3 Months with Haema: Lessons from a Type 1 Diabetic ✍🏽

✍🏽Introduction: Testing Haema on Myself

👩🏽‍🔬 I'm Jish, and I've had Type 1 diabetes for over 20 years. As the co-founder of Haema and a pharmacologist, experimenting on myself to test Haema's effectiveness was a must 🔬.

So a few months ago, I began on a journey to better manage my diabetes using Haema. My goal was to understand how my body reacts to different foods, exercise routines, and daily habits 🏃‍♀️🍽️.

📚 This blog series will share the lessons I’ve learned, backed by data, and how they can help you manage your diabetes (or general health) more effectively, scroll down 👇.

Lesson 1: The Timing of Exercise Matters 🕒🏃‍♀️

Experiment:I performed the same exercise routine—yoga, stretches, and a 45-minute walk—at different times of the day. I compared morning exercise before and after carbs with evening exercise before and after meals. Using Haema synced to my Apple watch, I tracked my exercise and blood sugar levels. Haema also tracked my meals by taking pictures of them 📊⌚.

Discovery:

• 🌅 Morning Exercise: Yoga and stretches followed by a 30-minute walk before breakfast resulted in stable blood sugar levels with no significant drops. However, walking for longer periods caused my blood sugar to decrease rapidly🚶‍♀️.

• 🌙 Evening Exercise: Exercising in the evening often led to hypoglycemia within 10-20 minutes of starting 🤸‍♀️.

Insight: The timing of exercise significantly impacts blood sugar levels due to changes in hormone levels and insulin sensitivity throughout the day. Haema helped identify the optimal time for me to exercise 📈.

Conclusion: Exercising in the morning before consuming any carbs minimises the risk of hypoglycemia compared to evening workouts. I will dive into the science of this in the upcoming blogs 🌞✨.

Lesson 2: The Importance of Food Combination and Order 🍽️🔗

Experiment: I tested various food combinations to see their impact on my blood sugar levels.

Discovery:

• Food Combination: Pairing foods correctly makes a significant difference. For instance, eating a date alone spiked my blood sugar, but combining it with nuts and berries prevented this spike. Small changes, like increasing fibre intake, positively impacted my blood sugar 🌰🍇.

• High vs Low Carb: Adding the right amount of protein and fat to my carb meals resulted in a slower release of blood sugar. I always feared eating carb-heavy meals because I thought they would spike my blood sugar, so I usually opted for low-carb meals. However, I now realise that I can eat carb-heavy meals if I combine them with the right amount of protein and fat, and also consider the order in which I eat them 🥑.

• Food Order: Eating the protein and fat components of my meal before the carbs helped reduce blood sugar spikes 🍗🍳.

Conclusion: No food is off-limits (well mostly); it's about finding the right combinations that work for you so you can still enjoy what you like. Pairing carbs with the right amount of protein and fat helps prevent blood sugar spikes. Remember, each body is different, so the ideal amounts will vary for everyone🌟.

✨Upcoming Enhancements with Haema:✨

• Determining the optimal amount of protein and fat to add with carb meals.

• Establishing the best order to eat different foods.

• Deciding appropriate gaps between meals.

• Identifying the best types of carbs.

• Making small changes to meals to ease blood sugar management.

Stay tuned for more insights on how food combination and order affect your blood sugar! 🌟

Lesson 3: Skipping Breakfast is Not an Option 🍳🚫

Experiment: I accidentally skipped breakfast on a few days.

Discovery:

• My blood sugar stayed higher throughout the day.

• Despite taking the correct dose of insulin, my body was more resistant.

Conclusion: Skipping breakfast increased my blood sugar and reduced my sensitivity to insulin.

Stay tuned for my next blog explaining the science on why skipping breakfast causes a spike in your blood sugar! 🌟

Lesson 4: Identifying Foods that Cause Spikes 🍣🍒

Experiment:I monitored my blood sugar levels after consuming various foods to identify which ones caused spikes. This was easy to do with Haema, as it tracks my meals against my blood sugar levels.

Results:

• Sushi and cherries caused rapid spikes in blood sugar 🍣🍒.

• Weetabix with tea in the morning led to high blood sugar levels 🥣☕.

Conclusion:Identifying foods that cause spikes helps me avoid or moderate their intake🌟.

Final Thoughts

It's fascinating what I'm learning about the effects of food choices, exercise, and timing. When to exercise, the order you eat your meal, and food combinations actually matter. I realise I have to relearn everything I thought I knew about food, nutrition, and exercise.

Using Haema over the past months has provided invaluable insights into managing my diabetes, and my time in range has improved from 70% to 83%. The real-time data has helped me make informed decisions about exercise, food pairing, and overall dietary habits. I hope these lessons can help you on your journey to better diabetes management.

Haema is now available on Apple app store, try it out and let me know what you discover 😊

Stay tuned for more detailed posts on each topic, where I will dive deeper into the experiments, share more data, and provide tips for implementing these strategies in your daily life.

Thanks for reading

Jish💜

Co-founder of Haema