Ultimately, the best exercise routine is the one you’ll actually do.
The second best exercise routine, in terms of its effectiveness on insulin sensitivity, is one that includes resistance training, and we’ll give you ways to integrate this into your exercise regimen.
Performing a minimum of three hours of exercise per week divided into five or six sessions spread over a seven-day period will keep your insulin sensitivity high at all times.
This approach is much more effective than spending longer periods of time exercising a few days a week, which temporarily boosts your insulin sensitivity for only a few days at a time while you become less insulin sensitive on your rest days.
We’ll also discuss simple ways to manage your blood glucose and insulin needs before, during, and after exercise to minimize your risk for high or low blood glucose, all while maximizing your athletic recovery.
Step 5: Mastering Your Lifestyle
In the latter part of this book, we’ll discuss specific lifestyle strategies that will help you integrate the Mastering Diabetes Method into your life and create a sustainable regimen that you can stick to in the long term. We’ll help you preemptively troubleshoot tricky situations, such as eating at a restaurant or at someone’s house.
We understand that modifying your lifestyle can be difficult because even small changes can disrupt the way you live your life. Especially as you age, your desire to modify your habits tends to decrease significantly. The Mastering Diabetes Method is designed with a long-term vision in mind so that none of the changes feel overwhelming, and yet our step-by-step nutrition, fitness, and lifestyle recommendations are designed to add new tools to your “insulin sensitivity toolbox” to significantly reduce your long-term disease risk.
One Size Fits . . . No One
If you are like many of our clients, you may have tried many diets over the years.
Perhaps some of these diets helped you lose weight and gain energy, while some of them caused you to gain weight and lose energy.
In an effort to regain control of your health, you may have spent countless hours reading books, surfing the internet, watching videos on YouTube, or participating in Facebook discussions to learn how to feel better.
Over the course of time you may have lost your enthusiasm for living an active life, managing your blood glucose, or taking the medicine prescribed by your doctor.
Many of our clients tell us that they have stopped taking their medication out of frustration.
If you’ve ever experienced any of these problems, join the club.
We’ve been there.
We know what it’s like to feel sick and tired of it all.
Luckily, the Mastering Diabetes Method has completely transformed the two of us from the ground up, mind, body, and spirit.
Gone are the days when lethargy kept us in bed until noon, when we couldn’t exercise because our joints and muscles hurt, when checking our blood glucose was a terrifying and annoying guessing game, and when going to the doctor’s office to get an A1c test felt like judgment day.
The real power of the Mastering Diabetes Method is that you have the ability to customize it to your unique preferences.
As you learn the fundamentals about how to change the foods you eat, when to not eat, what type of exercise to perform, when to exercise, and how to handle stressful situations, you will have the ability to adapt this program to your life.
One of the most important lessons we’ve learned as coaches is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to health.
Therefore we strongly encourage you to tailor this program to you, your family, your friends, and your career so that it becomes part of your life in the long term and keeps you free of insulin resistance for the rest of your life.
Meet Your Coaches
Cyrus: The PhD “Super Nerd College Professor”
I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 22, during my senior year of college at Stanford University.
Plagued with excessive thirst and low energy, I spent a few days trying to study for finals even though I could barely muster the energy to stay awake.
I remember feeling drained and assumed that it was because I was studying around the clock.
For a few days, I urinated between seventeen and twenty times per day, and yet no matter how much water I drank, my thirst increased.
After two days of frustration, I picked up the phone to call my sister Shanaz Khambatta, a family practice doctor of osteopathy, who instructed me to go to the campus health center immediately.
I asked her why, and she responded with “Your symptoms are telling me that you have type 1 diabetes.
I’ll explain later.
For now, just go to the health center.
And, Cyrus, please go quickly.”
I took her advice and checked myself into the campus health center within thirty minutes.
I was immediately seen by a nurse, who discovered that my blood glucose was over 600, six times higher than normal.
I was rushed to the emergency room, where I was hooked up to monitors, intravenous saline, and intravenous insulin.
Over the next twenty-four hours, a team of doctors asked me detailed questions about my health history and lifestyle, then officially diagnosed me with insulin-dependent type 1 diabetes.
Even though type 1 diabetes is one of the most common autoimmune diseases in children, affecting approximately 100,000 people in the United States every year, this diagnosis seemed very atypical.
Why?
Because in the six months prior to this diagnosis, I had developed two other autoimmune conditions, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (autoimmune hypothyroidism) and alopecia universalis (total body hair loss), making type 1 diabetes the third autoimmune condition that I developed within six months.
My doctors diagnosed me with a polyglandular autoimmune syndrome , a term used to describe a collection of autoimmune conditions with no known cause.
My doctors had never before cared for a patient with a polyglandular autoimmune condition, and as a 22-year-old, I was terrified that my health was deteriorating rapidly, even though I thought I lived a healthy lifestyle.
My family came to my hospital room, and we all tried to make sense of this situation together.
We were confused and had more questions than we were willing to admit.
The next day I was discharged from the hospital with a blood glucose meter, test strips, a prescription for basal and bolus insulin, a box of syringes, a carbohydrate counting guide, and a somewhat cryptic piece of paper with discharge information about how to return to a normal life.
In slightly over twenty-four hours, I went from being a normal happy-go-lucky college senior to a medical patient with multiple autoimmune diseases, now in charge of controlling my blood glucose using my lifestyle and insulin.
Even though I did my best to remain calm and practical, I returned to my dorm room terrified that something was very wrong with me.
I felt extremely alone and victimized, and I didn’t know a single other person living with type 1 diabetes that I could contact for guidance, support, or a simple hug.
Controlling my blood glucose was considerably more difficult than I had anticipated.
I knew that type 1 diabetes was a life-threatening condition that demanded my full attention, and that if I didn’t take it seriously, I ran the risk of overdosing on insulin and seriously harming myself.
I needed answers, and the only answer that I consistently read was “eat a low-carbohydrate diet, because your body can’t metabolize carbohydrates anymore.” No matter how diligently I controlled my diet and exercise patterns, maintaining my blood glucose within a “normal” range took most of my mental, emotional, and physical energy.
I felt vulnerable, weak, confused, and I grew increasingly angered because there weren’t many answers.
Often when I asked a troubleshooting question, I was given the same response: “Everyone’s different.”
In the quest to gain more energy, control my blood glucose, and return to being “normal,” I desperately listened to the advice of my doctor and nutritionist, both of whom gave me the same advice that they extended to all people newly diagnosed with diabetes: “Restrict your carbohydrate intake and eat foods high in fat and protein.” Their advice seemed reasonable, so I followed their recommendations to the best of my ability.
About nine months into living with diabetes, one day I returned home from work excited to eat a hard-earned dinner.
I remember that my body felt overly stiff.
My muscles felt unusually sore.
True, I was recovering from a soccer game that I had played three days earlier, but the soreness seemed to be getting worse with time.
My hamstrings were tight, my back was rigid, and I was extremely tired.
I checked my blood glucose, and it was three times higher than it should have been, despite eating a low-carbohydrate diet and moving my body the way I was told.
I felt out of shape, excessively tired, and downright confused, I was a 23-year-old living in what felt like the body of a 90-year-old. I had just graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering, a rigorous science that teaches you how to control complex mechanical and electrical systems with exquisite detail, and the irony is that despite my academic training, diabetes was a system that I simply couldn’t figure out. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many variables I worked to control, no matter how systematic I was about documenting my daily activities, my blood glucose meter acted like a random number generator, which frustrated me beyond belief.
In that moment of pure frustration I decided that it was time to take matters into my own hands and begin experimenting with the food I put in my mouth.
I heard a voice in my head that said, “Cyrus, you’re 23 years old, but you never learned how to eat.
Learn how to eat and it will change your life.” The next day I began looking for answers about food with a newfound enthusiasm that I had never experienced before.
I searched for information wherever I could find it, on the internet, at the bookstore, in recipe books, at scientific lectures, and noticed that practically every avenue I opened pointed me toward this thing called plant-based nutrition, of which I knew absolutely nothing.
For the first time in my life, I opened my mind to the idea of becoming a plant-based eater, even though I used to be that guy who ridiculed vegetarians and vegans in my teenage years, including my middle sister, Persis, who adamantly tried to be a vegetarian from the time she was in middle school.
When I would overhear people ordering a salad at a restaurant or watch as friends did the same, I would think to myself, I’m sorry that you can’t eat real food.
I wish things were better for you.
At the time, I didn’t know any better.
I was ignorant about why people chose to eat a plant-based diet, and charged through life with a typical protein-centric view of nutrition, arguing that I had to eat meat at least twice a day in order to fuel my body properly so that I could play high-intensity sports.
It seemed logical at the time, but in reality I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
I told myself exactly what I wanted to hear, that eating more meat and dairy products was the secret to excellent athletic health.
But being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes was a wake-up call, to say the least.
I began consulting with “alternative” medical professionals and read books by doctors who had outside-of-the-box solutions to common health conditions that couldn’t be solved by modern medicine.
I began eating a more plant-based diet by replacing foods like steak, eggs, cheese, meat loaf, chicken, and turkey burgers with foods like tomatoes, carrots, eggplant, peanut butter, and mushrooms.
I thought I felt better.
But I still couldn’t control my blood glucose with precision and knew that there was a whole world of nutrition and human biology about which I didn’t understand anything technical.