@Chris - Not at all. I’ve actually put on 14 pounds in the past 3 months, I didn’t feel well with my original 44 lb weight loss.
At 150 lbs, I only need to eat 600-800 calorie a day to maintain my weight. One of the biggest charades presented to mankind is that someone my size, age & metabolic rate needs +/- 1,500 calories a day to maintain weight. I tried 1,500 cal/day early in my keto regime and it proved to be too much.
I weigh myself everyday as I’m on lasix for CHF / PH. For the past 2 months I’ve maintained 150lbs (+/- 4 lbs) and over the course of those 2 months my average calorie intake has been 690 calories.
What is critical for my losing or gaining weight on LCHF is managing my percentage of Fat vs Protein (macros). My carbs are negligible. If I eat more protein I maintain or put on weight; eat more fat and I’ll lose.
Everyone has a Fat/Protein macro that’s taylor-made for them. And macros change over time. For some, 70% Fat and 30% protein will be adequate to lose weight, for others it might take 80 or 85% Fat. Once you want to stabilize weight, shift to less fat and more protein.
Agree! I have thought about it, but like @MM2 says, I expect uncertainty – in insulin action, carb absorption, effects of even mild activity, etc., etc., so for me, at least, it’s impossible to approach it in a regimented or mathematical way. I can certainly reduce the uncertainties, which is one reason I’m pretty rigorous about carb-counting, because then I get a fairly accurate dose and usually a decent BG outcome, barring the 1001 variables that differ by the day. I’ve found things are actually easier to plan with structured exercise, where I do see trends that can be adjusted for. But “moving around more than anticipated,” like cooking, or having to do a quick clean of the bathroom before someone drops over, is what’s harder to account for in terms of carbs/insulin, and so the lows and the oops carbs I consider inevitable.
Anyway, to answer the question in the heading, I’d say my ratio is 90/10.
Afrezza just levels off most of the time, but sometimes it’s a little lower than I’d prefer so a gulp or two of Gatorade bumps me back into range. Some days it might be more (esp when hiking) and other days it’s less. I’d guess 90/10 though.
I’ve been working to try to reduce both lows and approaching lows while maintaining the same average/st dev. I’m headed in the right direction, mostly by dosing with Afrezza right before or during my meals and doing a quick run in place if things aren’t kicking in as expected. The run in place might sound silly, but it can be pretty powerful. I got a little lazy and was dosing after my meals, but everything works a little better if I dose when I eat (unless the meal has no carbs).
I know a Afrezza is a different animal. I’m sorry if that doesn’t help much.
If you are going to eat a meal and then watch a movie…or if you are going to eat the same meal and then clean the garage in the summer heat…do you bolus the same for those?
Of course. But we’re probably thinking of “moving around more than anticipated” on a different scale.
Do you think this is a bad question? It kind of seems like you might.
@beacher and I made similar comments, but they are just as valid as your way of thinking.
@beacher and I were both diagnosed MANY years ago, before pumps, carb-counting, ratios, BG Testing, CGMS. I’m sure I would have different views if diagnosed more recently.
I’m just curious how often people hit their goalposts and how they define those.
Certainly on days that I’m eating a lot more Oh ■■■■ carbs, I tweak what I’m doing. But how many Oh ■■■■ carbs relative to what they actually planned and bolused for are people comfortable with?
That’s what my question is about. It’s not stemming from anxiety, striving for impossible goals, or any kind of rose colored glasses about everything being mathematical. It’s just a retrospective question that can indicate people’s various approaches and personal boundaries.
And my amount of Oh ■■■■ carbs is usually a pretty good indicator of what my insulin resistance/sensitivity is doing that hormone day or on that new pump site (the insides of my arms are INSANELY effective at absorption so those boluses get cut by at least a third), so I pay attention. It’s a way easier way to know how to change my basal percentage without having to fast and basal test that day.
Absolutely not. Today I went out for breakfast before going on to the farmers market. As usual I forgot to lower my basal before leaving the house. I expected to walk a lot and carry heavy bags, so I had only half of my breakfast bolus. It worked out beautifully, but the “half” was a guess. I didn’t know how much or for how long I was going to be walking beyond “a lot.” “Going to the market” or “cleaning the garage” or “going for a bike ride,” how do you quantify things like that in a carb/insulin/energy-expenditure way? I haven’t figured it out, so for me it’s guesswork, and reacting to what happens, like this morning.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever thought about it in a comfortable/uncomfortable way. If I have to eat more carbs because my site is super-absorbing or I didn’t judge the amount of activity well or whatever, that can be a nuisance, but since I just eat the meals I’d like to eat rather than eat to a set amount of carbs, I don’t really distinguish between planned and oops carbs.
Not at all! Please don’t think that. I answered the question I thought had been asked. Maybe I still don’t understand the question, though.
I wonder if this is more relevant to those of us with hormones that cause our blood sugar to suddenly skyrocket tor crash for no reason. I mean, I do the same thing, because I need some way of knowing when to change my basals, and I don’t like waiting until my blood sugar is running high or low for a week to do that… I do try to incorporate other factors (is it an expected time for a hormonal shift? Is my site feeling irritated?), but they aren’t always accurate cues, either. I’m currently going through a few of those days where I’m doing everything “right” including sugar surfing as needed and still going high and low constantly. I really don’t know that there are any easy answers to this. I try to eliminate the variables I can, such as eating low-carb and changing infusion sets if there is any doubt. But I still find myself with out-of-range blood sugar more than I would like, and more than the people who manage ultra tight control seem to manage.
When I say planned, I just mean what I counted out after I decided on what to eat. Planned for me just means what I bolused for…not some preset limit or anything.
Like if I bolus for lunch, and just bolused for what I planned to eat on my plate…and then the afternoon went sideways and I needed two juice boxes to bail myself out of a tank…that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about if that makes sense.
I must admit, I don’t count carbs, but just eyeball my meal and guess how to dose. How much, whether to dual or square wave, how long to wait, which foods to eat first.
As I eat, I check dexcom, and if rising too fast, may bolus more, or cancel wave if heading down. If I correlate your oops carbs to the additional tweaks I make, I think it would range from 0-50%
I think this is old habit from my early days of being instructed to use “exchanges” (with fixed dosing), before carb counting was popular.
It’s interesting for me to revisit this thread…bc I’ve lately had a MASSIVE epiphany about how my approach to life (personality, I guess?) is just so different from 95% of other people.
This all came to light in trying to help my son with his geometry homework and us repeatedly reaching an impasse in which we just were not working well together.
Long story short, my personality is one million percent PROCESS driven. What I value is analysis and autonomy….and setting up great systems so that my life can function more like a crockpot on all fronts: set it and forget it, in other words.
I never understood why people constantly told me I was “worrying” or I was “nervous” when doing my thing. I never felt either one of those things. But when I pack for a trip or prepare for a house move or plan outfits for a family portrait or whatever, if other people approached those projects the way that I do, then it would mean that THEY were nervous. I’m just a super duper front loaded person. I put 95% of my brain power into setting up a good system for something that anticipates most hiccups ahead of time, and then I can go completely hands off and move onto the next thing in life bc I know the system will accomplish what I intended it to.
Some people on here have kindly mentioned how I am overprepared in different scenarios.
Yup!
But it doesn’t come from worry or nervousness…I just really appreciate a good system and then it heads off the vast majority of later stresses bc they were already handled before they happened and I didn’t have to stop what I was doing to manage them.
It’s interesting to me (and confirmation for me) that this is just how my brain works and not at all a “Allison is nervous about Type 1 diabetes bc she carries all this stuff in her purse all the time” thing…bc I do think for many people on here, if they carried on them all the stuff that I carry with me daily, it would be a signifier that they are nervous about some particular outcome. But when I do it, this is just how I was born. (I’ve been this way for all 21 years before I was diagnosed…so it is not a T1D thing). This is my method for most everything and I really love how it works for me bc it frees up my bandwidth to focus on the things I want to focus on…and not on what seems to me to be foreseeable problems. That is not a judgment towards others’ methods…that’s just me explaining that I do what feels right for me and it’s completely fine if that doesn’t mean the same thing to anyone else if they were to employ my methods.
I think back to when my family got trapped with a tour group in the bottom of Wind Cave in 2019 while the one park ranger assigned to us was trapped in a stuck elevator with the first 10 people trying to exit the cave (who knew we would exit the cave tour via an ELEVATOR up from the bottom of the cave or that there was a repetitive KNOWN problem of the elevators getting stuck for long periods of time with people inside them??). But before we even started the tour, I insisted on permission to take my purse with me (I didn’t even know about the elevator…and the NPS was very, very clear that absolutely no bags were allowed in the cave)…and when we were trapped with about 20 other people with no ranger in the cave with us, I knew I would be fine for days. That could have been an absolute panic attack scenario having my two young kids with me and my elderly mother…but while the other people freaked out when the NPS called down to us via the Emergency Phone and the middle aged woman standing next to the phone looked at me and said, “What do I do??? It’s ringing!!” and then she ran away from the phone…I said, “Answer it!” And when she didn’t, I stepped over there and took the call and was the liaison for our group while we were on our own…bc the software for the elevators didn’t allow the second elevator to move at all while the first one was “in use” (i.e. stuck between stops in this case).
And while that is obviously an extreme example that no one could reasonably foresee, I am glad that I could focus on calming down my youngest son when he realized we were trapped rather than having my own panic attack that I was now starring in every terrible movie plot that involves a Type 1 diabetic being isolated away from their supplies (which seems to be the only reason we are ever included in movies).
I’m just honestly so excited that my personality and my approach to life makes sense to me now…bc it has been explained to me my entire life as “worry” and that is EXTREMELY disorienting to be constantly told you are worried about something when you feel no worry.
I have been told that if someone ever needed to mobilize an army for years on end across an ocean and mountains and volcanoes, that I would be the perfect person to plan the operation. I now see that as a compliment and can appreciate my strengths and my WHY.
And the weird thing about being the front-loaded and detail-oriented person that I am is that people have often mischaracterized me as “controlling”…which never made sense to me bc I was never ever ever imposing my will or my ways on anyone else. It was strictly criticism of what I was doing for myself that literally impacted no one else (like why do you care that I organize my closet a certain way? It works for me! Do whatever you want in your closet!). I think what they were saying was, “We don’t understand why you approach projects that way, if we were doing it that way we would be being controlling, and we would like to voice our opinion even though it does not practically affect us at all.”
I get it now.
So that is why I asked about Planned Carbs compared to Oops Carbs. Because that is how my brain works being a systems designer for what makes my life enjoyable for me.
It’s a good thing we have people like you in life, @T1Allison …many of us (non systems folks) benefit!
.Ahh yes, the homework is always the thing that brings personality differences into sharp relief….I say this now with the 4th of 4 kids being a senior in HS. There’ve been many differences of opinion at the kitchen table here, esp. with our son compared to his 3 sisters.
I went there for the first time in about 2021, despite living in SD for my whole life…the elevator didn’t get stuck though! I had to share your story with my wife, who’s been in Wind Cave probably 6 times…we both got a kick out of it. Incidentally, I found the tour stop in the common area most interesting, where they told the Native mythology about the cave.
I am 100% with you on being prepared for anything. I got snowed-in one time in the mountains and was running out of insulin. And I decided - Never again!
But I also want to make it the most compact tiny collection of supplies anyone has ever seen.
I always loved the gadgets that James Bond and Batman had. Those guys were prepared for anything. But they didn’t carry around huge backpacks with stuff in it.
So I worked on consolidating my stuff. Like I realized a pod is basically a vial you are wearing. So when I go on trips, I over-fill my pod.
I have a spare syringe I carry with me. And I am wearing a “vial” (pod). When I have had occlusions out of my house, it was not a problem. I had my vial and syringe.
But that was not cool enough. So I have now upgraded to this. It is an ACTUAL mini-vial and syringe. Inside a tiny metal case that I wear on a keychain.
So my point is, I always want to be prepared. But I also want to make it an art.
(Plus, I don’t have a purse. Because Batman and James Bond didn’t either.)
That’s your 6 year old quote and I think that summarises it concisely. This is what I do too. Had I responded to the original question I would have said, somewhat like @Beacher that I do zero planned and 100% oops.
For me the answer to the original question is that I do not plan to eat anything and, indeed, some days I don’t.
But I also don’t record everything; I record when I bolus; that’s when I scarf over about 20g.
I guess it’s not clear what the OP wanted to know. When I was diagnosed I really did have a “diet” of the exact amount of carbs I would eat at the exact time of day; everything planned for my future life. That never worked.
Most of my life I’ve just jabbed insulin in to one of my thighs or, later, my stomach (now both seriously damaged by the jabbing) and the amount could not possibly match any estimate of the carbs. Back in those days (up until some time in the 2000’s IRC) micro-dosing insulin was very difficult, but measuring carbs, while still highly inaccurate, was sort-of reliable. So “planned” made sense and “carb counting” made more. “Planned” is easier because we only eat exactly the food the docs have prescribed, with exactly the right amount of carbs; life sucks if you let it.
These days I’m still zero planned and 100% oops but I’m moving to zero recorded.
Ok, so I’ll stet the humorous (or not) comments about what I do with my pump. But I do always have a whole load of stuff around just in case everything goes sideways. Always the glucose tablets; hate them but I can live a week on one tube, probably longer. Lantus pen, several years old now but tell me when I’m at 10,000’ that I can’t use 5 year old insulin because it might not work and DKA is much better. Nah, don’t do that; that’s what happens when I post comments like this on Reddit.
My own personal paranoia is not knowing my BG. I have more Contour test strips that our current world leaders have nuclear missiles. I admit I certainly shouldn’t use them, they’re somewhat old. I used one earlier today, just fine, but like world leaders I know that if the test strip does something wacky, something my body doesn’t tell me, I need to repeat the test.
I also have a very supportive wife with an enormous handbag. It has everything any world leader might want, well, not golf balls, but there are limits. Dog chews, poop bags, an Omnipod, my Medicare card (it just took us half a day to find that, it is a very big bag), Lantus (pen), Fiasp pen and countless other things that I simply do not understand the use of.
It is a great handbag. It reminds me of Rincewind’s chest, without the teeth and locomotion; Andy provides those herself.
This is important to me, I call it teamwork (though people more included to judgement might call it exploitation). I carry an Omnipod, a G7 and a cellphone. I’m continuously tempted by the O5 simply because I could junk the ‘phone. Does anyone know of a stick-on cellphone?
(c) John Bowler
Amusing reference: pens and, (without the historical review) pumps; check for “pumice stones”:
Thanks to @T1Allison for refreshing this stream, it was interesting reading overall and reinforced the concepts different people use in their treatments! They all present food for thought, not that I’ll change, but gives others ideas none-the-less! I particularly liked the last article @jbowler provided, dated in 2010 (doesn’t seem that long, but then I’m 70 and I’m sure it makes a perceptional difference), it provides some perspective. The change in providers is amazing, even if the products types are not all that different. I recall just a few years back bemoaning the state-of-the-art and how long it took manufacturers to bring new products to market, reading the history that others have lived thru seems we’re in the space age, though not quite at the Star Trek level! Makes me appreciate what I currently have all the more. @T1Allison I’m glad I don’t have the concerns that women deal with regarding hormones, though at my age I’d hopefully be past that “opportunity to excel.”
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