Type 1's who have maintained their weight- looking for tips and hope

[Chris_Cousins_]

His approach is not only diet based but exercised based. The two go together , one does not work alone.
Daily exercising keeps me slim. Exercising in cold weather really makes me lose weight , due to the brown fat cells being 'activated' , which in turn burn calories like an oven.

I agree - I lost 3kg in 6 months because I started walking down the stairs at the office twice a day. I only work on the 6th floor and found I was reaching the ground floor faster than the lift anyway, half the time.

However I still suffer alarming drops in blood sugar as a result of exercise - e.g. it might be 9 or 10, I go and do an hour's gentle exercise and it will drop to between 2 and 3. I manage this by reducing the basal on my pump to 75% for the hour but it's a shock when I forget!

If you change your exercise regime make sure you have a blood test meter and glucose to hand!!

 

[jackois]

That's an interesting point by Spiker.

I didn't know about the reason for the initial dose rates set by the hospital diabetic team when I was first diagnosed and think I was probably lucky that they were switched on enough to encourage me to dose to my BS results rather than aim for a set amount of insulin and eat to that... A mixture of a switched on medical team (luckily doctor, hospital, diabetes nurse & dietician all singing the same hymn) and everything I learned from lurking around forums, reading (Bernstein et all)and good common sense has got to a stable position with both medication & weight in six months.

Type one is one of the best problems for allowing the patient to run his or her own medical care, so get to it, study like mad and take charge for your self.

 

[clarehayward]

I Put on a lot of weight and kept in on for some years, this last year or 2 ive started carb counting and doing a low carb diet and reducing my insulin as far as i can go while still maintain control and have now lost close to 3 stone with just that and nothing else.

wow! Nice going. I am picking up lots of tips and am trying this method out! As I was diagnosed way back in 1982 I am from the "eat to feed the insulin" regime and since have been advised the insulin always works better when taken with some carbs so have consequently always been a bit paranoid about "I must eat some carbs/have some bread/rice/pasta, anything with this meal" and I think that's continuing to add to my weight gain and even in 3 days of reducing carbs, I'm AMAZED to see how much insulin was left in my cartridge when I came to change my pump than I've normally used. If this insulin reduction helps stop putting on weight as well as the carb reduction, then I'm really hoping I can do something about the weight. Good tips here, thanks guys