"Fine Tuning" Your Diabetic Dog

Today we will talk about some of the ways to “fine tune” your protocols to get the result that you’re looking for. These are better used later in diagnosis when you are doing all that you can and your curve just isn’t exactly where you’d like it to be. Again, save these “tips and tricks” for a time that you have been seeing consistent numbers for a good bit of time, but just need a “tweak” or two. I have alluded to them in earlier posts, but will expand on them here.

If you have a curve that has high fasting numbers but the rest of the 12 hours is “in range” (150-250) then you can try tweaking your food mix to speed up digestion and smooth out your curve. If you feed kibble (dry food) only, you can try soaking a portion of it or all of it in warm water to soften it some and speed up its digestion rate. I’d start with soaking half of it and see if there is any effect on your numbers. If you see a slight change, you can soak more than half or perhaps all of it. You don’t need to turn it to mush, just soften it some. I think that you’ll be surprised to see just how hard that stuff is and how long you have to soak it to have any impact on it. Warm water is best when trying to soften it up. Just be sure that it has cooled off before you feed it to your pup.

If you feed a combination of canned (wet food) and kibble (dry food), you can try changing your ratio of wet to dry. Wet food digests faster than dry food does, so if your fasting numbers are higher than the rest of your curve, you’ll want to increase your wet food and decrease your dry food. The important part here is to be sure that your calories remain the same. Wet food is usually much lower in calories than kibble, so when changing your mix, keep your calories the same.

This is where your journal will come in very handy, make sure that you document any changes that you make and what impact it had on your numbers if any. You will have to give it some time to see any changes, so once again, I say, be patient. Some of you may see an immediate impact, others it may take a few days to see any differences.

If your curve starts off higher and then the rest of the day your numbers decrease, it may be that your injection site could use a “tweak”. Typically, if the insulin is slow to absorb, the food will get ahead of it and the insulin can’t catch up until later in the 12 hour period. I wrote a blog about “The Dance between Food and Insulin” that can be found here: https://shoppettest.com/blog/the-dance-between-food-and-insulin/ . We ideally want the food to finish digesting just as the insulin is fully absorbed. Because we give the injection subcutaneously, it takes it some time to absorb into the system. This is why we don’t exercise within the first 60-90 minutes after injection because it will change the absorption rate.

If your morning fasting number is higher than the rest of your curve, try moving your injection site further down the side off the spine. This is a better absorption rate area and you should see a difference fairly quickly. If you are injecting in the scruff of the neck, I’d strongly encourage you to move your injection site. The scruff has the slowest absorption rate and it also builds scar tissue quickly.

If you aren’t alternating injection sites routinely, the area where you inject may be building scar tissue and interfering with absorption. Scar tissue doesn’t absorb which will slow down the insulin from getting into the system because it has to find tissue that will take it in.

These are the two “tips” that will have the biggest impact on your curve. As with all things, go slowly and document everything that you do so if it doesn’t have the desired effect, you can just go back to what you were doing before.

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Until next time…