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Did you know that type 1 diabetes has an easy mode? And the challenging part is that no doctor is ever going to tell you that it exists. They give you the hard mode and pretend it's easy mode. Oh, just take insulin for your carbs, and if you go low, eat some sugar. See, it's framed as easy mode, but truthfully, that's the hardest mode there is. And see, I just beat a video game and it was absolutely thrilling. But something caught me off guard at the end. See, after the credits rolled, I watched the final cutscene, and right as the screen goes dark, it throws the exact same menu at me that it did on day one with a little asterisk. Easy, normal, hard. See, it gave me the option to play again with all those powers that I'd earned along the way in the video game. But here's what's interesting: I never pick easy up front. It's not because I'm I'm too proud, but because if I beat the game on easy, some part of me doesn't feel like it counts. You know, like it doesn't feel earned. And I also don't pick hard on day one, though, because I have no idea what I'm walking into or how good I'm actually going to be at it. I don't know if it's going to be enjoyable to play it on hard mode and just get stuck on every level. So I pick normal, right? And hard mode, that's the reward if the game was so good that it deems a replay. See, in my opinion, I don't you don't touch hard until you've already proven you can finish the thing on normal, right? Once you've got the confidence and you know the mechanics, then hard mode is just a victory lap with the difficulty turned up. So it's like a chance to hone in your skills and show them off, right? So easy first to learn the controls if you need to, like if this is your first video game ever, or diabetes, if it's your first run through, right, and your endo appointment. Normal to prove it actually counts, and then it's enjoyable but challenging, and then hard once you've earned it. And it's nearly every video game I've ever played. Now, see, type one diabetes runs the exact same three modes easy, normal, hard, except it's built completely backwards. And once I tell you how, you're not gonna be able to unsee it. See, I'm gonna walk you through exactly where you probably are right now when it comes to diabetes management and where you're stuck, what's actually waiting for you on the other side. I'm gonna prove it to you with the one thing our clients bring up more than anything else. Then I'm gonna hand you four cheat codes, so to speak, you can start using today. Whether you've mastered a single thing with this diabetes disease or not, so stick around for the whole thing because the cheat codes at the end are honestly the part most people go back and rewatch, but also the part most people miss when they're first diagnosed.

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Keep going and keep up the fight.

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Let's talk about where most of us start with this disease, which is hard mode. Sometimes that's literally day one, your diagnosis day. Sometimes it's five years in where it kind of switches on you, right? Ten years in because nobody ever handed you the manual in the first place. But you know the pattern that I'm talking about, where you guess at a carb count because the labels are confusing, uh, or you're eating out and there is no label, right? You dose based on what you guess, and then two hours later you're either climbing or crashing. So you correct, you retreat. Sometimes you overcorrect or over-treat because you panic, and panic math is not good math. And now you're chasing a low with juice or glucose tabs, and that sends you right back up, and the whole cycle starts over. We call it roller coaster blood sugars, right? That's not a discipline problem or you being careless with your health. That's what happens to literally anyone who has never taught the mechanics of their own body, which most people aren't, because most people don't have the medical background that I do, right? Nobody sat down and explained your actual insulin to carb ratio in the context of an active day versus a stressful day. Nobody walked you through how your specific insulin behaves once it's inside you, insulin pharmacokinetics, when it starts working, when it peaks, in other words, when it's most effective, how long it's still active and still capable of dropping you hours after you think it's done. So you white knuckle it, you survive the day. And a lot of people stay stuck right there for years because hard mode is the default setting the moment you get diagnosed. See, type one diabetes is crazy complicated. Seriously. And really, anyone gets up, uh gets the education they need up front or ever. I mean, think about how backwards that is compared to literally every other skill you've ever learned, right? You don't start driving a stick shift in a race. You know, I mean, I learned how to drive on a stick shift, but it wasn't a race, it was out in the mountains in my uncle's pickup truck. I was driving through riverbeds, you know. But you practice first, you take the easy route where there is no there's no stakes. You know, you don't start playing guitar with a solo on stage. You build competence first, low stakes environments, then the difficulty ramps up as your skills do. See, diabetes flips that entirely. It's not fair. It's it's on day one. You know, you're like a baby in the diabetes world. See, if nobody ever teaches you the mechanics, the difficulty doesn't start low and build, it starts maxed out, and it stays maxed out until you get the education that nobody gave you on day one. And this is exactly what we see with our private clients time and time again when they first start with us. Foundational pieces that balance their blood sugars and make it so much easier that are missing. And I'll even cover a few of those in this video that I'm pretty sure are going to help you out quite a bit. And I want to paint a couple more pictures here, too, because I think people hear hard mode and picture something abstract instead of picturing their actual Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. You know, hard mode is standing in the kitchen at 11 o'clock at night, staring at a number that won't come down, frustrated, trying to remember if you already corrected an hour ago or if this is a fresh high that you should take care of now. Hard mode is a birthday party where everyone else gets to just eat cake and you're doing math in your head while also trying to look like you're not doing math in your head so you can be present. Hard mode is waking up at three o'clock in the morning to an alarm, drinking juice, half asleep, and and lying there wondering if you're gonna crash again in 20 minutes or if you just overcorrect it into a rebound high. That's gonna wreck your morning. See, none of that is a character flaw. You're missing an organ that's fully functional or should be fully functional. That's just what the disease looks like before you've been taught the mechanics behind it, right? And metabolism is a complicated thing as well. And I want to be really clear about that because a lot of people internalize this hard mode as evidence that they're bad at managing their diabetes. You're not bad at it, unless you're actively choosing to be bad at it, right? If you're just saying no, I'm not gonna take care of myself. You were handed a hard mode that you never chose, right? With none of the tools you needed to make it easier. And you've been doing your best with what you had. That's not failure. It's just hard mode with no practice or no manual. See, in every video game, easy is where you start and hard is what you've earned. In diabetes, hard is where you start, and easy is what you've earned. Say that back to yourself if you need to. That single flip is kind of the whole point of this video. It's inverted, right? See, easy mode in type 1 diabetes is not lower stakes. It's not caring less or letting things slide because you're tired of trying. Easy mode is what's waiting for you on the other side of actually learning the game. It's the graduation point, not the starting point. I want to be specific here because vague inspiration doesn't change anybody's blood sugar, right? Easy mode looks like knowing your insulin to carb ratio specifically and your correction factor well enough that dosing stops being a guess and starts being math that you can actually trust, right? Or a blood sugar formula as an example, right? And of course, insulin to carb ratios and correction factors are just a slice of the pie. But that's a good starting point. Having specificity behind it. And again, something you can trust and be certain with. It looks like understanding the pharmacokinetics of your specific insulin, like when it actually kicks in, when it peaks or is most effective, how long the tail runs, so you're not layering dose on top of dose and creating a crash that you didn't see coming. It looks like knowing your own patterns closely enough that you can predict a swing before it happens instead of reacting to it after the fact. It's controlling your blood sugars so that they don't control you. That's the entire difference between surviving this disease and thriving with it. See, surviving is reactive. You're always one step behind the number on your CGM, whereas thriving is working with your body instead of constantly fighting against it. It's the same disease, but completely different experience living with it. And I'll say this from having lived on both sides of that line myself. The early years I spent guessing. It felt like the years that I I can't even tell you how frustrated what I was dealing with what felt like an impossible uncertainty puzzle that just made up its own rules day to day. You see, I've spent years working on my own formulas, understanding things, diving into the science, treating myself as a guinea pig so that you don't have to. Same diagnosis on both sides between beginning and now. Completely different game. That's not a coincidence. It's not because diabetes got easier, it's because I finally learned how it actually works. And here's the part that should give you you some hope if you're still deep in hard mode with diabetes right now. Nobody's born into easy mode. Well, maybe the honeymoon stage, they might argue that it's easier, right? But honestly, I've had a lot of type one clients that actually found the honeymoon phase harder than what came after because the pancreas was still trying to help, but they never knew how much help they were gonna get. You know what I mean? It's like, is it gonna help with this meal? Nope, I went high until you get out out of the pancreatic function, and now it's just you and it feels a lot more smooth, uh at the very least, more certain because you know that the insulin you gave is the only insulin in circulation, right? But every single person knows that that stage of life, they've been there, right? Every single person who's living there right now started exactly where you're standing. The gap between where you are and where they are isn't talent, it's not luck, it's a specific learnable knowledge about your own body that either somebody taught you or nobody did yet. Now, before the deep ratio work, before the pattern recognition, before any of the more advanced stuff we teach, the first real shift almost every single private client that we take on reports is pre-bolishing or dialing in their basal insulin. Both are very important, but very different. So, I mean, it really can be simple as timing the insulin ahead of the meal instead of during or after it. That one change alone tends to pull people out of the reactive spiral faster than almost anything else in the entire curriculum, right? The rest of it's like fine-tuning and like, oh, prediction, I can I did exact that was amazing. I did what I wanted to do, and everything's stay controlled. But prebolus and basal insulin, oh my gosh, it lays the foundation. You know, it's the mechanism. You're finally working with the timing of the drug instead of fighting against it. Because insulin doesn't work instantly. We know this, but food also doesn't always hit your bloodstream instantly either. And when those two timelines are lined up on purpose, based on a number of factors like macronutrients or the type of food, right? Your activity level that day, trend of blood sugar, insulin on board, et cetera, instead of colliding by accident, then the chaos drops immediately, often within days, right? Now, there's a second thing that shows up almost as often, and it's related. Once people start pre-bolisting correctly, they start noticing their own patterns for the first time. Because the chaos that used to drown everything else out and just feel impossible or um like it didn't have meaning, it was just random chaos. When the chaos that used to drown everything else out finally quiets down, that's when the real pattern recognition starts. Not because we handed them some complicated new system, but because the timing of the insulin correctly removed enough of that chaotic noise that the actual signal became visible where you're like, oh, my blood sugar went up an hour and a half later, I didn't know that happened before because before it was just one giant spike, you know, and now it's like stable, stable, stable rise. Oh, what was that? Oh, it's protein converting to glucose at a rate of 50%. It's like, oh, wait a second. There's meaning behind my blood sugars. You can't spot your own patterns when you're putting out a fire every 60 to 90 minutes. But once the fires slow down, the patterns are usually right there, waiting to be noticed. It's testing in isolation at its core, right? And you don't need to have graduated diabetes to easy mode to start borrowing pieces of it right now. So think of uh, I'll give you four. We'll call them cheat codes, all right? Since we're on the video game topic, you can be stuck mid-hard mode, still figuring out the whole thing with diabetes, and these still work for you today. So cheat code one, pre-bolus, obviously. Get the insulin in a head of the food instead of after it. This is the one I already told you about. And I'm putting it first for a reason. Timing beats guessing every time. The exact number of minutes, though, does depend on your insulin type and your own patterns, as well as a few other things, like the type of food, which is exactly the kind of thing your care team or your type one coach, if we're working together, can help you with to dial in. But the principle holds regardless of your specific timing. Insulin typically needs a head start on most food. I say most food because if you're eating like steak only, you know, like that's just fat and protein. You don't probably need a pre-bolus for that one. I'm gonna just stop talking about this because it's bordering on medical advice, and this is not medical advice, but I hope you're starting to get it. Yeah, think about this stuff. Context matters, right? But as far as generic rules go, generally speaking, the pre-bolus, game changer. If you take nothing else from this episode, start here. Now, cheat code number two move your body. All right. Exercise tends to improve insulin sensitivity better than anything else I've seen. And that doesn't mean you need to go run a marathon tomorrow. Okay. I've done Iron Man races, and I still tell people this doesn't need to be extreme. Consistency matters more than intensity here. So a daily walk moves the needle more than an occasional brutal workout followed by two weeks of nothing. Okay, especially because it's going to shift your insulin sensitivity in both directions and it's going to feel more chaotic, believe it or not. And if you're worried about lows during activity, that's a real and valid concern, which is exactly why this is a conversation to have with your care team or with your coach. Again, if you're working with my team of experts and myself about timing your movement around insulin or adjusting it proactively so that you can stay stable. Like uh I recently went on a 20-mile bike ride, stayed between 90 and 110 the whole time, and had 70 grams of carbs. It was delicious and super fun. Got to actually enjoy the view when you're not worried about blood sugars. All right. Uh, so again, get that dialed in. It's not a reason to skip movement altogether. It's going through the hard stuff so that you can get to easy mode. Right. Now, cheat code number three: regulate your nervous system. Stress, poor sleep, bad dietary choices. That's not really in the nervous system. We'll get to that one next, probably. But stress and poor sleep, right? They both tend to drive insulin resistance up. And it's not a soft, like feel-good wellness tip. Like, oh, take care of yourself and mindfulness. You can't ignore this stuff. This is a direct lever on your blood sugar. If your sleep is a mess and your stress is through the roof, your numbers will often reflect it, no matter how perfect your ratios are. All right. You can have the math exactly right and still get fought by a cortisol spike at three o'clock in the morning. This is why some of what we work with our clients isn't insulin dosing at all. It's helping the nervous system and lifestyle habits as well. Stop running in the fight or flight around the clock mode, right? Now, okay, cheat code number four. Let's get to it. Watch the inflammation. So, dietary choices, I mentioned I could add that to this one too. But yes, dietary choices, generally, inflammation from all sorts of stuff comes into play. Your dietary choices are quietly setting the baseline for your insulin resistance every single day. Processed foods, high fat, junk food, dessert, lots of sugar, lots of caffeine, all this stuff can mess you up. Some in uh moderate amounts, sure, I had chocolate. I'll be super honest with you. I ate four different types of chocolate for lunch today. Chocolate peanut butter cup, chocolate ice cream. I don't know what's going on. I don't usually eat this much chocolate, but for the last week or so, I've been just chowing down chocolate. Um, a chocolate quinoa cookie thing. I pretended it's healthy because it's got quinoa in it. That's actually really good. Um, and then some chocolate cereal that was like I it's a protein cereal, so I pretended that was healthy too. But you know, that's I wouldn't consider that moderation, but do as I say, not as I do, right? I'm just kidding. I typically live by the rules. That said, you don't need to overhaul your entire diet overnight, and you don't need to chase some perfect restrictive plan either. Right? That's actually the opposite of what easy mode looks like. As you can tell, I had four different types of chocolate in a single sit-down meal, right? You need to start noticing which foods tend to work against you and which ones tend to work with you and build from there one honest observation at a time. Now, none of these four require you to have already mastered your diabetes. They just they shrink hard mode while you're building toward easy mode. And that's the whole point of a cheat code. It doesn't finish the game for you, but it makes the level in front of you a lot less brutal while you're still learning and getting the practice in, figuring things out, right? And if one cheat code um, well, if especially at the first one, if cheat code one hit you the hardest just now, that's probably the tell. Pre-bolishing sounds simple until you actually try to time it against your specific insulin, your specific meals, your specific patterns. Uh, you know, pre-bolishing, oh, 10 or 15 minutes is very different than when I tell you 18 minutes for me. I'm like, what do you mean 18? Well, 20 and it's gonna start going down more than I would like. 15 and it's gonna spike a little bit. So if I want my blood sugars to stay perfectly level, 18 minutes. Now, how do I know that? Well, blood sugar formulas is what we work on with our clients, our private type one clients is specificity, it's precision. You control your diabetes so that it doesn't control you. Once your blood sugars are mastered, you can turn around and have freedom. That's why my book is called The Blood Sugar Freedom Formula, right? Everything is about controlling diabetes, not as the end cause, but like so I can go live my life, so I can have more quality of life and peace of mind and actually enjoy it again while being healthy. It's exactly what people start with inside of our free training as well. Like we walk through the timing, the ratios, and the mechanics behind all four of these cheat codes in a lot more depth than I can fit into one episode. In fact, you can find a free training as well as my number one bestseller book. Again, it's called the Blood Sugar Freedom Formula. I'll put those in the description for you guys, both the free video training and the book. I'll put it in the description of this episode. All right, so check that out. I'll also say this if you're the kind of person who wants the full framework, not just the highlights and what that's what the book walks through, start to finish. Like it's a quick read. It really doesn't take that much time. It's 10 chapters. All right. Same ideas, just with the room to actually build them out properly, but you got to implement. Promise me you're gonna actually use what you learn, not just think it's a cool book. All right. Cool. Now, let's bring this back to where we started. You beat the game and it hands you the same menu: easy, hard, normal. In every game you've ever played, easy is a starting line, and hard is the reward you earn after you've built the real skill and confidence. Diabetes flips that hard is the starting line, whether you asked for it or not. And then easy is the reward waiting for you on the other side of actually learning about your body, leaning into the diagnosis, trying to understand it, not just pretending it doesn't exist or just complaining about it and saying, Oh, diabetes sucks. Whoa, it's me. I don't deserve this. Doesn't matter. It's here and it's not going anywhere. And until you decide to take action against it, you're gonna continue suffering needlessly. Okay. And you might not be in a good space to hear that right now. That's okay. If somebody had told me that in the first five years of being diagnosed, I would have never spoken to them again because I was not ready to hear that. But once I made that shift, that acceptance, that diabetes is not going anywhere, and it's up to me and only me to do something about it, you can actually take action and make progress. Easy is the reward of waiting on the other side for you, of actually learning your own body. So again, not lowering the stakes, not caring less. The exact opposite. Easy mode is what competence looks like once you've put in the work. See, people often think that my diabetes is just easier than theirs when they hear about my Iron Man races or that I'm raising a family and building a business. I eating and doing nearly whatever I want, all while having an A1C at 5.7 and having over seven consecutive years above 90% time and range. Notice I said seven. You know, I've been diagnosed a lot longer than seven years. It's not easier, it's easy mode as a direct result of the hard work that I put in before those seven years. The same thing we do for and with our private T1D clients. And you don't have to wait until you've mastered everything, or even until you've been approved to work with us, to start moving toward it. Pre-ball this, move your body, exercise, regulate your nervous system, take care of yourself, watch for inflammation. Four cheat codes available to you today. No matter where you're starting from, improvements can be made. You don't have to wait for anybody else. It's up to you to take action and do something about this. And if you find that you're extra motivated right now, run with it. Motivation is fleeting. You will lose the motivation until you decide that this is just who you are now. You're gonna be the kind of person that takes care of your health because if you don't, no one else is doing it for you. And you will suffer in the long term. And I can tell you this because I've seen a lot of people over the years that wish they had started earlier.

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Don't be that person. Do something now before it's too late.

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And none of these cheat codes require you to already be at easy mode. That's the entire point of a cheat code. It works on the level that you're stuck on. You don't have to stay stuck guessing on hard mode. That was never the deal. And it's definitely not the hand you were supposed to be dealt for the rest of your life. Check the description below this episode. There's a link to the free training and a link to the book, the Blood Sugar Freedom Formula. Both are built to get you off hard mode faster and closer to actually living this thing on easy mode. We are renegades, we think differently, we do differently, we don't guess our way through this disease. We learn the formula and we play to win.

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I hope you enjoyed this one. Go take action. You deserve it. We'll see you in the next one. Keep up the fight.