Diabetes and Insulin Doses | | Health and Lifestyle

Regularly I'm asked how I know how many units of insulin to give myself. It's not as simple as just injecting. It requires a bit of mathematics, which is Not Good because I sucked at maths at school. Explaining how I work out my dose isn't easy, especially to someone who doesn't have diabetes.  So I thought an insight into how exactly I do it would be useful for all those who want to know more about diabetes!

Every individual diabetic has an insulin ratio which works specifically for them. This can be the same for each meal or it may differ, it depends on how your body reacts to many different factors. To find out your ratio it's basically trial and error, and everyone is different. My ratio is the same for each meal, I have to inject 1 unit of insulin for every 8 grams of carbohydrate I eat. Which means once I know the content of my meal I have to divide it by 8 and it gives me the units to inject. I might not be any good at maths but I'm pretty good at my 8 times table now... 

It depends entirely on what I eat, as well as my plans for the day. For example if I'm going to be active I need less insulin. I need to know the carbohydrate content of every meal/snack/drink I consume. This is easily done if the packaging offers the proper nutritional content, sometimes I have do the maths (all the time) because a product will only say what the carbohydrate content is per 100g and what if I'm not eating 100g of that product? 

When I'm making a meal from scratch I have to add up the carb content of each individual item and calculate the dose from there. The same goes for baking, each ingredient has a different amount and it can be so irritating and inconvenient but I've learned a lot about health and nutrition from it.  It's a lot of faffing about trying to work out the right dose, and even then, I might have measured it incorrectly but that's a completely different story to deal with. 

Eating out in restaurants and from takeaway places can be difficult and often my insulin dose is a guessing game. I have a general idea of the carbohydrates in most foods thanks to 5 years of constantly checking packaging, so I can make a rough estimate of what my meal contains. Some places will offer the nutritional information on their websites which is a lifesaver, but most of the time I have to wing it. I have to check my blood sugar levels more often to see if I got the right amount of insulin. Eating out can cause me much stress, especially having to deal with high blood sugars. I used to think the solution was to just avoid going out to eat, but that's silly. I can eat literally anything, there's no restrictions, as long as I give myself insulin. So I can order pizza, I can eat a veggie burger and chips, I just have to be very careful and sensible. 

So there's that. That's how I work out my insulin dose. Fortunately some foods have zero carbs - eggs, cheese, meat (although I don't eat it, would be helpful if I did) and diet drinks have no carbohydrates either.