#1427 Small Sips: Get What You Expect
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Find stability, then expect more.
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Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends, welcome to the sips series.
These foundational strategies were nominated by listeners. They told me, these are the ideas in the podcast that truly made a difference for them. So I distilled them down into short, actionable insights. There's not going to be any fluff or complex jargon, just practical, real world diabetes management that you can start applying today. And I know your time is valuable, so we're keeping these short. Another small sip will come out once a week for the foreseeable future. If you like what you hear, check out the Pro Tip series or the bold beginning series for more. Those series are available in the menu at Juicebox podcast.com and you can find complete lists of all of the series in the featured tab on the private Facebook group. Please remember that nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan or becoming bold with insulin. The questions you have, I guarantee you there's answers to them in the Juicebox Podcast, and it's all free. You music.
Awesome. Jennifer, we are going to do for our small sips series the last page, which says extra topics. So there were things that we heard back from people that really had a nice impact on them from the podcast, but they didn't have any deeper meaning or more explanation. So I figured we would try to parse through them here. Okay, so the first one is it was very helpful to me when Scott said to get stable and then increase your expectations. So now we have to figure out what I meant by
Jennifer Smith, CDE 2:01
that. Well, I would expect the comfort level with stability means that you're not having problems with significant drops. You're not having really dramatic rises. Stability offers you a comfort. It does, but if you get stable, and you're stable at 150 we've talked about this before, but you really would rather be stable at 110 Yeah, it's a step wise approach to getting there. You've achieved healthy, safe, stable, and now that stable is leaving you higher than you want. So then it just little inch by inch. I mean, you could do it in increments. Add a little bit more, add a little bit more. Look at your data and see where could I add a little more to get me closer to my desired next, lower target? So
Scott Benner 2:47
who is the person who's helped by this? So like, one of the problems I have, like, you'll hear me say all the time, like, I don't know what the podcast is. I'm not gonna go down a long road on this, but when you do this thing that I do, and you just say, like, here's what I think I don't know, good luck. And then somebody reports back, though this really helped me. It took me a couple of years to realize that they weren't always being helped the way that I thought they were going to be helped. Sure, you know what I mean, because they're not me, but they still took something from it the way I would think about it, like this. To me, seems like common sense, like if you don't know what you're doing. Starting out on day one, looking for an 85 blood sugar all day long is like a weird first hope. You don't mean, like, that's not gonna happen. Oh, I guess that's what it is. So then find stability somewhere, anywhere, and then work from that by increasing your expectations. You can do that, I think probably just psychologically increase your expectations. But I would also think, with your alarms on CGM true,
Jennifer Smith, CDE 3:46
adjust them if you've been comfortable now that you've come down from an average 200 blood sugar. You're wanting to be lower than that. You have stability in the picture. You can adjust again that expectation of okay, know the tricks that I do to hold me here? Yeah, again, it's all about insulin entirely. I'm stable here. I clearly need more insulin in the picture to get me to a stable place still, but lower my expectation is if I add just a little bit and nudge it slowly, I'm still comfortable and I'm reaching the goals that now I've moved on to.
Scott Benner 4:25
But I guess what I'm thinking is, is that if people have found stability at 180 for example, is it that they don't know that more insulin in targeted places would make that stability happen somewhere else? Like, why do you mean, like, yeah, or do you think it's even, maybe it's burnout? Like, maybe they're like, they spent so much time getting to it that once they're there, they're like, oh, I don't want to think about this again right now. Like, I finally got it stable, you know, I don't know I'm interested. And
Jennifer Smith, CDE 4:53
I think that's where the personality and the individual nature of this kind of comes. Comes into the picture, right? You know, when I was like planning pregnancies, I already had had a pretty tight target, so it wasn't hard to adjust my goal range a little bit tighter, and knowing what I knew about insulin to expect to make adjustments to get lower in a safe way.
Scott Benner 5:22
Yeah, the pregnancy is such a great example for this, right? Yeah? Because if you're running a six, and it's a nice, tight ship, and the doctor says we'd love to see at five and a half, you're like, oh, okay, right. If you're running around an eight and a half, and they're like, we'd like to see in the fives, you go, I don't know if I knew how to do that. I would have done it already, correct? Yeah, I see, okay, so get stable, and then increase your expectations. I hope that helps somebody from my money. That means learn how to find stability at one number, then bring down your CGM high alarm so that you don't get above that or see that you act prior to that number. And then, I guess the thing that I would say, that I have said in the past is it seems so childish, but often you get what you expect. And so
Jennifer Smith, CDE 6:05
true. I mean, it's kind of like taking a test, right? You're taking a math test. You don't study really in the back of your head unless you really, really know the subject, and it's not terribly new. You're not really expecting to do the greatest whereas, if you've put the effort in, you've done the work, you know, all the equations and everything, and now you just need to move it up a notch. You're expecting to really have that a on the test. Yeah.
Scott Benner 6:30
And the work is tools. It is with diabetes, understanding basal insulin to carb ratio. You're insulin sensitive. If you have those tools, and you found stability, and you want it to be lower, expect it to be better, like, right? Sometimes your expectations set your self confidence, a lot of other things, okay, all right, awesome. Thank you, yay.
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