I have no idea how many carbs this was. A thick pizza and 2 beers (I was telling the guy making it to keep piling stuff on, like they do in Chicago).
But I wouldn’t have any clue how to do this with a calculator or formula on a pump. Absolutely no idea what I would put in for this.
This was just a pump with NovoLog, no IM or IV or anything fancy. Just aggressive insulin, overdosing for what I was about to eat, and then waiting for the drop later and hitting it with dessert.
The only trick is, you have to stay awake for a few hours so you can get your dessert when the rest of the insulin hits. You take more than what you need for dinner, and just be patient for dessert, which covers the rest of the slower insulin a bit later.
Whenever I go out for pizza, and people say, “What should we get?”, I quickly say, “I don’t know what you are getting, but I am getting this…”
While your curve is mucho impressivo, I don’t think this is a good strategy for the majority of folks who put on weight more easily than you do. Massive amounts of food plus massive amounts of insulin makes for weight gain in most people. Even marathon runners. So I think I will chalk this one up to those genetically blessed with “thin” genes. My son would weigh 500 pounds if he did this regularly.
It’s not a normal meal. I gained a bunch of weight yesterday. If I did it everyday, I would quickly be overweight. But the fuel tank is full now, so I can burn it up.
@Eric, A friend of mine who is a T1D (a long-time T1D) can look at a meal plate and dose right away. You and he must be the same in your ability to gauge by eye, very quickly, what a meal dosing entails.
We are not there yet, though. But I think my son will get there with enough years.
Before a meal, before you count carbs or look at nutrition labels, or search the food database, just take a guess.
Base you guess on everything you already know - the food you will be eating, your current BG, which direction you are going, how soon you will be eating, how active you have been, all the factors.
Only after you have made a guess do you enter in your numbers and see what your pump or calculator tells you.
Then ask yourself:
Was your guess close or far from the number? Was it more or less? Why was there a difference? Was your guess better than the pump? Are you going to adjust the pump’s recommendation? Why?
That is how you can move toward being able to just enter a number automatically.
Just like when you drive to a familiar location, you don’t need to use your GPS anymore. You know how to get there. It becomes automatic, you no longer have to think about the roads and turns. But you have to drive the roads a lot before you know it automatically.
@Eric, your recommendations do work. If I’m going to eat pizza, burger or fries or mystery Chinese/Japanese food of unknown carb count, I bolus much more aggressively than my normal healthier meals of known carb content and monitor 1 hour, 2 hour and correct with my favorite desserts, if necessary. It does work because of the nonlinearity of the depletion or consumption of insulin in our body. When correcting high BG’s, it’s also the same idea. I feel so silly in retrospect when I used to attempt to correct high BG’s and wondered why I was not meeting my objectives. It’s also much faster to bring up a low than it is to bring down a high BG. However, vigilant monitoring of BG is important. The only low that I’ve experienced thus far was a 39 when I lost track of time when I pre bolused for dinner and was at the computer. That was a bit too low.
Ironically, given the trouble so many people have with pizza, it’s about the one thing I can fairly accurately guess at. Most of my diab life I’ve counted one slice of a medium pizza (cut in 6) as 30 grams carb, 35 if there’s pineapple on top. (I usually have pizza when I’m out, so I can’t get into factoring in protein and fat.) Invariably this turns out to be a spot-on number, whether I’m pumping or on MDI. I occasionally have to tweak the extended bolus. Currently, 60/40 over 3 hours works beautifully. Note that I usually choose a pizza with more veg than meat and not blanketed in cheese, which may factor in.
But it stops at pizza. Even though I eat bread almost every morning and should have the carb estimation down pat, confront me with a dinner roll in a restaurant and I’m at a complete loss where to begin.
You are a super human. I would have snorted at least 3 afrezza 8s for that spread out over hours and would have had a rougher ride than that… with liquid I’d have been thrilled to stay anywhere near under 180
I could have kept it flat with a little luck with novolog for about 2 hours then would have been hit with a hellacious delayed spike when the novolog wore off… that spike would just be getting started as the novolog was wearing off for me…
you sir.
