I am Christel from Diabetes Strong in this video I’ll be going over my daily
blood sugar levels and insulin doses I’ve been living with one diabetes since 1997
and I do want to point out that every day does not look the same for me both when it comes to what I
eat and how much insulin I take but when I post a video about what I eat in a day a lot of you guys
reached out and asked me to also include how much insulin I injected that day and how my blood sugar
levels fluctuated so let me show you but before we dive in please remember that this is just one day
in my life days look different and I’m not telling you or even suggesting how you should manage your
diabetes how much insulin you need for meals and corrections is most likely different from what I
need so be safe and please discuss any changes to your diabetes management with your medical team
and here you see my blood sugars for the full 24 hours of Sunday May 1st
and what you see here is a Dexcom CGM graph that stands for continuous glucose monitoring
and that's a device I wear that allows me to see my blood sugars 24/7. what you see here is you
see the orange line the orange line is 180 mg/dL that's 10 mmol/L the lower line you see the red
line is 70 mg/dL that's 3.9 mmol/L as you can see my blood sugars are fairly stable up until
around 6 a.m. in the morning and here you see the dawn phenomenon kicking in that's basically my
body releasing glucose into the bloodstream so at that point I was sleeping it was a Sunday I slept
in so I didn't act on that until 8:20 a.m. in the morning and at that point my blood sugar's already
almost reached 180 mg/dL I use a correction factor of 50 meaning that based on experience I know that
one unit of rapid acting insulin lowers my blood sugar is about 50 mg/dl so based on
that I injected 1.5 units of rapid acting insulin and as you can see it came down pretty nicely now
let's look at the meals so this was a lazy Sunday so breakfast ended up not being until 11:30 a.m.
and that day it was an omelet and an English muffin at that point my blood sugars were 86
and there was 28 grams of carbs in that whole meal so I injected three units of rapid-acting insulin
I did not plan on pre-bolusing for this meal so that means taking my insulin 15 maybe even 20
minutes before the meal I did not plan on doing that because my blood sugar was 86 mg/dl and I
was planning on going to the gym so I injected my insulin at 11:30 and was planning on eating but I
got distracted recording that video about what I eat in a day so I ended up not eating until 12:15
and this is a great example of insulin and meal timing because as you can see I kind of went low
again that's because I ended up pre-bolusing so taking my rapid acting insulin 45 minutes before
I actually ended up eating um I ended up taking one glucose tap and eating my meal
that kind of took care of that I took three units of insulin for 28 grams of carbs because
I use a carb ratio of 1 to 10. that means that I assume that one unit of rapid acting insulin
will cover 10 grams of carbohydrates so 1:10. I in the past I’ve used different
carb ratios for different meals so for example uh maybe an eight for breakfast and a 12 for dinner
but currently I find that a one to ten works for pretty much all my meals
after breakfast I went to the gym and I did 45 minutes of resistance training and 40
minutes of cardio and as you can see in the graph my blood sugars stay completely flat
that is unusual usually I will see some level of movement in my blood sugars when I exercise but
this day I did not after my workout I had a cup of coffee with collagen protein and I did not inject
any insulin for that I do sometimes as coffee as well as protein can impact my blood sugars
but it's a bit of a judgment call so I will look at where my blood sugar is at
am I dropping and how much insulin do I have on board
but this day again I chose not to inject any insulin and as you can see my blood sugar
stayed fairly flat at 110-120 mg/dl up until lunch so for that day it was the right call
then I had a large late lunch around 4:30 p.m. yes I know that's a weird time to have lunch but since
I had a late start my meals kind of got pushed out a bit so at that point my blood sugar was
114 mg/dL and the complete meal had 27 grams of carbs total carbs however six of that was fibers
I subtracted that got down to a net carb count of 21. and given I use a one to ten carb ratio I
injected two units of insulin for that whole meal and I did that before I started preparing my meal
so that means that I had a pre-bolus of about 10 minutes I usually take two units to two and a half
units for that type of lunch it kind of depends on how much protein I add and that day I should
clearly have taken two and a half and not just two units because as you can see I’m slowly trending
upwards after lunch and 90 minutes after lunch uh I wanted a snack and that point I was 143 mg/dL
so 143 mg/dl is not a horrible blood sugar in any way but I aim for me to be back in the 80 to 120
mg/dl 90 minutes after a meal I’d say the major variables for me when deciding between like two or
two and a half units for a meal like my lunch is as I said the protein as large amount of proteins
can also impact blood sugars and how much insulin I have on board to my IOB as well as whether or
not I exercised but even knowing these variables doesn't necessarily mean I get it right every time
so at 6 pm I decided to have a little snack and at that point my blood sugar
was 143 mg/dL I decided to have a kind bar uh and a cup of coffee so the kind bar has
10 grams of carbohydrates and giving my carb ratio is 1 to 10 that is one unit
the coffee is a bit of an unknown for me it's a bit of a unknown variable in sense that sometimes
coffee will raise my blood sugars sometimes it will not so that day I decided to not inject any
insulin decide to not bolus for the coffee however since I was a little higher my blood sugar was a
little higher than I wanted to be I did include half a unit of correction so that means one and
a half unit in total and the goal was then to try and get my blood sugars down closer to 100 mg/dL
I did not succeed in getting my blood sugars down to 100 before dinner so at 8:30 pm it was time for
dinner my blush was 148 mg/dL this is reality I’m just showing you what happened that day and
I don't always succeed in getting my blood sugars to the levels I want to anyway 148 mg/dl is still
not horrendous it's just not where I wanted it I did not do any further corrections between
that snack at 6 pm and dinner at 8:30. the reason for that is that I generally wait an
hour and a half to two hours after injecting insulin for a meal before I do any corrections
the reason for that is that injected insulin rapid-acting insulin takes time to work and
if I start stacking between meals too aggressively I run the risk of going low
and I don't want that so that's why I wait at least that hour and a half to two hours
okay so blood sugars were 148 mg/dL before dinner and I had a tuna melt on low carb toast
and that was a total carb of 18 subtract fiber get to a carb count of 15 net carbs so that's what I
bolused for, that's what I dosed for I’m not sure why I didn't do a correction but I didn't
so I only took one and a half unit for that whole meal and again I took the dose when I started to
prepare the meal which means that my pre-bolusing time was about 10 to 20 minutes before the meal
and this was the second meal in a row where I clearly took a little
bit to a little insulin about half a unit I think um so my blood sugars slowly climbed
up until 9:30 by like 34 mg/dl and topped out and around 179 mg/dL at this point I was irritated
get clear it's irritating it's annoying when your blood sugars it is like slowly climbing
I don't beat myself up about it I don't see it as failure but I do get irritated
so for my evening snack there at 9:30 p.m. I had a low carb yogurt um and some almonds so that knit
cards were only three grams so hardly anything but because I’m now still trending upwards I’m at 179
I decided to inject 1.5 units of rapid-acting insulin and the good news is that that did
take me down overnight and I woke up with a blood sugar of 82 mg/dl was perfect for me
so that did make me happy but I want to showcase here that you know I know what to do but still
there's gonna be days where I don't get it quite right now these blood sugars are horrendous it's
just slightly outside of the rains that I want to be in and yes I do get irritated
and that is what my blood sugars look like and how much insulin I took that specific day remember
not every day is going to look the same however generally I do find that when I eat like this when
I eat a very diet I don't see any crazy blood sugar spikes and yes I did see my blood sugars
trend up during the afternoon but if you look at the whole day let's just look at my stats here
you can see my average blood sugar is 122 mg/dL my time in range meaning how much time I spent
between 70 and 180 is 92% so that's still a pretty darn good day from a blood sugar perspective right
so I think that's one of those really good examples of it's really beneficial for us
to look at the broader strokes and not dial in and only focus on individual instances
throughout the day because overall this was a good day for me so thank you for following along
checking in on my blood sugars and my insulin levels throughout the day I hope you liked this
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