A little experiment today for @daisymae

Sports & Exercise
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I wanted to do a little experiment today for @daisymae

I mostly am doing MDI, but I have a few pods stashed aside, so I wanted to do a little demo today. We spoke about cutting off basal before exercise.

Today I went with a pump. I waited until all the normal basal insulin (Lantus / Levemir) had flushed out of my system.

I turned the pump off for 1 hour before starting my run, and left it off the whole run. A total of 2 1/2 hours disconnected.

I ran 90 minutes at an easy aerobic pace. I kind of imagined an equivalent pace for swimming 90 minutes. I tested BG several times and since it was an easy pace and my BG was not changing, the CGM was able to keep up and give a good representation of my BG.

(the little gap around 2pm was when I was getting ready for the run, the run started right after that)

A few points to mention @daisymae!

  • This was an easy pace, totally aerobic. Most of the few fuel for the run was fat metabolism. My body didn’t need to suck glucose out of my blood the whole time!

  • And also, the previous day I ate like an animal. My muscle glycogen fuel tank was totally full. Again, no need for my body to do any glucose blood-sucking.

So as flat and pretty as that looks, what happened after?

image1.jpeg810×498 77 KB

23 minutes later, with no food yet, I am already climbing. And the way CGM is delayed, I know the climb was happening much sooner. Basically right when I stopped running.

Why? All that time disconnected!

So that is exactly why I take a big insulin dose immediately after exercise.

So the 70 number might be too low for you right now. You want to target maybe 150. When you get comfortable with that, try 120.

Eventually you can start at 90 and end at 90. When you do that, tell your Endo or CDE about it, and get a video of them freaking out and send it to me, and I will enjoy seeing that! :wink:

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it seems unimaginable to me. i am staring right at the proof, but OMG.

btw, what was your latest A1c? also, don’t you have wacky days where BGs are difficult to keep in target range? and if/when that happens, how do you handle it? how do you manipulate your routine when your sugars are uncooperative?

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This thread is connected to the discussions in Daisy Mae’s swimming BG thread

(doing a little reorg’ing to make sure that people find the right threads when they search with keywords)

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Of course I have tough days, but there are some ways to handle it. We should have a complete thread on this sometime because there are a lot of things I do that are probably much different than what is in the book. Some of it will take some time to explain because it has to do with the way insulin is absorbed and how people usually do IC ratios which is much different than how I do it.

So many things we could discuss here. Like your correction number. Do you use the same correction factor no matter what your BG is? For many people, the higher their BG, their correction factor goes down. For example, if you are 200 and 1 unit drops you 50 points, but if you are 300 it might only drop you 30 points! Things like that.

But the reason I posted that picture is simply this: I have been talking to you about cutting basal for a little bit before you go swimming. I promise you, if I had not cut my basal today and did everything exactly the same, my numbers would have been totally different. I would have been fighting 40’s for the whole run. So that’s why I did the demo.

Also, CARBS!!! Eat up, DM!

That BG graph is what yours will look like very soon. :wink:

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