Hospitality and diabetes

[hawkes403]

Does anyone else work within the hospitality industry here? Mainly pub/ restaurants. I am a chef/kitchen manager and can find it very hard to manage my type 1 on a daily basis.

This is due to long 8-15 hour shifts, varied days off, inconsistent breaks which leads to inconsistent meals and not being able to pre-empt what food I'll be having and when to inject.

Just wondering if anyone else has had the same problem, and has found a good way to manage their sugar levels consistently.

Many thanks!

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[noblehead]

The member @Gaz-M works as chef (or did do) and has type 1, hopefully by tagging him he'll reply to your thread. Good luck.

 

[Gaz-M]

Yes still chefing it @noblehead, currently working at the Uni up here.

It's a fine balance and hard to keep right alot of the time, but as soon as I can grab a minute I go round to the staffroom and test my BS. I start at 6.45am and make sure I test at 8.30-9am then again at 11am before the other chef has his break (the unit manager at the Uni is a lad I trained to cook 25 years back so he knows what I need to do and this helps alot TBH), I try take my break at 12.30 and test again (most of the time I don't eat meals or anything while I am there) and I normally finish at 2.30. I always struggled when I was Kitchen Manager at a city centre pub and just had to try make time to test as much as possible. It is alot easier now I'm on a pump because I just increase/decrease my basal during busy and slow periods at work.

I hope you find a way to manage your BS as I know how hard it is to do so in our line of work

 

[nebraska_beauty]

I was a nurse and had the same problems with early/late shift crossovers meaning sometimes I was only in the house 7 hours before having to set off again. Also night and day shifts all in one week so my sleep and eating patterns were all over the place. Three days out of each week I had to leave the house by 5.30 am and often had no time to eat till 1pm. In the end i made me so ill I had to leave my job as my employers made no allowances for my needs. I was supposed to promote healthy leifestyles while my job made it impossible for me to manage my own condition. I know its not possible for everyone to leave their job and I wonder if your employers might be better than mine in making allowances for your condition. I find a lot of jobs are totally unsuitable for people with diabetes and the world of work needs to change

 

[jayne30]

Hi
I'm a chef and I find it really hard to manage. I used to have the libre but it's just too expensive.
My employer is really good about it and if I have a hypo and can just go and sort it out. But it's finding the time during a busy service to check my sugars.

 

[Nafu9]

Hi, I'm also a chef, although I've worked in hotels mainly, but same sort of hours. I've found that I had to just go do it, which was hard because as a chef in a busy business you feel like you're letting your part of the team down by taking a couple of minutes to look after yourself. If you're a smoker then that's a perfect time to do a quick sugar check, and if you aren't then doing it when someone else is smoking can work too.
When it comes to service, if you know when your busy times are, then doing a check before it works well, I would useally aim to have my sugars at about 8-9 before service so that I wouldn't need to worry about them during.

If you have issues with your boss, as I did at one job, I found telling them that they could either let me take 2 minutes when I need to or they can ring an ambulance when I collapse, changes their mind!