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How do you estimate carbs?

Milos

Milos

Newbie
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4
Location
Zurich
Type of diabetes
Family member
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Other
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Getting up early
My girlfriend got diagnosed Type 1 Diabetes about four years ago. One of the issues she struggled with, was estimating carbs for defining insulin bolus (e.g. in restaurants). How did you learn to manage it?

We came up with some ideas on how people could get better on learning about the impact of certain foods on their glucose. Imagine you are having your meal in front of you. You input your carb estimate and compare with the one from an app. Or you eat the same pizza you had a few weeks ago but cant remember if the bolus insulin was appropriate but you could easily look it up by taking a picture.

Happy to hear your feedback, inputs and experiences.

Have a great weekend
 
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Easiest way i learnt to estimate carbs was based on my hand - e.g. RIce portion the size of my palm is x amount of carbs. It's not perfect but works well enough when eating out. I know what a fistful of chips is and it means I can bolus without knowing 100% what is in the food!
 
Hi @Milos . A lot of T1's use the term " guesstimate ". Basically, without any source of information you look at the meal in front of you, decide what parts of the meal you need to bolus for and visually decide how many carbs to inject for. With practice you can become very good at it.
For example. If I go out for a traditional Sunday lunch at just about any pub/ restaurant I feel confident I'm going to be dealing with between 50/60 g carbs, it's only a guess, but it's going to be close.
The trick then is to inject slightly less insulin, for example, I think the meal looks like 50 g carbs I'll inject for 40 g carbs.
The most important part follows around 2 hrs later, I check my sugars and depending on my sugar levels I'll either have a correction dose or not. I shouldn't be low at this time so the need to eat more food isn't a problem.
Failing this technology provides some great apps and advice as @Diakat has pointed out.
Happy dining.
 
If she hasn't already, I'd really recommend going on a DAFNE course. It helped looking at lots of things including calculating insulin doses and foods. My course included going out for lunch and guessing the carbs and then checking bloods later on to see if you were on the right track or not.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Diabetes.co.uk Forum mobile app
 
Thanks a lot for the recommendations and help. Enjoy sunday dinner :)
 
Restaurants are the hardest! What i have been doing is this - Start going only to chain restaurants for a bit, ones that have nutritional information available, make sure you always look this when you order and start following it. After a while you start to get to know the carb amounts associated with those 'chain' meals, so when you happen to visit a place with information available you can use the values the chain places use (adjust up or down based on portion sizes, or if they have sweeter sauces and stuff).

After long enough you start to get better and better at estimating, and whenever you are in doubt just do your best to cut back on the carbs (salad instead of fries, don't have any free bread, stop ordering nachos, etc)

My second way is this - Go to whatever place you want to master, order whatever you want and take it home with a bottle of regular coke. Do you best at estimating the carbs through some research online or apps, or whatever else - write it down, wait 15-20min, and then eat your meal. After an hour test and give insulin if you need to but write that down as well - continue this testing and adjusting until youre stable. If you over shot, measure out some coke and drink it, but write down how many grams of carbs it was.

At the end of this adventure you should have 1) your initial estimate, 2) any corrections (up or down) that you had to give and they amount of carbs you estimated them to be. Add/subtract these numbers and you should have a fairly good idea of the amount of carbs in the meal you ate. WRITE THAT DOWN. Next time when you eat you that meal from that place - use that amount of carbs. If you do this for all your fav meals you will get really good ideas of how many grams of carbs are in each, and this exercise will give you a really good skill for being able to better estimate while out to dinner for other meals.

It sounds like a lot, but once you do it 2-3 times, you will really have a handle and will probably be able to guess really closely the first time while eating out.
 
Very helpful answer! Much appreciated :)

Diamattic said:
Restaurants are the hardest! What i have been doing is this - Start going only to chain restaurants for a bit, ones that have nutritional information available, make sure you always look this when you order and start following it. After a while you start to get to know the carb amounts associated with those 'chain' meals, so when you happen to visit a place with information available you can use the values the chain places use (adjust up or down based on portion sizes, or if they have sweeter sauces and stuff).

After long enough you start to get better and better at estimating, and whenever you are in doubt just do your best to cut back on the carbs (salad instead of fries, don't have any free bread, stop ordering nachos, etc)

My second way is this - Go to whatever place you want to master, order whatever you want and take it home with a bottle of regular coke. Do you best at estimating the carbs through some research online or apps, or whatever else - write it down, wait 15-20min, and then eat your meal. After an hour test and give insulin if you need to but write that down as well - continue this testing and adjusting until youre stable. If you over shot, measure out some coke and drink it, but write down how many grams of carbs it was.

At the end of this adventure you should have 1) your initial estimate, 2) any corrections (up or down) that you had to give and they amount of carbs you estimated them to be. Add/subtract these numbers and you should have a fairly good idea of the amount of carbs in the meal you ate. WRITE THAT DOWN. Next time when you eat you that meal from that place - use that amount of carbs. If you do this for all your fav meals you will get really good ideas of how many grams of carbs are in each, and this exercise will give you a really good skill for being able to better estimate while out to dinner for other meals.

It sounds like a lot, but once you do it 2-3 times, you will really have a handle and will probably be able to guess really closely the first time while eating out.
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