A bad flatline this time

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

I’ve eaten another 10g if vegetable for lunch and injected another 2/2 and then 1 and it’s still only been able to drag it down to 105

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.

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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 !!

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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 :slight_smile:

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.

About 3 wks now - just increased to daily - it’s as if it’s just ignoring me


The line is so smooth the different doses of humalog and at different types just don’t even make a dent in it !

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?

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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

I tried to find a paper on the subject of toxicity at:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

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 !!

And there’s this guy as well - the complete opposite to dr Bernstein - very expensive course though
https://www.mangomannutrition.com

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.

But I am just a natural skeptic.

I don’t know much about the subject of insulin toxicity, but I do know how sometimes two things are correlated and they shouldn’t be.

If the idea is that people who use more insulin are more likely to have more problems, I do not know if that makes sense. It might be that people who use more insulin may generally have worse control. I do not know. It may not be the insulin that is causing the problem, but the control. That is a problem with some of those reports.

It might be like saying - people who are using their windshield wipers are more likely to have a car accident. Obviously, turning them off in the rain is not going to help. There is a totally different reason for it.

I would be interested on reading up on this idea.

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It may be that insulin resistance is a good indication of generally poorer health… it may be that comparable conclusions could be drawn even amongst non diabetics-- like higher fasting c-peptide levels (which means more endogenous “insulin use”) could be associated with negative outcomes…

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I guess Im just freaking out that after all the progress i made i seem to be at the beginning again - uncontrollable rising sugars that no amount of homolog can bring down. I started this morning at 100, Ive eaten half an avocado and 2 eggs for lunch, and a cup of cauliflower and a piece of salmon for lunch - which anyone would think is healthy - the blood sugar kept on rising - I have put in 30 units now already and its still 202. Baffling and soul destroying at the same time

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