For Type 1.5’s like me, for years I managed to avoid medication and insulin because I still had some insulin production. So long as I didn’t overrun my system with carbohydrates, my blood sugars would not spike. A common go-to snack was nuts or cheese. Neither seemed to move my blood sugar numbers by much. My feeble insulin production was enough to manage that.
That said, I quickly bored of nuts and cheese. Early on, I remember howling to the cosmos that, “I was sick and tired of nuts and cheese!!!”
Even though I do use insulin now, 10 years after my original diagnosis, I still have the inclination to eat the rough equivalent of a South Beach Diet that is generally pretty low carb. I do very well with a cup of tea and a couple spoonfuls of peanut butter.
But how good can that be for me? While sufficiently filling, I’ve begun to wonder whether or not the same thing day and out is bound to leave some nutritional holes that might cause problems over the long term. So I was susceptible to a prime product placement close to the Whole Foods check out line: Garden of Life’s whole food and certified organic Shake and Meal Replacement!
On the face of it, this option seems ideal. The ingredients purport to be raw and organic, so there seems nothing to cause any concern. It has all sorts of ingredients listed, so there seems little chance that I would create an inadvertent nutritional hole.
The best part of this option is that a single serving appears to have less than a gram of sugar. The rest of these carbohydrates are fiber, which are low glycemic and typically won’t kick up my blood sugar.
What I found was that even with insulin on board, my sugars spiked faster than how they normally rise on a relatively low-carb diet.
Notable to me is the rapid rise after the shake, and then the equally rapid drop after the insulin kicks in.
That behavior seems logical for something with more sugar than the ingredients suggest are in the single serving of this meal replacement.
As I thought about it more, I had a short night of sleep the night of June 13th, so I repeated the experiment the next day after a better night’s sleep.
The 3 units of Homalog insulin kept the peak lower, but the following blood sugar drop is also more abrupt.
So this was a promising result, I kept up the meal-shake-as-breakfast routine for several more days. In the end, my muscle and joints became creaky during the same period as when I taking the powder, so I need to do some more investigations to see if there’s a connection.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a nutritious and well-balanced snack that can double as a meal?