New to this

[Pink]

Hi all, my name is Priyanka nickname pink and I'm new to chatting with other diabetics about the conditon and am so pleased that I've found a forum lke this!

I was diagnosed when I was 5 and now am 24, I would say that the last couple of years have probably the most challenging regarding my diabetes. I've never really until now had a problem with control and diet but then I went to University and obviously my life style changed.

Coming out of university I began to feel that my diabetes had taken over, I no longer had control, I've put on alot of weight and my hypo sensations have decreased quite scaringly. Needless to say I felt uneducated about my condition, out of touch with doctors and the nhs's changes in the way that diabetic patients were managed and so because of all that am starting from scratch. Now while I was at uni I heard about dafne, so I wanted to get on to a programme but to my local consultants insistance I am going to be started a cause this wednesday called the DIP course which is meant to be the same thing. (Carbohydrate counting)

I was hoping for some advice about the course and any recommended literature. I also wanted to find out if anybody could recommend an exercise and diet plan for myself to lose weight. I've noticed how people have spoken about a very low carb diet but for me until I complete this course I cnt even imagine eating fewer carbs as I was always taught throughout peadiatrics to eat carbs with every meal.

Also are there any other type 1s my age who are feeling lost, I just feel that so much has changed to the way diabetes is cared for now and just feel out of the loop, I also feel that its taken over my life as I'm no where close to where I want to be in evey aspect of my life because this is holding me back.

It's taken me almost a year just to get on this course as I've been sent from one person to another and 'm just frustrated and want to get the control back, get my body and confidence back so I can focus on my career and life rather than the diabetes like I used to.

Sorry if this is a bit much but I just needed to vent and really want to meet some people who know what it is to be a type 1 diabetic. xx

 

[jopar]

welcome to the forum Priyanka or can we call by your nickname pink?

I've done the DAFNE course, but to my understanding that most of the carb counting courses that other PCT provide are very similar to it, just less expensive to implement for them...

Here goes, the DIP course will give you the frame work not only to take control, because it will teach could monitoring practices, what you results actually mean and how you can use them to take action to determin the best way to make changes to your insulin to achieve good control..

Here you will find different ways to how some have managed to control there diabetes, as to whether you will need to go to the extreme level of carb restriction will depend on several factors, but once you've started your carb counting course you will be able to look at what works for you...

I hear a lot about how insulin means that you increase you're weight, but some of this is derived from myth, as for some people it is mainly caused by the simple fact that they are having too much insulin so end up having to fed the insulin that is swimming around there bodies with extra carbs and then wonder why they put on weight...

You will learn how to avoid this, and once you start to realise where the carb is hidden in a meal, and how many there really is in that meal, is generally a very good incentive to naturally cut back on portions size etc... So some of the work will be cut out for you...

What I would do now, is get some good monitoring before meals, 2 hours after and before bedtime, along side what you ate for that meal (inculding if you can portions size) any snacks or exercise you have done... This will help when you start your course, and also be helpful to your instructors as well to see what you've been up too..

 

[Pink]

Thanks Jopar, I'm going to carry on logging the way you said I presumed they would definately need that information. I believe I'm suffering from haveing my doses betoo high as I've roughly been on the same dosages for five years and haven't been very successful in reducing my doses and food intake and exercise accordingly that's why I'm really looking forward to the dip course.

Are there any publications I can read to get my head into the course and back into that mentality, I'm having a good read in the forums which I'm finding really helpful but any would love an actual book. Thank you for your advice.

 

[jopar]

Hi Pink

It sounds as though you are really postive and ready to get started...

A couple of books that I can suggest;

Think Like a pancrease - not sure of the author though
Using insulin- john walsh
Bernstien- this one is based around usng a extreme restricted diet of 30g of carbs a day...

I've used the john walsh, using insulin when I used MDI, I now use a insulin pump and have John Walsh's insulin pump book which most pumpers consider to be the pumpers bible..

The think like a pancreas also gets a good review form diabetics

Berstiens book, Even though this is written mainly for T1 diabetes I found that T2's tend to use more, as you're whole control is based around avery restricted carbohydrate diet of no more than 30g of carbs a day... Which for my personal taste is going a bit extreme...

 

[Katharine]

Hi Pink,

You can get a heads up on the DIP course by taking the online course "B-DEC". Just google it and it will come up.

My son Steven has had type one for the last 5 years and is now nearly 17. We hope he will go to college in September.

I would be interested to know what difficulties you encountered being a diabetic student. (Just so I know!) Why do you think the wheels came off? Did you meet other diabetic students? Did you live at home, in halls or with others? Anything you can think of now that would have made life easier for you?

Thanks,

Katharine.

 

[fergus]

It's no myth that insulin has a significant effect on fat metabolism. In fact it is by far the most significant hormone in the human body as far as making, storing or burning fat is concerned.

Certainly, without insulin, the body cannot make or retain fat, regardless of calorie intake. On the other hand, when insulin levels are elevated, not only is fat generated but it becomes far more difficult to access those fat stores and burn them.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few health professionals I've met who seem to have forgotten these things and think of insulin only in terms of glucose metabolism. It's influence on our health is far greater than that.

All the best,

fergus

 

[Pink]

Jopar what's MDI? (sorry my knowledge is appawling)

 

[jopar]

Pink

MDI, is Multi Daily Injections also know as, basal/bolus regime

This is when you use a background aka long ating insulin and a quick acting insulin when you eat, in gerneral 4 injections a day... Before I went on the pump generally had 5 injections because I had my background split into 2 injections am & pm..

 

[alaska]

I had a lot of trouble after coming out of University. School and uni seemed easy compared with starting work. My control wasn't great even at uni I don't think but the doctor's never raised it as an issue. They only told me my HbA1c results recently.

I hadn't given my consultants an honest set of results in years.

I finally made a change and am now writing down my results and beginning to learn to put the blocks together in the right order. When I was put onto multiple injections I was hardly given any idea of how it worked and unfortunately I didn't ask more questions.

I don't think carbs are essential as we get told but I get really scared of some sites which insist you can go insulin free. The people who make those sites seem like freaks. I'm sure the low carb diet will be useful.

I think it's a good idea to keep things simple.

I'd be interested to know what your strengths and not so good aspects are.

1. Is your monitoring good? - do you write all your results down?
2. Do you regularly review how you're doing?
3. Do you test regularly? once or twice each day say?
4. Do you have a fairly regular routine or does every day feel different?
5. Do you have a habit of letting your diabetes take second place or worse?
6. Roughly how good is your carb counting? do you carb count for easy things but still make quite rough guesses here and there?
7. How good is your understanding of how much insulin you need at different times?

Until recently my answers would be:
1. awful. i would never monitor results. they would just be left on my monitor and forgotten
2. no. i would think about things but very little i learned had relevance because every day was so very different
3. ok but sometimes I could go two days without a test and I'd not learn anything from doing the test other than to find out whether I was too high or too low at that moment
4. i had a terrible routine. my sleep was all over the place and i was always rushing around or working long hours and having meals at odd times
5. i'd often let things get in the way of my type 1. i eat then forget to inject far too often.
6. I'd gone on a carb counting course and whilst i knew the theory, applying it felt like too much effort (considering points 1 to 4 above were all over the place this is probably not surprising!)
7. i went for a long time not knowing what the effects of not taking my long term would be. i was told i should always take it but it took 15 years for someone to correctly explain that i must take it otherwise my body will start to poison me.

I've got better recently. I started by straightening out my routine. Getting a living pettern I could rely on. The second thing I did was monitor my levels much better, which included doing more 'intelligent' tests (ie not just testing when i felt particularly low or high).

I didn't do these in the order they are above but now I have a good idea of what my levels are most of the time. It feels really liberating. I hadn't felt so much a slave to diabetes more that my diabetes was a kind of parasite that would always be there and would periodically get in the way and make me ill.

Now it feel a bit more happy about the type 1 being a proper part of me and I'm trying to work with it rather than pull away from or ignore it.

this has got quite long! In summary, I'd say it's good to

1. get the basics right (like the 6 points above)
2. ask questions about anything you don't understand (you could write them down and call your diabetic nurse, ask on forums like these, or ask people like the diabetes uk careline)
3. spend a little time each week to review how your week was - some of the best learning comes from your own experience.
4. when things go wrong - don't give up! I wish i'd told myself this far earlier. when i've tried to get on track in the past I've done really well the first week and then the 2nd week starts going haywire and i gave up. only recently have i seen how short sighted this was. i'm beginning to stick at it for the first time in yonks.

Good luck with getting things back to how they were. Hopefully you'll rediscover almost a kind of passion to stay really on top of things.

All the best
Ed