing to get your head around when eating like this as it runs contrary to everything we've been told, but it's true. Protein matters a bit, but not much you can bolus for it by using more a finger in the air guess and take a small amount for the steak. As always it's the carbs that need to be addressed.

People have different responses to wine; I personally don't notice any affect on my blood sugar from red or white wine, but would not drink sweet wines.

The first thing to do when you think you are running high is to test your basal doses. Have a search on here for 'basal test' and you'll get lots of information.

If you cut out carbs and cut out fat you won't be able to continue with a low-carb diet; it's really a low carb, moderate fat and moderate protein diet. Just the low-carb view of 'moderate fat' is quite different to a dietician's view!

Good luck

Dillinger
 
Thanks Robert72 - I think I should be OK, relatively speaking the most protein I would eat would be a chicken breast in a meal. I don't eat much red meat and don't low carb.
 

Welcome @Bella72 It must have been hard to get your head round the change of diagnosis, but sadly it's not that uncommon.

Most Type 1s eat moderate low carb and adjust their insulin to match what they eat. The key to control is insulin more than diet for Type 1 (unless your diet is very poor or contains excessive carbs). from my experience, most problems people have can be vastly improved by tweaking their insulin doses and/or timings.

I highly recommend the book Think Like A Pancreas. It's really helpful and I still refer to,it even though I've had Type 1 more than 20 years.

You mention you did a course. Was that DAFNE?

To improve your control, you could consider doing a basal test as getting your basal dose right is the foundation of good control. Then if that's ok, you can move on to looking at your meal time boluses - both your insulin to carb ratios and your injection timings. Many Type 1s find they need different ratios for breakfast, lunch and evening meal, so,that might be something to consider.
 
Hi Bella72,

There realy isn't much I can add to what's already been said. However. With regards to alcohol? What it does is keep the liver busy & retards it from dumping glycogen into the blood? So if you have a low? (Apart from the possibility of the effects of alcohol "masking" hypoglycemia.) you could drop faster than if sober...

Just keep asking the questions. You'll soon pick it up!
 
Hi and welcome. It sounds like you are taking the right approach overall. I can only suggest checking that your Basal is well balanced and that you are getting the carb-counting roughly right. As others have said, most of us probably don't carb-count protein or fats but they do have small effect. Alcohol varies and can increase or decrease blood sugar a bit but can result in hypos if the liver is busy dumping it. I assume your BMI is reasonable?
 
Just read thru all the responses - I think everyone has just about covered what I was going to say. To add - I signed up on the forums this past summer somewhat skeptical that I would learn anything having lived with type 1 for a long time but I'm very impressed with the knowledge and diverse range of experiences expressed in these forums. Too bad I didn't sign up sooner. It's also a reminder that we're not alone in our diabetes management challenges ...
 
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