Flexible insulin therapy is any insulin injection regimen that allows you to adjust the amount of insulin you take at each dose.
Common regimens which may incorporate flexible insulin therapy include:
How do flexible insulin therapies work?
On a flexible insulin therapy, you aim to match the insulin dose you inject to the amount of carbohydrates in each meal you have.
For example, you may have different breakfasts on Saturday and Sunday.
On Saturday you may eat 30g of carbohydrate for breakfast whereas on Sunday you may choose to eat 50g of carbohydrate for breakfast.
In this example, if no other activities (such as sport) are planned, then you would inject a larger dose for Sunday’s breakfast than for Saturday’s.
What are the benefits of a flexible insulin therapy?
A key benefit of a flexible insulin therapy is that it gives you the freedom to choose how much carbohydrate you want to eat at each meal.
This can be very advantageous at times, particularly if your appetite varies from day to day.
Flexible insulin therapy will require significant care to understand how your body responds to varying carbohydrate intakes and insulin doses
If you can commit sufficient time to understand your results, a flexible insulin therapy can help you to achieve strong blood glucose results.
What are the disadvantages of a flexible insulin routine?
One disadvantage of a flexible insulin regimen is that it can make understanding variations in blood glucose results more difficult as there will be less consistency over carbohydrate intake and insulin dosages.
As noted above, a flexible insulin regimen will most likely need more time to be put into understanding blood glucose results and requires care to be taken in estimating insulin doses.
Taking a carbohydrate counting course comes highly recommended for helping people with type 1 diabetes choose appropriate insulin doses.
