The Pros and Cons of Carbohydrate Counting

I have been on the carb counting regime (or if you want the medical jargon- Basal Bolus) for just under 4 years now. From my experience it has a lot of pros and cons, in light of the new advancements for diabetics (I'm speaking mainly here of the diabetes pump which I have to admit I'm still rather dubious about myself) I think it is important to weigh up these pros and cons.

A bit of background.
Basically, and I'll try to keep this as simple as possible, my daytime insulin (orange bottle) is called Novo-Rapid. As the name suggests it is fast acting insulin. To determine how much of it I take, I must first determine how many carbohydrates (yes, carbs not sugars) I take with a meal. For example, because the only thing I am sat next to is a lucozade bottle please forgive me for this, but imagine for dinner I am going to be an idiot and simply have a bottle of lucozade (please for gods sake don't do that) In 380ml of lucozade (a full bottle) there is 65.0g carbohydrates. Move the decimal point one to the left and you are left with 6.5 (a smaller number, and is now much easier to work with) round 6.5 up (if it were 6.4 you would round it down-that's simple maths) and you have now ended up with 7 carbohydrate portions. I am on a 3:1 ratio for my meals meaning that for every one carbohydrate portion, I intake 3 units of insulin. So with this in mind, on my ratio if I were to have a bottle of lucozade for a meal, I would have to take 21 units of insulin to combat it (you see how it works? If my ratio were 2:1 I would take 14 units ect ect). We all know insulin controls the blood sugars- too much insulin the sugars drop, too little and they go too high (obviously there are a lot of external factors too of course- illness and stress and hormones all have effects too aswell as a whole range of other things). The other insulin I take is called Levimir (green bottle) this is my night time insulin which I only take once a day (though I am told that some people take this more than once). This insulin is a base line insulin, it is not fast acting, it releases slowly and should last up to 24 hours. Because it releases slowly, it makes it ideal for regulating the blood sugars while we are sleeping, as it wont take any dramatic turns.

The Pros of Basal Bolus.
-Eating times. One of the previous banes of my life was that I had to eat at particular times, I could be out with friends and we would have to stop what we were doing in order for me to eat at the correct time- and that was annoying. With basal bolus you have a lot more control over what times you eat- which consequently also means you can have a lot more lie-ins on weekends!
-More control over WHAT you're eating- This regime doesn't just give you more control over when you eat. It also gives you more control over what you eat. Basically, you can eat pretty much anything, as long as you take into consideration the carbohydrate content and inject accordingly.
-Snacks. Firstly, anyone who has been on the 2 injections (human mixtard I was on) will know that in order to regulate blood sugar levels with this regime you had to eat snacks at various points of the day, this got annoying and I especially hated people staring at me in the class, however, with basal bolus it isn't necessary to eat snacks- and should you get hungry at all and want one that's also possible- you just have to do another injection for it.
- It makes you a bit more like your friends. We all know it's a bit of a sod to watch your friends eating chocolate at break and about to offer you some when suddenly they remember and look all sheepish at you and apologise. I kind of  got used to this, but when I started basal bolus and my friends realised that they could now offer me chocolate and I could accecpt if I wanted to it went down a treat for both them and myself. :)

The cons of basal bolus.
-4 injections instead of two- nobody likes feeling like a pin cushion! The main problem I find with basal bolus is that you do start to feel like a pin cushion, on the average day you will have 4 injections, and this could be more if you happen to be eating more, and it's a bit of a pain to be honest, it's where the pump is probably a better idea.
-Carbohydrate counting can get a bit tedious- tell me honestly, who likes staring at food packets! Most things you can sort of learn by heart, other things you can kind of guess a little bit using informed judgement, but I find I have to refer to packets a lot too, and that is tedious! But then if you don't do it you get ill.....
- Sometimes the insulin ratios need revising- Since I started this 4 years ago, I've flicked back and forth from a 2:1 ratio to a 3:1 ratio, depending I think on a lot of variables regarding what is going on at the time (illness and such), but still this is another pain, because you think you've got something sorted and then all of a sudden your insulin seems to start not working and you're back to square one!
-The freedom of food and when you eat can get you into some bad habits- from my point of view, on the two injections I stayed very very healthy because I had to. When I had all of this freedom, it was something new for me, so instantly I went for all the stuff I didn't usually have- full fat fizzy drinks, chocolate and sweets and crap food all round. I've sorted that now, but it's easier to do when you have less obligations.

Please do not consider what I've written here to have any degree of medical certainty. I am not a doctor or a nurse or in fact in any way shape of form medically trained. I do however possess one thing that the majority of these doctors and nurses don't have- personal experience. They have experience in dealing with patients who are on this regime, I have experience in actually being on it. I can tell you from a less complicated point of view that is not tarnished with medical language. But I'm not medically trained, and my experience will probably differ from that of other diabetics- individual differences play HUGE parts in everything. :)

Keep Smiling :)
Love, Tutti-Frutti
xxx