Have you tried putting your daughter on a different diet (low glycemic-index diet with more natural and keto-friendly foods)? This will make managing her diabetes a lot simpler and it'll make her feel better too.
I'm a type one diabetic and have been one for over 15 years now. Getting diagnosed is one of the best things that's ever happened to me. It got me to notice the huge impact diet and exercise have on the mind and body. I initially had issues like your daughter too but changing my eating habits and altering my life-style definitely had a profound effect and made it much easier to manage. If you need tips / help let me know and I'll do what I can. My number one tip is to stick to a more keto-based diet. It will make her blood sugar much easier to manage and has a lot of health benefits.
Thanks for the suggestion! She's 20 and living at school so I have limited influence over her diet. She's pretty much raising a middle finger at her diagnosis right now out of spite and frustration so it's a tricky situation. I've asked her to try to find a community that caters to diabetics at school (i know one exists but i tell her to join it it will not work) to feel less alone about the whole thing.
Ohhh I see and my apology for the misunderstanding!! Either way - she's still young and she has plenty of time to figure it out. If not - one other recommendation I have is getting lab tests done every 3 to 6 months and going for regular check-ups with a doctor. If you find a good doctor - they can make a big difference in getting patients to notice bad HB1C measures and can talk with her about keeping them in check and why it's so important to keep blood sugar levels within normal range. Either way - I wish her a lot of luck and my offer still stands if she (or you yourself) need any help or advice :)
Second this. Just adding fats and protien to a meal effect the meal’s glycemic index (even though it does nothing to glycemic load). I did a lot of research both times my wife was gestational diebetic, and while I already knew that fats helped to smooth bloodsugar levels, it was still wierd to see a dataset with toast having one of the highest glycemic while buttered toast was significantly lower on the scale.
This is trying to solve the wrong problem. Juvenile diabetes is almost always a human problem - not one of optimizing for treatment.
If you have a kid in their teens or 20's who is not entirely ignoring it out of spite, you're way ahead of the game. This problem is much harder to solve than tracking carbs and insulin doses, or changing diet/etc.
The person has to be ready to attack it. And for many young folks (and I assume older as well) this is where the problem lies. It takes a lot to really accept this is going to be your entire life, especially at an age where everyone (seemingly) around you are living these amazing care-free young adult lives, while you have this constant monkey on your back being a buzzkill. Very few individuals have the desire to "do their research" and start hacking on their health the way the HN community would tend to approach things.
Short of commenting on how heartbreaking it is as a parent to watch your kid go through this, I really have no good answers. I guess the topic of this discussion is it - a magic device you can slap on once a week and never think about again. Short of a device like that, I can't see this problem turning to technical vs. human any time soon.
If you think of our brains as a complex electrochemical reaction, the concept of activation energy is in play. And I just think that for some people in some situations their mind doesn’t have the wiring to generate sufficient potential gradient to achieve the activation energy required to motivate action. They can’t just will a thing, they need to rewire their brain first.
I'm a type one diabetic and have been one for over 15 years now. Getting diagnosed is one of the best things that's ever happened to me. It got me to notice the huge impact diet and exercise have on the mind and body. I initially had issues like your daughter too but changing my eating habits and altering my life-style definitely had a profound effect and made it much easier to manage. If you need tips / help let me know and I'll do what I can. My number one tip is to stick to a more keto-based diet. It will make her blood sugar much easier to manage and has a lot of health benefits.