Control

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Record Keeping

Better Records With Charts (also see Better Records With Logbooks)

Charts help you visualize a complete picture of the interactions between insulin doses, food intake, carb counts, and activity. They can also help pinpoint other things that affect your blood sugar, such as menses, stress, or an infection. Having a complete picture enables you to sort out what is causing unwanted changes in your blood sugar. Your control is determined by how well your insulin is matched to these changes. Charts allow you to:

• record everything that affects your control in one place.
• graph the rise and fall of your blood sugar in real time.
• see patterns in your readings.
• see the time of day when problems typically occur.
• pinpoint the causes for control problems.

Over time, charts tell you if you are getting where you want to go. They can be used as a guide to let you know whether the changes you make are really helping you gain better control. Writing things down as they occur improves your decisions. Whatever recording device you use, you want to identify patterns easily and be able to record in one place all the things that affect your control.

What should you put on your charts?

The more information you put on your charts, the easier it is to control your blood sugars. Keep your charts or other recording tools handy so that recording and reviewing are easy to do. Use colored markers to quickly spot differences in activities, events, and readings. Highlighting highs and lows is particularly valuable. For each high and low, record what you think led to the particular problem. Some important topics that should be included on your chart are:

• activities
• blood sugars
• insulin doses
• foods and carb counts
• comments about emotions, stress, medications, etc...

Download a sample Smart Chart or download an empty chart to test out with your own information.

Spot Patterns

Adapted from Using Insulin © 2003, J Walsh PA, R Roberts MA, T Bailey MD, and C Varma MD

Once a week, review your completed charts for patterns of high and low blood sugars. As you gather information, patterns will become apparent to you and your health care team. You will finally be able to see logical explanations for ups and downs you were not previously able to explain.

Another way to monitor your overall control is to find the total percent of your readings that fall within your target ranges. Once a week, add up the total number of readings you have recorded and circle all the readings above your target range in one color and all the readings below your target range in another color. Divide the number of readings outside your range by your total readings to get your percentage. You should aim for being within your target range at least 75% of the time.

For example:

If you take 4 readings a day for a week, you end up with 28 overall readings. If 4 of these readings were outside your target range, you would divide 4 by 28 to get .14(14%). This means that 86% of your readings were within your target range.

Also see Better Records With Logbooks