Five Ways to Manage After-Meal Blood-Sugar Spikes with Fast-Acting Insulin
This article suggests five strategies to manage after-meal blood-sugar spikes with fast-acting insulin.
Having diabetes requires a delicate juggling of diet, medications, and physical activity to maintain healthy blood-sugar levels.
Blood-sugar spikes that occur after meals can be particularly challenging to control. Learning to quickly manage these blood-sugar spikes—or prevent them altogether—can be the key to feeling your best.
Furthermore, reducing after-meal blood-sugar spikes is crucial to improving time in range, and can help prevent long-term diabetes complications, including:
- Neuropathy
- Heart disease
- Kidney disease
- Retinopathy, and
- Reduced life expectancy.
What Are After-Meal Blood Sugar Spikes?
It’s normal to experience high blood sugar after a meal when living with diabetes.
Blood-sugar levels typically rise within 10 minutes to an hour after eating, leading to blood-sugar spikes. Most doctors aim for under 180 mg/dL two hours after eating.
Matching insulin to meals can be challenging, sometimes leading to prolonged high or low blood sugar.
Reducing these fluctuations can improve quality of life and prevent complications.
How to Manage After-Meal Blood Sugar Spikes with Fast-Acting Insulin
Using fast-acting insulin is a key way to prevent after-meal blood-sugar spikes.
Unlike slower basal insulins, fast-acting insulin is absorbed quickly to lower blood sugar.
Recent advances have made these insulins more effective than ever.
A variety of fast-acting insulins are available.
- If you are on multiple-daily-injection therapy, you most likely use a combination of fast-acting insulin and basal (long-acting) insulin.
- If you are on an insulin pump, your device will bolus fast-acting insulin when you eat or quickly need to lower blood sugar.
- Then, it will disseminate a small amount of fast-acting insulin every few minutes throughout the day, to work similarly to long-acting insulin.
The different types of fast-acting insulins include:
- Fast-acting (Humalog, Novolog, Apidra)
- Ultra-fast-acting (Lyumjev and Fiasp)
- These are the fastest-acting mealtime insulins on the market.
Additionally, since they’re absorbed into the bloodstream so much faster, they can prevent after-meal blood-sugar spikes altogether.
This leaves you feeling healthier and more human!
Five Strategies to Manage After-Meal Blood Sugar Spikes with Fast-Acting Insulin
Tip 1: Proper Timing of Insulin Administration
Timing your insulin is crucial to avoid low or high blood sugar after eating.
Taking insulin too early can cause a drop during your meal, while eating too soon after can lead to a spike you’ll chase all day.
Managing fast-acting insulin involves balancing timing, insulin type, sensitivity, and the meal’s carb composition.
- Fast-acting (Humalog, Novolog, Apidra)
- Best administered 0–15 minutes before a meal.
- These insulins work best between 10-30 minutes after they’re administered.
- Ultra-fast-acting (Lyumjev and Fiasp)
- Depending on your insulin sensitivity, they may be taken just before you start eating—or even during or after a meal.
- These insulins work best within one to five minutes after administration.
If your meal is rich in complex carbs (like whole wheat pasta with protein and fats), and you’re taking ultra-fast-acting insulin, consider bolusing right before or halfway through your meal. This can help prevent low blood sugar.
Depending on your insulin sensitivity and the makeup of your meal—especially if it’s high fat, high protein, and low carbohydrate—you may have to take insulin after you finish eating!
If you’re eating or drinking a simple carbohydrate—such as an ice cream sundae or fruit juice—these carbohydrates are quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, so you should take insulin earlier before you eat.
Tip 2: Correct Insulin Dosing
Correct insulin dosing—or determining your insulin-to-carbohydrate ratio—is crucial for managing blood sugar after meals.
This ratio tells you how much fast-acting insulin is needed for the carbs you eat, unlike long-acting insulin taken once or twice daily. Your fast-acting insulin needs can vary with carb intake and life changes. For example, if your ratio is 1:15 and you eat 45 grams of carbs, you’d take three units of insulin.
This excludes any correction factor used to adjust blood sugar to your normal range. The correction factor indicates how much one unit of fast-acting insulin will lower your blood sugar, and it can change over time.
For example, with a CF of 1:50, a blood sugar of 200 mg/dL would require two extra units to bring it down to 100 mg/dL.
Your doctor can help determine your ideal insulin-to-carb ratio and correction factor based on various factors like age, gender, activity level, lifestyle, diet, and insulin sensitivity.
Tip 3: Adjust Meal Composition
To further prevent after-meal blood sugar spikes, you may want to adjust the composition of your meals, sticking with lower- glycemic and carbohydrate foods.
Eating foods according to their glycemic index (and eating foods with a lower glycemic index in general) can help people with diabetes:
- Improve their blood-sugar levels
- Lower their A1C, and
- Improve their overall quality of life.
Studies have shown that eating primarily low-glycemic foods may also lead to weight loss in people with diabetes, which can help to improve insulin sensitivity and prevent insulin resistance.
Keep in mind that high-fat and high-protein meals digest a lot more slowly, so even if you’re not having many carbohydrates at a meal, you may still suffer from delayed high blood sugars if you haven’t appropriately bolused.
Tip 4: Monitor Blood-Sugar Levels
After eating, monitor your blood sugar a few hours later to avoid extremes if you have diabetes.
This can either be done by manually testing your blood sugar, or with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM).
Not checking your blood sugar within 30 minutes after you finish eating is recommended because most carbohydrates are still being digested and insulin—even the fastest-acting—has not fully peaked.
If you check your blood sugar too soon after you finish eating and it’s higher than you’d like, you may overcorrect with insulin, ending up with a low blood-sugar level.
One hour after eating, according to the American Diabetes Association’s 2023 Standards of Care, blood-sugar levels for adults should be less than 180 mg/dL and less than 140 mg/dL if you’re pregnant and have diabetes.
Two hours or more after eating, blood-sugar levels should largely have returned to normal.
You might require an extra insulin bolus if you have a meal that was heavier in fat, carbs, or protein, as these foods slow down the breakdown of glucose and might cause elevated blood-sugar levels after the meal.
Tip 5: Get Regular Physical Activity
Staying physically active helps fight insulin resistance and keeps your insulin sensitivity high. Additionally, it can be helpful to exercise after a meal to help prevent high blood sugar levels.
This may be in the form of a walk, a bike ride, a quick swim, or even a jog.
Even exercising for 20 minutes or so after a meal can help fight after-meal high blood sugar levels.
It is not advised to exercise if you have ketones, as high blood sugar levels with ketones can cause dehydration which exercise can exacerbate. This may make your blood sugars even higher, leading to diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA).
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Nail your insulin timing and dose, watch your diet, monitor blood sugar, and stay active to maintain great after-meal levels.
And be sure to follow Beyond Type 2 on social media.
You can also subscribe to our newsletter for more diabetes-management resources.
This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not substitute for professional medical advice. It is essential to consult with your healthcare team to determine the most appropriate insulin regimen for your individual needs.
This content was made possible by Lilly, a Founding Partner of Beyond Type 2.
Beyond Type 2 maintains editorial control over its content.
