u/jadiseoc

I applied my new sensor this morning with 12 hours to go on the old one, and I’ve told myself a dozen times or more already today to remember that the new one is the one applied HIGHER up on my arm.

I typically apply the new one pretty close to the old one because I’ve found kind of the sweet spot on my arm where the sensor tends to be pretty accurate and I hate to deviate from that fairly small area. But I’m endlessly paranoid that I’ll forget which is which and take off the wrong one!

I can’t be alone in this.

I posted the other day celebrating reducing my A1C from 8.1 in November to 5.7 on my most recent test this week. Obviously, I’m pretty stoked about this. I’ve also mentioned that since being diagnosed in 2010, I’ve had varying levels of control over the years, and in this most recent go-round, I’ve found I need to do A LOT more than just tightening up my low carb diet to get my numbers where I want them to be.

I’ve been thinking (and reading/watching) a lot about insulin sensitivity, and it has occurred to me with all the efforts I’ve been putting into getting my BG under control that I think a lot of focus on a low carb diet may be slightly over emphasized as the One True Path to treating T2 diabetes. Don’t get me wrong…I absolutely think reducing one’s glycemic load is a critical step in T2 management, but I think in a lot of ways it’s treating the symptoms and not the underlying root issue, which is insulin resistance/insensitivity.

So, as time went on and my numbers failed to improve the way I’d been hoping, I started doing at least as much to try to improve my insulin response as I was in paying attention to my carb load. These changes included:

* Intermittent fasting - for those not familiar, this is not some crazy deprivation scheme where I don’t eat for long periods of time. I’m doing what’s referred to as 16/8, which basically means I only eat in an 8 hour window and fast the other 16 hours. No snacking, no caloric drinks during the fasting hours, just water or sugar free beverages. I’m fortunately not much of a snacker anyway, so this essentially only meant I stopped eating breakfast entirely (and I struggled with dawn syndrome, so breakfast was always fraught with pitfalls anyway).

* Fiber - your body needs fiber for a healthy gut and normalized insulin response, and a low carb diet makes it very difficult to get enough fiber solely through your food in vegetable and grain sources. I obviously eat as many veggies as I can, but I’m also now supplementing a variety of types of fiber (prebiotic, probiotic, soluble, insoluble, resistant starch). My daily regimen includes breaking my 16/8 fast with a serving of active culture full fat yogurt with chia seeds, I put inulin powder in basically everything I drink, and I take a nighttime dose of green banana resistant starch plus psyllium.

* Exercise - I use the Libre3 CGM, which has been instrumental in showing me not only what foods I can and cannot tolerate, and how specific foods are affecting my BG in real time, but also tells me when I need to exercise. In addition to a daily evening walk, I now often hop on my mini stepper in my office once or twice for 10-15 min at a time during my work day if I notice that a meal isn’t agreeing with my BG. I am also doing some sort of resistance/strength training 3-4x a week, either resistance bands or a kettle bell workout, because building/retaining muscle mass is one of the core principles of improving insulin resistance. This is especially important if you’re on a GLP-1 and losing weight.

All of these factors are playing a pretty big role in driving my A1C down. Not only are all of my numbers vastly improved (in addition to my A1C, my cholesterol and triglycerides are great, my BP runs around 110/75, etc), I’ve noticed (and occasionally posted here about it) that when I make unfortunate food choices (voluntarily or not…for example, a restaurant I dined at accidentally gave me sweet tea and I spiked to the moon after two sips), my insulin response is SO MUCH better. Even a fairly high spike is pretty short lived, I can be back down to baseline sometimes in an hour, two at the most. Before these changes, my BG would soar and I’d fight it for DAYS to get back to normal.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am also on several meds. I have been on Metformin since my diagnosis in 2010. I added Jardiance about 8 years ago, because I feared the digestive side effects of GLP-1s (I have a severe vomit phobia and didn’t want to take a shot that stayed in my system for a week or more and risk the vomit factor and the inability to immediately suspend the medication if I wasn’t tolerating it). I have been on Mounjaro since November and have fortunately been tolerating it well, but I actually think it’s been my insulin sensitivity regimen overall that’s had the most effect, not so much the medication itself. I’m hoping to reduce my Jardiance dose when I talk to my doctor next week, since I feel like that’s causing a bit of dehydration that I’m having a hard time staying ahead of with how much exercise I’m doing, especially in the summer heat. I’d also ultimately like to reduce my Mounjaro dose if my numbers continue to improve as I build strength and maintain my exercise routine.

I hope this is marginally helpful/interesting to the community at large! LMK if anyone has questions, I’m happy to shine more light on exactly what I’m doing if anyone is curious.

The diner I go to daily for lunch is a cash only business. In spite of multiple signs at the entrances, they often get oblivious people, and they have an ATM on site so no excuses to not pay.

One of those customers was present today, and I heard my waitress (who is my age or so) tell the patron (who is boomer aged, so I thought they’d get it ) that there’s a MAC machine outside.

MAC MACHINE.

How long has it been since anyone called them that?!

Buckle up, it’s a doozy.

OK, so when I was 9 years old (April 1980) I was in Girl Scouts with a bunch of my neighborhood kids. My elementary school had this big playground situated where the main drive came into the school complex, so at the end of meetings, we’d go out there to goof around while we waited for our parents to come pick us up.

The playground had this big jungle gym apparatus that had a fireman’s pole at each end. One day, one of my neighbors and I decided we were going to climb up to the top and race down the fireman’s poles. I must have REALLY wanted to win, because I basically jumped, barely skimming the pole on the way down. Had to be at least 10-15’ up.

When I landed, I snapped both bones in my left leg completely in half. Not compound, but fully separated, like my leg was freely bending in the completely wrong spot.

I’m in agony, yelling, writhing around, and one of the troop leaders runs over to see what’s up. She looks at me, my leg obviously broken, and says “Come on over here into the grass”. I said “MY LEG IS BROKEN, I can’t walk”.

I would like to note here that said troop leader WAS AN RN. An RN who should ostensibly know better than to move someone with an obviously broken leg.

And she said “Well, your OTHER leg isn’t broken” and made me stand up on my unbroken leg, sling my arms around two friend’s shoulders and HOP on my good leg over to the grass adjacent to the playground. Mind you, with my loosely flapping disconnected foot flapping at the end of my leg while my shredded bones ground together.

What did she do next, you ask? Call my mom? An ambulance, maybe? No. She did nothing. NOTHING. Except wait for my ride. Which that day happened to NOT be my mother, mind you. It was a neighbor lady whose kids were also in my troop, coming to pile us in the back of her station wagon to cart us all home.

So, neighbor rolls up, gets the scoop, shrugs, and decides to just have them load me up in the back seat, sideways with my (again, obviously critically broken) leg stretched out, which made it impossible for the other kids to all fit, so they squashed together in the front and way back, and off we went.

We pull up at my house, and someone runs up to my door to get my mom. Who comes out, and…decides the best course of action for my agonizing obviously broken leg was to transfer me to HER CAR and take me to a radiology clinic in town to get an x-ray.

So, off we went, jostling over untold potholes and rough road, me wanting to die as my bones continued to grind together…and we get there but because it’s evening now, clinic closed. What next? Perhaps NOW the hospital?! No. Back home.

At which point everyone admits defeat and FINALLY they call an ambulance. They arrive, and some blessed angel puts an air cast on my leg, which stabilizes it enough that I’m no longer in complete agony, and off I go to the ER.

Where they admit me, I have my leg surgically set, spend a week in the hospital because I came down with an infection, and then spend 2.5 months in two different casts.

If this happened today, how many lawsuits are we looking at? LOL

I’ve generally had good luck with all manner of ChocZero products, but I’m always on the hunt for things to alleviate my sweet tooth and these Fruit Chews (similar to Starburst candies) looked good and I thought I’d give them a try. They supposedly have just 2g net carbs, and 18g of fiber (!!), but after trying them for the first time today, I discovered I’m apparently one of the population of people who are sensitive to the main ingredient, which is resistant corn starch (they’re sweetened with monk fruit, which I’ve never had a problem with). My CGM skyrocketed like I huffed confectioner’s sugar.

$20 down the drain (I bought two boxes, I was so sure I’d like them). 🙁🙁

Be careful out there!!

I'm 2 days into my fourth sensor and this one's readings are all over the place...sometimes nearly right on vs finger sticks but more often 30-40 points lower than reality. And because it's so often reading 40 points low, I'm getting critical low alerts overnight that wake me up, which is super frustrating.

I know you can report sensor failures and get a replacement (although I see this can also be dodgy if they feel like you've had "too many" failures), but since this sensor hasn't technically failed I was wondering what would happen if I just took it off and claimed it FELL off and was lost. It's driving me bugshit that this one is so inaccurate, and I have a bunch more on hand I could replace it with but I don't want to flush the $$ for this one down the drain if I can't get a replacement.