That it takes more insulin to bring down a high blood sugar, than if you’d just given the correct amount of insulin for your carbs in the first place.
Example: I eat 20 more grams of carbs than I bolus for. If I had bolused, it would have been around 2 units of insulin. But I didn’t and then I end up giving 5 or 6 units to bring it back down.
I don’t get it. Any suggestions?
That is a good question. That happens to me once in a while. It seems like it’s going to take an entire vial of insulin to bring me down. The worst is when you just keep dosing because you aren’t coming down that then… you really come down hard.
Ugg! This happens to me more than it should. I am just not patient enough.
Mine was stuck up above 200 for quite awhile today. Worked all day on getting it back to normal. It’s like swimming upstream. Why??? I don’t know.
-Dena
I was thinking the same thing today! I ate probably about 15 more grams than I bolused for at lunch, and an hour ago I was 204. My solution was to take a 35 minute walk. I also lowered by basal by 60% for 2 hours. Right now I’m 104. Lucky guessing.
I had this problem yesterday. Had a slice of pizza for lunch, thought I bolused enough, but obviously did not. Was up around 250 all afternoon. I think part of the problem is that we have a delay between when we take the insulin and when it has its peak effect. If we do it right at meal time, we get the insulin and the food to be peaking at the same time. If we let ourselves get too high, we need insulin to metabolize the unprocessed food and to correct for the rising BG. It is incredibly frustrating to watch it stay up or even continue to climb after a correction. I just keep adding boluses, but have to be careful about taking too much, because then I will come crashing down later.
Stacking is no fun. But I am so inclined to do it because I HATE feeling like crap when my blood sugar’s up and it just doesn’t come down quick enough for me.
Guessing is a big part of diabetes at times. We gather as much information as possible, but then, it’s all just a big guess.
When something happens that I don’t understand, I like to say it’s because Mars and Pluto aren’t aligned correctly. 
Mostly cause we just can’t explain everything.
Frustrating. 
It’s so slowly. Not near quick enough for me.
I just do not have the discipline to not stack (or is it that I do not trust the insulin on board to work to bring it down). And so frustrating to watch BG just stay all the way up there.
A HIGH sugar is harder to bring down, because more time is required to reduce it. 200 Pts is far more difficult to bring about than 10 points.
Stuart
I have wondered the same thing SO many times. I think another factor to consider is maybe that our synthetic insulins are better at a single task - like covering 20g of carbs - than fighting our bodies when our system is thrown out of whack. Think about it. When our blood sugars are high, adrenaline and stress and other issues could cause insulin to have to work harder, perhaps? Our bodies become resistant to the insulin as our sugars run higher.
Consider this analogy. Insulin for food is like: “I need to drive 50 miles, so I should get some gas first.” As opposed to “I need to get another 10 miles down the road to get to the next gas station, but I’m out of gas, so I have to push the car.”
That makes sense. I’d never thought of it that way…
I have no medical training (other than 60-plus year of Type 1) so take my observations with a grain of salt. Even so-called rapid-acting insulin takes four hours or so to do its work, I have found by trial and error that one unit of Humalog will reduce my glucose level by 20 mg/dl. The body also changes its behavior during the 24-hour cycle, and some of us need more insulin per gram of carbs at noon than in the early morning or late evening.
I think what I’ve read (so much lately) that insulin resistance if normal in all people. IR increases in the pre-waking hours, when we are stressed and ill (even before we know we are sick) and when our BS goes too high. it is a different reason in each scenario. oh, BTW, women have the added problem of menstration.
Hello Olaf:
Do not forget the “ketone factor” too. High sugar could easily trigger ketones though not all highs do, obviously.
Stuart