Carb Counting Made Simple

Carb Counting Made Simple

Your body needs energy - Calories (or Kcal) - in order to work.

If you can eat it!!

It can pretty much turn anything you stick in your mouth into energy.  The UK Department of Health Estimated Average Requirements (EAR) are a daily calorie intake of 1940 calories per day for woman and 2550 for men.

There is a fiendish calculation that works out for your height, weight and activity level what your personal total should be, but we'll go with the average for now.

All of those scrummy calories come from whatever we eat or drink.  Different types of food yield different amounts of calories, for example:

• Fats - 9 Kcal/g
• Carbs - 4 Kcal/g
• Protein - 4 Kcal/g
• Alcohol - 7 Kcal/g

Ranked in order of how quickly your body can use that energy?

1. Alcohol*
2. Carbs
3. Protein
4. Fats

* 'cos whilst your body is processing alcohol it can't process anything else!

So if you have a nice cold beer and meal of say, steak & chips with a creamy pepper sauce and vegetables followed by a delicious new york cheese cake (mmmmm)  you would have a combination of fats, protein, carbohydrates and alcohol.

Now your body tries to convert everything you eat or drink into energy, glucose. Some stuff is too hard, even for you! Fibre is tough for the body to breakdown, raw starchy foods are hard work and most raw veg is quite a lot of work too. Carbs are easy peasy.

The body *loves* carbohydrates in all their delicious and addictive forms.  Carbs are easy to digest and turn almost instantly into glucose.  So fast is the process that before you have even swallowed your first bite of that sponge cake the enzymes in your mouth are breaking it down into glucose!

What happens next I hear you cry!  Well, sit back and let me explain.

Assuming you are not doing any exercise, as you digest your food and turn it into glucose you naturally experience an increase in the amount of glucose in the blood stream.  The increase in glucose levels, in non-diabetics, causes the pancreas to start delivering insulin to the body.

The body can do three things with the glucose:

1. It can use it to provide fuel to the cells of the body.  Every cell in the body needs glucose to live and function.

2. It can 'charge up' the liver, where is is stored as glycogen (think concentrated glucose)

3. It can be turned into fat

To get the glucose into every cell of the body, with the exception of the brain and autonomic system (think nerves/heart/spine) which can satisfy their needs directly from the blood stream, the cells need insulin.

Insulin 'unlocks' the cell door.  It transports glucose into the cell.  

No insulin, no energy in the cell.

So for you, you pancreatically challenged fool, if you don't inject insulin, you have no mechanism for transporting fuel to the cells in your body.

"But how much insulin do I need to inject", now the fun starts.  Remember I told you to test?  Remember I told you to log data?  Well this is why.  You are as strange and unique as the next diabetic, and your body will behave in its own beautifully independent fashion.  It will not conform to averages, 'normal' ratios or even guesswork!

You will need to learn!  

You will then need to learn to think like your pancreas. If you *really* want to control your diabetes you will need to grab a hold of it and make it a part of you, accept it, internalise it and get on with living with it - not have it control you!

Keep a paper diary, log everything - time you ate, what you ate, how many grams of carbs (its on the label!!), what was your bg before you ate, was it a meal out, were you socialising, what sort of mood were you in? 

Always check you bg 1.5hrs after eating, 'cos 50% of your bolus will have been used up by then so you should have peaked on you bg post meal and you can check to see if you got it right.

Only with your data can you make informed decisions.

Keep capturing the data and believe me you will soon spot patterns.

Next edition:  Why Low Carb - are you mad?