Addicted to insulin...help me quit!

Type 1 and LADA
21

I recently discovered the Ketogenic Diet and wonder why it isn’t more popular with the rampant increase in Diabetes. This will sound odd but hear me out: At a very basic level humans are fuel cells, we take in food, water & oxygen and use them to build and power human tissue as well as make a small amount of electricity.

We do that in one of two ways: If you aren’t familiar our bodies have 2 metabolic pathways to make energy, we either burn glucose or we burn fat. Since all we ever have circulating in our blood is about teaspoon of glucose (5g) and most modern meals have much more than 5 g of carbs our body needs to do something with that excess.

Insulin is our bodies answer, it is the primary vehicle we use to store or partition any excess carbs. That is the ones we don’t burn off by our normal metabolic needs like breathing, heartbeat, muscle contraction, thinking etc get stored as fat via insulin. So believe it or not your son can exist with very little carbs (or insulin) if you approach the fuel you put into your little fuel cell/son differently.

Basically instead of bolusing your insulin, you bolus your carbs at each meal to match what your body can handle while using Fat to make up for any missing energy needs.

I can say it is a foreign way of eating but a luxuriant and delicious one, contrary to popular belief you don’t need to live on buttered bacon. An added bonus is that it improves most other cardiovascular blood markers like triglycerides and cholesterol along with stabilizing blood sugars…

I am not affiliated with any website or service but do recommend you check out either tasteaholics.com, healthfulpursuit.com or myketokitchen as some great primers to educate yourself. mariamindbodyhealth.com is another good one in that she is a “busy mom with 2 young children” on this program. Using it I have successfully brought my A1c down to below 6 now (it was 12.2 in early April). I am lucky in that my body still makes a tiny bit of insulin so with this new dietary approach I don’t even need to inject at all…

Best of luck to you, feel free to message me if you’d like to dive deeper on this.

22

Yes, I’m familiar with the low-carb, keto approach; we don’t think it is a good fit for our son. My kid is two and I don’t want him to be shorter than he otherwise would be. There’s a reason why Inuit are much shorter than other people; keto diets may keep people healthy but they do seem to limit growth.
Also, every time we have restricted carbs, he develops ketones, his blood sugar control gets worse and his insulin usage actually increases. It seems counterintuitive, but his body launches such an extreme rise in insulin resistance that it seems to cancel out any benefit of eating fewer carbs. We’ve found much better success simply increasing his basal dosage and lowering how much we bolus for meals, then letting him eat carbs freely.

23

Also, my son is currently running an A1C of 6.0 without any carb-restriction.

24

my guess only…the problem with blurring the distinction between basal and bolus rates would be the same as a mixed insulin, you eat to the dose, it’ may be a problem if he’s off his food for the day. so the amount of food and timing becomes more important. unless the school can adjust the pump. especially if a toddler is over 80g of carb a day. which is about 160-200 for an adult.

25

thanks @jack16, in our case the blurring of basal/bolus is a little less relevant because he’s running openAPS. So that means his insulin is being automatically given in tiny doses that are constantly adjusted based on his blood sugar numbers, meaning there’s some latitude in essentially adjusting what the pump does if he winds up eating less. But I agree that it’ snot great to have to eat to match the insulin.

26

right, thanks for that