Every Reason You Don't Pre-Bolus (and why they're all valid)
Here’s the quiet part said out loud: the reason you don’t pre-bolus is not that you’re lazy or that you don’t care. It’s that it scares you. Neil names the specific fear at the center of the whole challenge, the fear of going low before...
The episode, word for word
Today we open the junk drawer.
You know the one. The drawer where you keep all the reasons you don't pre-bolus. And I want to pull them out one at a time, hold them up to the light, and tell you that every single one of them makes sense. Because they do. And nobody's ever just sat with you and said that.
I'm Neil Greathouse, this is Your Best T1D Year. Monday we named the big one, the fear of going low before the food shows up. Today, the rest of the drawer. No studies, no stats. Just the real, human, lived reasons we've all been avoiding this thing.
Reason one. The bad memory. A lot of us tried pre-bolusing once, it went sideways, and we filed it under "never again."
I'll go first, because I always go first. Years ago I pre-bolused for a dinner out. Felt very advanced. Very "look at me, managing." And the kitchen was slammed. Our food took forever. And I sat there watching myself drop. I ate the garnish. I ate the lemon out of my water. I started asking the waiter how the entrees were coming in a voice that was getting less and less casual. And then I got into that bread basket like a raccoon who found a dumpster behind a steakhouse with the lid left up. It scared me. And honestly, after that, I just stopped pre-bolusing for like a year. The fear won.
If that's you, if you got burned once and backed off, you're not broken. You learned a lesson. The lesson was just a little too broad. You learned "pre-bolusing is dangerous," when the real lesson was "don't pre-bolus a restaurant meal when you don't know when the food's coming." We'll fix that. It's fixable.
Reason two. The forgetting. You mean to. You really do. And then you're hungry, the food's right there, and the dose happens mid-bite because your brain had four hundred other tabs open. That's not a discipline problem. That's a systems problem, and systems problems have systems solutions. We'll build one.
Reason three. The unpredictable table. You live with other people. "Dinner's almost ready" turns into 40 minutes. Or you've got a kid who requested this exact meal and is now staring at it like you've betrayed them. Pre-bolusing into that chaos feels like a trust fall with nobody behind you. Fair. Real. We'll handle it.
Reason four, and this is the sneaky one. It's just easier not to. Spike, correct, move on. It works, sort of, and it doesn't require you to feel that little flicker of fear. I get it. I have done the easier thing more times than I can count.
Here's what I want you to hear. Not one of these reasons makes you bad at this. Every one of them is a smart person responding reasonably to a hard situation. You're not the problem. The timing has been the problem, and nobody ever showed us a safe way to fix it.
So that's what the rest of these eight weeks are for. We're going to take this junk drawer, and one by one, we're going to deal with every single thing in it.
Your challenge this week. Pick your reason. The big one, the one that's actually been stopping you. Just name it to yourself, out loud if you're brave, write it down if you're really brave. You can't dismantle a thing you won't look at.
While that reason's fresh in your head, go put yourself in the room. Sign up at yourbestt1dyear.com so you're actually following the challenge, not just nodding along in the car. Free newsletter, free resources, and roughly 1,500 people doing this with you all over the world.
Here's the honest part, and I'm saying it with love. If you never open that drawer, nothing in it ever changes. Same spikes next summer. Same loop. Same 9pm guessing game in the dark. But you opened it today. That took guts, and it means this summer gets to go a little differently.
I'm Neil. Friday, we turn the corner. See you then.
This is the script as read on the mic, lightly tidied for reading. Education, not medical advice. Talk to your care team before you change anything about your insulin.