The Freestyle Libre affect

[CherryAA]

The "DP" is pretty vague IMO, and not very well founded in physiology as a separate "phenomenon". Yeah, I've seen people refer to "liver dumping" and stuff. But in the end it's a higher than desired fasting AM blood sugar. And there usually a reason for it. To be honest I sort of missed the whole topic until getting on this forum recently.

For me its very clearly not " fasting " per se - I have always sunderstood the fasting number to be the one closest to what your body is at rest at - my actual fasting numberis somewhere around 4.5 to 5.5 However something happens quite late in the morning after an entire night of perfectly acceptable numbers .
before I got the libre I was thinking my blood sugar was about 7- 9 since dinner the previous night up to about 1 pm the following day ie upto 16 hours a day

I now know I am actually in the 4- 6 range for about 12 hours of that. As such the libre has made me a lot happier with my progress overall.

 

[New2T1D]

It's a variation on the theme, called "foot on floor".

I'm lucky enough to not get true dp, those crazy unexplained 3am to 7am rises, but I can guarantee like clockwork that on most work days, as soon as I get up and just move around a bit, then over a period of 30 mins to 60 mins, I'll go up by 3 or 5 or more.

I knew that already to an extent from bg testing, but libre has let me watch it more carefully, and let me fine tune it a lot so that I'll get a sense of whether fof is kicking in, and, if so, how hard, and then I can generally pin it with, for me, 2 units or so.

Just makes things a lot tidier for when I come up for lunch - that 3 to 5 unpinned rise would easily take me well out of range, but pinning it keeps me in range coming up for lunch so I'm not having to do corrections at lunch - I've already corrected before it's happened by not letting the fof get too mad by doing the 2u by predicting from past experience and libre corroboration that fof is likely to happen, so have stopped it.

That's just how it works for me, not at all suggesting the same will be the case for your kid, but just something to think about.

The basis of fof is probably just that it makes sense from our genes from caveman days for our bodies to have more sugar kicking around as soon as we get up, but in a modern T1 context when we're not fighting sabre tooth tigers that often, maybe not so much. Still might be useful getting a place on the tram or tube, though...

Thanks for this. I need to learn as much as I can and so does he. I guess I'll have to watch out for bigger highs with him for the day the honeymoon truly ends. Hopefully not for a long time though. (I live in hope a lot these days.) I know you're supposed to be 7 or less when you eat ideally. Are you actually not supposed to eat if you're higher? What if you choose to eat a main course for which you bolus and then decide you want to eat something else, but you've gone up beyond 7 from the food you've just eaten? Should you just not do it?

Libre is brilliant. You can see the effects that different foods have and learn to adjust insulin differently too. For pizza (fave food) my son does a series of split injections, to avoid serious highs - and it appears to work. Certainly we seem to avoid the truly scary numbers that have happened in the past. He also seems to need about 150% as much insulin as for any other food - but then he does otherwise eat quite healthily. This is what we've learned to do from the Libre data.