I take fast acting (I am MDI) 20 to 25 minutes before eating. I walk every day and do aerobics or yoga three times a week. I eat 40-50 grams of carb per day–mostly from vegetables and fruit.
I still am not able to maintain a flat line 100% of the time… but I can get an “almost” flat line for 10 to twelve hour stretches several times per week.
I just keep practicing 
Since I use a CGM, I’m able to watch my blood glucose line start to head down after I dose. Waiting for that trigger to eat has taught me to wait longer than I used to wait. I am relatively insulin resistant in the morning and I usually wait an hour after my insulin dose to eat. For my evening meal, my prebolus time is about 30 minutes, sometimes less. I watch my CGM when I eat at home and am in control of my meal timing.
I know eating is a social event and I love sharing food with people. I’m always on edge though as to meal timing and even in cases where I try to emphasize the importance of meal timing, I’m often faced with a situation where others just don’t get it. People seem to be in the “-ish” sense of social eating timing and that just doesn’t work for me!
It depends. If you enjoy any natural insulin production, your external insulin timing may be more forgiving. The only way to know is to blood sugar track a few meal episodes and watch the outcome. For many of us, getting the insulin started before the first bite allows a better match to the insulin’s action profile.
If you find that your BG is too high at the one and two hour post-meal mark but in range at 4-5 hours then prebolusing may fix that for you.
Thanks! I don’t mean to hijack the thread here, but I know this group and children with D (before I left) helped me out a ton. Y’all even acted as my endo for a while when I was unable to go.
I hope we helped some @TimmyMac but you are the one doing the work in the trenches and dealing with what I recall to be a peculiar situation and you got through it and, from the sound of it, are doing awesome. If we were your endo though, we will send you a bill for $450… 
dear brian, I recently had a craving for some beef. (normally I don’t buy it because of the cost I will buy chicken instead.) I continued eating for a week. about 1/4lb twice daily. after the 3d day my bg dropped, boom. from a regular 166-179 to 97-137(before eating then an hour after eating). This continued through last month. this month the same until the money ran out. I went back to chicken and boom back up to the higher numbers. I haven’t changed my carb intake, no more than 15 per meal, nor the type of carbs. have you heard of anyone having this dramatic change from eating cow? my doctor looked at me today as if saying “i don’t believe it”. Oh by the way the lower numbers are with out the Humalog shots 2x’s daily. I had no insulin last month at all. any idea’s would be appreciated.
I have no idea. Maybe your digestion was not adapted to beef and you didn’t absorb your food well. But otherwise I have no idea. And I’m a but surprised that suddenly you would need no insulin. Are you LADA?
thank you for responding so quickly. what is LADA? Surprised doesn’t describe my reaction. shocked yet suspicious. had to keep testing it. but it’s working so i’m not going to question. as long as the a1c stays around 7 my doctor is happy and so am I. might be because the onset of the diabetes came from an infection that shut down my pancreas. the beef may have gotten it functioning again, YAAY. anyway take care and hopefully I won’t be in this forum much longer. my best prayers for you and yours. Shawn
LADA is adult onset T1. The progression is sometimes slow and your remaining insulin production can wax and wane causing just what you described. It which case it may have nothing to do with beef and chicken, it is just a coincidence.
I eat around 20-40 carbs a day, with the majority of my carbs coming from veggies. I do this to limit the swings I was getting from eating higher carb/larger doses of insulin.
I am eating way fewer carbs than when I was first diagnosed (and on the wretched sliding scale)–from 60g per meal plus 15g snacks to 30-45g per meal plus extra as needed for activities such as mowing and brisk walking. I feel better and have many fewer spikes!
I try to eat a max of 40 carbs/day and encourage my Type 1 daughter to do the same.
Why? For my daughter, improved BG control. For me, weight loss and better health. Low-carb is working for me. But my daughter rebels against low-carb because she views it as something that her T1D imposes on her as opposed to making a healthy lifestyle choice.
I try to eat by 7pm at the latest and don’t snack after (unless low, but usually I treat lows with glucose tabs). That gives me time to correct in time before I go to bed at around midnight. I’ve tracked my basal overnight to feel fairly confident that I’ll stay fairly flat. That said, I find that maybe about half the time, I have a low bg alert at 3-4am each morning. By “low” it gets to 60-65, but always in a slow flat decline, rather than a steep decline, so basically, it’s steady at 65. I’ve been comfortable with this because I wake up to the alert, allowing me to do a meter check, treat with glucose tabs, and then go back to sleep without any fear that it’s going to drop to (for me) a dangerous level. If I was less certain of my overnight basal, I would probably feel different.
For the record, my “Dexcom lines” as you put it, stay comfortably between 70 and 110 most days, as long as I don’t veer too far from Dr. Bernstein’s recommendations (I do about 30-45 carbs/day).
It has been some time since I kept very close track, but I believe I’m still eating about the same as I did during the long months I was recording every bite I put in my mouth. That would be between 120 to 150 carbs a day. My perspective might be a little different than many here, because I wasn’t diagnosed with diabetes until age 70, nor put on insulin until a year and a half later, when an endo changed my diagnosis from type 2 to type 1 (LADA). Consequently, I don’t have much concern about long term consequences 30 or 40 years hence.
I know that I could keep a more stable BG and avoid a lot of hypos if I’d eat lower carb, but I chose to just moderate my previous diet, not make really drastic changes. And my A1c has been between 5.5 and 5.9 ever since I was put on insulin over three years ago. I try to avoid going over 160 more often than necessary, but don’t get excited if occasionally I spot or suspect a postprandial reading close to or over 200. I rarely see them, but since I’m on MDI, do not have a CGM, and only test BG on average six times daily, I’m suspect I miss some high readings. Though I have a lot of hypos, I’ve never had one I couldn’t treat myself. And in the time I’ve been on insulin, I’ve only had two hypos at night, since I normally stay up at least four hours after my dinner bolus to check and eat or correct if needed. My hypos don’t really bother me, as I don’t get the strong uncomfortable feelings with them that many younger people do. I just treat and get back to normal living.
To the OP, How are you preparing your chicken BEFORE cooking it and how are you cooking it…Frying, baking, poaching? What are you eating with it? It seems odd that after eating chicken you go high…Could be the protein I suppose but I tend to wonder about gastroparesis, (slow stomach emptying)…Have you ever had a RR study done? Might be worth looking into…Most T1Ds have gastroparesis. Just a thought…
As an aside, I eat 30 grams of slow acting carbs a day and my blood sugars are around 70 to 100mg/dl. I did this because I ran in the upper 200s to mid 300s for years and would have to run back to the Endo to have my pumps settings tweaked…after the last time I said to myself…“I gotta do something or I’m gonna die…” I read Dr. Bersteins book, lowered my Carb intake to his 6/12/12 and literally within 2 days my blood sugars DROPPED into the mid 70s to mid 90s. I started walking 1 to 2 miles a day and I’ve lost 15lbs. so far and it’s only been 2 weeks since I started. I haven’t felt this good in YEARS!!! Dr. Bernstein Literally saved my life I feel…I have uploaded the last two weeks of my BGs so everyone can see my progress to date.BG1.pdf (32.5 KB)
BG2.pdf (31.6 KB)
I was under the impression that the opposite is true: that the majority of folks with Type 1 do not have gastroparesis. Does anyone know which is true? Any pertinent links would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
I’m a Type 1 for the last 18 years and have a stable A1c of 5.9-6.3 on 100-150g of carbohydrate a day. For a while there I was eating far, far fewer carbs but a funny thing happened - I became carb sensitive. What I mean by this is the slightest whiff of, say, blueberries and my blood glucose would spike and be hard to cover. I’m talking like a dozen blueberries or 1/8 cup and I’d either need to cover with a lot of insulin or hit a blood sugar of 160. So, I slowly added more carbs until I found the zone where I could tolerate (whole food) carbs and cover them without a lot of insulin or drama. Now, I can eat blueberries, 1/2 cup at a time, and bolus for 10g carbs, and move along. YMMV.
Even though you’re having great success with LCHF, I think you should take the time to learn how to adjust your own pump settings if you’ve been relying on your doctor to do it for years. Do you know how to do a basal test or how to adjust carb and correction ratios? For many of us, LCHF alone isn’t enough to maintain tight control, we still need to adjust insulin at varying intervals. Think Like a Pancreas and Pumping Insulin are great books that cover these topics.
Carbs per day is the wrong measurement unit. The real test is how high my blood glucose rises after a meal; thus the important unit is carbs per meal.
I found that varies because I have a different reaction to carbs at breakfast, lunch and dinner. The only way to discover your own personal per meal carb limits is to test at your peak after eating. I used this technique to discover my limits: Test, Review, Adjust