This page teaches you how to minimise the glucose spike after a high-carbohydrate meal with little fat.
A recap on the fundamentals may help: Episode 7: Fundamentals of The Glucose Never Lies.
Meals such as breakfast cereals, jacket potato with baked beans, toast and jam, waffles with spaghetti hoops.
Snacks such as cereal bars, biscuits, and rice crackers.
Remember, Grace and Jude: at least 80% of meals should be well balanced.
This page is not a free pass to start hammering the Coco Pops, Pop-Tarts, Supernoodles, sweets, and all sorts of processed crap.
Here’s a quick recap of what happens after eating this type of meal.
Why is there a spike?
Lack of insulin in the portal vein…
…and the slow absorption of insulin from injections or a pump.
How do you knock the top off a glucose spike?
There are lots of food-based options, such as:
- Choose whole-food carbohydrate options rather than processed ones.
- Add vegetables to slow the digestion process.
- Add fat to the meal to keep it in the stomach for longer.
- Add protein to the meal and eat that part first.
- Add vinegar to slow digestion.
There are two other options guaranteed to help:
- Give the insulin a head start using S from SET.
- Use T from SET and do 10–15 minutes of moderate activity after the meal, such as walking, playing, or gardening.
This graphic shows how these tactics knock the top off a spike.
This guide pulls everything together.
This does not mean it’s OK to eat high-carb meals all the time.
If you follow the typical Western diet, this is what you can expect.
If you follow the crappy advice of:
“Eat what you like, sit on the couch, just keep whacking in the insulin.”
Grace and Jude, you will have a shorter and more miserable life.
I have these two mantras ingrained in my mind; you should too:
“It’s important to respect I have low levels of insulin in my portal vein.”
“You cannot outrun a high-carb processed diet with type 1 diabetes.”
Time to show how you can get near-flat CGM lines after well-balanced meals.
Next step: Balanced meals.
