Buffet - would this be ok?

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mum2westiesGill

mum2westiesGill

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Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1
Buffets are so hard - my favourite things are sandwiches, sausage rolls and I never get too many anyway - would it be ok instead of having to try and work carbs out to test an hour or so after eating and do a correction dose?
 
No, in a word! You won’t know, after an hour or so, how much of the carb you’ve just eaten has been converted to blood glucose, because it’s difficult to gauge how fast (or slowly) it’s digesting, given the confounding factors of protein and fat in the pastry and sausage etc, so I think any guess at this stage would be useless.
The best thing, I think, would be to inject immediately after eating, having taken a mental note of what you’ve eaten, and do your best estimate of the carbs. You eat sandwiches often enough to be confident of your ability to work out the carbs in them, and you can look up sausage rolls.
 
Buffets are difficult but there are ways and means of dealing with them without having to get your scales out and weigh every single thing. I agree with Robin that any sort of guess is better than no injection at all, and then keep an eye on things afterwards.

So for example you know that a slice of bread is 15-20g carb, sandwiches obviously have two slices each, you should be able to estimate fairly well by eye whether the sandwiches you’ve eaten add up to a whole slice of bread on each side, or half, or a third or whatever and then work out roughly how many carbs from that. The fillings don’t usually count unless they are jam or Nutella or something horribly sweet like that! Just cheese or ham or some salad is no carbs.

Sausage rolls - I’ve just done a quick google and bite size ones are approx. 5-10 carbs each and big ones are 20-40, if you don’t want to be weighing them then you could guess in the middle so do 8 for little ones and 30 for big ones for example.

Then keep an eye on your blood sugars afterwards. This is where you need to be aware of stacking though, whatever insulin you inject will be floating around your blood stream for about 4 hours so you don’t want to be doing loads of corrections on top of that. If you’ve guessed about right then you will go up for an hour or so but then should start coming down again and be back to normal by the time the 4 hours is up. If you’ve guessed too high then you’ll probably go hypo so make sure you have some glucose in your pocket. If you’ve underdosed then you will go a bit high and stay there but it won’t hurt just for once, correct it later.

We are taught to calculate everything so precisely but it doesn’t really work like that, it’s perfectly OK for you to take a guess sometimes rather than spoiling your day out messing about weighing everything you eat! As long as you are doing an educated guess and not just picking random numbers out of thin air then you should be fine. If your guess is close enough it won’t make any noticeable difference to your blood sugar if it isn’t precisely what you would have calculated if you’d done it properly. If you get it a bit wrong oh well, that’s something to note for next time! We all make mistakes sometimes but then you just correct them and carry on 🙂
 
I tend to have a good scan of the buffet tables and judge what kind of things they’ve got and what I’m likely to eat, then I whack in an initial bolus to cover X amounts of carbs eg 50g carbs. I then fill my plate, keeping a rough count in my head to get up to my chosen 50g carbs or whatever.

If I eat more, and/or they suddenly bring out desserts, I just have another bolus to mop up any extra carbs.
 
I almost always find I need to add a bit extra to my buffet estimates. Because things are usually carbier than I expect. So I’d possibly make an estimate, add a unit or two, dose that before eating and then STILL need more a few hours later when the fat-delayed carbs have eventually shown up.

Enjoy the buffet!
 
I do it the same way as inka. I choose how many carbs I want to eat, bolus before going up, then get foods totalling that amount.
 
I went to look at the food and chose what I was going to have - then when it was time for the food to be served I went and got the food - 4 triangle sandwiches with sliced beef on and 2 mini sausage rolls - I did 36g altogether carbs for the sandwiches and 6g of carbs altogether for the sausage rolls.
My bg at 13:50pm was 8.3 before eating then at 18:40pm 9.0 bef tea.
 
mum2westiesGill said:
I went to look at the food and chose what I was going to have - then when it was time for the food to be served I went and got the food - 4 triangle sandwiches with sliced beef on and 2 mini sausage rolls - I did 36g altogether carbs for the sandwiches and 6g of carbs altogether for the sausage rolls.
My bg at 13:50pm was 8.3 before eating then at 18:40pm 9.0 bef tea.
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Sounds like a successful strategy then. Well done!
 
That sounds like you judged it perfectly, well done!
 
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