Managing diabetes can be challenging. But it is manageable.
It's really a balancing act - balancing your food intake with your insulin doses and activity levels.
Attaining good balance is easier said than done. Sometimes there will be highs and sometimes there will be lows.
Historically it's been very difficult to have one place to look to understand your blood glucose management. I've used paper log books, spreadsheets, software applications, iPhone applications, continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems, but none provide the full, realtime picture of the factors affecting my blood sugars.
While good blood sugars are the goal, your blood sugar readings are the result of the food you eat, the insulin you administer and how active you are. So for good blood sugar control you have to track and record you blood sugars, but in order to gain predictability and stability you really need to track your food, insulin and activity. And for that information to be useful, you need to correlate all that data together to provide a visual story of your blood glucose readings.
And that's why I created GlucoBalance in 2017. An application that requires five minutes of my time a day, but helps me understand my blood glucose highs and lows and continuously improve my blood sugar control.
I have been type 1 diabetic for 43 years. I have managed my diabetes with injections (for 18 years), an insulin pump (for 25 years) and continuous glucose monitoring (for 6 years). I was diagnosed in 8th grade, so have lived with diabetes through junior high, high school, college and as an adult while living in the US, Scotland and France.
In general I've had good HA1C levels and have no diabetes related side-effects. But my control was more reactive than proactive - I always checked my blood sugars and then corrected highs and lows with more insulin or more food. And when I think about my journey, it's reflected in the chart below. This doesn't necessarily apply to all diabetics, but I suspect you can identify with one of the stages below. My high school and college years were largely step 1 and step 2 but as I got older with more responsibility and a family I tightened my control.
I have been using GlucoBalance for 7 years and it's helped improve my understanding of my blood sugars which in turn has helped me achieve improved stability.
