In the second installment of his two-part story on carbohydrate counting, Eric considers what led to the development of his carb-count confidence underestimation creep. (Click here for Part 1.)
I had become pretty good at estimating the amount of carbohydrates in the food on my plate. But what I lost sight of, among other things, was how certain types of foods interact with others and affect the absorption of carbohydrates into my system, thus affecting my blood glucose readings.
You want to know some of those other things I lost sight of? I’d grown a bit sloppy in my counting of carbohydrates when I prepared to bolus for my oft-eaten foods. The breakfast and lunchtime staples, the repeated dinners. Here and there I’d ignore the sauce on something, or the changing of a sandwich size from original to large. Or I’d forget about the extra fruit on a bowl of cereal. The glass of juice: half full? Three-quarters full? Surely there isn’t much difference.
At least, that’s the lie I told myself. Oh, I knew, but I didn’t want to know, and so it became a small thing. Underestimating portion sizes! So easy to do. It’s something that can be dangerous enough for people without diabetes. But for me, I see now that it can be doubly dangerous.
When a portion size changed from one meal to the next, I’d default to bolusing for the amount I’d bolused for in meals past. Oh, yeah, there are many reasons for doing what I’d done before. It was easier, sure; rather than count, rather than think, I could just default to mindlessly punching in a number on my insulin pump.
Why do that? Why knowingly ignore carbohydrates? That’s the heart of this blog entry. I’m human. And, too, by not recognizing extra carbohydrates in the food I was eating (whether it was food or portion size is of no matter), what I was doing was protecting my pride. I’d been deluding myself into a pattern of thinking that went something like this: “Eric, if you aren’t bolusing for it, then you mustn’t really be eating it. Yes! That’s it! You’re eating the same because you’re bolusing for what you always bolus for.” And that kind of reasoning went on in my subconscious for many months (because I didn’t actually hear those voices).
If I said that the serving of mashed potatoes at dinner was only 40 carbohydrates, then they had to be 40 carbs, right? I wouldn’t have put 55 grams of carbohydrates on my plate, would I? And the whole-grain pasta for dinner? That extra scoop wouldn’t show up in my reading a few hours later? Surely not? Another few tablespoons of sauce wouldn’t alter the carb count, would it?
In a self-deluding maneuver that my brain is pretty adept at pulling off, it kinda believed itself and looked the other way rather than deal with some psychological things that it really needs (that I need) to face.
And what I did, that ignoring myself when all I needed was some self-examination, isn’t the kind of infraction that shows up immediately as a problem. At least, not a big one. I won’t get retinopathy or neuropathy from these transgressions. I won’t have a heart attack or stroke or kidney failure next week or month or even next year because I let something like this happen a few times, a few dozen times. Yet at what point is it too much?
At this point.
What I’ve written about here is one of those slow-building, easy-to-overlook nasty habits. In fact, like most things diabetes-related, it’s not the big one-time mistakes you make that get you; it’s the accretion over time of small, singular, seemingly insignificant actions that bite you — and hard — down the road. What’s so wrong with underestimating this meal? Well, not much. But writ large: underestimating five or six meals a week for five or ten years… that’s not going to be good. Not good at all.
I’m going back, then, and refamiliarizing myself with some elementary diabetes education. I’ll know a lot of it, but I’ll also raise my eyebrows about how much I’ve forgotten and how much I have yet to learn. There’s much that I take for granted with this condition, and I shouldn’t.