Good morning all - your replies have given me lots of hope for the future and encouragement. I have always been a very active person and one of my main concerns was I may not be able to excercise as much but so far I have continued with pilates, swimming and gym workout after the initial shock when first put on insulin and was advised not to excercise initially by my diabetic nurse. i am trying zumba again tonight but am a bit apprehensive about it as it is so fast! However my DN says just sip lucozade rather than water during the class so will see how it goes. Could anyone advise me how stress affects their levels please as I am returning to my job as Jobcentre adviser where I interview people on JSA all day long? As you can imagine I have 'difficult' interviews at times and too many interviews are squeezed into a day - on Friday - my first day back after 2 weeks - I have 12 interviews to do. Also my eating pattern will change as I will have breakfast at 7am but my lunch break is not until 1pm with a 15 minute tea break at 10am. I am thinking of asking my manager (who has so far been less than supportive) if I can luch at 12 noon instead if the other adviser agrees to swop with me. If any of you work full time how do you manage your condition while at work? It's all so new - so many questions! I only take 3 units Novorapid before each meal and 8 units Lantus at bedtime and my glucoze levels vary between 4.8 and 13 but I guess I may have to increase this - I am terrified of having a hypo and going unconscious! I look forward to hearing from you all again.
Hi Ali
Another welcome to the forum. Sorry to hear about your diagnosis. I gather some thyroid problems are also autoimmune (like T1 diabetes) so it's not uncommon for them to go together apparently.
A few thoughts from my perspective on what you have said:
Exercise
Should not be a problem at all, in fact it should help a great deal. There's a thread somewhere on here about Team Type 1, cyclists who compete (and succeed!) at the highest levels of one of the most physically demanding sports. You will just need to learn how to cope with is alongside your D now. You have probably been advised too much exercise at this point because it is not advisable to exercise strenuously at high blood glucose levels (eg in the teens).
With exercise (and with everything else!) it's a good bet to start keeping notes. What you ate beforehand (estimate grams of carbs to the nearest 5g-10g), what doses you took and when, what you did, what your levels did before/during/after.
That way you can look back in a week's time and try to spot patterns that emerge over several days. Try not to jump to conclusions (I am terrible for this) make changes to any approach, eg what lucozade you drink and when, gradually and try to see if results are repeatable. The infuriating thing about D is that there are a *lot* of factors to take into account. Testing and experimenting over several days should help ensure that your results are not thrown by a one-off crazy day.
Stress
This will most likely have an effect. As will many, many things (including even the general temperature!). How much it affects you and inn what way will be unique to you. Diabetes is very like that. 'General' rules and approaches tend to hold true, but all the nitty gritty detail will be unique to you. More than almost any other long term condition
you will be the expert. Your clinic and team will give you support, information and approaches, but in the end you will be the one dealing with this condition 24 hours a day - they will only be thinking about it in the context of *you* (albeit expertly and with experience) for a few minutes a year. Some people find stress increases blood glucose levels (fight or flight, release of adrenaline stress). Other people find stress makes their BG's plummet (busy supermarket with toddlers,
ask my wife)
Insulin and meal timings
Great news to hear you have been put on basal:bolus/MDI. Many newly diagnosed get started on mixed insulins twice a day which is far less flexible and often means you *have* to eat or snack at certain times. The good news for you is that this should not be the case once your doses are roughly right. Your Lantus (background or 'basal') is designed to deal with the trickle of glucose that comes from the liver 24 hours a day. It releases slowly and fairly steadily over 24(ish) hours and if you ate no carbohydrate, in an ideal world your BGs would stay more or less completely level over 24 hours. This means that once your Lantus dose is roughly right you can eat early, late or not at all and should not have to worry, unless you are being unusally active in which case you might need a little 'top-up'. Your NovoRapid should be dealing with the carbohydrate in your meals. If you are taking the same doses every day (as advised by your team) you should aim to eat *roughly* the same quantity of carbohydrate at each meal (so much for breakfast, so much for lunch...) In time you will be taught/shown how to adjust your own meal doses such that you can eat (within reason) pretty much anything you fancy. Novorapid tends to work over 4-5 hours so by lunchtime your 'breakfast' dose will be finishing. A good, regular testing regime can help you spot what is going on... A bit like this:
Test before breakfast: 6.5mmol/L (yay!)
Notes: Ate 3 slices granary toast, est 50g carbs
Test before lunch: 12.8 (bah!)
...
Next day...
Test before breakfast: 11.2mmol/L (rats!)
Notes: Ate 3 slices granary toast, est 50g carbs
Test before lunch: 16.2 (doh!)
Conclusion: Rose by approx 5-6mmol/L both days, will try one less slice of toast tomorrow...
At this stage the actual numbers themselves are arguably less important than the
differences and trends.
If you struggle trying to find out what food has carbs in there's a great little book by Collins Gem called the 'CALORIE' counter which lists hundreds of foods with carb counts per 100g (they have a 'carb' counter one, but people find that can be trickier to use since it often says things by portion, half of whatever, without you necessarily knowing how big the whole was!). DUK have a free Carb Count e-book too:
https://www.diabetes.org.uk/OnlineS...diabetes/Food-and-activity/Carb-count-e-book/
Good luck with getting your head around it all.
Keep on firing out the questions
🙂
