Morning basal tests are never a problem. In reality most mornings are basal tests for me. And I know for sure that my basal is exactly right.

Note: Basal is the insulin I get 24 hours a day – the background insulin that is needed all the time, without food. If you do not have diabetes, specifically Type 1, your pancreas does this for you automagically. The most important reason is that your brain needs glucose to function. If your blood glucose is low this is one of the reasons you end up in a kind of brain-fog, unable to function.

Back to breakfast. Often, however, I don’t eat anything at all for many hours after I wake up. Yeah, that’s supposed to be bad for you. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, they say.

If I end up having a reasonable breakfast within a few hours of waking, then I can forget about lunch. I’m just not hungry.

So why am I carrying around all this extra weight? No idea! Most of the time I do reasonably low-carb. All that falls over in the evening. Doesn’t matter what I do during the day – eat, not eat, snack, have big meals, the evening is the deal-breaker.

If I ever had to do lots of little meals a day (they say that’s better for metabolism), I know I couldn’t cope.

Unlike breakfast, in the evenings, I can eat when I’m not even remotely hungry. It’s a real struggle to tell myself I don’t need that snack and I’m not hungry. My brain tells me I am. Maybe it’s something to do with leptin not functioning at that time of night? I don’t know. Sometimes I’m successful at resistance and sometimes I’m not. (Yes, resistance is futile!) Even so, everything’s easier with an insulin pump. I can bolus in the middle of an extended bolus with anything I add to dinner, like desserts or snacks, or even more dinner. It’s so easy!

I think it’s the evening snacking that is playing havoc with my weight, but even if I don’t have them, I’m not losing a single ounce. It’s sooooo annoying! I think having a desk job doesn’t help either. And truly, I hate planned exercise, but I know I have to do it. I just keep putting it off. Lupus and arthritic pain doesn’t help. Any exercise I could actually do, probably wouldn’t make any difference. It never has before.

Exercise doesn’t really burn off calories… well I guess it does when you do enough of it. Figure out how much exercise you’d have to do to burn off a Big Mac! I don’t think anyone has THAT much time on their hands, let alone the effort-value. Exercise helps your cortisol levels, which in turn helps a whole bunch of things in your body. That should be the primary reason to do exercise, not the calorie-burning part of it but the cortisol part.

One time I always lose weight. When I have to move house! Something to do with skipping tons of meals, not snacking and moving bits of me a great deal (like 12 hours at a time) while packing boxes. If only I could do that every day! Moving house is coming up for me in the next few months. Something to look forward to in terms of weight loss!

The results showed that the subjects failing to initiate prescribed insulin commonly reported misconceptions regarding insulin risk (35% believed that insulin causes blindness, renal failure, amputations, heart attacks, strokes, or early death), plans to instead work harder on behavioral goals, sense of personal failure, low self-efficacy, injection phobia, hypoglycemia concerns, negative impact on social life and job, inadequate health literacy, health care provider inadequately explaining risks/benefits, and limited insulin self-management training.

So, whose fault is it that these 35% of surveyed patients think that insulin therapy is the cause of what are actually complications of poorly controlled diabetes?

I’m gobsmacked that a survey can come up with this data! Is the survey saying that it wasn’t known before that misconceptions about insulin are so prevalent?

Again, I ask, whose fault is that. In some 90 years of insulin therapy, you’d think that by now patient education would be far better than what this survey reveals.

On the other hand, despite the Internet and its information revolution, the general misconceptions about diabetes are huge! The basic difference between Type 1 and Type 2 – people can’t even get that right!

Type 1 is an autoimmune disease in which antibodies attack and result in little or not production of insulin. No definitive cause (possibly genes and some trigger) and no cure for Type 1 (and all its variants – LADA, MODY etc) at this time folks unless you have a transplant, or some other experimental therapy, which aren’t widely available.

Type 2 is caused by a number of factors, but not autoimmune disease. Sure, if you have autoimmune disease and you’re taking cortisone, that will raise your blood sugar and can bring on Type 2 Diabetes. But Type 2 is not autoimmune in nature. It’s more about fat resistance and because of it, an overabundance of insulin. More info about Type 2 and its causes can be found at Blood Sugar 101, which has by far the best info about type 2, especially the article entitled, You Did NOT Eat Your Way to Diabetes. This article should be required reading for every doctor, nurse and diabetes educator, and anyone else who has anything to say about Type 2 Diabetes, especially those who like to comment with insulting and uneducated remarks.

With all the misconceptions about diabetes, is it any wonder that some people think insulin therapy itself is some kind of fatal risk?

Come on folks! If medicine wasn’t so much about money, education would have come a lot further by now. People who didn’t want to start insulin might not have gone on to having the very complications they thought they’d have by using insulin. Crazy isn’t it?