blood sugar levels – Diabetes Diet

Diabetes and the roller-coaster ride

Sep 29, 2019Sep 22, 2019 Emma7 Comments

Just a quickie from me this week… I thought I’d share an interesting info-grab with you. The flash glucose monitoring system collects all sorts of info which is easy to see at a glance, such as your daily graph.

The graph shows you how often you have been in or out your target blood sugar range. The Monday one here (right) is me on holiday. Happy days, eh? Let’s loosen the reins on low-carb eating as boy, do the Cretans know how to do miraculous things with potatoes. While over there, I tasted what must count as the BEST CHIPS IN THE WORLD. A bold claim, I know.

And Wednesday is me back from holiday, determined to jump back on the low-carb wagon*. Goodness me, those graphs tell their own story, hmm? From wild jumps—the roller-coaster ride, to a far more sedate and steady line. A week’s potato bingeing is fun, but long-term I prefer to stick with the graph that doesn’t soar and plummet all over the place.

*Sorry for all the mixed metaphors.

My Favourite Health & Fitness Freebies

Sep 12, 2018Sep 12, 2018 Emma4 Comments

free sign on the Diabetes Diet A continuous glucose monitoring system, the MiniMed 670G self-adjusting insulin pump, a personal trainer AND an unlimited food budget so I can buy organic, ethically sourced food all the time…

And, whoops—you interrupted me there in the middle of a reverie relating to the things I’d have to help me manage my diabetes if money were no object. The top of the range monitoring and pump therapy tech is obvious while the food and exercise one less so—but activity and an excellent low-carb diet can help you manage your blood glucose levels.

Stable blood glucose levels don’t guarantee you riches or the partner of your dreams, but a person who doesn’t ride the blood sugar roller coaster is far more energetic, and free to pursue what they want unhindered by the hell of mood swings.

In the meantime, what can we fiscally challenged diabetics do so we can fix our blood glucose levels to the best of our abilities? Here are suggestions for freebies that can help you manage your condition…

YouTube—otherwise known as the exercise channel in our house. Online, you’ll find tens of thousands of exercise uploads—from yoga to Pilates, barre classes, HIIT workouts and weight-lifting. You could spend several years working your way through them and not do the same workout twice. If you find gyms off-putting or their membership fees too expensive, YouTube’s perfect. Look for workouts that don’t need equipment either.

Start with walking workouts (Lesley Sansome’s Walk at Home channel is great). Fitness Blender’s videos are explained well, and the exercises done at a speed you can keep up with. Jessica Smith TV does a huge variety of workouts that offer different fitness benefits, and Heart and Soul Fitness does the same.

MyFitnessPal—there are studies that claim food tracking helps you maintain your weight. Food logs are useful for we diabetics too as they allow us to work out how much insulin we need for meals we eat regularly. MyFitnessPal has a huge database, but you can also add your own recipes and the site will give you a full nutritional breakdown of each.

MySugr – a free app for logging blood sugar results and additional information such as insulin does, exercise, weight, blood pressure and more. The app is useful, but if you don’t log for a day or so you will struggle to remember all the information you need to input for a complete picture of what is going on.

The internet—thanks to the world-wide web, there’s a wealth of information at our fingertips. As a teenager and twenty-something with diabetes, I only knew one or two others with the condition, and we didn’t meet up regularly to swap notes. Now there are forums, websites, charities, blogs, recipes and more online where we can find out more about the ol’ defunct pancreas problem.

A word to the wise… We all know the internet allows unprecedented freedom of speech, which is mostly for the good. But it’s also a place where information spreads unchecked. Blogs—and I include this one too—offer opinions and personal experience, which do not always equate to fact and recommendations suitable for you. Still, the Diet Doctor, Diabetes.co.uk, radiabetes.com and diabetesdaily.com offer gems. (I apologise if I missed your great site out—limited room here.)

And finally…drum roll… the NHS! Here in the UK, we folks with type 1 diabetes get free healthcare and prescriptions. I mump and moan occasionally about wanting the latest tech, but I’ve had diabetes for more than 30 years and in that time, I’ve never paid for medications, appointments or equipment. Our fabulous healthcare system has existed 70 years now. It’s shaky on its feet sometimes, but you can’t argue with the wonderful principles at its core—free healthcare for all, based on clinical need.

What are your favourite diabetes freebies? And what websites or blogs do you like?

The Plunge

Feb 1, 2018Jan 15, 2018 Emma4 Comments

diabetes diet Hello fellow and female diabetics, and the friends who support us. This week, I’d like to talk about The Plunge.

If you are on insulin or other blood glucose-lowering medications, you’ll know The Plunge. It’s where your blood sugar drops at an alarmingly rapid rate usually because of insulin or other medicines. It feels very unpleasant.

What’s it like? Explaining diabetes feelings to non-diabetics is tricky, and it needs a lot of imagination. You search your vocabulary and powers of observation for ways to describe it and still come up short. Metaphors work the best, but they are still hard to think up.

The Plunge works well for me because it signifies a roller-coaster. There you are at the top; then suddenly, you’re heading to the bottom at super-fast speed.

Signs of fast-dropping blood sugars include tiredness, a lot of yawning, shakiness and confusion. They are also all symptoms of hypos.

One of the reasons we promote The Diabetes Diet (low-carb eating) is that it makes The Plunge easier to avoid. This is because you won’t need to take as much fast-acting insulin with your meals. Using fast-acting insulin can be a be a bit like picking up a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It isn’t subtle stuff, that’s for sure.

This isn’t a guarantee. Sometimes, you’ll need extra insulin to cover unexpected high blood sugar levels, and The Plunge may result.

But overall, using lower levels of insulin to cover meals means steadier blood sugar levels overall. Dips up and down are far less dramatic and therefore don’t feel as yucky. (This is a technical term.)

How do you experience The Plunge, and can you think up better ways to describe than I can?

Hypo or Not?

Nov 9, 2017Nov 20, 2017 EmmaLeave a comment

When do you feel the symptoms of a hypo?

The November/December issue of Balance, Diabetes UK’s magazine, reported that researchers have proposed that we need to take a fresh look at defining low blood glucose levels.

At present, a ‘hypo’ (low blood glucose level) is 3.9mmol and below (70.2mg/dL in the US), which the researchers feel isn’t all that low.

A severe hypo is one where someone needs help from another person to recover, something that rarely happens in clinical trials. Rightly so, as letting someone go so low without help wouldn’t be ethical.

Researchers suggest that there should be three levels of hypo – low, lower and oh f*****g shit. I’m kidding, obviously, but they are looking for the level that, below this point, a person’s health is seriously affected, i.e. where their brain, blood and cardiovascular systems are compromised, the risk of death begins to rise, and the level that has an impact on mental health.

Current research suggests these begin to take effect at about 3.0mmol (54mg/dL in the US). The team’s three definitions are:

Level 1: 3.9mmol or less –a hypo alert
Level 2: less than 3.0mmol – serious and important hypo
Level 3: serious hypo, requiring external assistance, even if none is available.

Like all of us, hypos are individual. One person’s “I’m fine at 3.9” is another’s “oh shit”. I sometimes feel the symptoms of a hypo coming on at 4.6, say. Other times, I’ll prick my fingers, get a 3.9 and wonder where it’s come from.

As you can see from the picture, I had a “serious and important hypo” this morning, thanks to undereating and walking too enthusiastically yesterday. Oof. It happens.

Keeping your blood sugar levels stable without going too low is a huge challenge. One of the reasons we promote low-carb eating for type 1s in particular is that the risk of hypos can be reduced because you don’t need to take as much insulin.

If the researchers could include advice about how to avoid hypos, while also achieving good HbA1c results in the long-term, we will cheer them on…

*Some good news! The NHS has approved flash glucose monitoring technology – i.e. systems such as the FreeStyle Libre. I’m off to investigate the possibilities of getting one. Also, big love to the NHS, a wondrous, wondrous institution.