Month: January 2021

The best basal insulin

Since I was diagnosed with diabetes two years ago I’ve taken three basal insulins: Lantus, Toujeo, and Tresiba. For me the winner is Tresiba. I started on Lantus with 12u every night at 11 pm. The problem that soon became evident was nighttime hypoglycemia. I woke up sweating in the 3 mmol/l (54 mg/dl) range.…
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Stone agers in the space age

Does it make sense to eat like our paleolithic ancestors? This is the core idea behind the paleo diet, the third most googled diet after keto and intermittent fasting in 2020. Arthur De Vany, known as the grandfather of the paleo diet, came up with a variant in his book called The new evolution diet.…
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Why do we measure insulin in units?

When I first got diabetes, I found it weird that we don’t deal in milliliters or milligrams as we do with most other drugs. What was the story with the insulin unit? A unit of what? As it turns out, we’re talking about rabbit units.  When Banting and Best were experimenting with insulin in the…
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Below 7: Zoodles Bolognese

My love affair with zoodles continues. One thing I really missed after going on the keto diet was spaghetti bolognese, and zoodles is a tasty low-carb substitute for spaghetti. The best thing is that they don’t spike your blood sugar the way pasta does. Zucchini is a low-carb vegetable with 3g of carbs/100g, and a…
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The NovoPen Echo

One of the best things I have in my diabetic toolkit is the NovoPen Echo. It uses insulin cartridges, and the build quality is a lot better than that of plastic pens, so it makes injecting insulin nicer. You also do your part to reduce the carbon footprint and save the environment. My favorite feature…
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Alcohol & Type 1 Diabetes

After ten months without alcohol, I fell off the wagon over Christmas. It reminded me of why I stopped drinking in the first place. When everyone had gone home after a successful dinner I drank the rest of an open bottle of wine while feasting on the leftover potato dauphinoise and chocolate-coated walnuts. I then…
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Veganuary

It’s that time of the year again. According to the Guardian, a record 500,000 people in the UK have signed up to the challenge to eat only plant-based foods for a month. It’s double what it was last year with Tesco and other supermarkets running ad-campaigns on tv to promote the event. Veganuary coincides with…
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The ethics of eating

Over Christmas, I’ve been reading What we eat and why it matters by Jim Mason and Peter Singer. Singer, who’s a moral philosopher at Princeton, hit fame with Animal Liberation in the 1970’s and became a front figure for the animal rights movement. He has since been busy criticising the industrial farm practices which are…
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Out of control blood sugars part 2

The results are in! After spending a month de-stressing with action movies on Netflix and John Grisham on the bedside table my blood sugar is back to normal. Changing the amount of basal insulin from 13u to 15u made a difference within a few days. Tresiba is a bit tricky in that it takes a…
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