Cary'sScott
Of everything they've tried over the years, the one that tastes most like syrup. Arden uses it and, in Scott's experience, it “doesn't add rocket fuel to pancakes,” so he doesn't cover it.
A shake-and-pour bottle of pancake mix, half of it on the plate: 90 carbs before anyone reaches for the syrup. Scott and Jenny work the bolus up from nine units to nine and a half to just about fifteen, talk through why a number that size scares people, and Scott shares the simple recipe he makes at home instead.
Scott's standing example settings: one unit for every 10 carbs, one unit moves the blood sugar 100 points. The kid comes downstairs out of a hot shower at 150 — stable, Scott says, “just to make those okay” — so the correction is half a unit against a target of 100; he never says the target out loud, but the half unit implies it. No fat-protein wave was worked on the recording: Scott and Jenny bolused the carbs and the correction, and talked about the long tail rather than counting it, so the estimator's fat-protein factor is off on this page. 9:44
A plastic jug. Pour in cold water, shake it, pour the batter. Jenny didn't know they made them that way — and Scott has tried to bolus for these pancakes for years. It takes a pre-bolus, an extended bolus and extra basal over the top, and it still isn't easy.
“A grain of salt on the serving size.” The label's pancake is not the pancake anyone makes.
For both pancakes, Jenny expects the trouble to be the long tail — the extended need after the meal, not the front end — because of how they're cooked. Scott's experience is that the box pancakes fight him and his own recipe doesn't; he can't say exactly why, but real, simple ingredients seem to bolus more predictably.
Nobody makes the label's pancake, so Scott and Jenny bolus for half the bottle — two servings — and then Scott reaches for the diner syrup.
Nine units for the pancakes alone. 90 carbs at one unit for 10, worked out loud before anyone mentioned a blood sugar. The units on each card are the plain 1:10 carb math for that card by itself; the correction comes in below. Fat was read once — “six grams of fat” — as Scott described the two-serving portion, and that is how the page uses it.
It's morning. Scott's question before the correction: how many people make pancakes and don't put bacon or a breakfast meat next to them? Jenny says a lot of listeners are adding protein on purpose to blunt what they expect the pancakes to do. Scott's caution — protein in the morning usually means bacon, bacon means fat, and fat means a lift later, on top of the pancakes.
Saturday morning, out of a hot shower — which lately sends Arden's blood sugar up, and not just on the CGM — the kid comes downstairs at 150. The bolus grows from there.
Nine units for the food, “now I need a half a unit to move the blood sugar” — a nine-and-a-half-unit meal bolus, as Scott calls it on the recording. Jenny's first question was whether the 150 was stable or still rising; stable, for the example. The 12 protein and 6 fat make about one fat-protein unit, and nobody extended for it on the recording, so nothing is extended here.
“That's a lot” is what Scott hears constantly when people see a bolus this size. The strategy above is a way in, not the destination.
Scott's arithmetic on the recording: 90 plus 52 is 142 carbs, “that's 14 plus the correction, that's just about 15 units.” The estimator says 14.70. His point isn't the decimal — it's that you can't say the number seems too big. Pancakes with syrup are what they are.
Jenny: once you've figured out your own pancakes — the portion, what goes in them — the diner's version is still different, and it may be the size of the plate. You can swag the carbs reasonably well from what you know, and then the pump says 14 units where you usually take five, and the number stops you. As long as the carb ratio is the same, the five and the fourteen are the same math on different portions. What you need is what you need.
Scott's way out of the fear, using the L and the T of Meal Bolt. Look at the CGM an hour and three hours later. If you end up correcting, look at how much insulin that correction took — is it about the amount you left out of the first bolus? That's how you learn what the meal actually needs, without going out and making a super-aggressive bolus on day one. You might be the person who doesn't need it. Work into it.
Type “pancake” into the search bar at juiceboxpodcast.com and this is what comes up — the recipe Scott makes at home, which doesn't cause the trouble the bottle does. Still pancakes. Not like drinking water.
Arden eats the same amount either way — sometimes with sugar-free syrup, sometimes dry. So he stacks a few strategies together.
Pancakes alone: if Scott gets it right, two hours later he's done. Add bacon — or, this being the Northeast, pork roll — and the checking isn't over at two hours. It's three, and four, and you still have to be looking. Same pancakes, different meal.
The numbers that transfer to the next breakfast.
“You can't come online all the time and tell me I don't know how to bolus for pancakes if you're not addressing them for what they really are.”
“At least you're getting the whole bolus without as much fear.”
“What you need is what you need.”
“I lay a blanket of insulin over top of it. Like a weighted blanket so it can't stand up.”
Every number on this page, with your own settings.
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