The Big Cut

As you may have read in my previous article, during the pandemic things had got exponentially better for me in terms of diabetes management, but, unfortunately, I wasn't doing that great for what concerned my body. And, even though I was struggling to admit that to myself, some negative comments on my shape from some friends and relatives of mine finally enabled me to comprehend that gaining weight would have become a problem both for my physical appearance and for diabetes itself, and that the approach I was following to combat my disease was no longer sustainable for my body. 

So, with the beginning of the 2021 summer, I decided that, on the scale of my priorities, fitness would have to be on the same level of diabetes management. Little did I know that, luckily, the first would have had major positive effects also on the latter. And it was like that that I discovered some of the most precious diabetes management techniques. 

First and foremost, using some internet tools, I calculated how many calories I spent in a day on average, and I began to keep track of the food I ingested, strictly applying a caloric deficit (maybe a bit too wide, since I lost 10 kgs in 2 months...). Furthermore, I started to practice many aerobic activities on a regular basis, such as hiking and running. 

In addition to this, being afraid of having to ingest too many calories under the form of correction for the many hypos I had had in the previous period, I started to reduce the doses of both my rapid and basal insulin, the latter due to the natural drop in insulin request which usually follows a loss in body weight. Instead, for what concerns rapid insulin, since I hadn't fully developed nor the splitted bolus technique and neither a full knowledge of macros' effects on BG, I experienced some rises in my glycaemia after the meals. And, instead of using insulin to tackle them, I started to practice high-intensity aerobic activities whenever my BG rose, with stunningly effective results and enthusiasm. However, since I didn't feel safe enough to combine insulin with sports, I needed an insane amount of them to keep my BG under control.

And, for this reason, I noticed that, even though I had reached noticeable TIR (over 90%) and A1c values (around 6/high 5's), I realised that neither that lifestyle was sustainable in the long term. In fact, I had dropped from 77 to 67 kgs in a short amount of time, and, even though at that time I would have liked to stop my weight loss and to put on some muscular mass, I found myself in huge difficulty, as I feared that the lack of a caloric deficit would have negatively affected my diabetes management.

Due to these insecurities, I kept on with this pattern and ended up losing four more kgs within December. And at that point, finding myself underweight, weak and stressed, I decided again to bring my whole well-being on the same level of my diabetes management, finding it, this time, possible and sustainable. 

Are you curious to know how I did it, finally reaching my actual methods in terms of self-care and diabetes management? All you have to do is to keep reading this section of my website!