I usually get met with shock when I tell anyone I am a diabetic and I don’t eat breakfast… but I have tried low carb, vegan, raw foods, etc…you name it… The only way I can avoid the morning roller coaster is to avoid eating in the morning. I do have a black coffee and drink lots of water until lunch…still need to increase basal as soon as I get out of bed, even if that timing varies from 6am to 8am…it’s like the second my feet hit the floor I need more insulin…
I worry a little that my no breakfast might be bad long term?? But I think that’s just because I’m used to the old saying “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”…
from what I have read, the dawn phenomenon spike is handled with bolus/short acting. I assume you do miss a meal and overnight basal testing. I’m sure better advice will come along
Bernstein’s book may help
try a fats breakfast google bulletproof coffee, just use your normal coffee, butter and coconut oil, sounds bad/tastes good. you get the energy without a spike.
I skip it frequently and when I do eat breakfast it’s almost always near-zero carb-- it’s just a bad way to start the day to sign yourself up for a roller coaster
My experience is very similar to yours. On most days, especially M-F, I skip breakfast, and I do not feel I am missing anything. A good day starts with a nice cup of coffee - that’s all I need .
I don’t skip breakfast but I eat it after 10 a.m. And my prebolus time is usually 60 minutes. So I give my insulin a good 60-minute head start. I watch my CGM and refrain from eating until I see the BG trace start to dip. I limit my breakfast carbs to 12 grams and I take a 20 minute walk almost every day after breakfast.
The combination of all these tactics limits my a post-breakfast BG to about 130-140 mg/dl an hour after eating and back under 120 mg/dl at two hours. Otherwise, eating a normal carb heavy breakfast breakfast early in the morning will certainly drive my BGs north of 250 mg/dl.
I think skipping breakfast is a highly rational response to living with diabetes. Nothing wrong with it.
I usually eat a small breakfast, like a piece of toast or small bowl of cereal that I can bolus with one or two units. Sometimes some berries or melon. Once I get to work it is coffee, which at that point I don’t consider part of breakfast Anyway if no breakfast is working for you it makes sense to stick with it?
+1. Once again, you need to do what works, and that may not be the same for you as it is for the next person. Eyes on the prize. It’s the result that counts, not whose formula produces that result.
Personally I do eat breakfast, but (a) mid-morning, like Terry, and (b) very low carb, a lá Bernstein. For me, that works. For you, some different pattern may be appropriate. Do what works!—not what somebody else thinks should. That needs to be carved in stone somewhere.
I grew up eating breakfast everyday, it’s my favourite meal of the day, so even though my bg is typically higher in the morning i still continued to eat breakfast everyday, just bolus for it, and go for lower carbs.
and yes, i guess just do whatever that works best for you, i am sure it’s ok that you dun eat breakfast.
I get too hungry to skip breakfast. My problem is that I get hungry about 2 1/2 hours after eating, so I still have insulin on board if I have a snack. However, for some reason I just do better eating this way. If I go three hours without eating, my energy flags. I’m not gaining or losing weight and I don’t need to do either.
Thanks everyone for the replies. I guess I’ll continue on for now…if it ain’t broke! I had one user tell me it was bad for a woman to skip breakfast due to hormones, but I couldn’t find anything to support that online.
I don’t eat breakfast, either. I tried for years, but it just doesn’t work well for me, both in terms of blood sugar control and digestion. I take 1 to 1.5 units of insulin in the morning when I wake up to account for the glucagon that will soon by pumped into my body by the liver…and it works great for me.
Dr. David Perlmutter recommends intermittent fasting as the best way to allow the body to do cellular repair and clean up metabolic debris. 16 hours without eating is required. Skipping breakfast works great for that!
I usually don’t eat breakfast, and on the rare times I do (if I foresee I won’t be having lunch) it will have next to no carbs. I do enjoy a nice big cup of brewed coffee with cream, though.
I am not hungry at that time of the day. What works, works.
I think the must have breakfast (toast, cereals etc), is a marketing tool. How much money will be lost on all those carb heavy, highly processed cereals and breads, spreads and special breakfast foods… if people no longer eat them.
Having breakfast did make sense when people were doing heavy physical labor all day. But in todays day and age, as long as you get your required calories and nutrients in somehow, then I don’t think it really matters how or when.
Ninety-five percent of the time I don’t eat breakfast simply because I don’t typically wake up hungry. (The other five percent are typically weekends when my husband makes something special and delicious or we go out for brunch.)
I do have a large cup of coffee with skim milk (there are obviously carbs in that, about 15), so it’s not exactly like trying to avoid morning carbs. But that’s been my preference as an adult from before T1D diagnosis (which for me happened at 29). In fact, the first three months after diagnosis I had to start eating breakfast because of the specific insulin regimen (MDI-based with two shots of 12-hour NPH) I was put on. If you can believe it, THAT was the most distressing part of my new life for me. I was so upset that I had to stuff myself when I didn’t feel like eating. I was incredibly relieved, once I got a pump, to be able to go back to just having my morning latte to sip for a while every day, with an extended bolus (1.5U over 90 mins), which seems to work well. And I don’t believe I am experiencing any downsides from that, hormonal or otherwise.
I don’t think you must have breakfast, but I do think that if you are seeing high BGs with or without, there is room for improvement in your BASAL rates. I am not sure how you take your insulin, so it might be less flexible with injections (on a pump you should simply set up another, higher, rate for those problematic hours), but it seems to me this is what you should discuss with your endocrinologist. Once you tackle that successfully, you’ll again have more choice to eat breakfast if you wanted. (Since it seems to me you do.)
curiousity question for you, have you ever checked for ketones around 11 or so? Something. I learned when missing breakfast back when I was a kid (1979) that was pretty much the only test back then, 10 drops of water 2 of peepee. when I would miss breakfast, I would have colors before lunch. Just curious if you ever checked that.
My recollection is the pee and water in the test tube was to check for sugar spilled in the urine, not ketones. maybe I am remembering wrong. this is back in 1967.
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Anyway if no breakfast is working for you it makes sense to stick with it?