Scott Benner 3/25/25 Scott Benner 3/25/25

#1472 Tao of Tom

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Tom, 29 (T1D since age 8), overcame resentment, weight gain, and stigma to take control of his diabetes while working in commercial real estate.

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DISCLAIMER: This text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record. Nothing that you read here constitutes advice medical or otherwise. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making changes to a healthcare plan.

Scott Benner 0:00
Here we are back together again, friends for another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

Tom Taylor 0:14
My name is Tom Taylor. I'm 29 years old. I'm from the New York City area. I work in commercial real estate analytics, I was diagnosed as a type one diabetic when I was eight years old in third grade. Please

Scott Benner 0:26
don't forget that nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your healthcare plan or becoming bold with insulin. Don't forget to save 40% off of your entire order at cozy earth.com All you have to do is use the offer code Juicebox at checkout. That's Juicebox at checkout to save 40% at cozy earth.com AG, one is offering my listeners a free $76 gift. When you sign up, you'll get a welcome kit, a bottle of d3, k2, and five free travel packs in your first box. So make sure you check out drink, AG, one.com/juice, box to get this offer. Are you an adult living with type one or the caregiver of someone who is, if you are, I'd love it if you would go to T 1d, exchange.org/juice, box and take the survey. When you complete that survey, your answers are used to move type one diabetes research of all kinds, T 1d exchange.org/juice, box. It should not take you more than about 10 minutes. The episode you're about to listen to is sponsored by tandem Moby, the impressively small insulin pump. Tandem mobi features tandems newest algorithm control iq plus technology. It's designed for greater discretion, more freedom and improved time and range. Learn more and get started today at tandem diabetes.com/juice box. This episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by the Dexcom g7 the same CGM that my daughter wears. Check it out now at dexcom.com/juicebox,

Tom Taylor 2:07
my name is Tom Thaler. I'm 29 years old. I'm from the New York City area. I work in commercial real estate analytics. I was diagnosed as a type one diabetic when I was eight years old in third grade, and I have had quite a journey managing the disease. I've been relatively independent about it since I was young. I come in contact with a lot of folks who recognize my pump or my CGM in public, even though my my omnipot receiver usually gets mistaken for a second phone. I'm not nearly that cool to need two phones. I think it's very, very interesting community, and I really appreciate the work that you do, Scott and educating people about it.

Scott Benner 2:44
Oh, thank you. Did you see the omnipot app came out yesterday? I

Tom Taylor 2:47
didn't. I've been waiting for that for so long. Oh, I can't wait to get rid of this device. So,

Scott Benner 2:53
yeah, the app came out yesterday. I put a link up, got hit like 1000s of times in the first 24 hours. I was like, Wow, that's amazing. So people

Tom Taylor 2:59
were obviously really excited waiting for it. Well, thank God you're on top of it. Yeah? Al, I mean, in fairness, I get a text from somebody who says, hey, the app just came out, so I'm a little ahead on stuff like that, nevertheless. So you've had diabetes for 21 years. Your Diabetes can vote, drink and all that stuff. That's right, yeah, that's exactly. Has it ever gone to Vegas for the weekend, left you alone? Yeah, yeah. I think it has, I think it's gotten away from me from time to time. And then, you know, it'll, especially when I was younger, you know, I'd come back and, metaphorically speaking, you know, the disease would kind of say, hey, you know, you've been feeling terrible for a few days. This is why you need to get a grip on this. You know, over time, I've definitely found, you know, rhythms and mechanisms to kind of regulate it. And I think that, you know, it's a blessing in disguise, in retrospect. In fact, actually, I wrote my my college essay on type one diabetes and the phenomenon of high blood sugar and just how unfortunate the feeling is, I likened it to, and this is pretty nerdy, so stick with me here for a second. But there's a there's an old epic poem called The rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. You know, this guy kills an albatross and and all of a sudden, the world kind of collapses around him. And he's, he's sailing on the high seas, and the seas kind of turn to molasses. And I, you know, when you when your blood sugar is high, it feels like your blood is molasses, and everything is just kind of, you know, prickly and painful and slow. And so, you know, I think that feeling, which when I was younger, was probably like half of the time I was awake, something like that. What it makes you appreciate just feeling normal and all the little things in life. Gotta accept everyone, but it's definitely a blessing in disguise. In that way, you mentioned that you've been taking care of this since a pretty young age, but it wasn't because you were doing awesome at it. It just wasn't. It was because that was what was needed to be done. Exactly right. Exactly right. You know, it was no one in my family had this disease prior actual that's we found out when I was diagnosed. I have a very large family, and my mother's one of nine, my father's one of six. We've got a lot of very close blood relatives that are all very close. Geographically and as far as spending time with each other, but nobody else got was diagnosed with type one diabetes of the, you know, I can probably count, you know, 60 to 80 close relatives I could probably name for you right now, I was, I was the lucky one, but our great grandmother, on my mother's side was a diabetic and and she apparently had to use one needle that she would boil to sterilize and bore insulin. Insulin from a bore because they didn't have synthesized one readily available in the early part of the 20th century. And so, you know, we kind of figured out what was available as far as equipment and stuff. My parents and I kind of got into a routine when I was young, but I was very much left to monitor my own blood sugar, to set a schedule, to inject myself with the help of school nurses as well. When I was, you know, enough to be in school, basically, I think that the kind of epochs of time for me in managing, you know, type one was when I was younger, in elementary school, and I was diagnosed in third grade. School Nurses were a big part of the regulation, because that was the time I was away from my parents, and I would have to go to the school nurses, as you probably hear all that all the time, and check my blood sugar and take insulin ahead of lunch and whatnot. So they were very integral in establishing some structure there for me and having some accountability, which I think is important for a young kid dealing with the disease. There's a fine line, frankly, between accountability and, you know, oversight kind of taking away that sense of internal accountability for a kid. So I think that, you know, I was very fortunate to have some great school nurses when I was young, that that really made me accountable to managing the disease myself. But also, you know, giving me oversight and checking in to make sure that I had the help I needed to

Scott Benner 6:43
what was the level of expectation 21 years ago? What kind of insulin were you using? What were your outcomes like, and what were your goals? I remember,

Tom Taylor 6:52
you know, being diagnosed. Then it was November, 2003 you know, I kind of had in my head. I think I'm a fairly managerial person, and that I'm always kind of tracking progress in some way, whether it's my health or, you know, my work or whatever else. So I would think about these things in the way, a couple of different gages. I would think about my blood sugar on a day to day basis. I would think about my a 1c in the long term. And then, you know, just kind of how I felt, the expectations were, you know, you're going to have some swings. In retrospect, I kind of wish that the knowledge, I think that is kind of widely disseminated now, about how food affects you and what cycles we have immediately after eating, how much pre bolusing can help. Due to CGM, that wasn't really in my consciousness yet, so it was kind of like, All right, well, you're going to eat, you're going to then take a shot. You're going to feel probably pretty bad for a while, but then it'll come down. And, you know, if you run around a lot and you're active, that'll probably help control it, but you know, just good luck kid, you're gonna, you're gonna have probably feel bad for a lot of the time. But before I was diagnosed, so, you know, who knows exactly how long it was that I was diabetic before, you know, we realized it. And I'm happy to go into the story too, of how I was diagnosed. But I remember, I was in third grade. It was my first year playing tackle football, you know, I would think about the number of bathroom breaks I could take in a day in terms of, like, time outs for, you know, a college basketball game or something. You see the amount of time outs on the screen, on the crayon on the bottom, and they've got, you know, five a half, or whatever it is. I was, you know, left my own devices. I would have gone to the bathroom probably 20 times a 20 times a day, but I tried to limit myself so I wasn't, you know, in and out of class and disrupting everything. And the teachers would get upset with me. And wherever I was, you know, I had to find myself having to go to the bathroom every 1520 minutes. So during football practice, I would urinate on myself at least twice a practice. And there's a tremendous amount of shame, you know, and it was just a very unpleasant and confusing experience, you know, I remember speaking with, you know, my coach about the problem and just having having no answer, being, you know, being eight years old, yeah. But, you know, in retrospect, like everything was better than that, you know, finally getting in some of my system, I kind of just thought about it incrementally. You know, I went from having an A, 1c in the double digits, I remember, you know, at eight, and then by the time I was, you know, probably 10 or 11, I got it down into the, you know, the sevens, and then, you know, eventually that was kind of the plateau, yeah, I think it was probably in the, in the kind of low sevens. And then I went off of the pump for a while, because it would just kept coming out. And I hated tubing. That was very active kid, you know, I'm a golfer as well. And just anytime you have twisting and sweating, the pump is going to come out. So I switched to injections, until the last couple of years, honestly, in my mid 20s, I went back on the pump. And that, combined with the CGM, you know, has me now in the in the fives. Well, you know, I think my last ANC was like 5.3 or 5.4 and I'm, you know, trying to optimize, to hopefully be as close to a non diabetic as possible. I have a clarifying question. Back when you're talking about the football practice, is that prior to your diagnosis or after diagnosis, you were still using the bathroom that frequently

Scott Benner 9:53
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Tom Taylor 12:01
Okay, I remember, I was diagnosed November 7, 2003 which was, you know, toward, toward the latter part of the football season. But, you know, I had had most of it already. And I, you know, I go, basically at a doctor's appointment, at a regular checkup with our pediatrician that day, that November they, you know, test my blood sugar. As part of that, it's 350 or so. We go to the hospital, to the hospital, to Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut, and I stay for the weekend, and I remember just the, you know, when I finally got an insulin drip and tremendous relief that I felt. I didn't realize, you know, how what the cause was from my horrible, just kind of state of existence for the prior several months. But yeah, going forward, that was not a problem anymore.

Scott Benner 12:41
Okay, are there autoimmune in your family besides type one? Not that

Tom Taylor 12:45
I'm aware of, no some thyroid stuff, but yeah, nothing, really. This is a kind of a lone wolf,

Scott Benner 12:50
but there is thyroid people have hypothyroidism or Hashimotos, I

Tom Taylor 12:55
believe so. Yeah, and you know, not to pry too much into their lives, but I know that there is definitely, you know, some metabolic dysfunction going on, but, and you know what, I have this suspicion that a lot more people are diabetes than they that are actually diagnosed, but, but, no, I was, I was the lucky one out of, you know, a few dozen family members. Wow.

Scott Benner 13:16
You feel like there are people that have diabetes type one that don't know in your family, or what

Tom Taylor 13:21
do you maybe not in my family specifically, but you know, it's kind of, it's kind of strange how much it's come up that, you know, I'll have a friend say, you know, I've got this crazy brain fog, and you know, I'm just, you know, I'm out of it, and you know, I'm going to the bathroom a lot, and I'm always like, Okay, well, there's, there's a clue we should look into this. And I'm also one. I always keep extra land sets on me or my backup meter, and I'm always testing people's

Scott Benner 13:43
blood sugar Tom's like, I'll get, you know, I was like, we'll figure out what's happening right now, I always offer. I always offer. And when I was, have you ever found one? Have you ever unearthed the diagnosis? Thankfully,

Tom Taylor 13:54
no, I guess, for better or worse, you know, I wouldn't want to, you know, unnecessarily bring anybody into this. But, you know, I just maybe it's my, you know, whatever, just seeking misery loves company. But I do think that at some point I will probably find somebody is just suffering day in, day out, unnecessarily, who could be helped by, you know, just the regular course of of type one treatment, obviously type two is proliferating. You know, as a mild tangent, I do also have this pet cause that I think we should probably come up with a new name for type one diabetes. I know there's juvenile there's, you know, diabetes mellitus, but I just think that there's a lot of association that people have with type one and type two diabetes that is really not, you know, helpful for for the top of public consciousness. And, you know, I don't know if it affects research dollars or anything like that, progress toward a cure, but I think that their disease is enough that separately, that hopefully one day we can call it something different, and it would maybe, maybe lead to a better understanding.

Scott Benner 14:55
I'm always interested, because I find that some people have that feeling, and some people. Don't like. But what do you think the the confusion is because I know nobody understands type one diabetes versus type two diabetes out in the general you know, in the general world, they don't know this diabetes to them. But once you understand what it is like, once you have it type one, you know the difference. And why does it matter to you if other people don't,

Tom Taylor 15:23
you know, I think there's two realms to it. One, you know, having had this since I was a kid, and having it, you know, it's not, I don't think it's a main feature of my identity, but it's definitely part of my identity. There's definitely some judgment and some shame whether not people realize they're doing it. I think a lot of people do these things without intending to, you know, I think so too explicit. But I think that a lot of people here, you know, you say you have diabetes, and they're like, Oh yeah, you've got the fat disease. You know, are you where you're responsible or you don't take care of yourself? And it's like, well, no, I've got the genetic one actually,

Scott Benner 15:52
right? And

Tom Taylor 15:53
so whether that is even true or not, it doesn't matter to you, right? Like, you don't want to be associated. You're looking to have one less thing on your on your head, and if they're looking at you thinking, Oh, you have diabetes. This is a thing you had a choice in, and you did it, and you just, you would just like it if they understood it was a thing that happened to you. Yeah, yeah. And maybe that's, you know, a victim mentality, and I don't know why. Maybe it's not productive. And I've, you know, I've gotten over a lot of the resentment that I had just put this, you know, luck of the draw. Obviously, I couldn't control it. And I guess, you know, part of me, just my, you know, animal brain wants people to know, like, Hey, I, you know, this was just a, an unfortunate draw that I got, and it wasn't my fault. Yeah, I've largely gotten over that. It doesn't really, you know, keep me up at night, but I do think it would be productive, you know, for the discourse, just maybe, maybe, maybe, just for me, but to to have a different kind of label, because I do think that the way that the diseases work to, you know, I explain it very simply. I just say, Look, my auto immune system thought that my pancreas and the islet cells producing insulin were a foreign, you know, invader, and shut it down. And so it's more of an autoimmu disorder than diabetes, which is insulin resistance type two, which is, you know, a function of this kind of that, you know, avalanche effect, snowball rolling downhill of more insulin having less effect, you know, due to numerous causes, but oftentimes due to a level of a, you know, body mass that

Scott Benner 17:17
is so well, first of all, the first part, I completely agree with you, and I understand why you would want in a world where everybody misunderstands why type two diabetes exists almost, you know, like you don't. You just don't want people looking at you and going, like, you did a thing to yourself, like, like, all right, I got enough going on here. I don't need that. I also think it's interesting. There's a study recently, and I did it on one of the I forget it's been in an episode, so I'm going to get some of the numbers wrong. But they did a study with GLP medication and people who were pre diabetic, so people who were all, you know, looked like they were on their way to type two. And they put these people all on a GLP medication. And something crazy, like, in the mid 90% of them are no longer pre diabetic. Wow. My thought is, like, I know some people take in more calories than they need, and I know some people's activity level is lower, but I also think that a lot of it is genetic as well, because we're all basically out here eating the same food. And to say that, like, the impact it had on one person versus the other person, like one person's lucky enough to not have insulin resistance, and the other one does, I don't know that anybody's out there making like there are some people who are eating great I'm not saying that, but I'm saying of all the people that are out there who are just eating everyday foods that are available to them, that they can afford. Some of them get type two diabetes. Some of them don't, yeah, I don't know. Like, we're blaming people now for the food they can afford. Like, the only mean, like, it's, it sucks, right? Because if you go back a number of years, probably before, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but probably before, we were using all the processed foods and the chemicals on foods and etc. Like there's just one again. Details are, you know, you can go look them up if you want, but somebody chemically engineered a weed killer so that it wouldn't kill, I think wheat, yeah, yeah, you can basically just drop it all over a field of something that you're growing, and everything dies except the thing you're growing. Because they genetically, I don't know how they obviously, I don't know how they do it, but they make that that that poison so that it won't attack the thing that you mean to be growing. You're still spraying it on the food right before we did that. I mean, I'm assuming, if we go back to before things like that happen, you're going to see much less insulin resistance, type two diabetes, autoimmune issues, you know, inflammation, type stuff. You know, people saying, I can't eat my stomach hurts like that stuff. So, I mean, if this is how the food's made, I wish people could say it looks like we're caught in a thing here. You know what I mean. Like it's, no, I don't think you can blame one person or the other, but you also can't fight that fight as a type one. You're just looking to not have people point fingers at you, whether they're right or wrong about what they're saying. You're looking for them to just leave you the hell alone. It all makes sense to me.

Tom Taylor 20:15
Yeah, make a great point. And you know, I do have a lot of I think we're very aligned on the root causes of a lot of this stuff, you know, as a type one, I think again, one of the blessings is the part of the disease that is most dangerous for me. I can also, you know, have have some degree of control over, right? I can. I can manage my blood sugar. I try to be as efficient with insulin as I can. I try to maintain activity and not, you know, cause a snowball effect of inflammation. You know, I take medications. Originally, I was on humanogue and Lantus, and now I'm on, you know, mostly hemolog, just, you know, with my pump and I can, I can I can, you know, make lifestyle changes. And I'm very fortunate to be able to mostly afford, you know, to do what I want when it comes to food, and eat whole foods and not rely on processed and fast foods. You know, talk about snowball effects and momentum. You're right. I mean the prevalence of processed foods and glyphosate and other other weed killers that are illegal in many other countries. People always talk about going to Europe and you eat pasta for, you know, a week, and you come back having lost weight, and your stomach doesn't hurt, and you feel good. And, you know, who knows if those effects are over blown? I'd love to see like a real study on that. But, I mean, we all know it, right? I mean, the American food system definitely has inputs that are less desirable, whether or not it's specifically the volume of food, which I also do think that just because the food is so calorie dense, but nutrition low and made basically to be addictive in terms of its texture, its color, its crunch, its whatever its flavor, its sugar content, it's high fructose corn syrup. It really does create this compound effect where people, people can only do so much. You know, there there are stronger forces. There are people whose jobs it is to design addictive substances, whether it's slot machines, whether it's Doritos, whether it's social media, and they're really smart and they're really well paid, yeah, they know how to do it, that's for sure. And it creates this, this cycle of inflammation, where the insulin resistance is just inevitable. You know, again, there's no single solution to all this, but my my answer in my life has been, you know, the best I can to try to break those cycles. You know, people have different methods for it. You know, there's the, I forget the name of it right now, but there's an index that basically says, you know, how much food causes you to crave more food? You know, it's carbs and and the simplicity of carbs. And if you eat a very simple carbohydrate, heavy diet with low protein, low fat, you're going to just crave that dopamine hit of more food, and your body is not truly satiated. So I go high protein, high fiber, high healthy fats, low carb. And, you know, my body composition has changed dramatically. You know, I was a relatively chubby kid. When I graduated college in 2017 I was 290 pounds, you know, now I'm down in the low two hundreds just, I think, largely because I reversed the effect the momentum. Well, good for you. You're 290 How tall are you? I was 290 Yeah, I'm, like, between six one and six two. Wow. I was pretty rotund. There's a, you know, I was always a bigger kid. You know, when I was playing football, I had to wear an X on my helmet because I can only play line. Otherwise, I guess would have just fell on, fallen on some smaller kids and broken them. But, you know, I was never small. But then, you know, college, which is difficult to manage for any diabetic, definitely got a little out of control. And you know, I was definitely in a bad cycle of just eating and not exercising. And you know, alcohol doesn't help. And you know, being able to reverse that once I kind of got some resources, you know, once had my first job and could buy the food I wanted and whatever else made a big difference. And it's just amazing how good you can feel every day when you put a lot of effort into deliberately crafting your

Scott Benner 23:50
body. So even though, and you can now afford to do these things, but still, something has to motivate because you also could have afforded to buy a pizza every day. So like, what happened to you? I'm kind of going to your notes here, like you're talking about a journey of struggle, resentment, self pity. Like, why don't you walk me through that, and then let's get to where you where you are now, totally, totally, you

Tom Taylor 24:09
know, I think you're real. This is one of the things I love about your show, is you get to the heart of the matter there. So, yeah, as a kid, I definitely felt sorry for myself that I had this, you know, disease. I had this befall me. Why me? Why me? But it could have happened to anybody. And then that just kind of, I think I got better at it, but I never quite fixed the underlying issue. I went to a college where there were a lot of folks who had just a lot more resources than me. And so, you know, I'm thinking here, why have I gotten such a bad, bad break? And then you fall into a hole, and you and you say, Well, you know, if I wasn't given what other folks were given, as far as health, as far as you know, financial resources, as far as you know, guidance, what's the point I'm never going to win? And I think that that was a very destructive cycle for me. It really led to me not doing. Anything that I could have done in retrospect to make a little bit of a difference. And so it comes to a point where I am, you know, 22 years old. I'm sitting in my parents house because I had, you know, graduated college without a job. And, you know, I'm not a very efficient person, really, in any way. And I remember sitting in a room in my parents house without a job and just having a moment, and I don't know what it was, you know, I'm not well attributed to any specific phenomenon, but I kind of said, All right, what are we going to do here? Here's the path that you're on, doesn't it doesn't seem like fun. So are we just going to kind of roll over? Are we going to become, you know, just somebody who gets by? I think I'm I think I'm better than that, and then that that I think I'm better than that moment, I think is what was the spark, and it's not better than anybody else. I'm better than what I currently am. Yeah,

Speaker 1 25:47
also, you weren't. It's so interesting. You weren't. It's not like you were starting in some horrible hole. You weren't as advantaged as some of the people you went to college with. I hear that. Listen, my son told me once, when he went to college, he was, I am the poorest person here. And so I think I understand what you're saying, right? But at the same time, if you look at the country as a whole, I'm not asking you exactly where you fall, but like you weren't poor, am I? I grew up. I had food to eat. I had a home. I was blessed my you know, I had two parents in my house. I and then so that, that spark of, you know, I'm better than this is why? Why? Because I have been given opportunities. And, you know, there are billions of people on this earth who would kill for the life that I have. So you know what? Let's stop feeling sorry for ourselves. And you know what I just said, let's give it a shot. Yeah, let's give it a shot. Let's let's give a shot trying to not be at war with the world and not feeling sorry for myself. Let's try to reverse it. And it's not as if everything changed that day but that minute, sure that spark, you know, became flame. And maybe that's not the perfect metaphor, because I guess it would be something like a forest fire, but, you know, I turned it around and I said, Hey, look, I'm gonna try to make incremental progress here. I'm gonna keep working at getting a job. I'm gonna keep working at I'm gonna start working on my my health, my physique. And, you know, I found a friend of a friend who was a nutritionist and a personal trainer who was willing to, for, you know, a friends and family rate help me out with a nutrition plan and a workout plan or starting slow. It was probably the fall of 2017 after I had graduated college, and it took me three or four months, but I, you know, I lost 80 pounds. I worked out, really, for the first time in my life. And other than playing sports as a kid, right? I learned about food. I learned about, you know, what makes my body feel good, what makes it doesn't what makes it not feel good, and then, and all that momentum just kind of built on itself. And I really do think that the way you and I'm not treading new ground here, this is, you know, millions of people have made, have made statements publicly, but, but but I just, you know, you have to, you have to really believe it yourself. And then, you know, the whole the diabetes thing really fits into it, because it's like diabetes is a momentum disease, type one especially, and if you do the little things right consistently, you're going to be fine. You're going to feel better, build and compound. I understand what you're saying is that you're not, you're not saying anything magical the world's never heard before, but in your life, it was the first time you thought about it. Pretty much it is new information. You know what I mean, like, because you I mean, I don't care what people can have their own opinions, obviously, but I look at other people and I think that we're born and, you know, we say, Oh, here's our kids, like, we'll give them all the advantages that we can possibly go forward to give them, and, you know, the sky's the limit. And then you tell the kid the sky is the limit. The kid thinks the sky is the limit everything, like, nothing's gonna hold me back. And then when real life gets to you, you know, like, when someone beats you out for a spot on a on a baseball team when you're eight, or when you, you know, graduate with a degree, and you're like, No one's hiring me like, what's happening? Like, you know, all of those things, they're speed bumps, right? And, like you said, you keep going and you keep going, and you get past them eventually. But the knowledge that that's possible, I don't know that we talk about that, right? Because everything sort of just happens for you as you're growing up, like your parents pull you along from thing to thing, and bail you out along the way, and then all of a sudden, you know, this diabetes is on me. I've, I've gained weight at school, I'm not getting a job, and it feels like it's sink or swim, like, like, right? Like I gotta, I gotta do something here. But some people don't feel that way.

Tom Taylor 29:18
Like, no, totally. And I think you're right, and I think that knowledge is was probably underlying that, that spark, right, you know, I probably, you know, ingested a lot of this, you know, motivational talk or examples in my head, and just, you know, whatever it added up to, it eventually bubbled at the surface. And, you know, look, I, I love my parents very much. They had their own struggles in life. And we were actually on Medicaid for a large portion of my kind of teenage years, you know, so getting insulin was always tough sometimes. And, you know, navigating the health insurance process kind of radicalized me on that. But coming to this personal philosophy, this kind of like outlook on life, where I wake up every day and I say, You know what, certain things. Things are going to impede you. It's truly the biggest thing that makes a difference in getting over those things and building momentum forward is just that first moment, that first moment when you get bad news, or whether you know something doesn't go your way. And you know the first pin is like, you know that anxious, angry, negative feeling, if you can kind of accept that for what it is, process it, digest it, not hate it, because it's never going to go away, but just digest it and then step over it. Yeah, and you can actually do something, and then also appreciate other people. I think everyone has a cross to bear. Like I said, I, you know, I've, I've dealt with with my own struggles, and, you know, being on, you know, public assistance for health insurance made me appreciate like, you know, look, I respect people who can't do it, who have, you know, don't have help. Aren't there yet, but I'm not there yet. And I think it's just to think of life as a continuum, and you're never done, you're never tapped out, and you shouldn't be, and diabetes is just one realm for that. If you're a 1c is bad right now, and you just feel bad and you don't see a way out, like, just accept that, process it and then start over.

Scott Benner 31:09
I do think that everyone is at some point gonna think, Why me? Like, I have to, I'll be honest that maybe six days ago, for the very first time, probably since she was a little kid, like Arden and I were talking about, like, personal, like, you know, stuff about her, and she got upset, and she's like, I don't understand why this is happening to me. And she's talking about a number of different things, but I think diabetes was mixed into it. How come? You know, the things that are trying to feel like they're trying to stop me, like, I don't see them happening to other people all the time. And I just told her, I said, I think everybody generally gets something, some people get more, and some people get less. And it's pretty random. I just shared with her. I was like, Look, I for me. I just get up every day and I start over again. Like, you know, whatever happened the day before we took care of the things we couldn't take care of we couldn't, you know, and the things we could we did. And then you keep moving, you know, if you think backwards to something that was really horrible in your life a decade ago, that thing probably doesn't exist anymore. And so the thing that's happening today won't exist at some point either. And Scott, yeah, that's just how it occurs to me. Is that? Like, I mean, people say it by saying, like, keep moving. You know that that kind of thing. But in my mind, stuff's not, not important. Like, you know, you need to be kind to people, you need to make some money. You got to pay for your things. Like, all the things that have to happen have to happen. But if they don't like, you're still going to keep living. And then it's up to you to decide how that the life as it's reflected back to you, like, how you accept it, feel it and and treat it like, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, I don't want to say you can be happy anywhere, because I'm sure there are places I couldn't be happy. But you know, you could try to until you can move forward.

Tom Taylor 33:04
Well, it's a couple of things that I'll build on that, because I think you make fantastic points, you know, there's a lot of, you know, you can borrow from different philosophies, right? But a lot of the philosophies I buy into, most are kind of talk about thinking of life as, as something that's, that's motion, that's, that's movement. It's not. There's never a perfect moment, right? There's never a snapshot in time where everything is going to be perfect and everything's going to be good, and you're going to have this shining, perfect feeling, you know, and no anxieties and no sadness and no loss. It's motion. Life is constantly progressing forward. So let's think of it that way, and let's think about progress. And let's be gracious. Let's have gratitude for the get the things that are good and realize that everything that is good came because somebody got up, put their pants on, that's what I'd love to say, and went to work, yeah. And the buildings you live in, the art you watch and the music you listen to, is because somebody thought, and they were probably told at some point, like, you know, that's dumb, or they had self doubt, but they did it anyway. And one thing I also think about in terms of time and that kind of motion thing is, you know, somebody once, I was at a wedding a couple years ago, and somebody told me, like, Oh, I just, you know, I wish I lived in the 19 and the year 1900 you know, I just think all this natural stuff would be so much better than what we have right now. And I said, Look, if I was born in 1900 I wouldn't have lived past age eight, yeah, and I was eight years old when I was diagnosed with diabetes before 1920 when, you know, the some unbelievable doctors in Toronto synthesized insulin, you know, kids just fell into comas and then they didn't wake up. Yeah. And so I was born in 1995 I for whatever reason, I was fortunate enough to be born then, and I have insulin, and I can live a life that prior to then, I would not have been able to for all of the, you know, million plus years of human evolution. Let's build on that. Just take that, that gratitude, and, you know, think like, All right, well, if I was born at a different time, whatever you weren't, I don't understand

Scott Benner 34:55
that. People don't understand that today is the best time, and they'll. Yes, in the history of the world, to be alive, and the only thing that's going to beat that is tomorrow, smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid, diphtheria, syphilis, pneumonia, cholera, the plague, leprosy, 1900 that all just kills you, probably, childhood mortality, yeah, I mean, and we don't have to, you know, everything isn't rosy and gold. There's still work to do, but there's, you know, we get to do that work, and that's great, and all of this is because people worked. It didn't just happen. Not that attitude is, is big. I wonder, sometimes I am not clear on purpose about like, how, like, where I fall politically, because I don't think it has anything to do with this podcast, but I think I speak in a way where I believe liberals hear me and think I'm liberal, and conservatives hear me and think I'm conservative, but I just take that as doing what you just said, which is kind of just taking good ideas from where they are, things that make common sense to me. I think

Tom Taylor 35:54
that's very advanced. I mean, it's not these sort of tribal as to say, you know, my team, my team, and I'm always right about this. You're just trying to find, I'm just trying

Scott Benner 36:02
to get trying to get through this thing, yeah? Like, I'm trying to get through this whole thing, like, and in the moment, what makes sense is, what

Tom Taylor 36:07
makes sense in order to run a government, you do have to, you know, eventually form coalitions and stuff. But when it comes to just people talking about stuff, yeah, we I just, I don't get how people can side with the camp and say, you know, look, I'm on this team. You know, you're wrong, because you're on the other team.

Scott Benner 36:24
I believe what I said earlier about type two diabetes. I think that if it progressed the way it has over the decades, it's clearly outside influences that are impacting people. And yes, people could continue to make better decisions. But that's not always as simple as it sounds. So I think a liberal person would hear me and go, My God, Scott is he's such a lefty. What a lovely thing. And but you know, like you, everybody deserves a chance, and you know, it's not your fault and everything, like all that stuff, generally speaking, I believe that. I also think that the world works because of people that get up off their ass and do stuff, and that complaining about your situation and expecting people to treat you in a certain way, I find it to be childish. And so, like, that's why, if you ask me where I am politically, I'd say I'm probably nowhere. Politically. You don't even mean, like, I know people are insulted to say that you're in the center and you see both sides. Like, it's like, well, I'll pick a side. I'm like, I'm picking our side. You don't even mean like, I'm picking your side. Like, there's some people have good ideas on all different kind of ideologies. You should try to soak them up as best you can. I don't. I just don't understand. And it's this time of year. And I mean, in fairness, the political cycle now runs like two and a half years. So it's like, you know, 18 months after an election, it goes away, and then it's back again pretty quickly. But I don't understand not wanting something enough to work for it, and I don't understand blaming somebody for being run over by a system or a world that is out of their control. And

Tom Taylor 37:54
that's, I think, the key there, is the out of your control, because I, you know, having been a kid, needed needed some help, needed some help, needed some instruction, and needed to learn some lessons for myself. You know, I do have a lot of sympathy for for folks who just taken it on the chin. Man. I mean, like life is a series of choices, and it's a series of inheritances, luck, whatever it is that you're getting, but neither are determinative. The choices are probably more determinative. But, you know, some people were born on third base and nothing hit the triple, and some people keep swinging and missing, and they don't realize they're facing the wrong way, you know? So it just all I can take it is, and your head starts to swirl, if you think about it, all at once. But from my perspective, all I ever want to do is try to make people's days a little bit better. I try to smile at people. I try to say hi to people, and then if I'm fortunate enough to tell my story, and you know anything about my outlook on life, I think it's about trying to elucidate, cast light upon the real choices that you make every day. You know, if you prioritize that there's like, also a sequential order of things you have to get an order in your life. I think, I think that it's like, you know, it's your physical body is very important in order to have order in your life. Then it's, it's clean your room. It's, it's, it's good, get some sleep. Find peace in your relationships. It's drop your resentments. Be honest with yourself about things, and then be honest about what it is that you want. You want validation from your peers. Do you want praise? Do you want security? You know, I think we all want those things a little bit, but I think just basing them head on is the first step. And like I said, you know, the batter facing the wrong direction keeps swinging and missing. If you just turn them around and say, hey, look, the pitcher's over there. Now they got a shot. A lot of people never get that shot. Yeah, no.

Scott Benner 39:33
And it's also can be very, very off putting to continue to put effort into something and watch it fail over and over and over again. I get that like, you know, in your parents didn't point you in the right direction, and you're just beating your head against the you know, like you said, you know you're facing the wrong way. You're beating their head against the wall. There's people too,

Tom Taylor 39:53
and you gotta, everyone's gotta just take accountability at some point their own life, do their best. And then we, you know, who have. Platform and, you know, have kind of come to these realizations. We just do our best to tell people, you know, the lessons we've learned, and hope that they can do it themselves as well. Yeah, well,

Scott Benner 40:10
for sure, listen. It doesn't change my life one way or the other people listening are like, I'm gonna try. Or they don't like, I just, I agree with you. I didn't know what you were going to talk about when you got on today. Now I know we're going to call this episode The Tao of Tom, you know, interesting to have the conversation and to let people listen and think maybe I am putting my effort in the wrong place. You know what I mean, like, because I'm not one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. And if you're a diabetic, who was like me in my teens and 20s, who you know, was just like, you know, this sucks. Was given a bad deck of cards. You know, no one else has to deal with this. I'm playing life on hard mode totally. But you know what? That's gonna be a great story when you figure it out, and you will have earned it, when you feel good every day, and then that's something you can build on. I genuinely believe in that, like, I think that nothing feels better than something like hard fought, yeah, to be able to step back at the end and say to yourself, like, I started in a hole, and I got out of that hole, and then I looked around, absorbed some sunshine, made some good decisions, made some bad decisions, I'm moving forward. Don't hold yourself up against other people. I just think that in the Kim Kardashian world of like, you know, watching rich people do rich things, and thinking, that's my goal, I don't think that's your goal.

Tom Taylor 41:29
No, it's about again, it comes back to that snapshot. It's like, you know, you imagine what it's like to be. Insert celebrity here. Insert whoever your you know, load star is. And you think, oh, you know, they must feel perfect all the time. You know, they're beautiful, they're rich, they don't have any worries. They don't have the anxieties that I do. Yeah, they do. What is the one thing that every rich and famous person says is it's like, you know, you think you get all this and it's going to make everything better, and it doesn't, you know, you you know, my favorite public people are the ones who say, Look, you know, I have fears and anxieties just like you. It seems kind of condescending in a way, and pedantic but, but I think it is true, and you just have to understand that there's no easy way life is is motion, it's progress, it's work every single day. If you are willing to accept that and just be present in the moment and do your best every single day, no matter how you stumble, then you can actually find that thing that you're searching for and just realize it doesn't feel like this imaginary, perfect snapshot that you think it might

Scott Benner 42:29
right. What you're trying to do is hone your life and your situation, not create someone else's. And examples

Tom Taylor 42:35
are good, by the way, example, I think examples are good. That's why I kind of, you know, we do this, and you need to be able to point to somebody and say, hey, look, all right, I don't feel like I can do this, but they did. If you

Scott Benner 42:45
listen to the podcast, you know, I agree with that too, because it's been for a long time in the diabetes spaces. You don't celebrate in public because you make people who aren't doing as well feel bad. No, you gotta show them how. I always think like if you're not having success, nothing could be easier than looking at someone who is and asking them, like, what are you doing? And then looking at yourself and going, they said they're doing this. I'm not doing three of those things in diabetes. The way it occurs to me is you go putting up a graph that somebody else would kill for, and then they come ask you, Hey, what is it, you know, I don't know. And they start telling you about, like, well, I got my settings right. My basal is good, you know, like, that kind of stuff. And they're like, Oh, I haven't looked at my basal in years. Or, you know, like, you Pre Bolus a meal, like, of all the crazy things, yeah, go for a walk after you eat. All these little things, they add up. Like, all these different like, so wait, I know I can Bolus for a bag of chips, but you're saying you don't eat chips. You don't even like back all that stuff like so you hear what? And then you can keep some of it. You can say, Look, you know what? I'm still eating chips, but I will Pre Bolus for them. I didn't realize that, and let me go find out what the math is on my basal insulin. And then you have some successes. And you say to yourself, like, wow, that worked. Now you fine tune and hone. And then one day, you find yourself back in that square. You know, often for me, it's either being on the podcast as a guest or being in the private group. And then you put your graph up and you go, you know, six months ago, this is what my graph looked like. But look at it now. And then someone else comes along and says, Oh my god, that's amazing. How did you do that? And then it all starts over again.

Tom Taylor 44:18
Hey, man, you know one of my favorite lines of all time, and you know, a song, or any kind of media was, you know, song, Atlantic City, the guy, he says, you know, there's winners and there's losers. I'm south of the line. There is no line. There's no line. You are not south of the line. You're not a loser. And, you know, all it takes is little choices, believing that you actually can make a difference. And I hope that doesn't sound too you know, cliche or, you know, or repetitive, but it's real.

Scott Benner 44:42
Well, you know how it sounds Tom to people who have done it and it's worked for him, it sounds like scripture. And to people who were struggling, it sounds like, yeah, the point is, is that everybody who made it was struggling at some point, I felt like a loser. I felt

Tom Taylor 44:57
like this wasn't going to happen for me. You know? It. Never was going to but then little things every day, you know, for instance, like losing weight. Like, one of the things I tell you to do is take progress pictures every, every single day, because you can't notice it's not one day to the next. You're not going to lose, you know, an inch off your waist, but over after a month or two, you will Yeah, and it motivates the hell

Scott Benner 45:15
out of you. After you realize it too, exactly, yeah, you go, Wow, this actually is working. Because you can't you get, you know, they say things like, you get sick the same way you get well, like, that stuff like, you know, slowly and, and it's very true, you didn't notice yourself. Like, you didn't notice you going to 290 pounds. You didn't notice it on the way. And you might have noticed it coming down a little bit because it happened more quickly. Because you're lucky and you're young and you were, you know, you put something into action, start happening. But if you're an older person, you're trying to lose 50 pounds, it could take you years,

Tom Taylor 45:46
yes, but it's worth it, yeah. And you got to zoom out and say, I'd rather you know if I'm 40 years old and I want to lose 50 pounds, yeah, it's going to take you two years. But you think about when you're 50, and you look back and you said, Thank God, I did that. And yeah, it took some time, but I've got a lot more time now on the back end, because I did that an earned feeling. We're talking about is

Scott Benner 46:04
that losing weight, finding a job after college, or honing your diabetes care. In the end, they all work the same way. It's slow and steady, right? Like again, I like checking in and saying, here's where I'm at. I can see progress. This is awesome, and give yourself some credit for it, because you can get tired, you know, I listen. I watch my son come out of college. I'm gonna guess, based on what you do for living, your degree and my son's degree are probably reasonably similar. Are you doing this? Yeah, basically, are you doing coding in your job?

Tom Taylor 46:35
Little bit, yeah. Little bit, okay, yeah, writing, analysis, modeling, coding. So

Scott Benner 46:40
he comes out of school and he's got a an econ degree, and then he comes to me one day and he goes, I don't want to be involved in like, money. Basically, he's like, I know I have this degree, but I have it because I'm good at math, like, not because I wanted to go get involved in finance. He's like, I don't want to do that. My son's had a couple of opportunities coming out of college that he's turned down for personal reasons, that I was proud of him, because they're not things I could have turned down when I was like, right? And one of them was like, somebody got him an interview at a at a place, and he interviewed, and he said, I don't want to work for a company like that. I'm not going to do that. And I'm like, okay, and it's a big company, and it would have done well for him, trust me, but he just that's not the part of society I want to be involved in. No, it's important

Tom Taylor 47:26
to him and unfortunate. You know, obviously he's had, you know, good parenting and tutelage to be able to recognize his values. Well,

Scott Benner 47:34
it's also, and I don't say privilege very often, but is also privileged, because when I was 2223 I needed a job. Like, I would have, like, if you came up to me and said, like, Hey, we're gonna pick dead skunks up off the road, here's what it pays. I'd be like, All right, I'm there. Let's do it. Yeah, my son might have been like, I'm gonna hold out for something better. So he has the opportunity to hold out because of whatever, but he still made a choice for, like, a valid reason. He was trying to be a better citizen. Like that was really the answer. There's another job. Another job would have been great for him. And he said that, I do not want to carry a gun. I can't take this seriously. And I was like, Okay. I was like, well, then stop talking to them. But he was super interested in the rest of it. He just that one piece of it. He's like, I don't want to do that. All this progress in life is about realizing what matters to you, whether it's your health, whether it's being around, whether it's feeling good, whether it's it's, you know, being a good citizen, and then figuring out what you can control about it, and then doing those steps every day. You can do those things for your diabetes, though, is, I think what Tom's saying, and what I'm obviously been saying for years, so, but you can't be mad, like you can't hear this, and go, Sure, well, it's easy for you. At some point it wasn't easy. Like, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when Arden was younger. Like, I actually heard a woman recently say it helped me a lot to go back and listen to the beginning of the podcast to realize that Scott's been on a journey too. I came in so late, it was hard not to just look at him and go, like, well, sure, you can do it because you're the guy from the thing. But she's like, and I realized he hasn't always been this person, and that really, like meant a lot to her. She's like, I can grow too. Then I think that's

Tom Taylor 49:11
why humans love stories of journeys, right? Whether it's the Odyssey or whether it's, you know, a person's life journey, sure, it's like, we all started somewhere, we got a path to take, and we're all gonna end up somewhere. And yeah, your journey, my journey, their stories of figuring it out slowly but surely, having patience and you can control your diabetes again. It will not be a flip of a switch, but it is worth it to put in the time and to when you zoom out on your life that year, whatever it takes will be minuscule, and it'll be worth it.

Scott Benner 49:39
Yeah, what do you think you learned along the way that got you to where you are? I know you made a decision to do better for yourself, but once that decision was made, what are the steps that got you there?

Tom Taylor 49:49
I think it was a relatively slow process at first, but you know, like anything with inertia, you know, there's resistance to change, and then then all of a sudden, the change, kind of it has momentum in and of itself. You know, I think the biggest things were those realizing those values, you know, and what I wanted to, you know, you think about what makes me feel good, right? And you think about, some people think about their bank accounts. To think about, you know, how many friends they have, any likes they get, whatever it is that you get these sources, basically, of dopamine, you know, I thought I really want to feel good, you know, I just feel I wake up and I feel blah, you know, I'm tired, I'm sluggish. I want to see what it's like to feel good. I would love to know what it's like to be fast, to be able to run quickly. So I, you know, I started kind of searching. I asked friends, but you know, they do friends who are in shape. And eventually I connected with a friend of a friend who's a trainer and nutritionist, and you know, he said, you know, I'll help you out. And so I got a plan, and I we talked about my goals, and I said, I want to lose weight, and I want to get strong. Want to get stronger and faster, and I want to feel good. And so we come up with a plan. And it was a, you know, a 16 week plan, or whatever it was. And, you know, there were time I remember, you know, a couple months in, I injured my shoulder because I really had never lifted before. So he said, All right, so downshift and do something else. Do active recovery. Do you know, until your shoulder heels up and then get back on the horse? Because this isn't permanent, and you need to keep it up. And this is a lifestyle once I've figured out that created that virtuous cycle for myself, where working out, eating, right, sleeping, hydrating, being on top of my Pre Bolus, saying and going for a walk, figuring out the right dosages for my insulin, checking my blood sugar, making sure I'm good before bed, all that made me feel good. It was over. It was it was a cycle from there, and all of a sudden my motivation wasn't the quick dopamine hit from the bag of chips. It was, No, I'm gonna feel worse and I'm honest with myself, yeah, worse about having that. I'm gonna feel worse when I look at myself in the mirror and myself in the mirror. And I wanted to look in the mirror and feel good as well. And eventually I got

Scott Benner 51:48
to a place I wouldn't say I'm fast, yeah, never

Tom Taylor 51:50
was. And I feel good when I look in the mirror, and I feel good when I wake up every morning. And you know what? I know that I earned that.

Scott Benner 51:57
Yeah, my wife bought something that she thought I wanted, like a food product that she thought I wanted, right? I like it. I like what she bought me, but it's like a frozen, kind of processed version of something that I like. And then I saw it in the freezer, and I was like, Well, I am in a hurry today. I do like this. It's not my choice to eat it, but my wife bought it for me, and that made it feel like I should eat it. Like, do you know what I mean? Like that idea? So I had it, and I wake up the next day, I'm like, two pounds heavier than I was the day before, because it's, you know, like, processed, and there was, like, all this crap in it and everything. And I thought, What in the hell am I doing? Like, why didn't I just throw that away? Why didn't I just say to her, thank you so much for getting this for me, but I know if I eat this, it's gonna hit me tough, and I don't want that to be involved, but I did. I ate it and then, but then the next day, I thought, do something right now. And I went downstairs, and I grabbed what was left, and I threw it in the trash. And I was like, I was like, I lost a couple of dollars there. But I think it's better than eating it out of guilt and then throwing off the next three weeks of my life somehow, which is what it would have done. Like, I know that sounds crazy, but my body is I'm delicate.

Tom Taylor 53:07
I hate Listen, yeah, I feel you. And, you know what? I just take that as you know again, what motivates you and what motivates you, I think it's sweet is you want to, you know, make your wife feel good for getting having gotten something that you appreciated. And you know, you, but you then you have these competing values and priorities, and you're like, Well, you know, in this moment, the appreciation that I had for her, and let's be honest, a little bit of self indulgence won, but it's not permanent. And you said, All right, well, you know what? I'm gonna make this other competing priority take precedence over that going forward. And you're a human and you can't beat yourself up over it and just say, Yeah, learn a little lesson there.

Scott Benner 53:44
Yeah. I think I was eating it for her, because she was like, she bought it out of love. And I was like, I didn't want to reject it and make her feel like, oh, I try to do something nice and that. So I had some and then I'm like, she's not even gonna remember this is in the freezer, like, I can just get but I'm gonna tell her, I'm just gonna tell her, Look, I really appreciate it. From now on, let's get this version of that food instead of that. And

Tom Taylor 54:04
you appreciate what she's trying to do for you. But this is, you know, this is something I want to be, you know, this is, this is something that I prioritize and, you know, I appreciate it, I acknowledge it. But you know what? Let's, let's stick to something a little bit more clean or, you know, whole food or whatever, whatever motivates your diet.

Scott Benner 54:20
Yeah. I mean, listen, we're like, we're cooking. We're having people here for Thanksgiving this year. And I said to my wife, I'm like, they don't expect me to, like, make carrots with like marshmallows on it, or something, like one of those things that people eat. I'm like, I'm not doing that. Yeah, I'm not doing that. I'm, uh, I'm gonna make like, staple foods. I'm gonna make it out of Whole Foods, and they can eat what they want. And if that's then we'll have a pie. And if that's not enough, then they should, you know, they'll bring it with them or get something from somewhere else later. But like, I'm not, like, I'm not gonna make candy food. That's okay, right? My wife's like, I don't think anybody cares. I was like, All right, I might be the only

Tom Taylor 54:57
one anyway. And I have found, I think one of the. Kind of, like last highlights from my experience with diabetes that I had to come to understand the hard way was anything with syrup or any kind of, like, crystalline sugar structure like that is just deadly.

Scott Benner 55:09
Hits you fast, hard, you know, and

Tom Taylor 55:13
it just, it just accelerates. And, you know, I rarely ever, and I take pride in this. Get the, you know, the double arrows and my my CGM like it's rising rapidly. You know, I always say, you know, if I have some maple syrup or something, that's, there's my day, you know, honey, it's unfortunate, because that stuff is great. But, you know, when I was a kid, I would just spend entire days just feeling terrible. You know, high blood sugar is, is a very low, slow burning health that the syrup is. I mean, it's heinous. And the fact that high fructose corn syrup is in everything, it should motivate people as well to be conscious of the ingredients they're putting in themselves. If it's a plastic packaged product, it's probably not what you want, and just anything with syrup or high fructose corn syrup, whether or not you're diabetic, it's gonna cause inflammation, it's gonna spike your blood sugar, and you're better off without it. You just don't realize how it throws you off. You know, so many people walking around saying, Oh, I'm tired or, you know, but then sometimes they go back to it again because they felt good when they were eating it. So like, oh, I eat this crappy food. I'll eat more of it because I get a nice jolt when I eat it, but then it ruins hours of day cycle. Yeah, and it's remembered. It was, it was the glycemic index. That's what I was trying to recall earlier. This phenomenon where, like, you know, you eat something with a simple carb, no other nutrients, and, you know, it causes a large insulin release, and that's inflammatory, and it also causes you to crave more carbs, and then you're just, you're a snowball going on a hill, versus, if you break that cycle, it's hard. You're probably gonna have basically withdrawals. But if you can power through it, and you can zoom out and say, this is worth it, protein, fats, whole grains will break that cycle, and you won't need to crave the simple carbs, and your body will have less inflammation. And you're you're on a much, much better path.

Scott Benner 56:48
First of all, there's an episode in the Pro Tip series about glycemic index and load. There we go. It doesn't mean you can't have something sweet once in a while. It's just you're not on a Benner that you don't realize you've been on for years. You know, like conscious of what

Tom Taylor 57:00
you're putting in your body. I love ice cream. I love chocolate, but, you know, like and to my detriment, I have a tremendous sweet tooth, but it's a treat. It's got to be a treat. And you can't be sitting there housing a bowl of ice cream every night. And I think that, just in general, in life, giving yourself a little bit of work for to earn an indulgence, and not just making it a given is also a great I mean, that's a great I mean, that's a personal philosophy. I'm not prescribing anything for anyone, but this is what works for me, and I feel a lot more imbalance with my life and everything else, especially my health. If the treats are treats, and they are not just part of my diet, and you're conscious of the ingredients you're putting in

Scott Benner 57:36
your body, yeah, no, I appreciate you sharing that. Is there anything we didn't talk about that we should have, anything that you have on a list somewhere or in your head.

Tom Taylor 57:43
No, sir. We covered a lot. I'm really appreciative for the opportunity I love, you know, trying to help folks the best I can. I'm really appreciative of what you do. You know, I listen to probably 90% of the episodes. I think you're doing really great work. And I hope that, you know, diabetes is, is obviously a topic close to my heart and thinkers, but I think that this is a message that's applicable to everyone, and that's kind of why I wrote my college essay about it. I think whatever it did, you know, helps me get into the schools I got into because I learned a lot about life from having to deal with this. I think a lot of people probably do too, and if they haven't yet, there's an opportunity to it's any any obstacle can become a vehicle, you know, if you just kind of orient it correctly and figure out how to ride it.

Scott Benner 58:26
Well, that's awesome. No, I appreciate that very much.

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Scott Benner 3/24/25 Scott Benner 3/24/25

#1471 Square Zero

Returning guest, FB group expert from episode #829 "Chinese Hamster Ovaries," shares exciting updates on her PCOS and gastroparesis success.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 00:00 Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of The Juicebox Podcast. Today I'm speaking with Cassandra. She's a returning guest who was initially on episode 829, called Chinese hamster ovaries. She is giving us an update on how things are going with her PCOS gastroparesis. She had SIBO. She's an awesome guest. She's had a lot of success. Jump on here with us today, find out what she did to help herself. It is really, really exciting. Nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your healthcare plan. AG, one is offering my listeners a free $76 gift. When you sign up, you'll get a welcome kit, a bottle of d3, k2, and five free travel packs in your first box. So make sure you check out drink AG, one.com/juice box. To get this offer, don't forget to save 40% off of your entire order at cozy earth.com. All you have to do is use the offer code juice box at checkout. That's Juicebox at checkout to save 40% at cozy earth.com Are you an adult living with type one or the caregiver of someone who is and a US resident? If you are, I'd love it if you would go to T 1d exchange.org/juicebox, and take the survey. When you complete that survey, your answers are used to move type one diabetes research of all kinds, T, 1d, exchange.org/juice, box. It should not take you more than about 10 minutes. This episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by Medtronic diabetes and their mini med 780 G system designed to help ease the burden of diabetes management, imagine fewer worries about mis Bolus is or miscalculated carbs thanks to meal detection technology and automatic correction doses, learn more and get started today at Medtronic diabetes.com/juicebox the show you're about to listen to is sponsored by the ever since 365 the ever since 365 has exceptional accuracy over one year and is the most accurate CGM in the low range that you can get ever since cgm.com/juicebox

Cassandra 02:28 Hey, my name is Cassandra. I'm a returning guest, and some of you may know me as a group expert from the Juicebox

Scott Benner 02:36 Podcast. What do we call you online? Princess in Cassandra, excellent. So nice to talk to you again.

Speaker 1 02:44 Yeah, I'm so happy to be back because I have, I guess, a lot of new things to share. Yeah,

Scott Benner 02:50 no kidding, I'm looking at your list here. We're gonna, we're gonna really get into some stuff, give people maybe just kind of a high level overview of what your last episode was about.

Speaker 1 03:00 Oh my god, about so much and nothing at the same. I feel like,

Scott Benner 03:05 how? So, you know, everyone says that. So let me, I'm gonna get somebody's opinion here. So everybody listening. What you don't know is that when most of the interviews end, people say the same thing, hey, if you don't want to use that, it's okay. Everyone always thinks that their episode was about nothing. It wasn't good, like I listened to the podcast and all these other episodes are so helpful to me. And I know I didn't help anybody, but I always say to them, I'm like, delete episodes like the ones you're feeling helped by those people thought the same thing as you when it was over, that this just was not valuable at all. Right? So

Speaker 1 03:40 I don't think necessarily it wasn't very valuable for anyone. I just think, like we covered so many topics, and probably the main thing for me was, even if life gets complicated, especially with diabetes, especially with complications, you still can have a good life and perspective matters.

Scott Benner 04:05 Yeah, yeah, for sure, excellent. So we don't have people back very often, so you're special, of course. Do you want me to call you Cassandra or princess? Where you at with us? Cassandra? Okay, so Cassandra, I guess let's keep it then last episode. Tell people your episode number. Do you know it? 829, 829, okay, so medically, what did you tell people about? We

Speaker 1 04:29 talked a lot about Chinese hamster ovaries, about immunosuppressants, about chronic urticaria, about retinopathy. We talked thyroid.

Scott Benner 04:44 What do you have going on that brings you back? I kind of want to jump into it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 04:48 Well, at that point back then, when we recorded the PCOS, I suffered from since, like forever, was kind of at bay and didn't. Bother me as much as the last couple of years, and it kind of got urgent or more severe, I feel like, towards the end of my 30s now, and maybe that played also into it. And every time I asked my gynecologist about it, she just told me to eat healthier and do more sports. And maybe one thing you should know about me, I have a pretty active lifestyle, and I try to eat as healthy as I can. So it was basically just gaslighting

Scott Benner 05:41 so your ovaries were giving you trouble. And she was like, have more kale and go for a walk. Yeah? That seems helpful. This

Speaker 1 05:49 works, but not when your BMI is 22 Yeah, right, yeah. I was at a perfectly normal weight. I mean, a lot of people who suffer from PCOS, obviously, are overweight or obese, but that wasn't my problem. I had an a hormonal imbalance. Even

Scott Benner 06:09 if they have a hormonal imbalance, you can help your hormones back into balance by being at a healthy weight, not carrying fat. Has a lot with your hormones. So I get it. If a person was in that situation. They're like, hey, let's get you active and and maybe get some weight off of you and see if that helps. But you're saying not your situation at all. No, right, okay. And

Speaker 1 06:29 then I switched endos, and there again, the topic PCOS came up, and he told me, like, well, I could try some anti testosterone medicine, blah, blah, blah and all this stuff just didn't convince me, because they came with an array of side effects that you don't want. Yeah, and then I told him that I want to go to a specialist who is only specialized in PCOS and talk to them. And in the back of my mind, I had kind of a plan what I wanted to do, because I did some research, also, how you can manage PCOS without hormones, like because I knew when I walk in there, the first suggestion they will give me is just take the pill. Yeah, and I didn't want that. I found out that they actually perform a surgery on some women when they try to conceive. But it doesn't work. They use a treatment called laparoscopic ovarian drilling, and that kind of drill. They drill holes into your ovaries for what, so they can get babies.

Scott Benner 07:48 And does that work or no? Yeah, it does. Wow, okay,

Speaker 1 07:52 well, but that wasn't also wasn't my situation. I don't want to have a baby. I think we talked about that also last time. But, I mean, I wrote this, read this paper a little further, and they saw in this research that it also normalizes hormone levels and gives you a regular cycle. And I thought, yeah, bingo. That's all I need. I don't care how fertile I am, right, right. The main thing is, I have a regular cycle. Did you do this? And it worked well, and then the whole gas lighting started over because Doctor said, Well, no, it's, we don't do this here. It's far too dangerous. Just take the pill, because it could be that you enter a perimenopausal early and it will be far too dangerous, okay? And then another doctor told me, Well, yeah, it's just you talk to manage and babysit your diabetes. And I really was at the point where my cycles were anywhere from like 28 to days to three months, and ovulation started at day 14. And there is where the craziness started. My body tried to build up. The hormones to ovulate. Insulin needs went up. The ovulation didn't take place. Hormone level dropped, insulin needs dropped, and that for weeks and weeks and weeks and then all over again. And he just said, yeah, that's just your job. Now, the only other thing he could offer me would be the pill, but only the pill would be much too dangerous for me, so I need, would need to take blood thinners. Additionally, tell people

Scott Benner 09:45 why you didn't want to take a birth control pill. Today's episode is sponsored by a long term CGM. It's going to help you to stay on top of your glucose readings the ever since 365 I'm talking, of course, about the work. World's first and only CGM that lasts for one year, one year, one CGM. Are you tired of those other CGMS, the ones that give you all those problems that you didn't expect, knocking them off, false alerts not lasting as long as they're supposed to. If you're tired of those constant frustrations, use my link ever since cgm.com/juice box to learn more about the ever since 365 some of you may be able to experience the ever since 365 for as low as $199 for a full year at my link, you'll find those details and can learn about eligibility. Ever since cgm.com/juice box, check it out. Today's episode is sponsored by Medtronic diabetes, who is making life with diabetes easier with the mini med 780 G system. The mini med 780 G automated insulin delivery system anticipates, adjusts and corrects every five minutes. Real world results show people achieving up to 80% time and range with recommended settings, without increasing lows. But of course, Individual results may vary. The 780 G works around the clock, so you can focus on what matters. Have you heard about Medtronic extended infusion set? It's the first and only infusion set labeled for up to a seven day wear. This feature is repeatedly asked for, and Medtronic has delivered. 97% of people using the 780 G reported that they could manage their diabetes without major disruptions of sleep. They felt more free to eat what they wanted, and they felt less stress with fewer alarms and alerts you can't beat that learn more about how you can spend less time and effort managing your diabetes by visiting Medtronic diabetes.com/juicebox

Unknown Speaker 11:49 because I don't want to gain weight.

Scott Benner 11:50 Yeah, that was, that was your main concern. Yeah. Okay. Why would you have to take blood thinners?

Speaker 1 11:56 Yeah, because I'm over 35 and they are concerned for your cardiovascular health, then,

Scott Benner 12:03 oh, if they put you on the pill, they put you on a blood thinner as well. Yeah,

Speaker 1 12:06 okay. And I mean that this plan already sounds ridiculous to me. And then I went to a third doctor, and he said, Yeah, let's do it. And and then

Scott Benner 12:20 what happened? And I did it well, tell me what happened. What was that like?

Speaker 1 12:23 And also in the same time frame, I know, can I this all took so long to figure out I was desperate and I wanted some relief, and it was also at the time where you started talking about authentic Okay, so I went to my end all and said, Please put me on the lowest dose of authentic. I want to try this. And it was all kind of in the same time frame, seven months ago. Now, okay, ever since the surgery and the authentic, I had a regular I have a regular cycle. Wow. I mean, it's not picture perfect 28 days. It is somewhere between maybe 28 and 3540 but it is regular, actually. And I never had that before in my life. It's

Scott Benner 13:14 awesome. So my question here is, with some hindsight now and out of the problem, the, I mean, the bleeding, forever and ever, the pain and everything else that came with it. Can you look back on that time that you felt that way and really quantify it, like put it into words for people, what it was like? What, what was that thing you were so desperate to get away from? I mean,

Speaker 1 13:35 there's not really words for that, because I was just chasing a monster, like six weeks, eight of us out of eight,

Scott Benner 13:46 yeah, like heavy bleeding. I didn't

Speaker 1 13:49 have any bleeding at all. I don't have had I didn't have pain, I didn't have bleeding. It was just kind of could tell when my hormones started to raise, and then went down. And that's what my insulin needs. Just constantly changed, and, like, they doubled, and then in one hour, I was back down to normal.

Scott Benner 14:13 And so for you, it wasn't as much about the classic problems of an extended period, it was about taking care of your diabetes, yeah, yeah. And how long had you been doing it this way? Like, how much of your life? Like, tell people how old you were when you got type one. And when did this all start with the PCOS? I

Speaker 1 14:30 mean, I got type one when I was 11. I never had a normal period, so it's the you could say I was diagnosed with 14 when my period never started. And

Scott Benner 14:45 do you look back over that time and see insulin issues the entire time? Or did it start when you got older?

Speaker 1 14:51 I mean, I was so unmanaged, you can't tell, but probably, probably, yeah, and then, I mean. Some years I had an IUD, and that was better, not good, but better. And then when the replacement came up, I tried an IUD again, but I was basically just crying out of nowhere for a month and that IUD had to go out.

Scott Benner 15:19 The hormones from the IUD just put you into a tizzy, as they would have called it in the 50s.

Speaker 1 15:24 I was just crying out, starting to cry out of nowhere, right? I wasn't myself anymore, terrible. And that's also a reason why I said I don't want to try a pill. Yeah,

Scott Benner 15:36 right, right. Okay, you did the ovarian drilling and you started a GLP med. Do you think it's a combination of the two that helped, or do you think one of them is doing something and the other one wasn't valuable? I don't

Speaker 1 15:49 know what I can tell you from the TLP side is that I was able to lose some weight on parts of my body where I always had like a little extra,

Scott Benner 16:05 where did that? Would you mind sharing, where it gathered on you, on my belly, your belly. Okay, I'm

Speaker 1 16:11 a lean person to begin with, but my belly just always stored some fat, and I started out on the authentic at around the 130 pounds, and went down the first week five pounds and lost now in total, 23 pounds. Wow,

Scott Benner 16:35 you didn't feel good for so long. But can you like separate the things? Can you tell how just weight loss itself has impacted you, or is it more about the fat being gone? I feel

Speaker 1 16:45 now that I'm at the weight that is reflecting my lifestyle, and it's kind of fair. Do you know how I'm mean?

Scott Benner 16:56 Has it changed things for you, socially, or just the way you feel about yourself.

Speaker 1 17:00 It hasn't changed anything socially. No, okay,

Scott Benner 17:04 your attitude about who you are and everything that hasn't changed. No, okay, what about this? The way you feel, health wise, do you notice a difference? Yeah.

Speaker 1 17:15 I mean, my cholesterol, for example, was always like, not high, but a little bit on the higher side where they want you as a diabetic, it's completely normal now. They were always concerned about my kidneys. They are functioning completely normal now, and that's all since I started the TLT, you

Scott Benner 17:42 didn't go up, right? Are you still on a low dose? No.

Speaker 1 17:44 I mean, I always stayed at the point two, five milligram because, I mean, my BMI is now almost underweight, so I even I can't afford to go up.

Scott Benner 17:58 My point was that you're getting these benefits without ramping up the medication more and more and more. Yeah, yeah. How about the eating? Are you able to eat? Or are you having, like, what are your fights with glps? I mean,

Speaker 1 18:10 the fight is that that I'm actually, I had gastroparesis before I started the authentic so that was a concern. But from what I can tell, it didn't get worse on the authentic so it's it was a bit worse, like the first two weeks, I wasn't able to eat that much and had to divide portions and eat more snack type things. But like, after two weeks, this was fine again, but only, like, maybe two months ago, I found out something very interesting. Go ahead, I started to log my calories because I was pretty certain I'm not getting enough calories with your Sen big I would say I was able to eat more and still lose weight. If I had eaten that much prior to authentic, I had gained weight, I'm sure

Scott Benner 19:11 interesting, I will tell you that. Well, I'm using zepbound, which is, you know, a GLB from a different company, and I didn't eat poorly before. Do you understand? Like I Yeah, me neither, yeah. I found myself thinking this. Arden and I went out yesterday afternoon, and she helped me pick out glasses, and I took her to lunch. First, I got a sandwich. It was a, it was a brisket sandwich, right? So it was a, it's not really what I wanted. Cassandra, but I was at a restaurant. I was limited options. I got a brisket sandwich, just two pieces of rye bread, some shaved brisket inside the tiniest bit of cheese. They sent it out with some fries. I think I had eight fries, and I was like, oh, it's enough. And I was able to eat half of the sandwich, yeah. And I looked back and I thought, prior to the GLP, would I have eaten? All of this, maybe right? I might have, I don't think I would have cleaned my plate, but I probably would have eaten a little more of the sandwich. I might have had a few more of the fries. I drank an unsweet tea with it, you know, in a glass of water. But my point is, is that I looked around the room and there were other people in that restaurant eating far more than I was eating, and they were all thin, and they didn't look like they had health, you know what I mean, like visually they and I thought if I ate this without the GLP, get it, I'd weigh 50 pounds more than this. Yeah, I just would. So did it change how I eat? I don't eat quite as much, but not to the degree that you know, you guys have, if you've listened to the podcast, you've heard before, like, I would say all the time, like, I'd eat the the tiniest little bit of thing, I'd wake up a pound heavier. I was always like, I'd wake up the next day a pound heavier, like I either had to eat nothing, or, you know, really restrict down to, like, little bits of protein and stuff like that. My digestion still sucked all these other things. Yeah, but on the GLP, I'm not saying, like, I could go out eat a quart of ice cream every day and still be thin, but there's part of me that wonders if I couldn't, like, I don't test it, you know what I mean, because I don't care and I don't want that food. But I think some people are losing weight on it because they're taking in too many calories, and it's restricting their calories, and they're losing weight. And I think other people like you and me, and probably other people with autoimmune stuff in their families, something else is happening with it.

Speaker 1 21:29 Yeah, you know, I mean, I talked to my endo about it, just like a week ago, and it's like, you're talking to a ball. Yeah? They don't know. He just tells me, Oh no, no, you're just eating less than before. And I mean, I eat dinner every day with my partner, and I trust that he can touch pretty objectively if I eat more or less and it's the same portion size. And then he said, Oh yeah, maybe you had, like, snacks in between, and didn't even notice you had them, and you don't have them. Now, did you

Scott Benner 22:07 try explaining to him that that's not it, or did you just go,

Speaker 1 22:10 Okay, I mean, it's, it's ridiculous, and he's, he's, listen, no, he didn't, but no, it's just, there is no explanation. So it can be

Scott Benner 22:21 it's funny, because I'm sure you've heard Dr Blevins on the show, right? I did. I've had great conversations with him about glps, and he's much more forward to thinking than most people. But it always sticks in my head that at one point when I kind of broached the subject with him, his answer was, well, people are eating fewer calories. And I thought, yes, for some people, but I think for other people, for everyone, yeah, and, and I know he gets it, because you can tell by the rest of the conversation that he's very open to the idea, yeah. But at the same time, I wonder if doctors are just trained not to say more than the label says it does. You know what I mean? It must be that, yeah, yeah, because I don't know how to argue with what you're saying. I started

Speaker 1 23:06 to log my calories, and I've figured out I've eaten probably for the last decade, not more than 800 calories a day.

Scott Benner 23:16 Yeah, so you shouldn't be carrying 20 extra pounds.

Speaker 1 23:19 No, right? Also not losing weight, because 800 calories for sure, don't cover my knee. Yeah, should

Scott Benner 23:26 put you in a deficit, right? Exactly. This is awesome. Listen, Cassandra, I don't get enough credit on this podcast. So you learned about the glps on the podcast. I did. Yeah, basically I saved your life. Is that what you're here to

Unknown Speaker 23:38 say again and again and over and over.

Scott Benner 23:42 I'm teasing for the people out there, and for those of you who hate me, you're like, oh, he really, really needs this. No, I just want to point out that getting information like this can really change things for you. There are things you're not going to hear in other places, and the only reason you hear them on this podcast is through random events. Like, you know, we had to put Arden on a GLP for a similar idea. Like, we really consider that Arden has PCOS, and, you know, her struggles are different, and we put her on a GLP and injected, gosh, she started with ozempic, but Arden also has a significant needle phobia that we don't talk about a ton on here, because I don't really know how to talk about it. I'm actually going to do an episode with Erica about it, to try to dig into it a little bit. But so she had trouble with the ozempic pen, having to give herself because the visible, the needle was visible, right? So we took her to a self injector. But she just has a lot of psychological pain, like she just does from from the needles. Like, if you don't know a person with a needle phobia, I don't just mean like, I don't like needles. I mean like running for your life when you see them, you know, like, that kind of thing. So she powered through it for a while, and was doing it, but on the self injector, you're stuck with whatever the lowest dose is in the self injector. And it was too much for it was. Handling her blood sugars beautifully, and her acne would just about completely go away. And, you know, belly pain that she would have, like, gone, or periods got better, like all that stuff, worked really well. She just really struggled with the injections. So she did just start this week. We're doing a experiment with rebellious so a GLP, yeah, I was going

Speaker 1 25:23 to ask you if that wasn't an option, yeah. So we're

Scott Benner 25:27 trying it now. She's three pills in and right now the doctor has her. She's like, let's start every other day, because we want her to be able to eat, so we're watching it, but I think she's going to be able to go to it daily and still be able to eat, but it's a, like I said, an experiment. We're going to be at it for a little bit before, before we figure out exactly

Speaker 1 25:46 how to handle it. Well, I hope it works for her. Thank you. Thank

Scott Benner 25:50 you. We're also going to try working on the phobia. It's, you know, little bits at a time.

Speaker 1 25:55 Yeah, that's not something you accomplish, like, in a week, no, no,

Scott Benner 25:59 when it got bad at the end, I wasn't sure if I was gonna ever share this on the podcast. But when it got bad at the end, she was home for a little bit from school, and she was at that time away at school, about a six hour drive. So I said, Look, well, I can inject it for you before you go back. And that buys you a week. And she's like, Oh, great. Well, what do we do next week? And I'm like, I don't know. Like, we'll figure it out, right? So she and I together in a room. We couldn't do it. She just, she was like, no, no, no. Like she turns into, it's almost like she's in the electric chair. That's terrible. And she'll say anything to keep you from pushing the button. It's, it's crazy how like, she turns into, like, a life or death situation for So finally, in that moment, she said, just have Cole come in and hold my wrists, like I'm giving you permission to just give it to me, but I'm gonna defend it. I think I'm gonna swat it away when you come at me with it. So have Cole hold my hands. And I was like, okay, so Cole came in, poor Cole. Was like, what is happening? And, you know, so he kind of just restrained her around her wrists, like holding her hands together. And, you know, it was difficult, right? It was really one of the more difficult moments I've been through recently. And as I do the and you know how quick these injections, if they take eight seconds, you know what I mean? And like, so I'm doing it, and I just hear colgo. She's biting me. She's biting me. Oh my god. And Arden, like, I look over and she goes, I'm sorry. I thought I was biting myself. Like she actually went to bite her own hand, like, out of like, desperation, I guess, and she got him and didn't like she couldn't feel anything she's like. So I just thought I was biting myself. And then Cassandra, as as horrible as that was and is, like, fraught with tension and peril and, like, honestly, seriously, I'm not doing a good enough job of telling you how tense it was. She just starts laughing, because it's over now and all that's gone. It just disappeared. Wow, that's crazy. We started talking about it later, and she said, I'm scared of the needle. She's like, I can I picture it like puncturing my skin. And she goes, but I'm also disappointed and embarrassed that this is my reaction. So she's fighting with all that at the same time. Yeah, so what are we gonna do next week? The GLP is helping her so much, and she now she's going to be away at school, and so I am a little embarrassed to tell you that every Sunday morning, got up really early and drove the six hours to her, gave her the injection. We had lunch, and then I drove home. I spent my whole day Sunday going to give her the shot. I did it like three weeks in a row, and then one day she was just like, please, I can't keep doing this. She goes, I'm dreading it the entire week. And I was like, Okay, well, then that can't be like, so took us a little time to get the rebellious, oh, we got some samples, and now we're trying it. So I'm definitely gonna knock terrible. But you know what she's trying to avoid, because you've been through it too, yeah, with the hormones and the impacts on your blood sugar and your life and everything anyway, my point was, is that you heard about glps and what they can do for that, because my daughter had a problem, and I'm trying to figure it out, and I talk about it on here, and that's just a weird combination, like so you could have gone your whole life and not heard about these.

Speaker 1 29:19 Actually, I heard about them like in the media, because obviously they're everywhere at the moment you and what helped me back was always the talk about gastroparesis, and that I actually have gastroparesis, and actually only one word or one sentence you said, with something in my head that I said, thought like I need to try this. That several times, this is not even a therapeutic dose,

Scott Benner 29:53 right? So maybe I'll just go down and try that and see if it doesn't hit me. Yeah, the hard i. I would not minimize anybody's problems seriously. And gastroparesis is super serious. There are two ladies on the Facebook group that anytime glps Come up, they'll race in and leave a comment about, like, you know, people have gastroparesis, and these drugs are going to bind their stomachs up and like, and I'm not saying that couldn't happen, but you have to know your situation, like, if you've had type one diet,

Speaker 1 30:23 and then in the end, every medication has side effects. Sure,

Scott Benner 30:27 yeah, no. I mean, yeah, the greater risk is, like you said, everyone's flipping a coin when they take a drug, right? But for the people who have had type one for 3040, years, you know, can look back with honesty and say, like, you know, I had high a one CS, I had a lot of variability. The technology wasn't as good back then. The drugs weren't as good back then, like I have gastroparesis. Now, this is not a thing I want to risk. I understand that. But if you've had type one for, you know, three years and your a one C's been, you know, six and a half the whole time, you don't have gastroparesis, you're not just going to magically get it for injecting the drugs. But I think some people,

Speaker 1 31:01 but I feel like that's what some people are worried about.

Scott Benner 31:06 Yeah, so. And then they worry about that, and they think that, and then they say it out loud, and it scares everybody off by the people they're tolerated by are very well tolerated by those people like you just have to figure out who you are in the situation now, and

Speaker 1 31:17 I think also you have to be aware that you have to carefully choose what you eat. Yeah,

Scott Benner 31:26 so you're making another point that I've seen with this is that some people think magic weight loss drug, right, like

Speaker 1 31:32 if you infect the authentic and go to McDonald's in the evening and eat, I don't know what? Three burgers. It's probably not gonna go well, yeah, exactly.

Scott Benner 31:44 You do have to put an extra effort, and it sucks, because I don't think doctors are gonna tell you about it, but yeah, that's true. Listen, I've been on it for a year and a half, maybe more. I'm at my lowest, literally, today, my lowest weight. Yay, congrats. Thank you. And forget the weight like you should see, like the other measurements, you know, like the other measurements of health. So I use this scale that measures a bunch of stuff, weight, BMI, subcutaneous fat, like, all this stuff, right? And when I started, all my numbers were red, and then slowly they became yellow. And now of the 369, 12, of the 13 things it's tracking. I have four items that are yellow and the rest are green. Wow. So it's stunning. It just it's and I feel awesome, you know?

Speaker 1 32:35 But, yeah, I mean, it's similar to my story. I always had the thing with my kidneys, where they were always concerned and always on the brink of putting me onto medication again and just gone now,

Scott Benner 32:51 yeah, I talked about it on here a couple times, but they did a study about the impact of GLP on kidney disease. Yeah,

Speaker 1 32:59 I know, and I was hoping I get some effects from it as well. And there you are. And then, like a month ago, I was at my lowest weight, and was concerned I'm losing more, because it was really like my BMI was only 18.1 then, and talk to the doctors, what we do about it? And I also had tried to up my calories, because obviously I'm not getting enough calories, but I can't eat more because not working, I don't think to eat and I would feel too full, probably also partially due to the gastroparesis. And I started now drinking high caloric drinks, which is a little insane. When you're on a PLP, to bring high caloric

Scott Benner 33:51 drinks, you're trying to get in the calories somehow. Yeah, and it's working the way it's back up. I drink up protein drinks sometimes, just because they Yeah,

Speaker 1 34:01 but they don't have enough calories for me. Yeah, I need like, 800 calories in drinks.

Scott Benner 34:07 What do you drink that does this for you? A doctor

Speaker 1 34:11 can prescribe those really, yeah, that's awesome. They do this like for people who have cancer, or for all people that don't have appetite, or for people with eating disorders, yeah, it's like, it's similar to a shake, and you can have like, 100 different tastes, and not

Scott Benner 34:37 bad, right? And you know what? It's funny, because you're basically, you're bio hacking yourself. The way I'm hoping for people to think about it is that you have all these different systems in your bodies, right in your body, and they all have different settings, basically, and your settings are off, and your body's not putting them back to where they belong. So you're, you know, use the GLP to move some of the settings, but now it's causing a problem with my. Caloric sense, so I'll put them in here. Yeah,

Speaker 1 35:01 and I actually was very worried that the doctors would see this the wrong way, because the TLP isn't the problem. My body is the problem exactly. There is no reason to take away the TLP because my body works now the way it's supposed to work. So we need to add the calories and not take away the TLP. And luckily, all of my care team agreed it's

Scott Benner 35:29 excellent. Well, and did you have to do a lot of explaining to them to get them, or did they just kind of go with it? They basically

Speaker 1 35:35 just went with it. Oh, that's awesome, because they also see all the benefits. Yeah,

Scott Benner 35:40 well, they're paying but, yeah, but yeah, but sometimes they see the benefits. I mean, think about the people with type one who find the podcast and go to their doctor three months later and they're like, Hey, how are you? I know my a 1c, has always been eight, but it's 6.4 now, and the doctors go, you're having too many lows. We need to cut back your insulin. Like they panic and like they see them out, yeah? So who knows when that happens or doesn't, yeah,

Speaker 1 36:02 yeah. And I guess also, because I was very proactive and told them, hey, my weight is dropping. It's not something I want to happen. We need to address this, and this is my solution. They were probably, yeah, more prepared to help.

Scott Benner 36:20 Yeah. Also Cassandra. If they're reasonable people, they probably thought, hey, this person's really paying attention. Like, you know what I mean? Like, they would probably like it if more people came in with solutions like this for their problems. So probably good for you. No, seriously, do you feel like we covered that part of the conversation well? Because I want to ask about the G poem surgery. Yeah. Okay, so think younger, excellent, excellent. It's great. It's great story. Actually, you have gastroparesis from years of I mean, what do you think? Why do you think you have it from

Speaker 1 36:49 years of not paying tension, from in checking insulin, from high blood sugars. Okay,

Scott Benner 36:56 so now you're trying to decide to do something about it. Did you get this G poem surgery. Yeah,

Speaker 1 37:02 I mean, last time we talked, I had the procedure where they dilate the pylus, and that worked great for three months, and then I had another one, and it worked again, great for three months, but it always was kind of destroyed by some side effects from meds that delayed gastric emptying, and I was basically back to square zero, and also got SIBO, the bacterial overgrowth in my stomach, also due to the gastroparesis and then my gastro suggested to make the cheap poem, basically, not even better my situation, or Sure, partially also to better my situation with the gastroparesis. But I didn't have, like, super bad symptoms, but because also, mainly to prevent that the bacteria return again. Can

Scott Benner 38:05 I read this real quick during G poem, a flexible endoscope is inserted through the mouth into the stomach. The surgeon makes a small incision in the stomach lining and creates a tunnel to access the pyloric sphincter, the valve controlling the passage of stomach contents into the small intestine by cutting the muscle around this valve, the procedure relaxes the sphincter, facilitating better gastric emptying. That's the idea, right? Exactly, okay. And so you had this done, yes, and it wasn't fun. I mean, beyond that description,

Speaker 1 38:36 I mean the surgery itself was easy, because obviously they put me under and the preparation wasn't that much fun, because the surgeon told me, Well, yeah, just don't eat after midnight and come in in the morning and we do the surgery. But I knew they need an empty stomach, and if I fast for just shy of 12 hours, my stomach won't be empty, right?

Scott Benner 39:00 Did you say to him, I have gastroparesis, that's not going to work. Yeah.

Speaker 1 39:04 And then we agreed on seven on a 72 hour fast, wow. And yeah, that was hard. How'd

Scott Benner 39:13 you keep your blood sugar up for 72 hours? It

Speaker 1 39:15 was actually pretty easy. With the loo. I didn't change any of the settings, and it was just smooth sailing. I was

Scott Benner 39:23 gonna say, Arden got up this morning early to go to the dentist, and so she's been up for a couple hours now, and her blood sugar is incredibly stable. So

Speaker 1 39:33 and that's also something I wanted to point out, because I see that very often in the group, that people are scared to go in with an empty stomach for anesthesia, if it's a planned surgery, it's actually the best time to basal test beforehand, and then you don't have to change any settings, and you just go in and change nothing. Yeah, I understand.

Scott Benner 39:59 Why it's scary. But once your settings are good, especially on an algorithm that's, you know, really dialed in, you can go a fair amount of time without eating, yeah, yeah. But it sucks not eating for 72 hours, I imagine, yeah,

Speaker 1 40:11 yeah. And then, I mean, after surgery, I couldn't eat for two more days.

Scott Benner 40:16 Oh, gosh, no kidding. Yeah. Oh, how hungry were

Speaker 1 40:21 you? Kind of the wound had to heal, and they couldn't the muscle had to relax, and yeah, the stomach chest shouldn't

Scott Benner 40:29 work. Did they give you IVs? Or did you stay in the hospital? I

Speaker 1 40:33 had to stay in the hospital for two nights for that reason, particularly, and actually on after the surgery, my sugar started to grow, and then I turned back the basal, but it wasn't enough. And they said, Yeah, you can have one or two dextrose tabs. I was like, yeah, one do nothing, but let's try.

Scott Benner 40:58 You say I need an IV with some dextrous and it is what I need. Yeah,

Speaker 1 41:03 well, they offered me that, but I was scared I'm gonna go high and I don't want high blood sugars when my body should be able to heal. Right now, I hear you after a few dextrose tabs, I agreed on the dextrose iwi, but said I'm deciding how much goes in.

Scott Benner 41:21 Nice look at you, and they listened. Yeah.

Speaker 1 41:26 I had a very, very nice nurse who listened, and that just rang the bell every 10 minutes. Like, go little back, go little up and like, within an hour, it was perfectly dialed in. I had some insulin going, I had some dextrose going, and it was smooth sailing again. Did you

Scott Benner 41:47 have like, daydreams about having access to this dextrose in your real life? Not use this at home some days?

Unknown Speaker 41:57 Yeah. Honestly, nice. The SIBO

Scott Benner 41:59 overgrowth. How did they handle that? Probably

Speaker 1 42:01 around 200 rounds of antibiotics.

Scott Benner 42:06 What kind oral or inject? Yeah,

Speaker 1 42:10 it's like a special antibiotic they only use for SIBO, and that always worked short time I felt great on the treatment, and maybe, like two weeks after, but I did a fair amount of research there as well, and there are also a lot of natural treatments, and basically the natural treatment worked better for me.

Scott Benner 42:37 Let me ask first about the medical intervention. So they're giving you the antibiotics, trying to get your gut to balance out, right? But do they know why it's like, Why do you have the overgrowth? They

Speaker 1 42:49 think it's from the gastroparesis. Okay, that's what I was just so much food in there. Oh, and actually, what I wanted to tell about the 72 hour fast after the surgery, I asked the surgeon, like if there was any food left in my stomach. And he said, Yeah. I mean, it was almost empty, but not completely. 72

Scott Benner 43:09 hours, and your stomach wasn't empty yet. Yeah. Wow. And then what did you find naturally to to address the SIBO

Speaker 1 43:16 Berberine, and then oil of oregano, and there's also a third one, like a combo of three mats that you have to take for three or four weeks. And, I mean, if you Google it, there are, there is a ton of research around that. There are dosing schemes. You can figure that out on your own. And actually, even my gastro knew about those treatment options and said For some the natural remedies just had better and that I should try

Scott Benner 43:53 it. Berberine and oregano oil, yeah,

Speaker 1 43:57 and something else. Are you still taking them every day? No, no, no, it's just like four week course. And I had to, I mean, I was on it, maybe on and off on meds for half a year, so it took quite a while to heal. And then I also did the low fault map diet, and just to help manage symptoms, and I still can't eat everything again.

Scott Benner 44:27 Where are you now? Like, in like, where's your health? Do you feel like you're still working towards something, or do you feel like you got there? I'm not

Speaker 1 44:35 back 100% but I'm fine where I'm at. I just tried to minimize my Gluten intake, I can't have too much garlic, and that's about it. And, oh yeah, and I have to pay attention around fruity stuff with fructose. That's still a bit tricky. But I mean, if I go to a restaurant and have spaghetti for one. Night, nothing will happen. I just don't do it three nights in a row.

Scott Benner 45:03 Yeah, the fructose, because it it kind of like, what does it seed your stomach with all that sugar, and you get the overgrowth. The low

Speaker 1 45:11 fault maps is all about different sugars that can ferment in your stomach and that that helps the overgrow to happen, I have

Scott Benner 45:22 to tell you, I'm really happy for you, because it's probably been a year or more now, for people listening who don't know like Cassandra is a group expert in the private Facebook group, and there's a pretty big handful of lovely people who kind of bang around in there and they see people's questions and they'll answer them, like, Hey, you should try this episode of the podcast. Or, you know, here's a post about that, like, just, you know, trying to help. It's a really big community, and you know, people need to be directed. Sometimes. A Facebook group is not a perfect way to introduce you to a podcast, but if people are there to say you should try this episode or check out this list, it's really helpful. And so Cassandra and a number of other great people are doing that, and I couldn't possibly begin to thank them enough. But at the end of the year, I usually call everybody and, like, we chat for a long time, usually, like, it's usually an hour or more, like, just kind of get on the phone and say hello and stuff like that, and you and I spoke. I don't know if it was last Christmas or the Christmas before that. I really don't know. But do you know last Christmas? Last Christmas? Okay, while I was driving to see Arden, I think, yeah, I remember we talked for a long time, and I remember getting off the phone and thinking, Cassandra's really going through a lot, and you sounded tired from it. I was, yeah, yeah, you found it really beat up. Like, not like you were giving up or anything, but just like, like, this had been going on too long for too many days without enough answers that how you felt, yeah,

Speaker 1 46:52 yeah. I mean, it was exactly in that period where I tried to figure out the PCOS. And then I guess also, shortly before our call was I switched over to Iaps and just couldn't figure the darn thing out. And felt really like a failure.

Scott Benner 47:15 When we got off that call, I thought, oh gosh. Like, I don't think Cassandra is okay, but you sound so much better today. I am better. Yeah, it's awesome. That's really great. I'm still very, very happy for you, is all I wanted to say. Thank you. Yeah, it's a interesting to check in on people's lives and see they mean, I'm obviously not there every day while you're doing the work or or, you know, feeling the pressure to see you in, you know, gaps of time, gaps of time, and to watch it get better. It's just, it's uplifting, because you didn't give up. You figured out a lot on your own. These are not easy things to figure out. This gut stuff is not easy to figure out. You know, most doctors around gastroparesis are just going to tell you to eat a gastroparesis diet, and that's all, that's it. That's all. It's going to happen, and they'll give you pain medication for your stomach. They won't actually give you something to help you, because

Speaker 1 48:05 there also isn't that much for diabetes, gastroparesis to help

Scott Benner 48:11 you get something to numb your stomach, basically, yeah, and then that's that. But you mean, look at he did the, by the way, the G poem in surgery that we talked about as gastric parole endoscopic, my Myo to me, geez, no wonder they call it g poem, you know, like, that's the thing you had to go find out about, you know what I mean, and like, do your research about, and go through the, you know, the whole process of doing it, just to try to get some relief. How long ago was that surgery?

Speaker 1 48:41 It was in June. So six months is it still working?

Scott Benner 48:45 Yes, that's awesome. So did you have to adjust your insulin because of the rate that you were digesting? No, I

Speaker 1 48:53 also didn't have such a big effect as with the dilations. I feel like there I had to adjust my insulin more, but I feel like, since I'm on your same pick, my basal went down quite a bit, but I have to be more aggressive with my Bolus, because

Scott Benner 49:15 you don't have a lot of background basal. I'm not sure it might be are you using less? I mean, you probably are. But how much less insulin are you using now than a year ago? Listen,

Speaker 1 49:26 this is a very difficult comparison, because I'm eating much more now, but I can tell you my basal went down by around 40%

Scott Benner 49:37 Wow. Do you have a different relationship with food today than you did prior? I mean, not crazy.

Speaker 1 49:41 I always was a healthy eater. I don't use a lot of processed food at home. I tried to cook a meal every day. The only thing I probably noticed is, for example, if we go out. Out and then have dinner. And then the waitress comes again and asks if you want dessert. I'm like, nah, nah, it's fine. And before the authentic I would have thought about it more. Yeah, it's not that I don't like it anymore, but it says, In the grand scheme of things. It doesn't matter that much if I don't have dessert or something sweet doesn't

Scott Benner 50:25 bother you, don't feel like you're missing anything. Yeah, CNN did a special about glps, and I put it on, and I watched it, and it was a little like this. Part of me it was like, Is this an ad? Like, you know, I couldn't tell exactly what was happening. At one point, they go to this person who tries to make the argument like, you know, well, it's ruined eating for me. And I'm like, I don't understand the argument here exactly like, you were very unhealthy prior to this, and you're describing this insane improvement in your overall health, your weight, you know, all these other measurables, like, have gotten better, better, better, better, and at the end you cry like you're like, ah, but I want cake after dinner, and I'm like, go get a different hobby. Yeah, I

Speaker 1 51:12 actually had a very funny discussion a couple of weeks ago with my family doctor. He told me that he has a patient on a TLP, and he's on it for weight loss, and he said he wants to stop it every few weeks so he can eat normally.

Scott Benner 51:32 I don't understand. So people are

Unknown Speaker 51:35 like that,

Scott Benner 51:36 yeah, listen, I understand if that's how you feel. I guess what I don't understand is seeing all these improvements in your life that create such you know, I think

Speaker 1 51:47 you know what, Scott, I noticed this also from your stories that you're not so emotionally bound to Food. Sure, yeah, that's fair. And that's also something I'm not that emotionally bound to food. And some people are very, very emotionally bound to food. And for them, it probably feels like more like missing out, even if they see all the advantages it brings. Yeah,

Scott Benner 52:19 I mean, I would say, go talk to a therapist. Don't stop your medication for a week to eat differently. I mean, you know, and I don't even mean that funny, like, I'm just like, you know, obvious. Obviously you've got to, like, an issue. Yeah, you have an issue. Go figure out what it is. Like, you're so close now. And I, you know, my heart goes out to people who feel that way. I know people who have that attachment. I've seen some of them be able to push through it with GLP. And I've seen others like you describe I talked to this one person this past summer, and they clearly have pre diabetes, right? But it's probably type two already, and a weight issue, and their job requires a certain A, 1c, so they go on a GLP long enough to bring their A 1c down, and then get the test so they can keep their job. And then they go off and go off it immediately because they want to eat. And I had a very frank conversation with the person. I was like, You're killing yourself. You're you're gonna die, like, running around with an A 1c like, in double digits, you know? And I was like, just, don't, you know, like, and the person described to me that one of their joys is to come home after work, take a bag of frozen french fries, put them on a sheet pan, bake them and put cheese over top of them and eat them. Wow. And the person was like, I don't want to not do that. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 53:43 you can't do that.

Scott Benner 53:46 No, no. TLP, yeah, you made the point earlier. There are going to be people who have stomach issues because it interacts poorly with them. Their body morphology is not able to handle it like but there are other people who slow their gastric emptying down with the drug, and then just continue to push in foods that are high fat, processed, not good food for you. You get stuck in there. Yeah, it's not like you're trying to digest a bunch of, you know, natural food. You're, you know, it's chemicals and additives and etc, and you're just jamming it in there in a slower digestive situation, and they're like, Well, I have stomach problems for the GLP, I would argue you have stomach problems from the bag of French fries, from the way they eat. And we need doctors to see the difference in that before they make blind judgments about, like, what this medication is for and what it's not for. You know, because I

Speaker 1 54:37 also had a person in my social circle who is overweight, and they tried the TLP as well. They tried it after I started. So I knew quite a bit to tell her how to handle the start and some tips and tricks. She couldn't do it. She just said, I can't eat such small portions. That isn't healthy for me,

Scott Benner 55:01 but they're significantly overweight. Yeah, yeah, I understand. Well, you tell yourself whatever. You tell yourself, I had side effects from GLP in the beginning, like, I probably didn't take what you would consider to be a well formed bowel movement for quite some time. And you know, my wife and I were doing it together, and she's like, are you gonna stop? And I'm like, I'm losing weight. I was like, No, you know, if this is how I gotta pay the piper to, like, you know, to get where I need to go, then I'm gonna find a way to get through this. And yeah, I had to take magnesium oxide to keep going to the bathroom. And it led to, you know, loose stool. And I was like, I guess this is the price I'm paying for, you know, for getting back to good. So I'll keep going, you know. And now it's not like that anymore, but it was like that for longer than I wanted it to be. I'll tell you that much. But I was like, I'm persevering. What have we not talked about that we should have? This is a good conversation.

Speaker 1 55:58 I think we covered everything that I wanted to talk about. Awesome,

Scott Benner 56:02 awesome. Hold on a second. Arden's texting me. Hi Arden. She said, the dentist, let me see if she's out now. She said, Are you recording? And I said, I'm almost done. Why? Let's see what she says, a drum roll. She's gonna want breakfast. What is she asking about? A lot of times, my kids just want me to cook for them. I'm hungry and I have to leave to get naughty in an hour or two, are you home? She could be in the house. I don't know. This is so boring, texting with Arden on, yeah, okay, I'll be down. She just wants breakfast. She's 20, by the way. She could use her hands and make it herself, but apparently it's better when I make it. But I think that's just convenience, yeah, well, that's it, yeah, exactly, right. They're like, Oh, it's better when you make it. I'm like, You mean, because I make it,

Speaker 1 56:44 yeah, in every aspect of it, you know, yeah,

Scott Benner 56:49 exactly I want to cook or clean up, or any of the stuff I have to get her back on. I've recordings with her. I'm starting to run out of my recordings of things she doesn't understand. Have

Speaker 1 56:58 to go do some love this series. You definitely have to continue. Oh, okay,

Scott Benner 57:01 good. I'll have to tell her, that's awesome. We were talking about the one that's coming out next week. It's about Bridget Mendler, like the Disney actress. No idea, nothing about this girl's like, a, you know, on a Disney TV show as a kid. Then she, you know, pumps out a couple of, like, hit pop songs, then she goes off to college, and, you know, who knows where she goes, and now she's running, like, running a satellite company, okay? And I'm like, What the hell? So Arden's just like, there's these crazy she's like, how did this happen? So we talked about, but I do love this guy. I like them. It's funny. I like them with Jenny too, because we talk more about, like, diabetes stuff in those Yeah. I think it's a great concept. Yeah. So I want to get more people to come on and do it. I'm going to, in 2025, I'm going to kind of put the call out for people and try to get people to pop on and just like, pick one topic, just like, I don't understand this, and I want to talk about it. And so together, we won't understand it. We'll figure it out. I'm definitely looking forward to that. Good, good. I'm glad. Oh, it's awesome to talk to you. Well, I'll see you. Oh, no, you're the oh, we're doing a group. What we're doing a group expert like, get together on Zoom. But we had to do it at a certain trying to stay up. What time of the morning? What time would it be for you if you were there 2am

Speaker 1 58:21 tell people where you live in Switzerland. Yeah, we

Scott Benner 58:26 adjusted it. We usually do it at one time, or Cassandra can come. But then it seems to mess up the people on the West Coast of America. So we moved it around a little bit so they could make it. But then it puts it like super late at night for you. So I will understand totally. Obviously, if you can't come, I'll try to manage you should pre record a message and send it over to us. This was really great to come back on and do a follow up like this. I really do appreciate it and all the hard work you put into the group,

Speaker 1 58:53 too. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me again. It's a pleasure.

Scott Benner 58:57 You're awesome to talk to. You're great to talk to because you have struggles, you pay attention to them, you research them, you put stuff into action. It works, or it doesn't work, you move on. And I think that's how more people should handle their health. Probably all people should handle their health. People like that are always very good at retelling their story, because they so authentically came to the answer that they really do understand the journey that makes sense. Makes sense? Yes, thank you. No, you're good at you're good at explaining your story. So it's always great to have you on. It's a pleasure. Hold on one second for me. Thanks for tuning in today, and thanks to Medtronic diabetes for sponsoring this episode. We've been talking about Medtronic mini med 780 G system today, an automated insulin delivery system that helps make diabetes management easier day and night, whether it's their meal detection technology or the Medtronic extended infusion set, it all comes together to simplify life with. Diabetes. Go find out more at my link, Medtronic diabetes.com/juice box. I'd like to thank the ever since 365 for sponsoring this episode of The Juicebox Podcast, and remind you that if you want the only sensor that gets inserted once a year and not every 14 days, you want the Eversense CGM, ever since cgm.com/juice, box, one year, one CGM. I can't thank you enough for listening. Please make sure you're subscribed, you're following in your audio app. I'll be back tomorrow with another episode of The Juicebox Podcast. Are you starting to see patterns but you can't quite make sense of them? You're like, Oh, if I Bolus here, this happens, but I don't know what to do. Should I put in a little less? A little more? If you're starting to have those thoughts, you're starting to think this isn't going the way the doctor said it would. I think I see something here, but I can't be sure. Once you're having those thoughts, you're ready for the diabetes Pro Tip series from the Juicebox Podcast. It begins at Episode 1000 you can also find it at Juicebox podcast.com up in the menu, and you can find a list in the private Facebook group. Just check right under the featured tab at the top, it'll show you lists of a ton of stuff, including the Pro Tip series, which runs from episode 1000 to 1025 Hey, what's up everybody? If you've noticed that the podcast sounds better and you're thinking like, how does that happen? What you're hearing is Rob at wrong way. Recording, doing his magic to these files. So if you want him to do his magic to you, wrong way. Recording.com, you got a podcast. You want somebody to edit it. You want rob you.

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Scott Benner 3/23/25 Scott Benner 3/23/25

#1470 Small Sips: That's Just Diabetes

Diabetes isn’t the only factor affecting blood sugar—other variables like stress and hormones play a role too.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 00:00 Hello friends, welcome to the sips series. These foundational strategies were nominated by listeners. They told me, these are the ideas in the podcast that truly made a difference for them. So I distilled them down into short, actionable insights. There's not going to be any fluff or complex jargon, just practical, real world diabetes management that you can start applying today. And I know your time is valuable, so we're keeping these short. Another small sip will come out once a week for the foreseeable future. If you like what you hear, check out the Pro Tip series or the bold beginning series for more. Those series are available in the menu at Juicebox podcast.com and you can find complete lists of all of the series in the featured tab on the private Facebook group. Please remember that nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan or becoming bold with insulin. The questions you have, I guarantee you there's answers to them in the Juicebox Podcast, and it's all free. You so Jenny, this one's weird, because it's more of a thing I said one time, and then we can, kind of like, pick it apart a little bit. Okay. So I think the point I was trying to make to people back then was that you just shouldn't take what someone tells you and just blindly do it, especially if it's not working. And I think the way I illuminated that idea back then was I said, if you were being taught to drive a car, and for some reason, the person the instructor said to you, just push halfway down on the brake when you come up on a curve, and you came up on your first curve, and you pressed halfway down on the brake, and your car skid off and went into the bushes, and you got your car out of the bushes, and you got back in your car the next day, and you approached that curve, would you press the brake halfway and go? Well, this is what the instructor told me to do. Or would you say, I wonder what happens if I push on this thing a little harder, right? So, right. So in that driving situation, everyone learns how to drive and doesn't know what the hell they're doing at first, right? And you make these quick adjustments, Trial by Fire adjustments often while you're learning to drive, which

Jennifer Smith, CDE 02:39 is why my father took me to a parking lot exactly like so he could yell stuff. We're not gonna go on the real street, we're gonna go around the parking lot. We could yell

Scott Benner 02:47 stop 1000 times and still have trouble, right? Or have time. But my point is that a lot of this, my expectation from making the podcast from so long, is that people just have different personalities. Like, of course, somebody goes to the doctor, and the doctor says, halfway down that the brake pedal, they will not change. And there are plenty of people who hear that and go, Hey, look, I drove into the bushes. I'm going to push harder on I don't care what you say, if you're in that first camp related to diabetes, you could end up for the rest of your life making small decisions that could go much better and never will. And so to me, I think you have to take control. And by control I mean a little bit of responsibility and a little bit of understanding how insulin works. You're gonna hear me say this over and over again in all these episodes, but diabetes type one using insulin, it's a lot about timing and amount. Relate that to my little story, if it helps you or not. But what I'm saying is you got to learn how to set your settings. You got to learn how to change your settings. You got to learn when to Bolus a little more at a meal, when to Bolus little less at a meal that you don't always need 15 carbs to stop below like these little things will change your life if you take control of them, right?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 04:05 And it goes along with also the concept of using, if you are using a continuous monitor, using that to your advantage, because then you can see, well, goodness, when I pushed on the brakes a little bit didn't work fast enough, or it didn't work the way that I expected. When I gave a little bit more and I got a little bit more comfortable, look at the difference. Look at the change in the graph, right and that's how you can evaluate thankfully, you know, we have that information now where finger sticks only gave you a blip in time right now, and you missed all of the information in between, so you couldn't make as much, I guess, true adjustment. That made sense if you're

Scott Benner 04:49 an old head and you've been around forever and you were resisting, you know, technology apply the brakes, idea to that, you know, like, push harder. Get a CGM if you can afford it, you're. Insurance covers it, and you don't have one, please get one. Like, even, just try it. Don't put it on once I go the thing. Like, just wear it for a little while. Like, try to really live with it for a bit. Because I promise you, it's going to change your health, and it'll change your psychological health, it'll it'll change your physical health. It'll make diabetes easier. So, I mean, that's one idea. Like, if you're out there managing like a baller with MDI, I'm not saying go get a pump, right? But if you're struggling all the time, maybe give it a shot. You know what I mean? And I didn't mean for this to be about technology, really, but what you said really, kind of like, lit me up inside. Like you've got to be willing to try things. Maybe that really is the message, right? Like, you have to try things to see what happens. You can't just say, Well, the doctor told me, and this is what happened. So I did what I was supposed to do, and it didn't work. That's just diabetes. Because, I promise you, it's not just diabetes. And I don't mean this in a boastful way, but if Jenny came to your house and bullish, you, it wouldn't go that way, right? And if I did it, no, can you imagine, if you, like, showed up all proud, you're like, I'll take care of this. Nothing, nothing changed. Just because someone didn't give you good information doesn't mean that's your lot in life. Like, you can go get that information for yourself, correct? You

Jennifer Smith, CDE 06:20 can and again, where the technology piece of that comes in, I think what it offers is the person who is more the personality that would take what was suggested. This is the black and white rule. This is what I was told to do, but without any new technology, even as much as just a CGM, you're in the dark about what that recommendation is or is not doing well for you, and you have nothing else to go on. So if you want to gain some confidence and be able to step outside of just a baseline recommendation, not that you're not going to take it from the doctor or the clinician, you're going to try it. But then with more information, you can actually make adjustments, or you can go back and say, You know what? I tried this. This is what I saw. Don't you think I could do it this way? Right? If you feel the need to really get the recommendation back from your doctor or your clinician, then do your own homework and bring them back some information so that they can help you further, because it's not that they don't want to, right? And

Scott Benner 07:25 if your clinician ends up being not as good of an instructor as Jenny's father was, and I, I'll, I'll sound like I'm pushing people towards the thing, but it doesn't need to be my thing. Go find a friend who knows how to drive and ask them for some advice. Go to the Juicebox Podcast, Facebook group and ask there. Like, go find another person with type one, and you can't find a person with type one. I got over 55,000 of them. You can go talk to in the Facebook group. Facebook group is free. It's very kind, gentle place. Head over there. Ask your question out loud, mate. Hey, listen, I've been seeing this happening. I told I told my doctor. My doctor says, Don't worry about it. I'm listening to this podcast now. I'm worried about it, right? What do you guys think? Because the tiniest bit you don't know which tiny bit of information is going to just light a candle in your mind and make you go, Oh, I understand. Now, at some place on this list of shorts that we're doing, someone said the thing that changed my life was when Scott told the story about the M, M's, like, that simple, when I just said, like, and we'll do it another episode, but it's a parable, like, it's a it's a 62nd story about a thing that happened to me and my daughter in an endos office, and 18 years later, some lady in Kalamazoo is like, Oh my God, my blood sugars are better now, because she heard that was the one thing that made her mind click into and she went, Oh, I know what to do now, right?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 08:46 Yeah, well, I will actually to just put a plus towards the Facebook group. I think the the quality, sort of experts, I guess they're called now, I don't do much social media in Yes, so

Scott Benner 09:00 I have a handful of lovely people who volunteer their time as group experts, yes, when you ask a question, they will answer your question with links from the podcast that should help you, which

Jennifer Smith, CDE 09:11 I love, because, again, while it's valuable, the whole diabetes online community is valuable in many, many different arenas, CGM, pump, use, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. But I think you can, especially as a person asking a baseline question, you can get overwhelmed with the responses. And because each and every response is the lived person, the lived experience of that person, this, I see your issue is such and such, give this a try, and the next person is like, Well, that didn't work for me. This is what worked for me. The original question is, I know what to do. I got 50 responses here, right? But I love that the experts step in and they say, Hey, if you want this whole concept described to you, go here, right? Yeah, it's great. It's definitely

Scott Benner 10:01 the internet. Like, it's never gonna not be the internet, right? But no, I've definitely seen people like, I have a stomach ache, and five minutes later they have celiac I'm like, I was a pretty big leap. But Jenny's point is, is valid, and it's what makes it so valuable, which is, everyone comes in with their experience. And the truth is, that's a real post I saw recently, hey, my kid's stomach hurts. Someone said that happened to my kid and it ended up being celiac. Somebody said that happened to my kid and it ended up being stress that happened to my kid ended up being constipation. And I said, Hey, that happened to my kid and it ended up being this. And we all and you know what in there somewhere is your answer, right? Like, right, very likely of all the responses that came in. Now, I know it gets scary because one person's like, Oh, my stomach hurt once is because I was shot at the bus station and, you know, like, can you like, oh, that's probably not it. I would just take what everybody says, write it down and go, I'm going to try to figure out if in here lies the answer, right? And that, and it normally does. But you know, between me and you and everybody listening, please don't just accept that's just diabetes. It's the way it is. There's nothing I can do about it. And as much as I think there are tons and tons and tons of wonderful clinicians. I also believe there's probably an equal amount of them who are winging in a prayer in it and don't know what the hell they're telling you, and they've told you something you think is a rule, and it's not even right, and you're going to go live your whole life that way. So check and do it for yourself. Push down on the break if you're running into the weeds, is what I would say, good idea. Are you starting to see patterns, but you can't quite make sense of them? You're like, Oh, if I Bolus here, this happens, but I don't know what to do. Should I put in a little less, a little more, if you're starting to have those thoughts, if you're starting to think this isn't going the way the doctor said it would. I think I see something here, but I can't be sure. Once you're having those thoughts, you're ready for the diabetes Pro Tip series from the Juicebox Podcast. It begins at Episode 1000 you can also find it at Juicebox podcast.com up in the menu, and you can find a list in the private Facebook group, just check right under the featured tab at the top, it'll show you lists of a ton of stuff, including the Pro Tip series, which runs from episode 1000 to 1025 if you or a loved one, was just diagnosed with type one diabetes, and you're looking for some fresh perspective, the bold beginning series from The Juicebox Podcast is a terrific place to start. That series is with myself and Jenny Smith. Jenny is a CD CES, a registered dietitian and a type one for over 35 years, and in the bowl beginning series, Jenny and I are going to answer the questions that most people have after a type one diabetes diagnosis. The series begins at episode 698, in your podcast player, or you can go to Juicebox podcast.com and click on bold beginnings in the menu. I can't thank you enough for listening. Please make sure you're subscribed, you're following in your audio app. I'll be back tomorrow with another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

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