Weight Loss Help!

Have you reduced the amount of carbohydrate in your diet?
Nothing else has ever worked for me, diabetic or not.
Carbs are stashed away as fat.

Hi Becky

I am also type 1 and on a pump and weight stable though naturally I gain fat and muscle pretty easily.
My blood sugars aren't perfect either btw.
I am a PT too but do tell my clients that they will need to change their diet to see results!
Here are some possibilities:
1) you are eating too many carbohydrates and your body is using the insulin you inject to turn carbs into fat. This is what insulin does. It also stops fat that is trapped in your fat cells from being released.
2) You are double D meaning insulin resistant - this would show up as needing to take increasing amounts of insulin (basal rate increase and especially a carb: bolus ratio that's going up).
3) You snack too often. Even if those snacks are 'healthy' e.g. a banana or oat cakes they still require insulin to cover them and can slow weight loss
4) Over treatment of hypos? Or prevention of hypos by pre exercise snacking etc.
5) Is there an emotional element? That's very common in type 1s who have to control themselves so much and are forbidden certain foods. Do you tend to binge on certain things or eat when not hungry?
6) Where are you at hormonally?
Hope that helps and you're welcome to message me privately if you want to discuss more.

Bexter1111 said:

Hi guys,

I guess Im here because I really just need help.

I am a type 1 diabetic with a pump for the last 18 months. I love the pump it is easier to use and stuff, but I think I am kinda blaming that for me being stuck at the same weight. Ive been diabetic for 21 years.

The start of the year, I made it my mission to lose some weight, started the gym, got a personal trainer, ate better. Nothing has changed!!! Im at the end of my tether now, so incredibly frustrated that I am struggling to lose even a lbs! I either put on or stay the same every week.

My sugars arent stable and im wondering if that has anything to do with it.

If anyone has any kind of tip, knowledge, absolutely anything, i would be extremely grateful! Im so close to sacking it all off as I felt better before I made all these changes!

Thanks In Advance

Becky

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Hi Becky
I'm T1 eleven years.
On a Cellnovo pump... Its excellent.
CV training works for me.
I'm a cyclist. Road, track and trails.
I train 5 days per week... 3 CV sessions & 2 weights. CV usually 1 hour interval profile on bike, Versaclimber or Xtrainer. HIT towards end of sessions to avoid post exercise hypos.
Low carbo diet.
Good results so far.
Ross

Bexter1111 said:

Hi Ross,

How do you keep your sugars stable during training? I love spin but tend to drop whenever I do, I try tweak my basal to like 50% for 3 hours before during and after the class, but ive not quite perfected it yet!

And if you do hypo, what sort of stuff do you use to correct it?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Becky
I use a staged reduction prior to training. Then 0.2 units per hour during workout. Post workout glycaemic response will depend on type of exercise so be careful. Still use Lucozade for hypos.
Check out TORQ website for info related to exercise/nutrition.
Ross

Bexter1111 said:

Hi guys,

I guess Im here because I really just need help.

I am a type 1 diabetic with a pump for the last 18 months. I love the pump it is easier to use and stuff, but I think I am kinda blaming that for me being stuck at the same weight. Ive been diabetic for 21 years.

The start of the year, I made it my mission to lose some weight, started the gym, got a personal trainer, ate better. Nothing has changed!!! Im at the end of my tether now, so incredibly frustrated that I am struggling to lose even a lbs! I either put on or stay the same every week.

My sugars arent stable and im wondering if that has anything to do with it.

If anyone has any kind of tip, knowledge, absolutely anything, i would be extremely grateful! Im so close to sacking it all off as I felt better before I made all these changes!

Thanks In Advance

Becky

Click to expand...

I'm finding different injected insulin's have a different affect on me.... and their ability to protect against hypos. New ones especially. Toujeo300 is very anti hypo which often bounces back from near hypos. No matter how much as a severe insulin resistant diabetic I take. Only the novarapid reduces my bgs even to lose weight. Toujeo basal keeps levels steady.
I only lose weight when my bgs are good and steady.

Bexter1111 said:

Thank you Nicole. Some of your points I probably don't relate to, like the snacking or the insulin resistance ones, but maybe I'm having too many carbs with meals! I think you've have me think abouts things I hadn't thought about. Mayb cutting carbs to training day so! Small portion of them

Plus point number 4 I'm terrible for. Over correcting hypos. After 21 years you would think I would have cracked it. But I've definitely not! Went through an awful denial stage and now I'm trying to get back on track!

What do you do with your insulin whilst training with your pump? And also what do you recommend as a hypo treatment? I'm on cans of Coke at the moment but I know this isn't ideal!

Sorry for 101 questions!

Click to expand...

Hi again!
To answer your questions:
I check my BG before training. If its 5 or below I remove my pump for aerobic exercise. If it is above 12 I do not correct. If it is above 15 I'd halve the correction dose because I need some insulin to access that excess glucose.
For weights/resistance it is tricky because it raises my bgs but it is very counter intuitive to take insulin prior to training so I tend to correct it afterwards.

Re hypos, I get hardly any on a pump and low carb just because the overdosing errors are a lot smaller than on a higher carb diet with MDI (pumps also use insulin more efficiently). Anyway its a swig of lucosade by preference (100ml) and unplug the pump (hopefully remember to re-plug it!). Coke is full of sugar but only half of that sugar is actual glucose and the rest is fructose which will not raise your blood sugar hence you'd need to neck more of it to get the same effect. If you are on jabs then you may need more carb after that because the active insulin will likely be on board for 4 hours if the cause of the bypo was an insulin overdoes versus a bout of exercise!
Portion size for carbs when trying to lose weight - cupped handful of rice or pasta or potatoes or a bread roll might be a good place to start but don't forget to fill up on protein and fat. Hope that makes sense?

I'm a type 1 diabetic, have been for 17 years now. Like you I decided I wanted to get into better shape and improve my diabetes further, I was probably what they call skinny fat (I looked thin in clothes but had belly fat which was clear without). I was probably around 20-22% body fat around 7 weeks ago, weighing 84kg I decided to change.

First and foremost thing is to get your blood glucose levels under control, its paramount, I studied quite a bit into the effects of high/low levels; but in summary low levels cause you to have hypos, correcting these hypos makes you eat unnecessary calories (believe me, you can easily pile these on when having a hypo), on the other hand high glucose levels cause muscle break down (main source of glucose usage). Also when insulin is present, the body is using glucose for the muscles etc, this prevents usage of fat and therefore fat loss, so you want to minimize the amount and frequency of insulin usage (i.e low carbs, less meals).

It's the old saying, of less calories in than out. You must reduce the amount of calories you eat, but also do exercise to burn calories and maintain a deficit. I still eat what I always have, but in smaller portion sizes and its worked well. I do HIIT followed by weight training at the gym 6/7 days a week over the past 7 weeks. I am now at ~76.5kg, so that's ~16 pounds of weight loss, I think that's pretty good and sustainable for me. I rarely snack, and don't really miss it either.

One thing however was the frequency of hypos increased as I started exercising more; from my understanding this was not only to do with the exercise itself dropping glucose levels, but my body becoming more insulin sensitive, I now require half the insulin for carbs as I did before. I also dropped my basal insulin to minimize hypos. One thing to understand however is that if you only do strength training this can increase glucose levels, so depends on type of exercise. I usually go to the gym with a slightly elevated level or take a bottle of lucozade sport to maintain my levels.

If you maintain a good level of glucose control, watch how much you eat and do frequent exercise to maintain a calorific deficit I guarantee you will see results. But be consistent, don't make such drastic changes that you can't maintain them!

If you want to know anything else, I will try and help best I can, but please don't give up. Diabetes is nothing but a way of manually administering insulin (yes it can be difficult) but it should not stop you from doing what everyone else does.