Everyone is different. I take humalog but it doesn’t work that quickly for me. That is where experimenting comes in. I pre-bolus but would eat whenever BG fell inside my target whether it was 5 minutes or an hour.
microwave it, if necessary
I’ve been pre-bolusing pretty much since the day I stopped using the old beef/pork insulin for the newer quicker acting varieties.
Prior to CGM none of us really knew what the blood glucose response curve was to insulin. It’s easy to manage today, and most of us will pre-bolus. For every meal. Especially when we rise in the morning. AM insulin resistance isn’t just because your liver is releasing sugar (both glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis), it’s your adrenals releasing growth hormone, cortisol and even your pancreas’s alpha cells producing glucagon. Why it impacts some of us far more than others is still being hotly debated.
For me, the Humalog which once required only 20-30 minutes pre-bolusing now requires a full 2 hours. I’m not insulin resistant, my insulin/carb ratio and ISF haven’t changed, it just requires 2 full hours for insulin to impact my glucose levels. Any time of day. Perhaps it’s the ketones …?
I apologize in advance for all the typos. I have cataracts and now have great difficulty seeing. Although Canadian healthcare is for the most part “free”, we wait extended times for even the most basic procedures.
For me the pre-bolus time is unpredictable. Yesterday in the morning I had to wait 2 hrs after breakfast bolus to start eating. Today only 20 minutes and it went too low. But better to eat and quickly get rid of lows than to spend hours to get rid of highs.
I’ve also noticed a variation in my personal pre-bolus time. For many months at breakfast I needed a 60-minute pre-bolus and sometimes it stretched to 90 minutes. But now it’s changed to a shorter time. If my blood glucose is running flat but under 80 mg/dL (4.4), I can often get by with a 15-minutes or less pre-bolus. My pre-bolus is usually under 30 minutes at breakfast these days. My breakfast timing, however, is delayed from the average person; I eat between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
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I have had a similar experience. If my wake-up numbers are stable and < 5 mmol/L then everything works like it would at lunch or dinner. But if I’m 6+ mmol/L at breakfast and/or there are signs of a dawn effect spike, then I need much more insulin and it takes effect more slowly. I see that dawn effect spike probably 75% of the time to some degree.
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I’ll have to try that. I usually pre-bolus, wait to drop, then eat full meal. The one aspect of your idea bothers me, that the glucose level may drop too quickly after eating half the meal. But you could trim that with orange juice and sugar. I found that to be the fastest way to raise glucose, even faster than the so-called glucose tabs (actually dextrose).