Life With Jenny: Type 1 Diabetes & Exercise

Type 1 diabetes cannot be cured by changing your diet and exercising! Type 1 diabetes is autoimmune and there is currently no cure for it!

However, exercise is good for diabetics - exercise is good for everyone! Type 1 diabetics just have to be more careful and plan out their exercise, food intake, and insulin. This is another reason I absolutely love my Tandem TSlim pump - it has an activity mode feature that I can turn on during exercise that will automatically adjust how much basal insulin I am getting based on what my blood sugar is to prevent me from having extreme lows during exercise. It's just genius technology!

Interestingly, most exercise lowers our blood sugar, but there are some exercises that actually raise blood sugar levels, like heavy weightlifting, sprints and competitive sports. The reason for this is these kinds of activities cause our bodies to produce adrenaline, which then signals to the liver to release glucose, therefore raising our blood sugar level. I do find this to be a very interesting thing that our bodies do and the effect that adrenaline has on our bodies.

I seem to go through phases with exercising - I'm really not one who has that mindset of 'I have to go workout'. I think that is because for me, I have used exercise negatively in the past and my view of it now is that it's a form of punishment - let me share some reasons why that will help make this all make more sense, because I know exercise is not supposed to be a form of punishment!

So we're going to go way back to when I was 12, a preteen with raging hormones! I was in middle school, starting to get into boy bands (#BackstreetBoys4Life), started developing physically. It appeared to me that I didn't look like most of the other girls. I was a little bit bigger than them, I had larger breasts than most girls my age, I had some belly fat and hips - basically I wasn't flat and skinny like all the girls the guys seemed to like. So, as any rational (haha) preteen girl would think, I must change myself so people will like me. Every time I went to the grocery store with my mom, I'd see the magazines with something on the front cover about how to lose weight by doing this simple exercise or that simple exercise, etc. Sometimes mom would let me get one of the magazines and I would spend hours reading it and learning to do the exercises they spoke of so I could be 'skinny'. Sometimes I'd do the exercises in my bedroom really late at night when I was busy obsessing over my physical appearance. I started doing these exercises early in the morning before school but I never got to a point where I saw myself as 'skinny'.

I've always thought of myself as overweight and that I wasn't pretty enough (I know these are lies from satan himself and I work every day to put on my Armor of God to fight the enemy!). So now fast forward to 2015, I saw a movie that just really convinced me to eat better foods and be more active. But, I always took it as a challenge each day to try to eat THE HEALTHIEST food I could. So I'd make a smoothie every morning with almost all the fruits plus kale and spinach - this ended up being about a 20 ounce smoothie and it would take me about 2 hours to drink it all - but I had to drink it all, because if I didn't I'd have failed at my daily challenge! Then for lunch I'd have a salad with just about every green thing you'd put in a salad - there was so much salad, I got tired of chewing! And then the rest of the day I drank water and didn't eat until dinner. In the evenings I'd go for walks, I'd try to run (running is not my thing!), I'd ride my bike. It didn't matter, I had to do some kind of exercise.

Later in 2015, we moved, I got a new job at a gym, and continued with these same patterns, except now I worked at a gym and had a gym membership where I could go to group classes on my lunch hour. So, I would do yoga twice a week and I'd go to a weight lifting class twice a week. I was working out 4 days in a row. Then every single evening, I would do more yoga practice at home for 1-2 hours. Needless to say, I was pretty fit during this time but I still didn't seem myself the way others saw me. I was still using my diet and exercise as a form of punishment.

In 2019 when my thyroid went bonkers, I decided that I was into biking and cycling now so I found a used spin bike for sale and bought it. I used that spin bike every single day, sometimes twice a day and those workouts I did were HARD! I'd burn so many calories, my legs would be on fire, sweat was dripping everywhere, it was great! It felt good! However, I was only exercising like this because I'd gained weight due to my thyroid and was really just punishing myself for the weight gain. My thyroid issues got so bad that I just didn't have the energy anymore to keep exercising the way I was, and I just stopped.

Now, this year in 2023 my work added a new benefit of gym memberships to our benefit package. I did go ahead and take them up on this offer for the YMCA because there's something there for everyone in my family! Volleyball for Ryann, swimming for Erica, and weights for Steven. I have recently taken an interest in working through my fear of drowning (I've had a few scary experiences), and watching Erica swim just made me want to! So, Erica and I have been swimming together. It's fun and the pool at the YMCA isn't deep, and Erica is teaching me all kinds of things she's learned on the swim team and I am getting stronger and better in the pool. I'm working through my fears and I am exercising in a fun way for me, that also doesn't feel like a punishment and doesn't leave my body in pain afterwards! This is positive!

Exercising should be fun and shouldn't be a form of punishment. Exercise is good for our heart, lungs, bones, and muscles, and it's good for type 1 diabetics to help regulate their blood sugars. Exercise is good for mental health too! We should use exercise as a tool rather than some kind of forced activity.

Long story short, exercise is good for all of us. It's a shame that society is the way it is and many of us are affected by the societal norms of 'skinny is pretty'. We are all beautiful the way we are because God designed and created each of us in our mother's womb in His image. We are beautiful because God doesn't make mistakes!

So that's my story about how I've used exercise both negatively and now positively, and I have to say, doing something that I enjoy is way better than doing various exercises that just cause me pain and the only reason I'm doing it is to look like somebody else. I'm proud of this healthier road I'm on. ♥

Do you exercise regularly? What's your favorite?

Well, that's all for now.

I'm so glad you're here!

xoxo - Jenny