A note before you read: This is my personal experience with type 1 diabetes (T1D). It isn't medical advice, and I'm not promising any of it will work the same way for you. Our bodies are different. Our circumstances are different. I'm sharing as a person with T1D who found some things that helped me, in case a piece of it helps you, too. Always discuss anything involving insulin doses or medications with your healthcare team.

One more thing before I get into it: food tracking isn't right for everyone. If you're in recovery from disordered eating, or you notice tracking pulling you somewhere unkind, please skip that part of this post and talk to someone you trust. It took me years and a lot of work to feel safe, and it still might not be safe for you. That's not a failure. It's information. If you want support, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline is free and staffed by licensed therapists who specialize in eating disorders: 866-662-1235, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET.

Disclosure: I'm a MiniMed Champion and a Dexcom Warrior. I wasn't paid to write this, neither company reviewed it, and I have no relationship with MyFitnessPal. These are simply the tools I use and prefer. Full disclosures at the end.

Months ago, I was working harder for worse results

My Dexcom went off at 2 a.m. Then again, around 4.

I'd get up, treat the low, go back to bed, and wait out the rebound. In the morning, I'd look at my graph and tell myself I'd handled it.

I hadn't. I was taking too much basal (long-acting) insulin. Most of those lows were mine.

I wasn't tracking my carbs honestly either. I was eating in ways that weren't supporting me, and I didn't want to look at that too closely.

Underneath it all, I was living a life that didn't leave much room for me. I'm not going to get into the details. Those are mine. What matters is that I let go of what was no longer serving me, and when I did, I finally had enough of myself left over to take care of myself.

Here's everything that changed after that:

Tracking my food gave me information, not restrictions

I avoided food tracking for years because I assumed it meant giving things up. After experiencing a disordered relationship with food in my teens, I was scared those feelings might reignite. But here's the thing—tracking my food didn't mean restriction, and those feelings didn't come back.

I use MyFitnessPal. I log what I eat, I pay attention to my macronutrients (macros), and I follow a plan that fits my life realistically. I haven't cut out a single food I love. I'm just more thoughtful about how and when I have them.

Here's the strange part: I'm eating less and feeling more nourished.

Awareness was the whole thing! That's it. For those of us with diabetes, food is never just about the food itself. It's math, timing, and a decision that follows you around for the next four hours, maybe even days.

Paying closer attention made every other choice easier.

I was missing my protein and didn't know it

The first thing tracking showed me was how little protein I was actually eating. I'd been stress-eating carbs more than I'd like to admit, and I didn't connect that to how flat I'd been feeling.

Protein slows digestion and softens the blood sugar spike that comes after a meal. Once I improved my protein intake to meet my nutrition and fitness goals, my post-meal blood sugar curves also changed almost immediately.

My energy improved. I stayed full longer. My numbers steadied. I'd been treating those as three separate problems, but they were always connected. Because that's holistic health, baby!

Water isn't a small thing

MyFitnessPal tracks hydration, too, and I've used that logging feature almost every single day. Dehydration concentrates the glucose (sugar) in your blood and makes diabetes management much harder than it needs to be. Getting enough water supports digestion, helps my levels stay stable, and keeps me fuller longer.

It was a hot summer! I've felt better in it than I have in years, and some of that is as simple as a full glass of water. I also made an honest effort to balance that water against my caffeine intake, which sits on top of your daily water intake.

I commit to drinking 80 ounces of water per day. If I have 24 ounces of caffeine, that number needs to rise to 104 ounces. Do I get it right every day? No, of course not! I'm human. But I get close most days, and that consistency matters.

The small habits we make matter most!

I don't stress about eating ice cream or enjoying a piece of gluten-free cake, because it's not a habit. And not all cake or ice cream is created equal. The kind you choose and how often you eat it matter. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Halo Top, Jeni's Ice Cream, and a local gluten-free bakery. I set personal rules around these foods to keep myself on track without feeling restricted or punished.

Food is meant to be enjoyed!

Less stress meant better blood sugars

This is the change I most want you to hear, because it's the one least likely to show up on a clinic checklist.

Stress hormones raise blood sugar. That's not a feeling; it's physiology. Cortisol and adrenaline tell your liver to release stored glucose, which helps if you're in danger and is awful if the "danger" is a job, a group chat, or other situation you've outgrown.

So I started letting go. I started accepting who I am. I started setting boundaries and then holding them, which is much harder than setting them.

This is still a work in progress, and I think it always will be. I'll keep at it until it stops being something I have to practice and starts being part of who I am.

My time in range (TIR) improved. My lows went down. That didn't come from an insulin adjustment. That came from my life getting quieter.

I want to be careful here. "Reduce your stress" can land as blame, and I don't mean it that way. I've received it that way, too. I get it. I still do sometimes. It never feels good when someone else points out that you're stressed. I'm willing to bet most of us have been on the receiving and sending ends of that.

Not everyone can walk away from what's not supporting them, and nobody deserves to be told their blood sugars are their own fault. But if you do have room to put something down to lift yourself back up, putting that down counts as diabetes care.

Whether they're micro or macro decisions, they matter for your holistic health and wellbeing.

Reducing my alarms helped more than I expected

I don't only mean my continuous glucose monitor (CGM) alarms, though those quieted down too once everything else improved.

I mean all of it. Notifications, alerts, pings, and sounds I couldn't control or predict. It felt like a butterfly flapping its wings could set them off. For a long time, I lived surrounded by them and never questioned what they were doing to me.

I didn't have the language then for why they bothered me so much. I do now. Between T1D and sensory challenges, I hadn't yet understood that I'm more sensitive to that kind of input than I ever accounted for. I felt dysregulated all the time.

Here's what I learned from that: You can't live in a low-grade state of alert and expect calm blood sugars. Mine weren't calm.

Turning down the noise around me has done more for my TIR than I expected. A nervous system that never fully powers down eventually shows up in your numbers.

It wasn't just anxiety: it was ADHD

I'm going to be vulnerable here because I think somebody reading this needs it. I know I did years ago.

For years, I wondered if something was going on beyond diabetes. I wondered about anxiety. I wondered about obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). This summer, I finally got tested and got answers.

OCD was ruled out. Anxiety was there. But so was ADHD, and ADHD was the piece I'd only considered in passing. I'd spent years watching TikToks of women getting diagnosed later in life, nodding along, subscribing to the channels. And still telling myself I was making it up... that it couldn't be me.

I started medication for it. Not long after, I understood something I could never have seen from the inside: a huge amount of my anxiety was triggered by ADHD. My brain wasn't anxious about everything. It was running at full speed with no brakes, and the anxiety was the byproduct.

Getting diagnosed has been one of the most helpful things I've done for myself in a long time. For the first time in years, I feel safe inside my own head.

I'm putting this in a diabetes post on purpose because the two were never separate. Yet, they felt the same to me. Growing up with T1D made it easy to blame everything in my life on it: what I was going through, how I was feeling, and especially how I was reacting to the world around me.

T1D asks you to remember, plan, sequence, and follow through every single day for the rest of your life.

One of my favorite things I've ever heard from another diabetes community member was something like: "You could walk into your doctor's office with an axe in your head, and they'd still blame your diabetes."

It's true.

And after a while of experiencing that in the healthcare system, you start doing it to yourself, too. I know I did. It's easy to blame everything on diabetes because so much in life is caused by it when you have it.

But the reality is, diabetes gives ADHD a lot of ammunition. It's not the same thing.

Once I knew what I was actually working with, my management got easier. Not because I tried harder. Because I finally knew what I was managing. I opened up. I saw myself more broadly.

I started truly seeing me beyond T1D, as crazy as that sounds, nearly 23 years into it. People with ADHD struggle to process, remember? (Wink.)

I was taking too much basal insulin

I've lost a significant amount of weight since October 2025, and my insulin needs have changed with me. I was still running a basal rate built for a body I no longer had.

I dropped it by six units over time.

I felt it almost immediately. Fewer lows. Less chasing. A baseline that finally matched who I am now, instead of who I was a year ago.

My insulin-to-carb ratio changed too, from 1:10 to 1:13. That's how many grams of carbohydrate one unit of insulin covers for me, so one unit now handles 13 grams instead of 10. That shift came later, after metformin and after I lost weight.

Our insulin needs aren't fixed. They shift with weight, stress, activity, hormones, and time. Treating a dose as permanent is one of the quieter ways this disease wears us down.

Sometimes, I need to remember to adjust my basal rate situationally to accommodate my menstrual cycle or peaks in activity, such as during a move or vacation when I'm lifting or walking more. Basal rates don't have to be flat, but you should adjust them only with your healthcare provider's help.

Metformin was the change I was most afraid of

I'll be honest—I was scared of metformin at first. I tried it once, got dizzy, and blamed the drug.

I was wrong. The dizziness was my body letting go of a bunch of stress. I shouldn't have started it when I did, but I'm glad I gave it another chance. When I tried it again, none of it came back.

I've been taking it for nearly 45 days. I started at 500 milligrams extended-release (ER), and I recently moved up to 750. Honestly, it's working great! Wonders, even. Metformin lowers the glucose your liver makes and helps your body use insulin better, and for me, the difference has been unmistakable.

My dawn phenomenon—that early-morning rise driven by hormones that fire before you're even awake—has flattened out. The post-meal spikes I used to accept as unavoidable mostly don't happen anymore, unless I'm eating something super sugary and didn't pre-bolus.

On that note, let me be honest and say that I'm still not great at pre-bolusing. I know I should dose about 15 minutes before I eat, but I frequently don't. Metformin has been covering for a habit I haven't fixed yet, and I'd rather say that out loud than let anyone think my graphs come from perfect behavior.

No one's diabetes management is perfect. No one's.

Is this the best change I've made since I got my first CGM almost seven years ago, when I could finally reasonably afford one? Yes! And that's a high bar.

My lines have never been straighter. (Knock on wood.)

A pump isn't automatically better

One of my pet peeves in the T1D community is the assumption that a pump is the upgrade and everything else is settling.

It isn't. I'm proof. Diabetes is a very personal disease, so all management choices should be personal, not set by a standard that isn't designed to accommodate everyone's body, preferences, goals, lifestyle, or finances.

On a pump, I wasted insulin. I couldn't reliably afford it. I sat closer to diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) than I ever had on pens. And I didn't like wearing it. My Omnipod was tubeless, and it still felt like something attached to me at all times. That was a sensory issue, and sensory issues are real issues.

What works for me is a smartpen. I've had my InPen for three or four years, and it's been one of the most unexpected blessings of my management. It sends me notifications, calculates my carbs, and tracks my insulin on board (IOB), meaning the insulin is still working in my body from an earlier dose.

That IOB tracker matters even more to me now that I know about the ADHD. I spend a lot of my life asking, "did I actually do that, or did I just think about doing it?" Insulin doses were always on that list.

Having a pen that answers the question for me took real anxiety off my plate, and it doesn't give me sensory issues the way a pump did.

Pair that with my Dexcom G7, and I'm set. I've used Dexcom products for most of the past seven years, and it's still the most accurate system for my body.

Would I push this on anyone? Never. I celebrate whatever works for you. Having options at all is a privilege.

Movement I'll actually do

MyFitnessPal tracks activity too, and I aim for at least 10,000 steps a day. Summer 2026 made that easier. I relished the long walks and talks I've had with my mom over the past few months.

Movement improves insulin sensitivity, and walking is the version of exercise I'll actually do. It's one I actually enjoy. Give me a good city walk any day!

That makes it the right one for me, and that's really where accountability with exercise starts: when you find something you enjoy that actually works for your life.

I hit 91 percent time in range for three days, and I'm not going to qualify it

I'm going to say that and leave it alone.

No asterisk. No, "but of course it isn't always like this." No apology to anyone reading who's having a harder week.

I've spent years qualifying every good number the second it showed up, like celebrating it out loud would summon the crash. A lot of us do this. We treat a win like something diabetes will take back, so we never really enjoy it.

If you live with T1D, you already know a stretch like that isn't the everyday. You don't need me to remind you. And I'm not going to pretend that reminding you is generosity, because it isn't. It's fear dressed up as humility.

Diabetes takes enough. It takes sleep, money, spontaneity, and the ordinary luxury of eating a meal without doing math first.

It doesn't get to take the good days, too.

91%, for three days. Everything on this list is working at once. I freaking earned this.

Starting to accept who I am was the biggest change of all

It felt like I moved through a few seasons of life this summer. There were ups and downs. A lot going on behind the scenes. A lot to process. Mostly, there was a lot of healing, and I came out on the other side stronger than before. Better than before.

And yes, I'm still better with diabetes.

Here's something about chronic illness I don't hear said often enough. Sometimes you want a break from your body. Not a day off. A break from the whole arrangement.

You don't get one. So you go looking for the next closest thing.

For me, that meant rediscovering myself. There's a name for part of it, by the way. Researchers call it biographical disruption. Chronic illness interrupts the story you were telling about your own life, and you're left rebuilding a sense of self out of what's left. Identity loss is one of the better-documented and less discussed parts of living with a chronic condition.

Then layer ADHD on top of that. Years of masking, of shaping yourself into whatever the room seemed to want, and then a diagnosis that asks you to sort out which parts were ever actually you. Researchers describe that as its own process of identity reconstruction.

It's a whole thing. And it isn't just me.

For a long time, I thought I was supposed to be someone other than who I am. I didn't think the real me was good enough.

I never sat down and decided to become someone else. It happened in small adjustments, one at a time, until I'd lost track of the person I actually was. The conflict never let up. It followed me into everything.

And guess what? A more authentic version of me resurfaced anyway.

That pressure had a cost, and it wasn't only emotional. Chronic stress drives inflammation, and I can see it now when I look at old pictures. It makes me sad. Why is it so clear when you're on the other side of a new chapter?

Accepting myself has been the biggest relief of this journey. It made every other change possible because it's hard to take care of a body you're quietly at war with.

I should have been true to myself the whole time.

If you learn anything from this post, hear me when I say: please don't spend your life doing anything else.

You will not be able to welcome the people and things meant for you if you aren't welcoming the person you are inside. Even if it's scary. You know your inner self better than you think, and leaning into it makes your whole life better, T1D included.

For me, this time has proven that. I am excited to continue on this path, as I see more fullness to come. This is just the start, and I'm excited to share these healing steps with you in hopes that they may also help and inspire you to do the same.

Disclosures:

1. I am a Medtronic MiniMed ambassador and a Dexcom Warrior. I received no payment or compensation for this article, and neither company reviewed, approved, or had any input on it. I have no affiliation with MyFitnessPal. The products named here are the ones I personally use and choose, and my opinions about them are my own, including the critical ones.

   
   

2. I work with Beyond Type 1 and Diabetes Nerd, both of which are linked in this article. I have no other affiliation with any organization, publication, or study linked here. No one paid for, requested, or reviewed any link in this post.

   
   

3. This article reflects my personal experiences and opinions and does not constitute medical advice. No specific outcomes are guaranteed. Make all medical decisions and insulin adjustments in collaboration with your healthcare team.