Eating healthily with Type 1 Diabetes.

For me, a key word is balance, really, and it used to be the name of the British Diabetic Association's magazine in the days, you know, I can remember at the age of four or five these magazines would come, and it would have the symbol of the weighing scales, and it kind of stayed with me, so that the balance issue has been a constant, probably more of a constant than the being organised bit. So it's about balancing your insulin levels with your exercise and activity and the timings of it and also your food and carbohydrates. And you know the main thing as I said about Daphne was that you didn't have to be regular in your meal times, whereas before they had to be split out every kind of three to six hours because of the effects of the insulin that you were taking. But with Daphne it turned everything upside down in that you take your insulin to match the food that you want when you want it. And that was very freeing. You know life wasn't the same for me after that it improved significantly and things kind of got better since. So in terms of food, yes I have to be aware of carbohydrate content. At the age of nine when I went on my first diet I was hugely resentful of the fact that I had to count things because I felt then that food is food and there's more of an art to it. You should enjoy what you're eating rather than have to eat some things that you might not want. And I still have that sort of mental issue now when I'm having to have a snack for a hypo. I don't really want this. In terms of my hunger, I don't need this because I'm not hungry. Yet I'm having to have it. What I try to do is avoid food with high levels of fat. my wife and I are kind of very considerate of different cooking methods and, you know, the different kind of glycemic stuff of different foods. I don't let it rule my life. I'm not someone who will choose a firm banana over a kind of mouldy brown one, you know, because some people get into that levity war. If it's yellow, it's a certain index and if it's brown, it's another. I just think, well, if I want a banana, I want a banana. So I think you can kind of go overboard. And so I've chosen just to sort of have a middle ground, really, in terms of just eat what you fancy, but be aware of what its effects are. And as I said earlier, the kind of of key event for me was the DAPHNE programme. It was about dosage adjustment for normal eating, so key words for me were the normal eating bit. I still try not to leave long gaps between meals so that they're sort of fairly regular. It's not like I'm eating at midnight and then will wait until noon the following day. You know, it's not like that because I don't think that's great in terms of the balance again between insulin and its effects and lack of food. But I think it's important that you're aware of your total health. You happen to be a person with diabetes rather than a diabetic and sometimes when I kind of attend diabetes clinics I think what about the bigger picture? and it's something that I always have at the back of my mind. But talking about going to the clinics, I think it's important to discuss issues with your diabetes specialist nurse and your consultant or medical team and I respect their expertise. I also respect that I'm an expert but they are experts too and sometimes they might give you information that you don't really want to hear, but it's important that you listen I think because I think there are kind of key flags and there are reasons behind what they're telling you. So I'd say consider their views carefully even if you disagree and you know I think probably the most common sources of disagreement are going to be around weight, drinking and smoking. My own style of alcohol consumption is that I drink alcohol with an evening meal and the reason for that is that I know that if I was to drink alcohol without having any food it would just bring my blood glucose levels down. It would cause almost an instant hypo. And the other thing about alcohol is like it's a waste of calories in a way because they are calorific, it is calorific and it's not exactly what I would call a food item. Smoking, I've never smoked. My mother was a smoker so I might have been a passive smoker but I've never smoked and I've done that because of the risks of various forms of cancer but I also believe that it compromises the arteries and it affects blood circulation and I think as a diabetic we need to bear that in mind given the risks of how the circulatory system can be compromised. So that's been a no-no for me and I know through friends who happen to be diabetic and smokers that's a hell of a struggle but my view is the sooner you give up the better.