Sometimes when everyone’s been sick for over a week, you get lazy and have brunch for dinner. We’ll be eating donuts(!) that I’ve had in the freezer for, well, a while (bought in a moment of weakness when they were on sale 
). I had a disastrous fail eating a similar donut while pregnant (note to self: don’t eat a donut when at the height of insulin resistance in pregnancy…), and I have zero idea how to even begin to tackle eating one again. Which brings up my question - how DO you decide what dosing strategy to start with for a new experiment/food? Last time I had one, I had a delayed spike that stubbornly stayed up for hours, so I’m guessing I will need an extended bolus-type strategy (since I’m on MDI, it will be multiple injections). Beyond that…any advice, for both this and just new foods in general?
If I’m in a position to look up the food and weigh it, I just dose and see what happens. For a glazed donut the USDA database says it is 50.64% carb. So I’d weigh it, multiply the gram weight by 0.5064, and take insulin for that amount of carb. For me donuts are a relatively fast carb, so I’d expect a quick spike, and I’d not be using an extended bolus, I’d prebolus by maybe 20 minutes and maybe also use the “eating soon” strategy. (“Eating soon” means an hour before you eat, you take the largest correction that you can, to try to bring yourself to your lower limit without going low. That tends to put a good dose of active insulin in your bloodstream, which enables the liver to gather up glucose to make glycogen, and this helps reduce the spike that would otherwise occur.)
One tip is to start small and watch what happens, like start with a 1/4 donut, and then depending on how it goes you can adjust the dosing up or down for next time. Starting small reduces the size of the BG excursion if it turns out the insulin dose wasn’t right.
Thanks! Fortunately these are prepackaged donuts (best option when you have celiac disease), so the nutrition facts are on the box. I was thinking of doing the “eating soon” strategy to start. 1/4 donut to start is probably a good idea, especially since I’m having reactive hypos lately.
@Pianoplayer7008 I was going to suggest the eating soon strategy, as a way to crash your Bg in a controlled manner.
The donuts, especially if they are commercially made, are just sugar bombs. They are what I like to eat when my Bg is on the 50-55 range. They are a vital part of my strategy to never waste a good low.
I wish I could use donuts to treat lows, but I do not have the self control to eat just 1/4 of a donut when I’m low. 
Maybe I need to chop the leftover donut from tonight and put it in separate bags so any lows the next couple of days can be a quick grab…I’m curious, how many carbs does it take to bring you up from the 50s, and how do you keep from overtreating with donuts?
Dosed .5u at 5pm to bring me to the 70s, then 1.5us when I sat down to eat at 6pm (dosed for 60 carbs total, only ate ~30, as I usually have to double bonus for sugary things). I ate 1/2 a cinnamon sugar donut and am holding in the 120s right now an hour later; we’ll see where I go from here!
ETA: The funny thing was my 3yo, who hates being messy, refused to eat her donut because of all the “sparklies” it got on her hand. I can’t say I’m disappointed exactly…
Never waste a good low. I believe in this too.
It’s pretty situational, but I’ll generally eat 20g if I’m around 50. I don’t have a problem with self control at that level, but if I’m at 30 I’ll eat everything in sight and not even think about the consequences.
Thats the “I’m low Lets eat everything in the Fridge” syndrome.
Maybe I just have a lack of self control in general - it was hard enough sticking to just 1/2 a donut at dinner. If I’m in the 50s, I can usually eat 6-8g carbs and that will bring me up to around 100, so I can’t eat much - usually just 4 jelly beans.
Had a nice curve and dipping back down now at the 2 hr mark (never went above the 120s). A fun experiment, and tentatively saying it was a success!
Looks like a success to me! I think I just spiked to 195 just because I was thinking about donuts… I honestly have no idea why I’m at 195-- I snacked on some pickles, olives, and cheese, I didn’t bolus or count carbs but that shouldn’t have been anywhere near enough carbs to go from 85-195. So I think it was thinking about powdered sugar donuts.
LOL Powdered sugar donuts are the best! So sorry about that spike - that’s really frustrating. 
doc, my husband shoves everything he can pull from the fridge and the cabinets and tries to shove it into my mouth. on my own, i try my best to be very conservative. i hate the bounce-back from over-doing it.
That is one of the best things about having a CGM these days… I’m MUCH better about not over-correcting than I used to be. For many years I ate until I felt better, and then felt awful for being high for so long. I am so thankful I’m alive after years of bad choices!!
Our kids have moved out and my wife doesn’t like sweet food and I do but don’t have the self-control needed to keep it lying around, so we never buy stuff like cakes or donuts unless our kids are visiting.
But last week she stopped by Dunkin Donuts to get a coffee and it was closing time so they gave her a bag of free donuts (including a maple frosted!!!) which she brought home and timidly told me about - not wanting me to stay over 300 all night. It was dinner time so my solution was look up the carb content and have donuts for dinner. Instead of my normal meal (normal meal for me is mostly lots of mixed vegetable with some meat and smallish portion of brown rice or carb).
Donuts are obviously much faster acting than my normal meals, so I took my insulin and ate as needed to follow the insulin curve (I don’t have a CGM so used BG tests, but same idea). This is probably good since it made my “meal” last much longer than it would have if I had eaten at full speed. It actually worked out fine blood sugar and otherwise and filled me up. Not something I’ll plan to make a habit of, and I’m not going to start hanging out at the donut shop at closing time 
, but if you’re willing to test BG and calibrate your insulin you can make it work.
Sugar surfing off of fingersticks is harder than off of a CGM, but it’s great that you made it work.