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Pre-Meal Target

Pre-Meal Range

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The Loop toolbar's second icon from the left is a small clock with a knife and fork on the sides. This is the pre-meal tool. The tool will be colored grey until you define a glucose range in Loop settings. Once a pre-meal range is available in Loop Settings, the icon will be colored green and available for use. The background coloring of the Pre-Meal Range icon will turn green when active and there will be a dark blue line on the glucose chart indicating the pre-meal range.

The pre-meal range can be used as an easy way to get a small amount of insulin delivered before a meal in order to help control post-meal blood glucose spikes. It's not designed to replace a traditional pre-bolus, but rather as a more gentle way to build up some pre-meal insulin activity.

If your normal target is 100-110 mg/dL and pre-meal range is 80-80 mg/dL, for example, Loop will give you an extra push to get you to the lower target number before the meal. This early insulin brings you into the meal with a mini-prebolus. The pre-meal range, when activated by pressing on the icon, will stay active for one hour, until carbs are entered, or until it is manually canceled... whichever comes first. Setting an override will also cancel pre-meal range.

Loop will adjust any insulin bolus as needed based on the extra insulin provided during this pre-meal time.

Other Uses

Some people prefer to use this as an easy way to raise the correction range for an hour.

How to Adjust Pre-Meal Range

Loop 3:

  • In Loop Settings, select Therapy Settings and then tap on Pre-Meal Range to adjust
  • If you prefer not to have that icon active on the Toolbar, you can tap Delete in the upper right corner of the adjustment screen

Loop 2.2.x:

  • In Loop settings, find the Correction Range section. The Correction Range sections stores all targets for Loop over the hours of the day, including Pre-Meal.

Assessing the impact of pre-meal

The intent of the pre-meal icon on the toolbar is to provide an eating-soon mode in Loop. Do not set pre-meal limits to any hypoglycemic ranges that may require treatment.

To mitigate the impact of unintentional pre-meal activation:

  • If you are running Loop 3, you can delete the setting to deactivate the icon
  • If you are running Loop 2.2.x, you can set the pre-meal range to the same value as your usual correction range

Custom Pre-Meal Overrides

Some loopers set up a custom override to use instead of the pre-meal icon. This allows enabling the override remotely with Nightscout, permits specifying a custom duration, and will keep the override enabled after carbs are announced.