Carb Counting
There are many ways to approach diabetes management for a newly diagnosed diabetic: typically, the endocrinologist, some time after diagnosis, explains the approach that she wants the T1D to take. But, whatever method we use, at one level or another we need to count carbohydrates. As you have probably noticed already, we T1Ds refer to carbohydrates as carbs.
Why are carbs special?
Our body can turn them very quickly into glucose that will make it into our blood soon, and either require more insulin, or make up for low blood glucose. So, for better or for worse, we need to know how many carbs we eat because, whatever we do, our body will turn it into blood glucose. Fats and proteins take much longer to digest, and a much lower percentage of them end up in our bloodstream in the form of glucose, so barring extreme cases, we assume their effect to be negligible.
How to count
There are many tips and tricks that educators give to new diabetics in order to figure out how carbs are in a meal. For me, none of it stuck. I have a single method that I use: it works well and it always works. Over time I have learned the values of many food elements just because I have looked them up many times.
My method:
- I carry a smartphone everywhere. My parents got me one ahead of schedule when I was diagnosed
- On my phone, I have a carb-counting app where I look up everything I eat. I use a for-pay version of MyNetDiary, but there are many others, most of them free.
- At home, we used to weigh every meal, component by component, to figure out what the carb count for the full meal would be. My parents bought a few kitchen scales when I was diagnosed. To this day, I always travel with a small scale to weigh food when I’m in doubt.
- After a few weeks, I knew many of my common eating items by heart. For instance, I know by heart a clementine is 9 carbs, an orange 18 carbs, an apple 18 to 25 depending on size, a banana 25 to 40 depending on size, 8 oz of milk 12 carbs, a cookie 25 to 40, a sandwich from 1 full slice of sliced bread 20, a small (6”) sub sandwich 45, a slice of sliced bread at home 14-19, a slice of regular crust pizza 36-38 carbs (but pizza, like pasta and french fries, comes with many complications).
- When I correct a low, I always calculate very precisely how many carbs I take. For that, I sometimes use a scale, although more often I simply use food components I know well.
Now I eat often without looking up the data because experienced diabetics can look at a plate and tell, within 10 carbs, how many carbs there are. I do that every day. But we still weigh some meals. And, to be sure, when we weigh I am more likely to land just right. But whether or not we do it at a glance or through painful calculations, one way or another we all carb count. Don’t get too confident in your ability to carb count by sight though! I counted carbs thoroughly on my app for almost two years before I started relying on it less, and even now I sometimes make mistakes in carb counting. There’s no shame in looking it up.
Growing up T1D 