April 21, 2022
So yesterday, I’ll admit it — when lunchtime came, I was lazy. Lunch was a bowl (about eight ounces) of peanut butter.
Dinner was a cauliflower/parmesan cheese bread replacement, a sausage, a slice of cheese, some salad and about eight ounces of roasted broccoli.
So what really stands out to me about the curve in my CGM data is that it so clearly shows the difference that different types of carbohydrates can have, even in the same quantities. I didn’t plan this demonstration, it just turned out this way by chance, but here you can see that the peanut butter hits me slower and lighter than my other “low carb” choices at dinner.
One main difference between the two might be the amount of fat. There’s more in the peanut butter I expect than there was in the olive oil I used when roasting the broccoli.
The back end result of that is also pretty interesting. I was able to pretty quickly bring the level down with exercise alone. Within 30 minutes I was just about at 100 mg/dl, and 15 minutes later at the 45-minute mark, I was getting an alarm on my CGM that it was about to go into the danger zone.
In point of fact, because I didn’t have insulin on board, I could likely have withstood a dip, even far into the danger zone because my liver would have produced the necessary glycogen to keep me from going into a low blood suger-induced coma. But if I went too far in that direction, it might have over-compensated, and caused me to rocket back to a peak. Then dealing with all that, especially when I’d rather be sleeping, is a drag. So rather than push to a 60-minute exercise session, I cut it off at 45 minutes in the hopes that the correction up would not be too extreme.
In the end, as went to sleep, I saw that it had climbed back up to 111 from its low in the 70’s. It might have flattened out on its own, but I decided the curve was gradual enough that I would not try to change its trajectory abruptly with some fast acting insulin. Instead, I decided to bolus five units of long acting insulin and go to sleep.
That appears to have been the right call. The curve gradually crested and turned back towards a low number. By the time I woke, I was in the 90’s. That was an excellent soft landing.