Lantus Insulin and Cold/Snacks Last night 260 BG

New to Lantus and Insulin. Woke up to 260 bg fasting. Took 24 units of insulin at 730 am. Usually take it this past week around 530 am when working but weekends later as slept in.

Ate some light popcorn last night probably 6-7 cups. Ate a low carb ice cream bar. have a slight sore throat and cold this morning, granddaughter has had the cold for 3 days.

Know bg will be elevated with cold. But concerned as bg was 239 a few minutes ago 8:54 am. Yesterday my bg was 90 after swimming and yoga. Later after eating a meal went to about 239.

Just wondering thoughts from others. Feels like a yoyo. I don’t see endo till Nov 3 so think I will need the bolus people mention.

Also worried about weight gain with Lantus. Want to go on Tresiba and will ask endo…

Is there a place for posting daily readings to get feedback?

New to this site and thankful to all the input as it really helps to hear from others.

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Hey. I’m new to this site about month or two. Love the feedback I get and reading others discussions. I take 12 hour insulin and fast acting when eat. After 10 years I have control better in past months than ever before I recently quit job of 9 years. Stress had factors and not taking the time to monitor like I need too. I still learn daily. But we learn from others with advice and sharing. Which each is different but it’s nice to know others that underdtand the struggle. Anyways just wanted to share and your not alone.

Well it’s pretty clear you need bolus insulin and unfortunately you may just need to wait until November 3 to get it if your regular doctor won’t give it to you. If I were you I’d call your regular doc and ask them to fax an rx for novolog to your local pharmacy (so you can pick it up same day). They might not be willing to do this until you see he endo and get some diabetes education logged with a CDE or whatever they make you do… bolus insulin isn’t prescribed lightly it’s a pretty dangerous drug and they have to be convinced you know how to use it.

You can manage your bg between now and then by really minimizing your carbohydrate intake. 6-7 cups of popcorn and a “low carb” ice cream bar would have shot my levels into the stratosphere without bolus insulin…

Lantus/ tresiba don’t really cover foods, at all— their sole role is to counterbalance your bodies own natural glucose production that occurs outside of eating. It actually looks like lantus is doing its job pretty well with you but the spikes from foods are too high… I’m not really sure if any particular insulins are worse culprits than others in terms of weight gain. Insulin itself is your bodies hormonal messenger that tells your cells to store energy… and stored energy is weight.

I agree that tresiba is better but lantus works pretty well too.

I find that although popcorn seems “free” it isn’t. A cup of popcorn has 6 g of carbs so 6-7 cups has 36-42g of carbs. And then on top of that you had a low carb ice cream bar. If that popcorn had butter on it that might also make it slow digesting causing an elevated blood sugar for hours. And then a cold which also raises your blood sugar. All of this could be contributing to a higher blood sugar this morning.

I know that you freak out at a blood sugar in the 200s, but it is explainable. And it doesn’t mean that the insulin isn’t working. It is. This only that you have some more work to do.

Many people raise their basal doses when they are sick, but it takes experience to know how much to raise it. It just takes time to figure it all out.

Ok thanks. I need a new diet. I used to do paleo for two years very strictly. With granddaughter here it is more challenging. I had coffee black and scrambled eggs for breakfast. Any links to ripe of diet you eat and others would be helpful. I eat low carb and avoid rice pasta bread except seed low carb bread but need to change up diet a bit.

My diet is very simple. Basically no grains, no potatoes, very limited legumes. Any meat, seafood, nuts, selected dairy (almost no milk) and any non-starchy veggies. Within that domain you can create infinite meals. I have dozens of cookbooks. One good prolific author is Dana Carpender, many of her books are in public libraries.

Snacking is always an issue. I would encourage going out of your way to buy things that you can snack on, not simply snacking from things around the house that really are for others. I personally have a weakness for pickles, but I also like nuts, little pouches of fish, beef jerky etc. At times I’ll also make a dip out of sour cream and cut up veggies and snack on that.

Thanks Brian. I had cut out legumes but added peas and peanut butter back in a year ago. Will eliminate again. I eat yours full fat with pecans and berries walnuts. Eat too many bananas and know they are starchy so sadly guess need to eliminate those too. Apples are high and I like those too. Will try harder! Thanks!

You also need to give yourself a break. You have already made some major improvements, but you have to set reasonable expectations. Give yourself some credit, look at how your blood sugar has come down. You aren’t likely to get perfect blood sugars with just a basal insulin. And even if you just eat meat you will still have a blood sugar rise from meals. Just understand and accept that your meals will cause a blood sugar rise that you cannot completely control without mealtime insulin. And doing your best to reduce carbs will help but it won’t solve that issue.

What I did when my PCP was still treating me as a type 2 and the meds weren’t doing much was to log everything I ate into the FitDay website. It has a very good database of foods, plus there is an option to add your own recipes, too, if you want to take the time to do that. Though the website is designed primarily for people trying to lose weight, I used it for tallying carbs for the day. It also tallies other nutrients, too, so one can see over time whether one’s diet is lacking in specific nutrients and needs adjustment.

And, as you might guess, a database like that can be really helpful if one is trying to decide what to eat. It is easy to compare several alternatives, such as seeing which of several vegetables is the lowest in carbs.

I’d definitely try to keep carbs down until I saw the endo. But like someone mentioned earlier, one wouldn’t want to get them so low that when the endo sees the postprandial readings that he might think one doesn’t really need meal time insulin at all. If it were me, I’d cut carbs down, but certainly not almost out at this point. You might also want to record what you’d eaten in the meal before each reading so both you and he/she can evaluate accordingly.