My good run of average of 100 is being wrecked by my uptake in exercise I think - only thing I can think of that’s happening as my diet hasn’t changed or my dose
Do any of you get it when no matter what you inject it just refuses to drop your bg
My basal tresiba is still good (if maybe a little high) as I still have a slight drop of 40 overnight but today it shot up at 6 am to 140 and then since then I’ve injected humalog of 2 or 1 unit 6 Times and it refuses to drop ( I only had my normal low carb breakfast which normally requires 2 units) - normally a unit of humalog would take me down 30 in 2 hrs but these are having zero impact
My only thought is after reading Eric’s wiki on exercise as I have just started strength and cardio for an hour each day
My liver is pumping out sugar to feed my glycogen - but boy is it frustrating - yesterday I injected 4 afterwards but then had a massive drop - today I’ve put in 4 and nothing happens !!!
Sorry to see this, @Robellengold. So frustrating! And it sounds like the insulin is still potent, since it occassioned a drop yesterday, right? Hmmm. What are your basal doses right now?
I want to put together a thorough thread on this. A lot of stuff about exercising on low carb…
A lot depends on the type of exercise you are doing and your daily carb numbers. But, if you are exercising at a certain intensity, your body will need to fuel that. And no matter what people say about becoming “fat adapted”, your body will still need a more rapid fuel source than can be provided by fat metabolism. If your body does not have an adequate replacement for muscle glycogen, it has to use whatever else is available - either sugar in your blood or liver glycogen.
Tell me about your carb intake and your exercise intensity.
Sure - I’m eating about 30-35 gms a day of carbs right now - it may go a little over this as I take 1-2 skittles when I’m a little low (say if it drops to 65)
I worked out my total calorie intake as well and that’s probably a little on the low side at around 1200-1400 a day - given I’m not losing weight and I seem to be static at 208lb (I’m 6ft)
Exercise is very moderate - I do a cardio / strength workout for 30mins with dumbbells and lots of core exercises so I can build up my core strength (bad back etc ) and then I do straight after for 15mins cardio climbing up and down my stairs before a 5 min stretch - I’m also doing about 10000 steps a day extra on Fitbit from dog walking
My tresiba basal is 19 which is bang on for my weight - my nighttime bg is flat (neglible DP) - apart from today I’ve noticed this happening a few times actually when I look at my results the last week - I started exercising about 3 wks ago
Would definitely be interested in your thoughts @eric as a more seasoned athlete. I exercised today at 2.15 - my BG was 105 before and I did the normal routine - I also calculated that I had about 3 units of humalog in my system on their 1/2/3rd hour. When i finished at 3.30pm, I was 90, I took 5 units of humalog and ate 10g of chocolate (I normally need 1 unit for 13g of carbs). BG was 150 in 1hr, at 4.15pm when I took another 4 units. Now its down to 114 and still dropping but steadily (5 in every 5 mins) so OK. So that means I need to inject at least 9 units after moderate exercise and a small snack but I need to do it before I even finish the exercise to prevent a peak !!
Wow, your carb intake is pretty low. Doing resistance training or anaerobic or high intensity on such a low carb intake is tough. Over time, your body’s glycogen storage gets depleted.
A few things that help might be to time your carbs to be a few hours before you exercise, to give your body an available carb source. Or to coinsider an occasional carb loading day inserted into your week to restore glycogen.
Doing stairs slower and keeping your heart rate down is fine for fat metabolism. But if you are doing them fast enough to raise your heart rate and move into carb useage, BG spikes could definitely be a result of your liver trying to fuel the activity.
That low carb diet can make it easy to maintain good BG or help to lose weight, but once you throw exercise into the mix, it can become tough. Would you be able to do occasional carb loading days?
If nothing else, save the highest intensity activities for last, because that will cause the most spike. You can then hit it with insulin when you are finished.
Thanks this is very helpful - I had originally started on the Bernstein diet as I found that it was only below 45 grams that I could get consistency on the effect of protein and it’s also completely removed my hunger and appetite so helping me to lose weight
But I’ll give the carb load day a go and keep thit protein down for that day first and then also give the Carb before exercise
When I get more limber I want to increase the exercise to what I was doing 10 yrs ago so I need to change something I’ll take it up to 70 on they day and have a sandwich !!
That load day will help, and even on days you are not eating a lot, if you can eat that 30 grams a couple of hours before exercise, it gives your body something to use for the exercise.
If you were only doing walking or slow running, low carb is somewhat manageable. But when you add the cardio and strength or resistance training, it pushes you into a different energy system.
If you haven’t read this one yet, this gives a bit of info on some of it: the-3-energy-pathways
Thanks do you think the addition of exercise can have such a severe effect - it’s still ongoing now - I ate some broccoli and a piece of salmon tonight at 7pm when my blood sugar was 95 - I took 1 before eating(8g carb) and 1 after (30g protein) as that’s what I’ve calculated before and then 1 more 3 hrs later
5 1/2 hrs later I have put in another 12 units in total spread out and it’s still rising steadily at 181 - in total the last 3 days my humalog has gone up from 11 a day to about 30 a day but my average has gone up to 135 - it’s insane - 30 units a day can’t be fine for a 30g a day carb diet - kind of defeats the objective of doing it
There could be other factors. Maybe a combination of other things. Changes in sleep, stress, sickness, lots of things could be contributing.
How long have you been doing that exercise on a 30 gram daily carb intake? I really do think there is a point when your body gets tapped out with low carb.
So to make sure I understand it, you were doing 30 grams of carbs but exercising just a few times a week, but have just recently increased the exercise to daily?
Yep every other day until a week ago today when I switched up to every day - bizarrely the drop started at exactly 5 hrs after I finished eating at 7 45pm - may be as I need more glucagon the liver has amped up the conversion of protein to glucose 4 fold as 5hr is exactly the timing I get for that as well - it dropped from 190 to 158 bang on 12.45 !!
The timing of it happening after going to a daily routine really sounds like it is because of your body trying to cover that exercise.
Doing it every other day gives your body more time to replace glycogen with that small amount of carbs. It only needs half as much as when you go to everyday exercise.
Is your main reason for low carb to lose weight or to help with BG?
It was three fold - I wanted to get my a1c down - it was 8.5 - second - my doctor told me and I had read also that insulin toxicity was becoming more of a reason to create complications and he felt my dose was too high - I was on at least 60 units a day and I was 100kg - not sure if that is danger territority but he scared me when he showed me an article that discussed the prevailing factor for those who beat the odds was low insulin doses and I wasn’t following that / it had gone up steadily for 10 yrs - kind of made sense to me - those of us that still run very high a1c but still last a long time generally take lower amounts - I had done this for most of my 20s and 30s as I never changed my dose from 24 a day for most of that time ! I also wanted to lose weight as that was a factor also
I now find on low carb that the protein is driving up my tdd as I’m back to almost 50 if I need to continually dose for exercise and protein so maybe a higher amount of low GI carbs will allow me to get my humalog back down to 11 a day and 19 tresiba which is where I got to - I haven’t seen a thread on insulin toxicity here and what people’s doses are so maybe that would be an interesting topic
But after filtering out the initial hits relating to intentional toxicity, I could not find any articles. I checked the Mayo Clinic site also but no hits.
As FYI, your TDD per body weight is significantly lower at 60/day then my child’s TDD per body weight.
Having an endo that likes to scare me I hope - remember before I came on here I’d never met a type 1 diabetic before so had no clue ! The paper he gave me was a print out - but this refers to the studies mentioned in it as well - one is the famous one but there is another golden cohort one that examined insulin doses
I guess I’m doing what’s required now - but my BMI is still 28 so it’s got some way to go - hence the exercise and low carb diet !!
Maybe it works for others. For me, a quick spin through the first link had too many assumptions that were listed as given facts. I am just too skeptical to take anything at face value. But that is just me. The second one is hard for me to put faith in given the monetary aspect.
