Need some control!

Hi everyone as usual my diabetes is taking second place to everything else in my life! I need some control and I need help getting it!!

I’m due to get the omnipod in a weeks time the 9th to be precise and I feel I need to start carb counting and monitoring my sugars in preparation!

I read on here how amazing the omnipod is but I am still aware it will only work with what I give to it!

So has anyone out there got any advice or tips to starting again and getting back on track!

All advice is greatly appreciated

Sarah xxxx

I put the Calorie King App on my cell phone which helps a lot when eating foods that I don't know the Carbs and it's All About the CARBS!!

Go back to basics when you start. As much as it stinks, back to the old basal testing and meal/carb ratios is s great place to start. Hope you like the new omnipod!

I agree the Calorie King, although I use the book rather than the app, is a great resource. Re apps, I prefer "Lose It!" as the interface struck me as simpler and quicker than CK or My Fitness Pal.

Another tool which I found very valuable when I came to pumping (at the same time I started carb counting and using Novolog instead of R, I did a bunch of changes all at onces!) was a scale. It's great to eyeball how many servings you have but, at least for me, it was very educational to learn that "a bowl" of cereal might be 2-2.5 servings which might, in turn, explain what happened to my BG afterwards? I don't absolutely weight everything but I've weighed things regularly enough that I think it helps my control significantly to have done this. Get one that you can stand on your counter and leave it there and use it.

When I got my pump, it was after years (1984-2008...) of not really knowing what the hell I was doing, essentially "winging it,", not getting a lot of input from doctors, just going "I'm fine, nah, I know what I'm doing". When I decided to get a pump I also found the DOC (at another message board...) which, in turn, led me to "Pumping Insulin" by John Walsh and "Think Like a Pancreas" by Gary Scheiner. These are both excellent diabetes "owner's manuals" that pretty much have everything you need to do to take care of T1 in easy, readable books. It may seem a bit tedious but, when I read them, it was like a lightbulb going on so I didn't put them down for a couple of days and whipped through them. They kind of explained the theory so that what I did with the pump made more sense. I'd recommend making the effort to track either of these down, or maybe both. They have helped me a lot and I still crack them open to check things or kind of reset my brain to what the process for figuring this or workaround for that might be. I also take zillions of shortcuts and perhaps do some of my own things but having these manuals has been invaluable for me. A third book I also recommend, not quite as "manually" but a very fun and engaging read is "Your Diabetes Science Experiment" by Ginger Vieira. This has a lot of step-by-step how to fix numbers, settings, etc. that is very useful. The style is very lighthearted and it's a bit shorter. The proper spirit is to look at it as challenging but something you can handle and I think that the approach of "well, let's see what this does to my numbers..." is exactly right. Really, all 3 of these books are great to have on hand, write in, dog ear favorite pages, etc.

Thanks everyone all this advice is just what I needed x eeeeek a week tomorrow and ill be starting a new chapter in my diabetes life hopefully the step towards a normal hba1c xxx