As a type 1 diabetic, I try to eat healthy. I shy away from breads , rice and pasta. How do you feel about your partner not caring and eating all of these in front of you? Especially after knowing that the last time you ate bread your blood sugar was high the ENTIRE next day!
I have been with my wife Sheryl for 42 of my 44 years with T1. I have never once asked her to not eat or eat anything based on my diabetes. I am good with it.
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My wife just nibbles on things, so while I eat the inside of a hamburger with a knife and fork, or order a salad, she will leave most of her meal on the plate and then order dessert. I am into the details, while she goes for the big splash. Opposites attract.
Is your partner aware of the impact of your choices for you? Could it be not knowing rather than not caring?
been diabetic for three years , diagnosed almost after we got married. She is one of those who can eat anything and not get fat, loves dessert and junk food 
we tend to influence each other, I acquired a habit of eating something sweet after a meal which is a piece of low sugar fruit in my case vs a sugar loaded pastry or cake in her case 
she now eats more vegetables than she did before we met though.
at First she tried to eat low carb like i do out of laziness and not having to cook two dishes but she gave up and returned to eating carbs as she isn’t yet convinced that it can even benefit non-diabetics. on the bright side, she now feels guilty when eating lots of junk or dessert because i never have these.
to be honest i can never ask her to follow the same diet if she didn’t have to, for me it can be a life or death thing but for any healthy person she can get away with some carbs and sweets specially with her high metabolism, so it would be totally unfair to ask her to eat the same. I guess it’s part of accepting diabetes that you have to live with restricted food choices and resist temptations that anybody else is free to give in to, same thing with fasting Ramadan for us muslims when everyone else has food during the day, you accept the fact that you cannot have the same food everybody else or your partner is having, not even occasionally. The reward is near normal blood sugars and feeling great which makes me stick to it every second of everyday.
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My influence was and is, I will make this food I eat for you too if you want, but you have to make your own whatever. He prefers to not have to make his own food. I’m a vegan, he’s a vegetarian. He wasn’t a vegetarian when we first married. It worked great to change what he ate. But I made it his choice.
If you need time to get used to not eating certain foods, maybe you can tell them you crave to eat it when they are eating it in front of you, but it really raises your blood sugar so you shouldn’t, so can they not eat it in front of you for a few months while you adjust? You should be able to get used to it after a while.
We still have his food, my food and our food after 41 years of marriage!
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I can’t understand why what someone else eats should influence what you feel you should eat. If you have a special medical condition which makes it inadvisable to eat what the person across from you is eating, just eat what you feel you should eat and ignore what the other person is eating. What I don’t like is when people try to make me eat what they are eating, which seems to be one of the most powerful human instincts, or, if they know I am diabetic, to play food policeman, commenting on what a pity it is that I can’t eat X, without even understnaind that I could take additional insulin and easily eat it if I wanted to.
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I have a similar problem, but it’s not about what we eat, it’s about when. He wants to eat dinner at a different time based on his mood every night, and I can’t seem to explain to him that this is making my life a nightmare. I’m trying to get in the habit of pre-bolusing, but it’s so hard when some days he comes home from work and wants to eat immediately and some days he doesn’t want to eat until midnight. And when we’re out with friends or family, this timing issue becomes even harder because we live a very carefree life, and we always have done. I’m trying to get healthier, but when i met my husband I had an HbA1c of almost 10 do I told him a lot of things were normal (like eating anytime and taking insulin as I go) when they weren’t, so it’s definitely partly my fault, but still frustrating. I wish you all the best in working things out.
Do you fast during Ramadan? I tried once, shortly after I converted, but the dehydration caused serious issues for me, so my husband told me to stop because type 1 qualifies as a medical exemption. I’d be fascinated to hear what your tricks for managing are.
Perhaps it should be based on your mood for awhile!!!
Have you looked into Afrezza? It’s a very fast-acting insulin that may be helpful on nights when pre-bolusing becomes more difficult. I generally have to dose after I eat to ensure I don’t drop low. It’s duration is much shorter, so for meals with more protein/fat, you’d need to either dose with Humalog/Novolog as well (to cover the 2+ hour time frame) or give an additional Afrezza dose approx 2 hours later.
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TYPE 1 37 years. What your partner eats should have no impact on you eat. Take care of what you eat and you will just fine.
I was criticized by one girlfriend once who did not know I had type 1 diabetes for being “too much addicted to the same routine all the time.” I suppose from the outside a diabetic life looks like that, if people don’t know the reason for controlling extraneous variables.
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I’m on an insulin pump, so I don’t know how afrezza works. I only heard about it last week when I joined tudiabetes. Most of the time I’m still okay with pre-bolusing because it takes 15 minutes to get the food ready and I don’t need a lot of time to pre-bolus because I digest real slow. It’s just a surprising adjustment for both of us to adhere to a routine because we’ve never done that before, but when we stick to a routine my numbers are better, so we’re taking baby steps towards a reliable routine. This is just teething troubles.
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Salam Alikom @BeckyZ , for Ramadan i do a few simple things that do help
- Stop coffee early on maybe one month before ramadan or at least a week before helps with two things:
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helps you get used to getting about your day without coffee and the brain fog in the early days of Ramadan
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caffeine is a diuretic so cutting it will prevent your body from peeing away all those liquids you drank between iftar and sohour
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Eat lots of veggies, i pretty much eat more than half the size of my meal as veggies they contain a lot of water
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don’t eat carbs because these make you thirsty specially sweet stuff
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eat less salt because it makes you more thirsty
ever since i was diagnosed with LADA three years ago i’ve been fasting in Australia in the winter so that helped tremendously with not losing water, this year i went back to Egypt for the last week of Ramadan , 35+ degrees was challenging but still my blood sugar levels during the fast were pretty much under control.
Also you have to Tune your basal before Ramadan or maybe in the first few days it’s a good chance to do basal testing since you’re already fasting so it’s a good chance to determine your perfect basal dose that keeps your BG steady for most of the day not let it go up or do low you get a hypo by the end of the day
Low carb helps you adjust to low blood sugar that you won’t actually get a hypo even if your blood sugar goes below 3.5 (63) from experience you’ll only feel hypos if you have had high blood sugars for a while (above 9 (162)) otherwise you might only feel a light headache as your blood glucose level decreases but without the sweating and the shakes.
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story of my life although my wife has pretty much accepted the fact that i’m a T1 diabetic, but she still drives me crazy saying “i’m bored for you that you eat the same thing everyday” well that’s what keeps things consistent and what makes diabetes management way easier.
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These compromises you’ve made at the start might have made things hard but, you need to start coming up with a routine for your meals if he doesn’t follow. You have to have meals at certain times so do that and he will eventually come to terms with it for the simple fact that it makes life easier for you and the fact that it’s better for you to eat alone on a fixed schedule than just agree to whatever time he wants to eat. that’s what i did with my wife to be honest i started dictating my own rules and sticking to them, doesn’t affect what she eats but i have to reinforce that i can only have certain foods and repeatedly state the negative side effects when I have to do certain things that hurt my diabetes like staying up late or eating carbs or sweets or not exercising. After a while they do accept it.
At one point my wife was sick of trying to cook low carb, i told her you cook your own meals and i’ll cook mine
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I went to Egypt just before Ramadan, but came back early because I didn’t want to make fasting harder on my family because I don’t fast. I converted 6 years ago, and spent the first year in Egypt and the last 5 in California so Ramadan was always in the summer and both Egypt and California are HOT. I couldn’t handle the long days combined with the heat and dehydration. I think maybe I’ll try when Ramadan moves to the winter months here, and your tips on conserving water are very helpful.
I eat low carb, I eat the protein with the meal but no rice, potatoes or pasta. If it is a pie I eat the filling and the vegetables but no starch.
It is only very occasionally that I will cook a special low carb meal, but even that can be shared with other members of the family. For example, moussaka is low carb and can be eaten by anyone, it is delicious.
With a bit of compromise and common sense food can be shared with the whole family.
I would never expect my husband to eat what I eat. I have diabetes, he does not.
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The reality is that eating & drinking has a strong social component. It can be taken as antisocial/unfriendly not to share with a loved one.
My partner has been very understanding of my food needs, but sometimes he keeps junk food on the kitchen counter. If I see a bag of open chips, I have no control. After a couple years, I simply asked him to keep the chips off the counter–out of my sight. A couple of reminders later, we are good.
Natalie: I suggest thinking clearly about what you want your partner to change when with you. Is your desire reasonable? Sit down sometime, not at a meal, and explain.
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