• Please Remember: Members are only permitted to share their own experiences. Members are not qualified to give medical advice. Additionally, everyone manages their health differently. Please be respectful of other people's opinions about their own diabetes management.
  • We seem to be having technical difficulties with new user accounts. If you are trying to register please check your Spam or Junk folder for your confirmation email. If you still haven't received a confirmation email, please reach out to our support inbox: support.forum@diabetes.org.uk

Please help me! Stopped eating carbs and it’s still rising.

Status
This thread is now closed. Please contact Anna DUK, Ieva DUK or everydayupsanddowns if you would like it re-opened.
H

Hellospringett

Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1
I’m 60 and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 3 years ago. I cannot control it and my mental health is now suffering.

I am on day 3 of trialling no carbs with my meals so I don’t have to inject. However with every meal my sugar has still spiked, for example I was at 6 and ate a tuna salad with boiled eggs and an hour later it had risen to 12.
I had a roast dinner with just meat and veg (non carbohydrates veg), it went from 7 to 16 within an hour.

Can anyone explain this?
 
STOP this stupid experiment now! As a Tyoe I you produce zero insulin and your body needs a certain background level The reasons are multi-faceted and I am too tired to type out 5 sides of A4. I met someone carrying out this experiment years ago at a forum carried out on behalf of DUK. The woman had already developed eyesight problems and was in the early stages of kidney failure! Contact your GP or the DUK helpline first thing as you need urgent help NOW!
 
Hellospringett said:
I’m 60 and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 3 years ago. I cannot control it and my mental health is now suffering.

I am on day 3 of trialling no carbs with my meals so I don’t have to inject. However with every meal my sugar has still spiked, for example I was at 6 and ate a tuna salad with boiled eggs and an hour later it had risen to 12.
I had a roast dinner with just meat and veg (non carbohydrates veg), it went from 7 to 16 within an hour.

Can anyone explain this?
Click to expand...
You’ll still need insulin with meals if you don’t eat carbs as your body will get glucose from the protein when you’re not eating carbs. It will just be more complicated to bolus for.

Either you need to eat some carbs with your meals and bolus for them
Or work out a ratio to bolus for the protein
 
@Hellospringet I am sorry you are struggling.
The reason why your blood sugar is rising is, in the absence of carbs, our body will break down protein into sugar so you need to inject.
Is there a reason why you are trying not to inject? Unfortunately, with Type 1 diabetes there is no way around it.
If you have a problem with injecting, please get some help. Without insulin, you will become very ill very quickly.
 
In the absence of dietary glucose, the liver produces a fair amount of glucose to keep things going. So this is why it keeps rising when you aren’t eating.
 
Hellospringett said:
I’m 60 and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 3 years ago. I cannot control it and my mental health is now suffering.

I am on day 3 of trialling no carbs with my meals so I don’t have to inject. However with every meal my sugar has still spiked, for example I was at 6 and ate a tuna salad with boiled eggs and an hour later it had risen to 12.
I had a roast dinner with just meat and veg (non carbohydrates veg), it went from 7 to 16 within an hour.

Can anyone explain this?
Click to expand...

Carbs aren’t the problem @Hellospringett The problem is your body doesn’t have enough insulin. Before the discovery of insulin, Type 1 was a terminal illness. Despite the Type 1s being put on no-carb starvation diets, they all died, some quickly, some slowly.

Insulin is crucial for Type 1s. Never stop your insulin.

The body needs glucose to function and insulin to process that glucose. If you don’t eat any carbs, your body will make glucose from protein and generate it by itself.

It sounds like you haven’t been given support to control your diabetes. Were you taught carb-counting and insulin adjusting? What insulins should you be taking? Can you explain a little more so we can help you?
 
Huge sympathies. Diabetes burn out is a real thing and the daily drag of dealing with it all is very wearing. Well done for continuing to monitor as you now have the information you need to see that you need insulin with food. Your basal can keep your levels stable without food but as others have said your body needs glucose to work and in the absence of easily available glucose from carbs it will break other food down or dump its own so you still need insulin with food.

Give the helpline a call and talk through everything you’re going through. They’ll be able to help you assess whether your regular management needs tweaks which would give you more confidence in the whole thing.

Take care of yourself. Having a kid diagnosed means we got a tonne of support and have a team we can call on at any time. Adults get much less support and that can be very lonely as well as confusing.
 
I am trying it because I am at my last bit of hope mentally with this. I want to cut carbs as I just cannot get my levels accurate.

I have the same meals everyday as I am quite a simple man, for example one day a roast with potatoes I could inject for it and it could send me levels sky high and the next day I could inject the same and I could have a low, this would continue all the through the night.

I have been dealing with sleepless nights for a couple months and I was diagnosed with this during Covid so feel I was put to the side with no support. Really struggling.

I feel like I need face to face support groups or something to help me, but cannot seem to find this anywhere locally in Kent
 
Even if there was some sort of two three day course I could go on to learn about this stuff. I don’t mean an online presentation either I mean like a training course with real people where I can ask questions throughout the day. I would even pay private if they exist :(
 
Hellospringett said:
I am trying it because I am at my last bit of hope mentally with this. I want to cut carbs as I just cannot get my levels accurate.

I have the same meals everyday as I am quite a simple man, for example one day a roast with potatoes I could inject for it and it could send me levels sky high and the next day I could inject the same and I could have a low, this would continue all the through the night.

I have been dealing with sleepless nights for a couple months and I was diagnosed with this during Covid so feel I was put to the side with no support. Really struggling.

I feel like I need face to face support groups or something to help me, but cannot seem to find this anywhere locally in Kent
Click to expand...

Do you weigh your potatoes to make sure you’re having exactly the same carbs? Type 1 is a bit like you described. There are more than 42 things that can affect our blood sugar so it’s often the case that we can do the same things but get different results. That happened to me after breakfast yesterday. I’d usually be in the 7s at two hours but went up to 13. My guess is poor absorption of the insulin but it could have been stress (I was going out on a one-off job) or heat or anything.

Don’t aim for perfection. It’s not possible.

We can help you with tips to get control. Can you tell us what insulins you’re on? Have you done a basal test recently? Eating very low carbs isn’t a magic answer. It’s a common thought to think that if you just avoid carbs, you won’t have to do your meal time injections, but you do, for the reasons above. It’s actually easier to eat some carbs as things are more predictable and easier to inject for.
 
Reading back over some of your old posts, I see you were on Lantus - are you still on it? If so, you might find Levemir better as you can adjust the dose for daytime and nighttime.

Also, it was suggested you get a half unit pen - do you have one?

You weren’t using ratios for your meals at one point - are you now?

Not eating carbs can cause a form of insulin resistance and make it harder to control your diabetes. I see that you were finding your blood sugar rose late morning when you only had a cup of tea for breakfast. A carb breakfast and the right dose of insulin can really nip this rise in the bud.
 
I think it is highly likely that your basal (long acting) insulin dose is not correct and that is throwing everything off and confusing you. I know when I was first diagnosed, I kind of assumed that once my basal dose was set by the nurse that was it and all I had to worry about was adjusting my fast acting insulin for the carbs I ate but the truth of the matter is that for me basal insulin needs change and I have to regularly adjust my basal to keep things on an even keel otherwise my diabetes management is very frustrating and doesn't make sense.
It was my DAFNE (Dose Adjustment For Normal Eating) course which gave me the confidence to start adjusting my basal doses so you are definitely on the right lines in wanting an intensive course. DAFNE is a 5 day course sometimes a whole week at one go and other times one day a week for 5 weeks. DAFNE is the gold standard but some NHS areas have developed their own course based on similar principles. You need to speak to the staff at your diabetes clinic to put you forward for such a course. In my area, there is a helpline to ring the clinic where you leave a message on the answering service and they ring you back. Other people can ring the department direct or have email addresses for consultant or nurse.
When was the last time you had an appointment with someone about your diabetes and who was it with? It sounds like you are not getting nearly enough support and unfortunately, in the current climate you need to be a bit politely pushy and persistent to get help.
 
I should like to say that going low carb is not crazy or nonsense (it is what I do) but you have to know what you are doing and you will have to inject insulin for protein but that usually releases 2 hours after a low carb meal not within an hour which is why I suspect something else like basal insulin is responsible or there were more carbs in the salad than you think.
What did you have with your tuna and boiled egg salad? I am assuming there was no pasta with the salad?? Did you have cherry tomatoes? Some of those can be quite sweet if you had a few. What did you have to drink with it? Did you have any salad dressing and if so what? Was it a bought salad or home made? If it was bought, did you look at the carbs it contained? Just because it is a salad, doesn't mean it has no carbs, depending upon what it contains.

Which basal (night time) insulin do you use and how many units and when at night do you take it and what does your overnight graph typically look like. You may find levels go high at night if you are having a l;ow carb meal because the protein will release for several hours after your meal.
 
Eggs can be a peculiarity for some people @rebrascora I remember someone who had to treat each egg as 5g carbs.
 
Inka said:
Eggs can be a peculiarity for some people @rebrascora I remember someone who had to treat each egg as 5g carbs.
Click to expand...
I certainly have to inject for eggs, I presume because of the protein, and a 2 egg omelette with salad will need 2 units 2 hours after I have eaten it. Considering that they are also high in fat, I would be surprised if they are broken down within an hour to release any notable glucose, so I really do think that a rise from 6 to 12 within an hour of eating is unlikely to be down to protein. I also wonder if these are Libre readings in which case it may not actually have risen as high as 12 but that was a "predicted" result due to the algorithm which subsequently didn't materialize..... unless there was pasta or potato salad in the salad..... or the basal wasn't holding steady.... or protein from a previous meal was releasing but even then, protein doesn't release enough to spike you that quickly.
 
Status
This thread is now closed. Please contact Anna DUK, Ieva DUK or everydayupsanddowns if you would like it re-opened.
Back
Top