4.6u · stable line
No blood sugar entered. The estimator still asks for about a fifteen-minute pre-bolus.
A listener sent in a whole restaurant night: chips with guacamole, sour cream and salsa, a margarita, steak fajitas with rice and refried beans — and could you talk about tacos and enchiladas too? Scott runs it through the Bolus 4 estimator a piece at a time. The carbs alone say 15.58 units. Count the fat and protein and it's 20.
Scott runs the live estimator on the recording: carb ratio 1:10, sensitivity 50, the default 50% fat-protein factor, and a stable line with no blood sugar entered for the appetizer. For the full meal he enters a blood sugar of 99; the 15.58 up front only works out with a target of 90, so that's the target used here. 8:34
The appetizer, built one dip at a time. Scott adds each one to the estimator as they go and reads what it does to the bolus.
Tortilla chips with guacamole, sour cream and salsa. Steak, pepper and onion fajitas with a side of rice and refried beans. What happens with a margarita on top of all that. And could you talk about tacos and enchiladas? Scott's warning going in: this one is going to be a lot more art than science.
1:10 · sensitivity 50 · 50% factor · stable, no blood sugar entered.
Jenny: those little dishes the dips come in — souffle cups, about the size of Scott's fist, two inches high — are usually about a half cup, flat-topped. The quarter cups on this page are servings. What you actually scoop is your portion. Go ahead and have 40 chips instead of 20, Scott says, and it's nine units up front and three extended, over more hours.
As read on the recording: 4.6 up front, 1.43 stretched over four hours — the estimator's math lands on the same numbers. The four pieces as read add to 7 grams of protein; Scott's running total and the estimator run carried 6, so the sour cream's gram is left out here to match the tape.
Scott: unless you really crush it hard, or the food takes a while to come, he doesn't see how you catch up. Jenny: it's grazing in a short window, chatting and laughing, before you've even ordered — a fair amount of carb with 29 grams of fat behind it. Then, Scott says, you shovel tortillas and rice on top of that slowed-down stomach.
Jenny: nobody waits for the entree to have the fancy drink. It lands with the appetizer.
When Arden was nine, walking into a restaurant: look at her blood sugar, put some insulin in just to get it on their side, and figure out the rest once they sat down. Jenny's version: sit down and put in 30 grams as your pre-bolus. You haven't seen the chips yet, but you've had a margarita before and you know its hit. Once you can see the food, add more before the entree comes.
As read: seven up front, 1.4 stretched over four hours. Same fat-protein wave as the appetizer alone — the margarita only moves the front.
The entree, Gemini's breakdown. Then the whole night in the estimator three ways — carbs only, add the protein, add the fat.
Scott: the delightful part of these conversations is hearing it — “oh, there's way more protein in steak than I think about. I don't even bolus for protein.” Six ounces of skirt steak is 40 grams of it.
Scott's first run: 154 carbs and nothing else. 15.58 units.
As read: 15.58 up front, 1.3 over four hours.
As read: “15.58 up front, four and a half over now eight-hour window, and this whole bolus goes to 20 units.” The pieces Scott read add to 66 grams of protein; he read the total as 67, and the tape wins.
Scott: this is how it happens. I didn't pre-bolus long enough, it got ahead of me, I didn't consider the fat and protein. Then at 280 you never have the nerve to do more than a unit. Even an automated system, if you don't tell it about that impact, pushes slowly and never gets ahead of anything.
Jenny and Scott, back and forth.
The rest of the request, and what happened when Scott asked ChatGPT the same question he'd asked Gemini.
Scott's read: it wouldn't change the bolus by more than a quarter or half a unit. Jenny's advice for anyone doing what Scott did: give it as much direction as you can — ask for the macro breakdown sourced from the USDA. And at a mom-and-pop place without standardized recipes, nobody knows the fat. She eyeballs her own olive oil.
Not run on the recording — this is the estimator's math on the totals Scott read, at the same settings as the appetizer.
Scott: 1,800 episodes in, it really only needs to be about 25 episodes long. Count the fat, the carbs and the protein, understand the timing of the insulin, have your settings right. This is the Pro Tip series from a slightly different angle. Jenny: you come into a meal like this with history — you know what you order and about how much you'll eat. Use it.
Two mixed injections a day, a sliding scale, a meter. She ordered a taco salad because she knew how to do a salad — and it came out in a gigantic fried tortilla bowl, the biggest plate at a table of eight. She picked through it, went to the dance and moved. “I am still alive after my taco salad.”
The numbers that transfer to the next one.
“Chips are just a method of getting like, I would just happily eat the bowl of salsa.”
“If you don't pre bolus this meal coming in the door, I don't see how you catch up.”
“Our brains kind of calculate less than is truly there.”
“In the end, it's timing and amount. That's it.”
Every number on this page, with your own settings.
Open it →The methodThe tutorial the whole series is built on.
Read it →The collectionTap the cart and pick a food. One page per episode, with Scott and Jenny.
Open the cart →