13g fat · small
Jenny's instinct was that the tots weren't terribly high in fat. For a small, that holds.
Scott asked online which restaurant foods give people the most trouble, and somebody said Sonic tater tots — very specific. Neither of them has ever been to a Sonic. A medium order off the website: 43 carbs, 19 grams of fat, 890 milligrams of “lightly seasoned.” Then what happens when you add the chicken.
Scott's numbers: blood sugar stable at 120, one unit covers 10, one unit moves you 50, and he'd love to see it come down to 80. The fat-protein calculator he used on the recording gave 18 grams of carb equivalent — 1.8 units at 1:10 — which is one unit per fat-protein unit, a 100% factor. The page runs at 100% to match. 6:40
Off Sonic's website, read live. Small, medium or large, and nothing says how many tots are in any of them. Jenny picks the middle.
Scott's post. Some answers were vague — Chinese food, pancakes, pizza. Some were very specific: chow mein, honey garlic chicken, Panera, McDonald's, Taco Bell, Panda Express, boba (neither of them gets boba), Culver's cheese curds (Jenny is from Wisconsin; Scott had to look it up). And tater tots from Sonic.
Roll up on a Sonic, just the tots, blood sugar nice and stable at 120. Measure the meal, evaluate yourself, add the base units, layer a correction — and then the fat.
“Let's make it easy for us.”
Scott: this isn't at your house, and nobody is twenty minutes out saying “I'm definitely getting tater tots, I'm going to bolus now.” Jenny's way: bolus for something of it on the way — a five or ten gram bolus to start tipping insulin in the right direction — then look at the trend once you're in line, and bolus for the rest once it's in your hand.
Jenny's read on the tots.
On the tape: 5.3 up front (4.3 plus a rounded unit of correction) and 1.8 extended over four hours. The estimator's math on the same numbers: 5.10 up front, 1.83 over three hours, 6.93 total. The difference up front is Scott rounding 0.8 to one; the hours are his calculator's bracket versus the estimator's.
Scott: two more units on a 4.3-unit carb bolus. Not understanding that piece is where “I don't know what happened, I just had tater tots” comes from — you float up, the automated system believes the bolus you entered and pulls basal, and it won't come down.
Jenny: a road trip, a quick stop, back in the car for another hour or two. The travel-team kids she works with — play, stop, eat, another hour home in the car. You may control the first rise well with the carb bolus alone and then never see the curve come back down, or watch it nudge up more than you expected.
Scott reads down the rest of the menu. Protein wasn't read for any of these, so the fat-protein figures below count the fat only — the real extended amounts are higher.
Scott, counting it out: “forty, fifty, sixty, seventy carbs.” That's a significant bolus. “Once that meal gets ahead of you, it's gonna stay ahead of you.” People think of the chicken as free — they don't think about the breading or the fat.
Jenny: this is the best example of why teaching about only carbohydrates is false information. You read the label, you know your ratio, you did it right — why is this happening? Unless somebody steps in and says this meal had 50 grams of fat and shows you how to handle it, you're forever going to be frustrated by only counting carbohydrates.
Not picking on Sonic — everybody has these.
Sonic's original cold brew iced coffee comes in four sizes: small, medium, large, and something called the RT 44.
The numbers that transfer to the next one.
“Once that meal gets ahead of you, it's gonna stay ahead of you.”
“You're forever going to be frustrated by only counting carbohydrates.”
“The fries are the delivery system for the ketchup?”
“They're precooked before they get fried. So their glycemic impact is absolutely going to be a heavier, quicker hit.”
Every number on this page, with your own settings.
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