I agree... even better tasting to me is a flatbread I found called Light Flatout wraps. They are more rectangular, grill better, 90 calories per, 6 g net carb YMMV, 9 g Fiber and protein and 2.5 g Fat. I ordered a bunch of packages of them at www.flatoutbread.com. They have several different versions of "Light" = LoCarb, e.g., Italian flavored, spinach flavored, and so on. I am about to finish my first package of "The Original" flavored Light Flatout Bread. I like them better than the tortillas for most things now and the geometry of them makes it easier to construct most sandwiches... I think I may be tortilla construction challenged... /sigh

/smile

Those Best-Lifes are good. I have some of those in Spinach. My health food store stocks them. Very gentle on the BG levels too.

The Joseph's Flax wraps are huge and square. You could make 4 bread size pieces out of one and double them up, maybe stick them together with butter.

I'm jonesing for a bread replacement, something a little fluffier, so I can cook a real grilled cheese in butter in the cast iron pan.

The dough is rising (fingers crossed). Got in the fireplace which is about 80F. It is hot, hot, hot here.

Posted in wrong Universe

Cajun, how does one fight insulin. Explain that to me. I just don't get it.

Sounds good.

It was mid-nineties here today and very humid - July/August weather...

I finally used my Carbquik for pancakes yesterday and it was great! Lots of butter and DaVinci pancake syrup flavor.

Gonna do biscuits and gravy next.

/smile

Posted in wrong Universe

You are entitled to your opinions as am I. Experience >> opinion in my experience. I don't know whom you are speaking of regarding nitpicking of your methods. I recall that I was happy that your methods worked for you and I am. Similarly, I am very happy for your progress. I don't know how to state it otherwise.

There is a world of difference between opinion and experience, in my opinion. One of the two is worth something. I don't think any right-minded individual can argue with another's individual experience. I tried to make that clear earlier but apparently was not sufficiently clear.

What I do have problems with is a self-righteous, sanctimonious, condescending attitude that "my way is the way", yours is wrong. No one else has walked in my shoes or tested my BG. What is right for you may be very wrong for me. Nevertheless, I respect your rights to your beliefs. I might suggest that you learn to respect the rights of others to have theirs. I fully disagree with your methodology but I do agree with your rights to treat yourself as you see fit. It seems to me that you are unable or unwilling to do the same for others. Most people learn this in their twenties or thirties. Perhaps you are not that old yet... so my bad.

Again, I really am happy that your methods work for you but mine seem to work just fine for me... and I really don't know what you mean when you say I am fighting.

I hope other things in your life are going well and I wish you the best. This is my last diatribe on this matter as I do not like beating a dead horse. If you feel you need further clarification from me, please don't hesitate to pm me.

Hope you have a nice day, ... I really do...
/smile

That is precisely how people who are on insulin adjust their dosages of insulin. The next time I will take the insulin before I eat x grams of tomato and it probably won't be perfect and I may have to adjust it again. But at some point, I will find the right dosage and tomato combination that will be right.

Anything I eat is going to make my blood sugar high without insulin. Not eating anything at all is going to make my blood sugar high without insulin. There are other foods that you can enjoy that I want to work back into my diet. Should I not have that opportunity? I'm never going to make my insulin dependency any better - ever! I'm eating so few carbs that I'm bolusing 2-3 units a meal and I probably have less circulating insulin and much less insulin resistance than you. I just don't make any.

That is the limitation of Bernstein. Don't get me wrong, I've been a Bernstein fan for *years* and have given his book as gifts many times.

But he is too dogmatic.

I bought his newer book when I got home from the hospital because his older book had instructions for insulins that are no longer available. However... his dosing rules assume you eat the same amount of protein and carb for breakfast at the same time every day, ditto for lunch and dinner.

I'm just not that consistent. Some days I'm hungry, some days I'm not - I don't eat the same every day. One day I'll eat 800 calories and the next eat 2000. I average 1400-1600, but there's lots of variation.

Some nights I stay up late and sleep in the next day. Some times I take a road trip to visit family and have to eat out and don't know the *exact* carb and protein content of my meals.

My life isn't regimented enough to *strictly* follow his system.

Bernstein's system is how I adjust my Sweetarts for hypos, and how I figured my corrective bolus and how I adjusted my basal. But I had to go elsewhere to figure out how to adjust bolus to match meals.

So... I looked around and read books on pumping insulin. I don't have a pump, and don't want one yet, but... those systems are designed to learn to control bg with a flexible life. Reading that stuff is part of how I learned to adjust my bolus doses (though it's addressed primarily to high-carbing T1s).

I also *do* think Bernstein's diet is too restrictive... for *me*. I'm not willing to never eat fruit, never eat cottage cheese, etc.

But there is a place in between going as strict as he does and just eating whatever. I have several other diabetics in my family and all of them eat anything and just ignore their diabetes. Frankly, the ADA diet would be a *big* improvement for them.

I eat *way* better than that even if it's not ideal. Overall, people have to develop a diet that is livable for them. This is not for the short term for weight loss, but for the long term to avoid blindness, heart attacks, kidney disease, amputation. You *have* to stick to it because it's too important to screw it up!

For me, I consider cottage cheese and yogurt staples... anytime I need to eat and don't have leftovers, they're there as fast protein sources.

I eat lower-sugar fruits too - a cup of melon or berries, a kiwi, half a pomegranate, and at least once each summer I eat an entire peach. Never at breakfast, always with a meal including lots of protein and fat, and not more than once a day. That works for me cause I'm just not going to live forever without fruit.

So... I need to be able to adjust my insulin for what I can really live with, not for an "ideal" diet that I don't stick to.

There's a post about how I figured out my "rules" for bolus dosing here:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt....931a05a37aae0b2

The other thing is... Bernstein doesn't tell you what to do when you "cheat." I've been low-carbing for over a decade, and for me, cheats are going to happen. I know this. There are foods I can live without 99% of the time, but there's always that 1% of the time that I give in to temptation and I want to minimize the bg excursions. For me, I use the same "rules" for dosing when I eat off plan, knowing my postprandials will be out of range, and then do a corrective bolus at the next meal. This limits how bad my numbers are over a cheat. I also only cheat one meal a month. I learned this even before insulin, I can "recover" from one meal in a day, but if I cheat for an entire day, it takes 2-3 days to recover. So one meal once a month is my limit and my other "rule" for cheating is... I *must* test. I need to *see* how bad each cheat is to decide which ones are "worth it."

Susan
I guess a lot of type 2's didn't understand the type 1
test/adjust regimen.This thread has certainly helped
us(I'm a type 2) appreciate the situation faced by type 1's.
Actually,there is also the type 2 who is an insulin user(like
Korban)-don't want to forget them.About the only thing that
I got out of Bernstein's book was a very slight understanding
of how touchy it is to balance insulin use with diet.
Time to shower and head to work
Eddie

I cheated accidentally, drinking a real coke (I am almost sure) - probably 25 ounces or so at a restaurant. I was able to bolus and get my BG down near 100 but it took me four days to get my fasting BG under 100, five days to under 90. Jenny mentioned that highs like I experienced can cause a temporary increase in IR. That was exactly what it acted like. In the next two days I had two postprandials that went to around 160 while eating low carb. I kept shooting Novolog... but always after the fact.
I stick with water or club soda now. I may cheat again at some point in the future but it sure won't be with a coke...

/smile

One way of reading Bernstein: He is strict and rigid only if you give him the authority over your diet/insulin. I read him as: This is how to get tight control, and maintain absolutely normal BGs. Obviously if he had a regime that was sloppy and inaccurate we could not use it for tight control and normal BGs. Just because you read it does not mean the 30 grams of carbs is right for you. And it does not make you a patient of Dr B.

Some of my favorite stories in his book are those who eat carbs so they can shop, eat chocolate chip cookies so they can work, walk at lunch time so they don't have to use another shot of insulin.

What was new in the world when B came along, was that we could choose our own goals, and a system for reaching them. We are still being told by certified diabetic educators that only if we ate more apples our BGs will go down.

Here is the education my internist gave me when he started me on Lantus.

Start at 20 units increasing 1 unit per day if needed. Jab this pen in your thigh once every day until your waking BG is 100... I'll see you in 4 months...

For me at the time (zero knowledge of diabetes treatment) Bernstein's book got me off to a decent start. I needed the simple nuts-and-bolts approach he used. I could have picked many worse sources to base my treatment. For that, I am grateful and have recommended it to others. Having said that, I am hardly a Bernstein zealot, but it sure was nice to find out that I could jab myself in the stomach instead of the thigh... among other things.

/smile

Yup. And too robotic. And he doesn't seem to have any fun in the real world. Take his exercise routine. He's doing resistance training with his smarties and meter. He doesn't talk about sports or exercising with other people. It's just too weird to stop, check and chew smarties. It's simply a lot more socially acceptable to drink something. That's something that doesn't raise an eyebrow. What would be more helpful is how much Gatorade to drink before, during and after exercise of varying degrees and if you know in advance of your exercise how to decrease both basal and bolus.



I really hate that too. That is also part of being robotic.



Ditto. And I can't stand it for any period of time when it is that regulated.



I pumped for several years. I don't pump any longer mainly because I am very into water sports, particularly diving at pressures that would cause a pump to croak. I also have fat damage on my stomach from pumping. On the average, pumpers are hitting their target levels 66% of the time. And it's so easy to gain weight pumping. I'm on 4 or more injections daily and learned that technique in 1982 which meant I have had pretty good control for 25 years. My delayed stomach emptying problem brought Bernstein's diet to my attention. I also like the fact that it is pretty simple. I had many bolus rules on the old system, a different one for breakfast, lunch and dinner because my body responds differently at each time of day. I even have a bolus rule for just coffee. I have correction rules for over target and under target. There is even a rule for factoring non-used previous bolus amounts when you want to eat before your insulin has finished working. I read that in "Think Like a Pancreas."



Yes. It is a good starting point, but there really needs to be an OWL phase which teaches us how to increase low-glycemic carbs while remaining in control. Either you do what you've done and remain in control or I think more typically diabetics would punt the whole thing after a while because it is just too restrictive. With the 6-12-12 plan, you have a situation like we had when we took the old insulins and were FORCED to eat when we didn't want to. You had to eat X number of exchanges from each group at a certain time of day or you were screwed. It was a horrible way to live. That's why I jumped on the MDA/bolus bandwagon as soon as I learned about it. This seems like a step back in some ways.



Absolutely. Everyone needs to have a quality life and that is something that doctors often overlook.



What do you do about exercise? Always a big problem for me.



I read the entire post and was very impressed. The only way to find your rules is to experiment and log it, tweak it until it begins to work most of the time.



You're right. You either carb count or adjust after the fact. I think Bernstein probably knows how to cheat, but he's not going to publish a rule for cheating or a rule for large numbers.

OMG!

When I first started out, I was in the hospital, of course. I learned how to mix my insulins (in pork or beef flavor) and to shoot myself in various places. Site rotation was big because the stuff caused nasty rashes. The dietician worked out your diet and you had to eat X amount of different exchanges at every meal to coincide with your 2 injections of R/NPH mix. And we peed on sticks to see if we were "spilling" sugar. I had no clue after I returned home what my BG was at any time because there wasn't any home testing. If your "spilling" went high enough, you had to go to the ER to have your blood drawn and BG level tested and a correction administered in the hospital. That was in 1978.

1980 - home testing
1981 - Humulin insulin
1982 - MDI/bolus system which I lucked into because I had a great endo who was doing research on insulin pumps.