Low blood sugar

[pondita]

So I bravely tried 50% and that worked - just; could have gone further. So your remark that you may decrease by 1 unit might prove to be overly cautious.
Are you aware that intense (or hard anaerobic) exercise can initially bring about an increase - as your body thinks you need to be in "fight or flight" mode and releases more glucose into your blood; in due course that extra gets soaked up and I then drop a fair amount later that day. Intense activity also carries on affecting my BG for 2 or more days; but I'm T3c and my diabetes is very brittle (erratic).
I have relative who has been T1 since age 16 (now late 40s). He goes Munro walking and frequently takes what he call a diabetes holiday - skips one or more bosul and walks off his meals, with supplementary protein snacks as he goes. So while I wouldn't recommend going that far, it does seem to be OK for him. I have a high carb breakfast and if very busy regularly skip lunch (so no bolus) and take a couple of snacks during the afternoon; the snack might be a couple of JBs and a slower GI choc biscuit, plus plenty of fluid to keep myself well hydrated. Dehydration noticeably affects my BG. My alarms let me know when I'm dropping and when I'm in a low zone.

Thank you, Proud to be erratic, for all the tips and thoughts. I will try a further reduction in pre exercise insulin, or like your friend does, take a "holiday", just to see how it goes. I'd read about intense exercise increasing my BG, but I've not found that happening with me. So I guess my exercise isn't intense enough. :-D

 

[pondita]

Exercise on basal only is a good place to start. Depending on the exercise you do, you may require no bolus or a massive reduction.
A normal amount of bolus insulin with food and then doing exercise ensures going hypo, this means more food to treat the hypo. You are feeding the insulin, this will not help to reduce weight, it will help you to gain weight.

Hi Benny G. Of course! A light bulb just went on. That makes so much sense, I hadn't thought of it quite that way. Depending on what I eat before exercising, maybe I can go just on the basal insulin. If it's a higher CHO meal, I would probably need some insulin. I'll practice with that, and see if I can come up with a better plan. Thank you.

 

[pondita]

Hi @pondita It will depend on you as an individual, but you could try slightly shortening the time between your meal and when you start exercising. I’m trying to remember how long I left, but struggling as I haven’t been swimming in the evenings for years. I remember I left long enough to be comfortable but not too long. The point of that was to make sure I started exercising with higher sugar and with rising sugar from my meal.

Yes, I started my exercise higher than normal. It depends what you class as normal, but I started with a higher sugar than I’d usually have in the evening. Again, I’m struggling to remember, but I think it was between, say, 8 and 10. I then judged my snack on what end of the range my blood sugar was, eating more if it was near the lower end of my target.

I personally see exercise as more of a way to keep fit and healthy and increase/maintain insulin sensitivity. To me, the best way to lose weight is to moderate your food intake slightly.

However, unless you’re very short, I don’t think you sound overweight. What I alluded to briefly in my first response to you was that it’s very possible the loss of your beta cells took place over a number of years. This would have caused higher and/or erratic blood sugars that you wouldn’t even have noticed. These would have meant your weight may have been artificially lower than your natural weight. So, when you talk about going beyond your pre-diagnosis weight, just keep in mind that that weight might not have been your ‘right’ weight due to erratic higher sugars. If you eat well, your body should find its own natural weight.

I'd been giving it about 1 1/2 hours between meal/ insulin and exercising. I'll try to eat and then go to the gym. Depending on what I eat, I'll adjust insulin down a lot more than I have, and look at the results. Thank you for sharing what you'd done; that helps.

I understand that the loss my beta cells may have taken several years, and that my weight would have been artificially low. Hard to know....?

4-9 is the "normal" range I try to stay in. My BMI is in the high normal range, but this weight is about the same as the most weight I've ever weighed, and I just don't feel good at this weight. I have tried moderating my food intake, and I'm not gaining weight quickly, but I am gaining, slowly but surely. Many of my clothes already don't fit, and I'm going to need to buy new clothes if it continues along this path, and I don't want to do that ! 🙂

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Some exercise specialists for T1 suggest timing exercise before meals, then eating afterwards (with a dose reduction because of the increased insulin sensitivity).

Hope you manage to work out what is going on with your low BGs @Lee1978 - might it be ‘reactive hypoglycaemia’ where the body’s second phase insulin slightly over does things after an initial post-meal rise? It’s not unheard of to get occasional hypos with Metformin, but it is quite unusual. Do you only get these low readings with exercise?