If you have a diabetic friend of relative, you have most likely witnessed them injecting insulin into their stomach, legs or arms. Insulin is a hormone that plays a crucial role in your metabolic system by enabling your body to utilize the food that you consume as fuel. If you are a type 1 diabetic it means that your immune system has attacked your pancreas and destroyed the cells that produce insulin, and your body thus needs artificially produced insulin. The process means you must match the injected insulin to your carbohydrate intake for a normal and safe blood sugar level, counting and tracking the carbs.
Step 1
Measure out your portion size so that you know exactly how much you are eating, which is crucial in determining your proper carbohydrate counts. For example, you must track how many pieces of bread were on your sandwich, how much rice you ate and even how many cherries you consumed as a snack. Every carb that you consume as a diabetic must be counted.
Step 2
Read food labels to determine how many carbohydrates are in each serving of the food that you are eating. There are also a plethora of nutrition books or websites, or cookbooks, which also offer serving size and carbohydrate information.
Step 3
Count your carbs. For example, if you are having a whole turkey sandwich with lettuce on two slices of whole-wheat bread and a medium sized Fuji apple, your total carbohydrate count for the meal would be 52; 15 grams of carbohydrates for each slice of bread and 22 for the apple.
Step 4
Determine how much insulin you would need to take based on your particular ratio; each diabetes patient has a specific insulin-to-carb ratio that he follows, determined by his physician. In this case, we'll say the ratio is 1 unit of insulin to 15 grams of carbohydrates, which is a common amount. Therefore you would take 3.5 units of insulin to cover your meal of 52 units of carbohydrates.
Things You'll Need
- Food labels
- Nutrition books and guides
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