This is not a competition, Jag. I’m speaking just for myself and my experience. My experience is what it is, and yours is what it is. Neither one is wrong or right, nor does it have much to do with how long we’ve been diagnosed. I assume when somebody posts on here they want to hear a variety of different people’s experiences. I’m not offended by differences between us, and I respect your time spent with the condition. My only disagreement is when you say my experience is “inaccurate” or “incorrect”. (because it is not yours).
As for the orange/bread question: I’m not saying that any foodtakes “double or triple” to cover for everyone. We are all different. That is my whole point. I for one do fine with a slice of bread. I haven’t eaten oranges lately. But yes, my experience , is that certain foods do not respond predictably to my usual I:C ratios. So for example, my dinner ratio is 1:18. If I have 36 carbs of just non-starchy vegies chances are the 2 units will cover it fine or even take me a tad low. If I have 36 carbs of rice (which I just looked up is between 2/3 and 1 cup of rice) or cereal, I will without a doubt be high. I’ve tested this out many times. I admit I was just throwing out numbers when I said “double or triple”, my guess is that it would be pretty unpredictable how much I’d need, which is the reason I just don’t eat those things.
Again, this is just myexperience. When you say “a slice of bread takes…” you make it sound I am stating facts…for everyone. I’m not. I’m just saying what is true for me.
I was asking you for your experience. You had said that you could eat things you don’t normally eat “if I doubled or tripled my insulin dose”. I wanted to know if you really meant it - I guess you’re now saying that it would take you more insulin, but you’re not sure how much more. OK, that answers my question.
I don’t think its useful to others for you to claim that some foods take two to three times the amount of insulin to cover as another food with the same number of carbs, unless you have real data to back that up.
Trust me, it isn’t winning a competition to have T1 diabetes, and that was never my point. And although you seem to be quoting me, I NEVER said your experience was “inaccurate” or “incorrect” - please look in my post for either of those words and you won’t find them - so why the quotes?. If anything I was trying to find a reason that your experience was different than mine - it seemed to me that the fact we have different types of diabetes and we have had them for very different lengths of time could be an explanation, and I stand by that belief.
For me a carb is a carb is a carb is a carb. Complex carbs spike my BG as much as a similar amount of simple carbs. A whole wheat bagel same as a regular bagel same as a donut for goodness sake. Perhaps the complex carbs take a little longer to spike, but I can slow down things by eating some protein and fat.
I appreciate both of your points and this debate however Jag I agree with Zoe, we are all completely different and if you ask most doctors/nutritionists they will tell you that food does break down differently for different people. You are indeed a lucky one not to have faced this problem like the rest of us have, but I dont think you should discount the fact that just because our bodies break it down differently that yours is the correct way. Zoe and I are both women too and it may be a lot easier for you as a male, without the many hornmones we face daily surging through our bodies, to be a lot different than a female’s would. If you find any valid research I would really love to see that to counteract my claim.
I know you were probably not trying to be mean, but you made me and I’m sure Zoe feel also like you look down at us because our bodies dont work the way yours does, and it must be something that we’re doing on purpose? Trust me, I want to live a long andd healthy life like anyone, let alone a Type 1 Diabetic, and I have even more weight on my shoulders with caring for another life now, trust me I am doing everything in my power to keep my numbers down and to bolus and I count, weigh, measure out EVERYTHING!
I do not have LADA, I’m not even sure what that is exactly, I was diagnosed with straighht up Type 1 Diabetes and have a very good health team who treats me for that.
We are all in this together, and we should come together to help each other out, not fight over who is right or wrong.
I have said my piece, please do not come back with a counter argument against anything that I had to say because I am just trying to make peace and I’m really not in the mood to fight about this and its not good for my baby either, thanks
I’ve already written in other discussions about the types of carbs, but I thought that I would add some more info about boluses. When I count carbs, whole grain doesn’t have any less carbs than white flour, I just prefer it because (1) I think it tastes better, (2) it’s healthier, and (3) I see less of a spike at one hour post prandial (about the same by two hour).
I have not had much luck with dual wave boluses. This could be because I didn’t experiment with it enough to get it right, but now I only do it for extremely high fat meals (like pizza). For tomato soup and grilled cheese, I would just do a normal bolus (but we are all different in this). The tomato soup likely has fast acting carbs and the whole grain bread should be a bit slower. That might be why you saw two spikes.
Are you using a scale to count carbs? I switched to this before pregnancy and it helped a lot. Measuring with cups always turned out to be inaccurate. I also don’t trust the packaging of what is in “one serving” or “one slice”, but I figure out from the labels how many carbs would be in 100g of that food (the carb factor) and I calculate the carb by multiplying the weight of the food that I eat by the carb factor (divided by 100). I don’t think that I will ever go back to measuring by cups!
For me, the secret to eating pasta is to NOT cook it over 7 minutes (it should be firm, ‘al dente’ still). My husband likes it overcooked – and I can see the difference in my one hour postprandial number.
Finally, you may also need to adjust your insulin to carb ratios. Before pregnancy, I was using the same one all day and I thought that it was fine and just had a lot of random spikes. My endo helped me to tweak my I:C ratios. As a general rule, if it is a time of the day when you need more BASAL insulin, it is likely that you will need bigger boluses too (meaning that you need a lower insulin to carb ratio). My breakfast ratio is now 1:5, my lunch ratio is 1:8, my dinner ratio is 1:13. I bet that I needed different boluses before pregnancy too, but I wasn’t logging well enough to catch the difference then, but I had a lot more “unexplainable highs” back then.
Maybe as an experiment, try eating the same food for dinner that gives you a spike at lunch and see if you get the same spike.
Hope that you can find more options that work for you!
Without taking sides in any way, can I point out that there is actually no carb that we pancreatically-challenged folks cannot eat. It depends on the portion size. I can eat any carb I want without spiking, but the portion size is Lilliputian. E.g. half a teaspoon of any dessert does not spike me, ditto two bites of a donut. It does not count as a ‘portion’ in the real world - but I can still eat it! In that sense we are different from, for example, nut allergy sufferers, some of whom could have serious repercussions simply from smelling peanuts.
As to how much we can eat without facing a BG storm - ah well that is all very very individual. I get intensely irritated by the ‘party line’ about ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ carbs. All carbs are the same! But Zoe like you I too find that different carbs require different I:C ratios. Quite bizarrely, I have a better ratio for French fries than for rice (all kinds) or wholegrain bread!
You asked me not to respond to your response above, so I won’t. Just let me say that I think Kristen has said exactly what I was trying to say - but she has done a much better job of it! The whole current scheme to best manage diabetes is based on covering carbs (and proteins and fats to a lesser degree) with insulin by counting the number of grams and bolusing based on that number. There are no “magic” foods to this way of thinking - there are foods that cause faster or slower glycemic response (and tricks for managing the speed of response) but a carb is a carb when it comes to injecting insulin based on this approach. This is what is taught in all the books (Pumping insulin, Think like a Pancreas, Type 1 Diabetes, etc.) and I think Kristen has done a wonderful job of summarizing this. These books teach that you can approach diabetes management in a scientific way and I think Kristen’s experience speaks well of the results of this approach.
Sincerely - congratulations and good luck - raising young children will be the best time of your life.
Hey Jag. I haven’t gotten the sense that you’re being competitive here. I think I may understand (but please correct me if I’m wrong) why you are trying to differentiate LADA (which certainly is autoimmune mediated and demonstrates beta cell depletion like other T1s) for purposes of this discussion:
We talk about carbs, insulin (and amylin of late), all the time, but the body is a complex organism – much more complicated than just the CHO and these specific hormones. Hormones of all kinds interact within the body, in ways which we do not yet fully understand. (Stress and sleep can figure into these interactions as well.) Mariah cannot compare herself with men, nor LADA females who are by definition significantly older than she, nor non-pregnant females who are comparable in age, because hormone levels don’t even approach being comparable. It’s most obvious that hormones differ by gender, but we also must bear in mind that they differ across the lifespan.
Most pertinent to this discussion is Mariah, and the (happy!) condition she’s currently in. She’s a very young woman, number one, and she’s going to be experiencing a tremendous rush of hormones, number two. Talking about tripling insulin doses can be troubling to readers here because Mariah may (or, of course, may not!) experience severe first trimester hypos that those who haven’t been in her position wouldn’t understand or know how to handle. She has to be careful, think beyond simple CHO:insulin, and take care. So you take care, girl!
Strangely enough, I can’t process potatoes with their skin, but I can process french fries very well. I can eat only very small portions of rice, measured and counted, but it will inevitably make my BG spike anyway about an hour to two hours later. Therefore, I typically just don’t eat rice or pasta at all. However, candy bars give me no issue whatsoever. I can eat a candy bar and have no spikes at all. But, measuring breakfast cereals, I will spike two hours later and it will stay there for another two hours. Not fun.
I do well with wheat bread and flatbread (?)- the ones that you can wrap veggies and foods in to make a kind of roll sandwich. The thin ones, not the pita ones.
I’ve been eating peanut butter without the breads when I want to give my baby protein and the good fats. I’ve been eating salads wrapped in those thin flatbread wraps. Lots of greens. I did the wheat english muffins, but they taste like butt- so I switched to the white english muffins and inject at consumption, then inject an extra half dosage a half hour later to avoid spiking.
I had 1:4 for breakfast and 1:5 for the rest of the day before pregnancy
Now it’s 1:2 breakfast and 1:5 for the rest of the day. Not much of a difference, I guess. haha.
I need more Levemir at my nighttime dosage to cover my morning numbers, and a lower dosage of Levemir in the morning to cover my evening numbers.
I know that we are not supposed to eat sprouts during pregnancy (nothing related to diabetes). Do you know if sprout bread is OK? I’m wondering is baking the sprouts is enough to reduce the risk.
Yeah. 1 unit per 2g of carbs. That’s right. Can’t wait until the third trimester when it’s supposedly going to double. Then it’ll be like 2 units for 1g of carbs. yay. Gotta love my body.
Ezekial bread is 35.3% net carbs by weight. Most other whole wheat breads are something like 39.2%. I started buying Ezekial bread because its low sodium bread tastes good but I do a little better on it than other whole wheat breads. I’m not a low carber and will only go low carb if I’m eating out or I’ve had a tough day and have a bunch of correction insulin on board as I’m sitting down to a meal.
Snap! I am so happy to find another person out there who can process French fries very well. In fact I have had several hypos after fries and that was how I found out that I get better ‘value for money’ for my bolus insulin when it comes to fries. Ditto hash browns. I am not sure what plain boiled or mashed potatoes would do to my BG but as they don’t excite me in any way, I am not really interested in the answer anyway.
Your Not alone, starchy carbs react like that, I think that is why most of us choose to cut alot of them out.
There evil on me, so I do choose not to eat them…
I am not sure if its worth all the added insulin to just cover a starchy meal… not sure what your body might be thinking.
My Sisters MIL will inject a bunch of insulin to eat carb and sugar ladden foods, she is blind and nearly deaf, and has very poor function of her kidneys, but she has been a type 1 for some 50 yrs… I just don’t know if she was bound to complications or she earned it with bad choices…its just something I am trying to ward off, with all my might…
