Tag: eating

Carbs, Christmastime, and a Conundrum

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I can’t believe Christmas is just a couple of days away!

It feels like the Christmas season just started, but really, I’ve had visions of sugar plums dancing in my head a whole lot longer than 23 days now.

Not just sugar plums, though. Christmas cookies. Homemade caramel sauce. Spiked hot chocolate. Reese’s trees (and bells, and nutcrackers, and any other shape Reese’s comes in)…

Conundrum: I love baking. I love Christmas cookies. I love tasting Christmas cookies that I’ve baked. As such, the above image of my Irish cream cookies is very tempting to me.

Needless to say, I feel like my sugar consumption is at an all-time high lately, no doubt due in part to the endless array of seasonal treats that seem to be readily available to me. This is partially my fault – I always have a stash of Reese’s in my home, and baking is one of my favorite hobbies (I feel obligated to try my creations before doling them out to friends and family, y’know, for quality assurance purposes). I should know better because I am very aware of the fact that I have little self-control, but said self-control is completely lacking lately.

So my conundrum is: Do I consume all the carbs this Christmastime and just have a “IDGAF” attitude about it? Or do I go ahead and enjoy all the delicious, carbohydrate-laden sweets of the season with minimal guilt?

I think the solution lies somewhere between those two extremes.

I won’t deprive myself of carbs, but I’ll be deliberate in how I go about eating them. I’ll pre-bolus so sugary spikes won’t appear as often in my Dexcom graphs. I’ll look up carb counts when I can. I’ll enjoy things in moderation, eating one treat at a time or sharing with others when I can so my carb intake gets automatically halved. And I won’t stop baking – it’s one of the things that brings me joy in life, so I know better than to cut out that entirely.

Besides, the Christmas season is so fleeting. I should indulge a little here and there and remind myself that it’s not just about the carbs and blood sugar spikes that cookies cause…it’s also about the holiday traditions associated with cookie baking and the memories made when eating them (and all the carbs). That fuzzy feeling makes me feel a whole lot better about my carb conundrum; coupled with my plan on how to approach carb consumption, I’m actually looking forward to eating many more Christmassy confections over the next few days.

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A Human Garbage Disposal

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Sometimes, I feel like I am a human garbage disposal.

It’s not everyday, but there are occasions in which I want to eat anything and everything within arm’s reach like it’s the last meal or snack that I’ll consume for days. When I’m experiencing a low blood sugar, I’m especially likely to inhale food as if I’m a living Hoover vacuum…or as I’ve come to think of it, a human garbage disposal.

There’s no doubt about it: Diabetes has totally screwed up my relationship with food. I’ve written about this previously. I’m also just as sure of the fact that my relationship with food has gotten worse as I’ve grown older, a phenomenon that I blame on numerous factors such as the natural process of aging, social media, and society’s constant scrutiny of how women’s bodies “should” look. Add my diabetes into this mix and I feel like trash about my body and harvest negative feelings towards food (despite also loving food).

I definitely blame my diabetes for ruining my relationship with food.

So yeah, a human garbage disposal – with diabetes, no less – feels like an accurate way to describe me and my relationship with food.

Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t a “pity me” post. Not at all. This post is more so me…trying to understand what can be done to repair my relationship with food. Because I think if I can repair it, then I can start seeing positive outcomes on my blood sugar and start to strengthen my own sense of self-love. These are important things, you know, and I’ve hit a point where I’m just tired of feeling so damn negative about my diabetes, food, and my body all the time.

I might feel like a human garbage disposal lately, but “human” is at the forefront of that phrase. I’m human, I make mistakes, and my relationships with my diabetes, my food, and my body are bound to ebb and flow over the years.

At the end of the day, I think it’s just a matter of making peace with that.

My Close Encounter with the Keto Diet

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Remember that time that Oprah Winfrey did a Weight Watchers commercial and proclaimed loudly and proudly before the cameras that she loves bread? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the link to the ad with a little doctoring done to it – it is worth a watch.)

Well, I can relate to Ms. Winfrey – except my obsession with carbs extends beyond bread. I love cake, candy, chocolate, pizza, pasta, sushi…and just about every other carbohydrate-laden food that exists. So while I think it’s awesome that many of my peers with T1D choose to follow low or close to no-carb diets, that’s not the kind of thing that works for a girl like me: I’m happy managing my diabetes in tandem with a moderate carb intake. But that’s not to say that I don’t eat lower carb sometimes or that I don’t have an interest in the principles of the keto diet, just because it’s so restrictive.

At least, that’s what I used to think about it.

Would my love of carbs prevent me from trying out aspects of the keto diet?

When my boyfriend decided to go on the keto diet back in May (he’s had experience with it before), I was simultaneously impressed with his dedication to it, but also a little worried. We have dinner together a few times each week and since I wanted to show him that I support him 100%, I knew that I’d have to change up my cooking so it adhered better with the dietary guidelines of keto.

So for the last two months, I’ve had a lot of exposure to the keto diet, and this is what I’ve learned about it:

  • It’s not as restrictive as I thought it would be. I figured that eating strictly keto meant that the only food groups we could eat were meats/proteins, fibrous vegetables, and cheese. That wasn’t 100% true. While we stuck to proteins and vegetables for most dinners, we also had plenty of snacks that kept things fun and interesting. I developed a mild addiction to cheese crisps and chicharrons (otherwise known as pork rinds). I also had a lot of fun trying different keto dessert options out there, including cookies, ice creams, and peanut butter cups (the latter being my absolute favorite).
  • Snacks can get expensive. One of the keto peanut butter cups that we ate cost $10 for a bag of 7. That’s an insane price. When you factor in the cost of other more expensive grocery items, like beef jerky or nuts, things add up quickly, which is definitely a downside to the keto diet.
  • My blood sugars tended to respond well when I ate keto…for the most part, anyways. Eating keto dinners was mostly great for my blood sugar and it stayed relatively steady more often than not. On the occasions it didn’t, it was because I was trying to bolus for the amount of protein or the negligible amount of carbs in the veggies I was consuming at dinner, and I would go low as a result. There’s an art to bolusing on the keto diet, for sure, but since I was half-assing it (really quarter-assing it) and not following it all the time, I never got a grip on how to account for minimal carbs.
  • Keto can inspire creativity in the kitchen. The best thing I made, ate, and loved throughout my experience with the keto diet was cauliflower crust pizza. I found the best recipe for it that was so easy to make and yielded delicious results. I always assumed that cauliflower pizza crust would be too difficult to make or not satisfying in the same way that pizza is, but that isn’t accurate at all. I grew to appreciate the challenge that keto presented me to come up with new things to eat that were tasty and filling, which I didn’t expect but liked.

When Carbs Collide with a Bent Cannula, Chaos Ensues

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Sushi. Wine. Not one, but two slices (I swear they were slivers, honest) of cake. A pod with a cannula that got bent out of shape accidentally due to clumsiness.

The above sounds like some sort of weird laundry list, but it’s really just all the factors that contributed to a night of high blood sugars and relative sleeplessness.

Let me explain what happened: The night started out fabulously! I got sushi for dinner from a local spot that I was trying for the first time. I was excited about it because sushi is a rare treat for me, and I figured the occasion warranted some wine – my first glass(es) that I’ve had in about 2 months (I gave it up for Lent).

Those two things right there are definitely a “dangerous” duo that can cause carbohydrate calculation errors or prolonged blood sugars, but I tucked that in the back of my mind because I wasn’t done with indulgences for the evening.

I want to say I regret nothing about this carb-o-licious evening, but…

That’s right, I kept up with the carb-loading by enjoying some cake (white chocolate blueberry cake that I made myself that is just as decadent as it sounds) soon after dinner was done. My problem is that I thought I’d curbed the impact of the carbs by setting a temporary basal increase and stacking a small amount of my insulin, but no such luck. I’d destroyed my second piece (it was just a tiny sliver, people) and noticed that I was creeping up. I took more insulin and soon forgot about my high blood sugar as I immersed myself in episode after episode of Impractical Jokers, which, side note: It’s a series I just discovered and it’s hilarious cringe comedy that is the perfect thing to watch after a long day.

A handful of episodes later, it was time for bed. Or so I thought…because soon after I was settled in bed, I twisted around in just the right – or in this case, wrong – manner that was rough enough to loosen my pod from its allegedly secure location on my back. The smell of insulin was pungent and indicated to me immediately that the pod would have to be ripped off completely and replaced. And the sooner, the better, because my blood sugar was getting closer and closer to 300…definitely not a level I want to see before I go to sleep.

By 12:30 A.M., the new pod was on my arm and a temp basal increase was running to combat my lingering high blood sugar. I also gave myself yet another bolus and crossed my fingers, hoping that the combination would be enough to bring my levels down overnight.

At around 2 A.M., my PDM started beeping to let me know that it’d been about 90 minutes since the new pod was activated, so in response I woke up to silence it and glance at my CGM. My blood sugar barely budged! Frustrated, I gave myself more insulin and fell back into a restless sleep.

Several hours later, my alarm was blaring, far sooner than I wanted it to. I hit the snooze button, also taking care to check out my CGM yet again before I made an attempt at 15 more minutes of sleep. And guess what – I was still high. Quite high. Not 300, but in the mid-200s.

It was official: My blood sugar was punishing me for my night of careless carb consumption and reckless pod-handling. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the resulting chaos, but at least I was able to restore peace again the next morning…eventually.

4 Tips on How to Handle T1D, Treats, and Temptation

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If you regularly read this blog, then you know that I’m not a strict person with diabetes, in the sense that I don’t really restrict the foods that I include in my diet.

I’ve always been of the mindset that my diabetes can’t dictate what I choose to consume, though it might limit the actual quantity of a given food type that I eat.

So while my fridge and freezer is almost always stocked with fresh and frozen fruits/veggies/proteins, my pantry often stores more shelf-stable (and usually less healthy) things like crackers, cookies, and even candy. In fact, a full week post-Easter, my cabinets contain 3 bags of jellybeans, a chocolate bunny, and several Reese’s eggs. And it’s very tempting to reach into the cupboards and help myself to as much sugary sweetness as I can stomach in one sitting – screw my diabetes/blood sugar, I’ve got delectable confections to consume!

I don’t even like jelly beans very much, but that doesn’t mean that I doubt my ability to crush this bag in one sitting…

But of course, I know that indulging my cravings will only wreak havoc on my blood sugar levels, so I’ve found a few ways to curb temptation but still keep tasty treats in my home. Here’s 4 things that have worked for me:

  1. Only eat these treats when my blood sugar is low. I call this “medically necessary” candy consumption, and let me tell you, it makes low blood sugars a whole lot more tolerable when they’re treated with something that’s more fun and yummier than chalky glucose tablets or juice boxes.
  2. Keep them out of sight. I do my best to shove bags of treats in the very back of my top cabinets. That way, if I’m tempted to dig into them, I remember that I won’t be able to reach them unless I get a chair and rummage through the contents of the top shelves…and usually, that’s enough to take away my desire to snack on something sugary. I’m not saying it always happens, but laziness will typically beat my sweet tooth.
  3. Pre-portion single servings of treats. I have a real problem with snacks that come in bottomless bags – it’s hard to know when to stop and my blood sugar always suffers the consequences. So I like to study the serving size on bags and use it as a guide to portion out single servings of treats. It’s much easier to bolus for whatever it may be (or treat a low blood sugar as described in tip #1) when I know the exact carbohydrate count; after all, a few handfuls of an unknown number of Skittles have far more carbs than a single serving of 15 Skittles.
  4. Be picky about the types of treats kept in the house. My kryptonite is most definitely Reese’s cups…I love the salty/sweet combination of peanut butter and chocolate almost as much as I love my dog. So I recognized that a bad habit was forming when I kept a little bowl out in my living room filled to the brim with mini cups. I was breaking every single one of the above rules with this practice! After I realized this, I put the bowl away and stopped buying Reese’s every time I went to the grocery store. I still have other things around the house that will satisfy my sweet tooth (before Easter, I bought a package of dark chocolate Oreos that I’ve easily kept around for the last 6 weeks because they don’t tempt me in the same way that Reese’s cups do), so I’m really not depriving myself at all.

Temptation can be tricky to navigate when you have T1Ds and love sugary treats as much as I do…but as long as you can come up with ways to cope with temptation like I did, then you don’t have to feel guilty for giving in to your cravings every now and then. I sure don’t!

Luck O’ the Irish Diabetic

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!!

Last week, it occurred to me that in more than 3 years of running this blog, I’ve never written anything about St. Paddy’s Day here…so I sought out to rectify that immediately; hence, today’s blog post.

I love St. Patrick’s Day. Always have, always will. I celebrate it each year decking myself out in head-to-toe green. I eat a traditional Irish dinner – always prepared by my mother, until this year when I will attempt to cook the meal myself – that consists of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and Irish soda bread. We eat it while listening to Irish music and more often than not, we’ll have a Guinness or an Irish coffee along with the meal. My family’s attended St. Patrick’s Day parades in various locations in years past, though obviously, we didn’t go to any last year and we won’t this year, either. But we’re still proud of our Irish heritage and we made the most of it in 2020, as I know we’ll do today.

My parents’ dog, Clarence, and I certainly made the most of the day last year. I was dressed up like this for all of my work video conference calls, which made my colleagues laugh at a time when we all needed one.

So you know my plans for St. Patrick’s Day, but what does this have to do with my blog that’s about diabetes?

Let me explain.

The common denominator between this holidays, all the others, and my diabetes is…food.

Foods consumed on holidays are often special and laden with carbohydrates. Rather than deprive myself, I like to indulge on holidays, and worry a little less about my topsy-turvy blood sugar levels.

You might be thinking, “But the food you described isn’t even that carb-heavy!” and you’d be right, for the most part. Corned beef, cabbage, carrots…those are all easy to bolus for seeing as the carbohydrate content is negligible.

It’s the combo of potatoes – which normally, I can bolus for without any troubles – and Irish soda bread – hellooooo, carbs – that really screws me up.

You see, the problem is that Irish soda bread is too delicious. It’s a quick bread that has a buttery exterior and a tender, mouthwatering interior that’s densely packed with raisins. It doesn’t sound like much, but my mother’s recipe is sheer perfection and I can’t resist helping myself to a big ol’ slice (and a couple of mini, just-one-more-taste slices) of the stuff every year.

So more often than not, my St. Patrick’s Days end with high blood sugars (which I suppose is better than ending with a trip to the toilet due to excessive…ahem, celebrating).

The Irish soda bread is worth the high blood sugar alone, but this year, I’m hoping for a little luck when I tuck into this festive feast. I’m tired of simultaneously welcoming holidays and high blood sugars…it’s about time that I make more of an effort to have better levels when I’m eating special meals. I know the extra work will make the day and the food that much more enjoyable and special.

With a little luck o’ the Irish (and some aggressive bolusing), this diabetic will finally have a St. Patrick’s Day filled with lots o’ green, Guinness, and great blood sugar levels.

The Truth About My Carb Counting

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One of the many reasons why I love the diabetes community is that I’m constantly learning new information, finding inspiration, and enjoying support from my fellow friends living with T1D. Sharing our stories with one another leads to us finding that it’s more than diabetes that we have in common.

Here’s an example: My friend, Cherise Shockley, recently wrote an article for DiaTribe in which she made a confession to herself regarding how she counts her carbs. I recommend reading the extremely well-written article to get a full sense of what she discovered, but in short, Cherise recently realized that her carb counting is inaccurate because of the “glass ceiling” for entering carbs into her pump for bolus calculations. In other words, Cherise’s personal maximum of carbs that she was comfortable with dosing for using her pump wasn’t aligning with the actual amount of carbs she was consuming. This excerpt explains part of it:

That was my moment of truth. I told Natalie I ate my favorite chocolate chunk cookie that day. She asked me how many carbs the cookie contained, and I told her 68 grams; she wondered why I only bolused for 55 grams. I paused before I replied – I did not know the answer.

Natalie then asked me if I had a glass ceiling for entering carbs in my pump. She explained that this means even though I know I eat 63 carbs, I will only enter 50 carbs in my pump because anything higher than that concerns me. What she said was interesting; I had never heard anyone describe it to me in that way.

-Cherise Shockley

When I read this, I said, “Yes! Finally, someone is able to articulate exactly how I handle carb counting!”

This is the truth about my carb counting: I have limits when it comes to how many carbs I will bolus for at a time, but those limits do not apply to the actual number of carbs that I consume.

In my 23 years of life with type 1 diabetes, I never knew the meaning behind my carbohydrate glass ceiling.

To explain, I am only comfortable with bolusing for a maximum of 60 grams of carbohydrate at a time. I do not know how I came up with this particular number, but I do know that there are situations (e.g., holiday celebrations) in which I am absolutely consuming more than 60 carbs in a sitting, and yet I only bolus for that amount.

Still confused by what I mean? Read the full article to understand, but this excerpt from it helps to explain why this fear of bolusing for more than 60 carbs at a time exists for me:

To learn more about carbohydrate glass ceilings and why some people have one, I talked to Dr. Korey Hood, a professor of pediatric endocrinology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University who has lived with type 1 diabetes for over 20 years. Dr. Hood told me that all parts of diabetes management can be challenging, and carb counting is particularly tough because it is hard to be accurate and precise. He always recommends people with diabetes meet annually with their diabetes educator (CDCES) to get a refresher on different aspects of diabetes management, including carb counting.

Dr. Hood said that the glass ceiling is most likely due to one of two issues – worries about hypoglycemia or the meaning behind taking such a big dose of insulin. Dr. Hood said that “many of us with diabetes, particularly those on insulin, worry about going low. Why wouldn’t we – it is a terrible feeling! We often experience fears of hypoglycemia because we had a terrible low in the past and have a desperate desire to avoid it in the future. When we worry about hypoglycemia, we scale back our insulin dosing. This prevents the low but also likely results in high glucose levels. So, it really is not a good strategy.” 

-Cherise Shockley

This was a major revelation for me because suddenly I realized what my reasoning is for my carbohydrate glass ceiling: I have a hypoglycemia fear. I have experienced scary episodes in the past (fortunately, none of which have required medical attention). I have friends who have experienced severe hypoglycemic episodes, and when a colleague of mine experienced a low episode that was so bad that I had to call 911 for him, it left a mark on me. So on the occasions that I do eat more than 60 carbs in a sitting, I simply don’t take the amount of insulin that I should to account for those carbs, and I wind up going high, exactly as Dr. Hood describes in the quote above.

When it comes to diabetes, there is no such thing as “perfection”. My blood sugars cannot and will not be perfect 100% of the time. But one thing that I do have control over is doing the absolute best that I can with carb counting and bolusing. It’s time I hold myself more accountable to my carbohydrate glass ceiling…in fact, it’s time for me to smash through it.

A ginormous thank you to Cherise for being so open and honest in this piece and for inspiring me to own my carbs, too.

The Bad ‘Betes Habit I’ve Tried to Break for 23 Years (and It’s Still a Work in Progress)

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Bad habits are notoriously difficult to break.

Nail-biting. Forgetting to floss. A social media addiction. Swearing. Luckily, I only struggle with two out of the four of those (I’ll let you figure out which ones are a big fuckin’ problem for me while I go check my Instagram account real quick).

When it comes to diabetes-specific bad habits, though, well let’s just say that in more than two decades of life with diabetes, there’s a biiiiiig bad (Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, think Big Bad like Evil Willow or Glorificus) habit that feels impossible to break.

And for me, that’s snacking freely without bolusing.

When I’m snacking throughout the day, I am not nearly as adorable about it as this cartoon girl (and I am almost never snacking on something as healthy as the piece of fruit she’s cutting up).

When I say “snacking freely”, I think it’s more accurate to call it grazing…I’m not eating large quantities of food or anything particularly carb-heavy, but it is usually enough to impact my blood sugar, at least moderately.

I’ve acknowledged this as a bad habit in a previous blog post, but for the first time, I’m really taking a step back and thinking about how if I stop doing this, I might see a tangible change in not just my blood sugar levels, but my A1c.

Don’t get me wrong, my A1c reading isn’t the most important thing to me (I’d rather focus on time in range, or the amount of time I spend each day below my high limit and above my low limit). But it is something that does come up, and will always come up, during appointments with all of my healthcare professionals. It’s definitely not something that they will be ignoring any time soon, and this year, I’d like to have an A1c that I’m a little more proud to own.

So I’m going to actively try and break this bad habit.

Whenever the desire to snack/graze strikes, I’m going to do what the pros recommend: Have a glass of water. Walk outside for a few minutes. Play with my puppy. Find a task around the house to focus on instead. Actively seek something else that will consume my time instead of me consuming something that will ultimately have a negative impact on my blood sugar as well as my mood. Be more careful about portion control when treating low blood sugars, because I can really spiral and eat half the damn kitchen when correcting a low, and it ain’t cute. And when all else fails and I need a snack (no shame in that game) actually take a freaking bolus for it because it’s okay to eat something extra throughout the day, I just need to stop being lazy and measure out whatever it is so I know exactly how much insulin I need to cover for it. That part isn’t rocket science, so I should stop treating it as such.

All bad habits are difficult to break, and I know one that’s been around for most of my life will make it particularly challenging…but it’s a new year, a great excuse for making a positive change with my eating habits and blood sugar levels, so I say bring on the challenge.

The Impact of Diabetes on My Relationship with Food

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There’s no cutesy lead-in to this post…I’m going with a very straightforward statement here:

Diabetes has caused me to have a very weird and strained relationship with food.

How? Oh, let me count the ways…

Diabetes has positively impacted my relationship with food because it has helped me understand the importance of nutrition. I’ve had to learn how carbohydrates, proteins, and fats affect my levels, as well as the role that the glycemic index of foods play into the picture. I’m also grateful that diabetes has caused me to realize there are limits – I can’t mindlessly eat huge quantities of food (though on occasion I do, more on that in a minute). I must measure everything out, and I believe that this forced sense of portion control has helped me maintain a (mostly) healthy weight.

But diabetes has also, absolutely, negatively impacted my relationship with food.

Here’s pretend cartoon me, being absolutely adorable as she calmly whips up a feast in the kitchen (LOL there’s so much wrong about that sentence)!!!

For starters, I can get so fed-up with having to account for every single morsel I consume in a given day – I resent having to take insulin for foods I’d otherwise find enjoyable. Plus, there’s a lot of guilt associated with my regular food consumption. “Should you eat that?” is question I hear not just from others, but from myself as I have to think about whether certain foods are worth not just the calories, but also the amount of insulin that I have to dose for it. And don’t even get me started on how literally unsavory it is to have to eat food when I’m already full but dealing with a low blood sugar…

In a word, my relationship with food is complicated…and I don’t hesitate to blame my diabetes for that. Don’t get me wrong: At the end of the day, I loooooooove food. Really, there’s very few things that I don’t (or won’t) eat or at least try. I enjoy consuming a large variety of foods and I like to eat veggies almost as much as I like eating chocolate (that may be a bit of a stretch, but I think you get my point).

It’s just unfortunate that my diabetes forces me to overthink every food choice that I make. So I’m that much more hopeful for the day which I can eat food without having to think twice about it, without having to feel guilt, shame, doubt, anger, sadness…nothing but pure enjoyment.

Is Chia Seed Pudding REALLY Life-Changing for T1Ds?

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“A Three-Minute Diabetes Breakfast That Changes Lives?”

Whoa, a life-changing breakfast? Sign me up!

Three years ago, that post was published on DiaTribe. I’ve come back to it every now and again with every intention of trying this amazing recipe myself, but it called for ingredients that I don’t usually have on hand.

I mean…chia seeds? Coconut oil? Those aren’t exactly pantry stables for me…and they probably aren’t for many other people.

But during a grocery store trip earlier this month (before things got really crazy), I finally remembered to pick up a giant pack of plain old chia seeds and decided to whip up the recipe.

As a simple Internet search informed me, I was free to play around with the ingredients I added to my chia seed pudding – really play around. Coconut oil wasn’t a requirement; rather, an add-in, and it turns out the only truly needed recipe components are chia seeds and a liquid of some sort. I’ve been using a combination of unsweetened vanilla almond milk and water, which suits my tastes just fine, though I’m sure that just about any other kind of milk out there would work well in this recipe, too.

This is what I added to my first batch of chia seed pudding (which made 4 servings):

  • 1/2 cup chia seeds
  • 1 cup of unsweetened vanilla almond milk
  • 1 cup of water
  • 3 tbsp. vanilla protein powder (I just kind of eyeball it when I add it in)
  • 1 tsp. vanilla extract (adds more flavor)
  • 1 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/4 cup sugar-free syrup

I combined all the ingredients into a plastic container, gave it a good stir, and let it chill in the fridge for 4-6 hours before giving it a taste test.

And I was pleasantly surprised. It was definitely sweet and had an interesting texture going on – very pudding-like, but with a little something…else going on. I could almost compare it to bubble tea (a.k.a. boba or tapioca pearls).

When I prepped a bowl for breakfast the next morning, I added a little of whatever I had on hand, which was craisins, a bit of granola, and some shredded coconut. Now the challenge was…how do I bolus for something like this? And how would my blood sugar react over the next 3-4 hours?

Is Chia Seed Pudding REALLY Life-Changing for T1Ds_
Sure, it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing breakfast…but it sure does make my blood sugar happy.

I decided to bolus for the toppings, which I figured were about 15 carbs. Ultimately, though, I rounded up to 20 to pad my bolus since I really wasn’t sure how the chia seeds would affect me. (They’re loaded with fiber and even some protein, and sometimes it can be tricky to calculate accurate insulin dosages for high-fiber foods.)

I’m not exaggerating when I say I experienced an incredibly flat post-breakfast line on my CGM.

I was pretty wowed. There was ZERO rise after consuming the meal, and my blood sugar just…held out for hours afterward. So yeah, I’d say it’s pretty effin’ life-changing for THIS person with diabetes…

…except for one tiny caveat: I was hungry again just a couple of hours later. Perhaps I could’ve added more of the pudding to my serving, but it was probably over a full cup that was in the bowl…I had assumed that would be more than enough to tide me over until lunch. Then again, an easy fix could be to add more satiating toppings, like fresh fruit – which I’ve experimented with, and they make a great addition to the mix.

I’ve had chia seed pudding for breakfast many times now, and I’d say the final verdict is that I definitely like it, and my blood sugars seem to LOVE it. It’s probably not for everyone considering the texture is a little “different”, but I’m glad that I took a chance on this highly versatile recipe.