this is exactly where i learned everything that i am doing now. trusting in this community has been life changing in the best of ways. my gratitude is overflowing.
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Same here! I wouldn’t be anywhere near where I am without the help from other D’s online, but particularly on this forum.
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my mother is a doctor of nutrition. i grew up without many sweets other than juice or fruits, so not eating sweet foods is more the norm for me. of course, i do have my weaknesses; i am human of course. i cannot resist a large slice of key lime pie. no way, no how. in fact, i had a piece at a big meal with my family just last week 
PS: my husband is the opposite; he is a total sweet tooth. every night of every day he must have at least a large chocolate chip cookie. its crazy. my only sweets are for treating lows.
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I had a similar upbringing, actually. My mom’s health severely detoriated starting when I was 16, though, so more convenience foods started creeping in, and sweets along with them. I formed some bad habits in college, in particular, while under a lot of stress. I’m like your husband - now I try to do dark chocolate or yogurt with berries as my “sweet” nightly treat, but half the time it’s ice cream or a mug cake.
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you might find this ridiculously weird, but what i look forward to in the evenings is a large cup of hot Lactaid milk with 2 Splendas. i find it very soothing and feel like a nurtured child. my husband, of over 25 years, still thinks i am crazy.
but i will admit that chocolate is my deff go-to for correcting every low above 30 (then its juice all the way)
PS: i love Lindt Dark Chocolate with a touch of Sea Salt. OMG; if you haven’t had it, you must try it!!!
I might have found that weird 5 years ago, but since having to cut out dairy off and on the past 4 years, I LOVE a big glass of milk. 
Ha. The CDE I saw the other day wasn’t happy to hear I was sometimes treating lows with chocolate (I didn’t volunteer that info, but she wrangled it from me anyway). She even pointed out, after asking if the ice cream bar I treated a low with during pregnancy had chocolate, that it “slows things down,” even after I’d JUST told her it had made me spike too high. 
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i found that with foods like ice cream, the fat content slows down the digestion process. so, you might react “normally” in the beginning but spike later on. if i want to eat ice cream (which is rare for me), i MUST use a dual bolus and extend the insulin duration time. this keeps me level.
Maybe it’s because I eat a high percentage of fat overall, but the most delay I see with ice cream (coconut milk ice cream, usually) is at 1.5 hrs rather than 1 hr, so it really makes very little difference for me. It’s also another thing that really works well for me to double bolus for, actually. 
I think the only people who say that are CDE’s and Endos and the American Diabetes Association.
They tell you to use grandma candy. 
A good hard butterscotch that has been sitting in a bowl for 20 years!
Or a glass of orange juice - measured out. 
You can use anything. Chocolate might not be the fastest, but it works fine.
If you want to have some fun with them, at least once, use a mixed drink like a Jack and Coke or Seagrams 7 and Seven. And then when they ask you how you treat lows, watch them freak out when you tell them you treat lows with mixed drinks. 
Good times at the endo office!
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LOL I can see her reaction now…sweet, soft spoken lady who kept saying, “Ohhh, hmm, well that worries me a bit.”
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My sentiments exactly.
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I would love if that were true for me, but I find chocolate is useless – unless you’re talking one of those long, slow afternoon drifts downward and you just want a little something to bump you up a notch. Or unless the chocolate surrounds some sickly super-sweet gunk like in a Cadbury Creme Egg, whose filling is made of sugar, corn syrup, and high-fructose corn syrup.
But for those shaky, sweaty, hallucinogenic-state lows, chocolate is not going to do a thing for me. And as a (now reformed) chronic over-treater of lows for more than four decades, I have done some research.
I don’t have any problem with the advice to measure it out. It’s so easy in the throes of a low to open that carton of juice and guzzle from it. Then you go super-high, overcorrect, end up super-low, guzzle more juice, and round it goes. Measuring out the juice is no different than finding out that one or two glucose tabs usually work just fine, and you don’t actually have to wolf down the whole tube, even though that can be very satisfying in the heat of the moment.
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I don’t think chocolate would end up my go to for a low like that - I’d imagine that’s where you’d want the super fast juice or pure sugary something. Most of my lows so far have been more slow drops into just the 50s/60s, so chocolate still works for that.
I was heading down while grocery shopping the other day. This store offers free coffee (sample-sized cups) so I put a heaping teaspoon of sugar in mine to head off the low quickly…then followed up with a tasty section of a Kit-Kat bar. 
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Yum! I’m all for enjoying those low treatments as much as possible.
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as most of you know, i am a chocolate fiend. i will use any excuse to eat chocolate. but as eric says, it does take time. so if its not a significant low, i will go right for the chocolate (50s, 60s ) but if i am in the 30s i go for the juice AND then treat with chocolate but the chocolate takes, for me, about 1 hour to work effectively; so if i do go to the chocolate, i know i will need to be patient and not over-do it with more and more sweets if i don’t see a reaction within 20 minutes or so.
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It really depends for me on the type of low and the context for me. Sometimes I’ll go low when I’m not at all hungry or needing more food—then I’ll use smarties/sweettarts or the like in order to use as few calories as possible to treat the low as effectively as possible. I’ll also use those if it’s bad low. If it’s a gradual low, and I’m hungry though, that’s when treating with whatever that has carbs, as long as it doesn’t have a ton of fat/protein, usually works fine. I’ve definitely treated lows with cheez-its, for example. Or when I was in France, a bit of bread or pastry worked well! Also I love chocolate, but I tend to prefer and only have around the good dark stuff, which I think does take a bit longer. Candy bars or milk chocolate or the like work fine for non-severe lows though.
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@daisymae, I finally succeeded in achieving the minimal rise from instant oatmeal I wanted this morning - from 100 pre to 132 @1hr post (started a little higher than my norm, unfortunately)! Now to experiment with adding toast. 
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Getting unlimited I see! Awesome.
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glad to hear about your NOT spiking over bfast with oatmeal. have you tried the regular “old fashioned” oats from Quaker? eric turned me on to them and i switched from the instant b/c i found them more favorable and a bit heartier and more substantial.
i also found a great way to prepare them: i boil water in a sauce pan. i pour the oats in and give them a quick stir, then i turn the flame off and let the oats soak up the water until it gets thick. stir as needed until you are ready to eat them.
one good thing about this method is that you can have the opportunity to pre-bolus while the oats are cooking. its so simple and so easy and convenient.
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