The 5 Most Commonly Asked Questions About My Type 1 Diabetes

Current favorite bathing suit can be found here. 

1. Where do you wear/hide your pump when you are wearing a dress or a bathing suit?  Ah well I have become quite the undercover agent when it comes to concealing my pump in tricky outfits.  When I wear a dress with straps I will use the clear pump clip and clip it in the center of my bra in the front.  So, the pump and infusion tubing are facing down.  I have tried to just shimmy my pump in between the girls inside my bra and that never works and usually results in it falling out when I bend over and me acting like an organ just fell out whenever that does happen ha!  So the clip action is the best.  If I am wearing a dress with a strapless bra or where it is not possible to clip it into the center part of my bra, I will clip the pump to the side of my undies.  This works great if I am wearing a maxi dress or a dress that is not tight on the bottom half.  This obviously does make it almost impossible to bolus in public but a quick trip to the ladies room solves that.  When I wear a bathing suit I usually just tuck it into the bottoms on the side.  I also have to get creative with tucking in the tubing so my kids don't pull it out if we are just playing at the beach or outside of the pool. And then when I get in the water I obviously take my pump off completely.

2.  How did you start eating Paleo and how does it help with your diabetes management?  I have always had issues with grains and legumes and whenever I would eat them in the past they would always without fail cause my blood sugars to spike and then drop.  I could never quite figure out how to cover for them so I just started avoiding those two things pretty much altogether.  So, when the Paleo diet become really popular a few years ago I just figured this would be an easy lifestyle to follow, and it was and still is.  I would say I am not as big of a meat fanatic as the typical Paleo person and I eat more of a vegetable based diet but for me this is the best and easiest way to avoid spikes and to control my blood sugars through my diet. I do still eat cheese because I just can not go through life without putting feta cheese on my salad or having cheese and salami together but other than that I would say I follow about an 80% Paleo diet. My Paleo grocery shopping list can be found here.

3. I notice that you love wine and I would love to know how does alcohol affect your blood sugars?  Okay yes it is no surprise that I love my wine and I am happy to report that for some weird phenomenon wine does nothing to my blood sugars. It does not raise it or lower it.  Maybe I am immune haha.  But, other alcohols can take a major tole on my blood sugars. I avoid beer almost all together because it always spikes me and makes me feel so sluggish because of the gluten and hard alcohol like vodka usually tends to be mixed with drinks that are full of sugar and in turn these tend to make my blood sugars rise and then fall fast several hours later or early in the morning the next day. So when I do drink alcohol I usually just stick to wine.

4.  Did you ever have a diabetes burnout? Yes and I talked about that in great length in this post.

5.  I remember you mentioned you were going to go on a pump vacation a while back.  How did that go?  It lasted only one week and it sucked big time. I was quickly reminded how much I hate doing shots.  Also, because I have had the luxury of bolusing and then snacking with the pump that had to stop with the pump vacation since every time I wanted a snack I had to give myself a shot.  I was also having so many highs and overall I just felt super crappy. So after one short week I decided I will forever love my pump, stop complaining about it and never do that again.

I would love to do a part two to this post so if you have any other questions that you did not see covered I am more than happy to answer them on the next post.