• Guest - w'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the 2026 Survey »

Reducing diet and exercise changing insulin needs

T

TomScot

Newbie
Messages
2
Type of diabetes
Type 1
Treatment type
Insulin
Just throwing this out there for comments/testimony. I'm a 52 year old T1 weighing 150lbs and I've been doing a little gym work over the winter to stay fit for skiing.

I've recently started a reducing diet and upped the cardio part of my exercise routine to include interval training with a view to losing some weight, which over two weeks looks like it's going to plan since I've lost a couple of pounds.

However I'm also seeing a change in my requirements for insulin. I work using DAFNE and my bolus Humalog is usually 2 units for 10g of carbs, whilst my basal is 18 units of Lantus.

I'm now down to 16 units of Lantus, having had some lows overnight and my 2 for 10 requirement seems to be declining.

I'm quite happy to self administer and if I'm concerned then I'll contact the specialist nursing team at my local clinic, but I just wondered if anyone had experience of this type of thing for comparison purposes.
 
Well exercise makes us more sensitive to the insulin we inject so your ratio's will change now your active, also weight loss helps with insulin resistance so over time your needs will become less.

Well done and I hope you continue to make good progress Tom :)
 
Entirely expected - keep in mind that if you stop (injury/illness etc) for a few days or more you may see your levels and insulin needs go back up. Also, how do you find your levels with the interval training? I had to inject a unit or two during interval training on the track as it sends your BG levels up.
 
Scardoc said:
Entirely expected - keep in mind that if you stop (injury/illness etc) for a few days or more you may see your levels and insulin needs go back up. Also, how do you find your levels with the interval training? I had to inject a unit or two during interval training on the track as it sends your BG levels up.
Click to expand...

I'm doing interval, cardio (effectively a warm down), and strength all in the same session, so I'm not seeing a difference. I did see my BG go down in my last session after staying on the bike for a little bit longer than normal. The stuff about glucose and glycogen is pretty hard to grasp as well. I think I need to do more reading up on that, now that I'm looking at taking this a bit more seriously.
 
The best thing you can do is simply to test as often as possible before, during and after and look for the patterns. If I stopped running now then in a weeks time I would almost certainly have to increase my long lasting insulin by a couple of units and would be needing more fast acting. The intensity of the exercise is probably most important. If I run an hour gently then my levels will drop steadily, anything over that and they'll start to drop to drop sharply. Short burst of interval training and they rise quickly.
 
Back
Top