Type 1 Diabetes: Insulin, Meals and Useful Records
Understand type 1 diabetes and keep useful meal, glucose and prescribed insulin notes while following your diabetes team's personal care and safety plan.
Learning to live with type 1 diabetes brings practical decisions into familiar meals. Good support helps you make those decisions without expecting you to learn everything at once.
Start your food and symptom diary
Understanding Type 1 diabetes
In type 1 diabetes, the body cannot make insulin, causing blood glucose to rise. Insulin treatment is essential. Your diabetes team teaches monitoring and helps you understand how food, activity and illness fit your care. [1]
Care and everyday food decisions
Follow the team's instructions for insulin, carbohydrate counting, glucose and ketone checks, and sick days. Ask what to do if you cannot eat normally. A food restriction or supplement cannot replace insulin, and One Food Forward must not be used to calculate doses. [1]
Keeping a useful personal record
Record meals, glucose readings with their units and timing, and insulin taken according to your prescribed plan when helpful. Keep questions for your team. One Food Forward does not connect to a glucose sensor or insulin pump, issue hypo alerts or check the safety of an insulin dose.
Related reading: Diabetes; Gastroparesis.
Can a diary replace my glucose monitor?
No. Use the monitoring equipment and plan prescribed by your team. A separate personal record is optional and should not add barriers to essential diabetes care. [1] [2] [3]
Keep the details somewhere you can find them
There is no need to tell the whole story at once. Start with today’s meal, a symptom or a few words about how you felt. Those small entries give you something to return to when it is time to talk about your care.
Sources and further reading
Your healthcare team should guide diagnosis, treatment and changes to your diet or medicines.
Spotted something that needs correcting? Contact One Food Forward support and include this page’s address.