Your Best T1D Year

A few months after Neil was diagnosed in 1992, his dad dragged him to a JDRF event. Neil was 20, arms crossed, doing the math on how fast they could leave. Somewhere in the middle of a keynote, his dad leaned over and whispered, "You can do this one day." It took Neil about 10 years to understand what he meant. This kicks off the November series, and this month is about people instead of a habit....

The Keep It Moving finale. Eight weeks ago you took a before picture; today the wall goes up: real before-and-afters from the community, from the desk worker who cut a 4.5-hour sit to 90 minutes, to the trucker walking laps around his rig at every fuel stop, to the anonymous listener whose numbers haven't moved yet but whose walk became the only part of the day they're not mad at their body. Still...

Halloween week, the most complicated holiday on the type 1 diabetes calendar, hosted by a man who hands out candy from a fire pit in his front yard like a benevolent porch goblin. This is the Halloween playbook, movement edition: why fun-size candy is secretly pre-portioned low treatment, why trick-or-treating is the biggest walking night of the year, and why lawn-chair sit-to-stands technically c...

Christel Oerum might be the most trusted voice out there on exercise and type 1 diabetes, and she got there the honest way... by getting a lot of it wrong first and telling everybody about it. She's lived with type 1 since 1997, she founded Diabetes Strong, and six years ago she had to define "D-bag" on camera for Neil with a straight face. (It's a diabetes supply bag. She did not keep a straight...

The habits that survive have one thing in common, and it isn't discipline: somebody else knows about them. Neil's after-dinner walk survives because it belongs to three of them: Neil, his wife Gina, and Cora the 5.9-pound Morkie who sets the pace. Skipping it doesn't feel like skipping exercise. It feels like standing up his wife. With one week left in the challenge, this episode is about future-p...

Measurement day, and the idea underneath it might be the most important sentence of the whole challenge: the average response was never the problem, the spread around it is. The newest wave of 2026 research in Diabetologia and Diabetes Technology and Therapeutics is mostly about variability, how differently the same walk lands in different bodies. Which means the most important dataset in the worl...

No studies today. Week seven is the community check-in, and Neil reads real stories from the challenge: the 61-year-old doing sit-to-stands during Wheel of Fortune whose post-supper numbers are the best they've been in years, the night-shift nurse walking a 2am hospital parking garage with a fellow T1D she met through the show, the football fan logging 11,000 living-room steps during a loss, and t...

Six weeks of below-the-neck science, and now the part a CGM can't graph. Type 1 diabetes carries a mental load the pamphlets undersell: four hundred decisions a day, alarms, math, the low that hijacks an afternoon. The research on movement and mood is deep and consistent: regular light movement measurably helps with stress, anxiety, and low mood. Not a replacement for real mental health care, and...

The conversation with Ginger Vieira and Tara Mayo was going so well we didn't stop. This is the next half hour, and it might be the most practical thing we've ever put on this show. No games this time, no Fastest Five, no Confession Booth. If you want those, go back to the October 12th episode. It starts with a study that stopped Neil cold. In 2008, researchers at the Université de Montréal asked...

Neil is a streak guy, which is exactly why he's qualified to tell you streaks are a trap. One missed night, and your brain declares the whole habit dead, files it next to your grieving Duolingo owl, and quits. That's a terrible system, and the research agrees. The most-cited habit study out there (Lally, 2010, European Journal of Social Psychology) found it takes about 66 days on average for a beh...

Who's scared to exercise with type 1? If your hand went up, this one's for you. Ginger Vieira set more than a dozen powerlifting records with type 1 diabetes, wrote the book Exercise with Type 1 Diabetes , and hosts the Diabetes Nerd podcast. She was one of the very first guests on this show, and she came back anyway. This time she brought her business partner, Tara Mayo, a personal trainer, yoga...

Nobody decides to stop moving in October. You skip one drizzly Tuesday, then the time change hits, then it's dark at 5:30, and you look up in January at half your summer step count, shocked, like this hasn't happened every year since the Clinton administration. This episode is about beating the fall slump by making one decision now, while there's still daylight. Pick your indoor plan before you ne...

The best news in the whole research pile, for everyone whose body has notes: you don't have to walk. At all. A 2016 Diabetes Care study by Paddy Dempsey found that breaking up sitting with simple resistance moves, calf raises, half squats, sit-to-stands right beside a desk, lowered post-meal glucose and insulin about as well as walking did. The magic was never the walking. It's muscle contraction,...

Eight meetings, one mailbox trip, and a CGM drifting up by 3pm for no food-related reason. Welcome to October, the real-life month of the Keep It Moving challenge, starting with everyone whose job owns their body eight hours a day: office workers, teachers, truckers, nurses charting after a shift. The principle: don't ADD movement to your day, HIDE it inside your day. Five plays, easiest first: th...

A scene from Neil's actual life: an airport layover, a stubborn high from hours of travel sitting, and one man doing laps past the same Cinnabon so many times the employees start whispering. This episode covers movement as a tool when your blood sugar is already high: what it can do, what it can't, and the one rule that never bends. Gentle walking helps the correction you already took work better,...

The fear episode, faced head-on. The couch was never the real reason people with type 1 diabetes move less. The real reason is the low. So this is the safety net, built from the top shelf: the international consensus statement on exercise and T1D in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, and a 2026 analysis of 8,171 real-world activity sessions from the Type 1 Diabetes Exercise Initiative. That st...

Alex St. John is six foot five, about 295 pounds, and three years into serious lifting when type 1 diabetes showed up mid-semester of his kinesiology degree, at a blood sugar of 504. His response was never "should I stop?" It was "how do I keep lifting?"  Twelve years later he's a T1D exercise researcher in one of the top labs on the planet for this stuff, and he spends this hour translating scien...

The graduate seminar of movement snacks, with the loudest safety caveat of the month. A 2014 study in Diabetologia coined the term exercise snacks: short, brisk bursts of movement a few minutes BEFORE each meal. Compared to a standard 30-minute workout, the little pre-meal bursts lowered average post-meal glucose by about 12 percent. You're preheating the oven before the food arrives. But for type...

Meet Neil's walking partner: Cora, a 5.9-pound senior Morkie whose hips don't lie and whose top speed is best described as eventually. Every evening, Neil, his wife Gina, and Cora take the after-dinner walk, and that slow, unimpressive, dog-paced walk is the single most valuable thing he does for his blood sugar most days. The numbers back it up: a 2022 review in Sports Medicine found even a short...

Somebody sold all of us the same lie: that getting active means a membership, an hour a day, and a personality transplant. This episode formally cancels that belief system with receipts. Look at the evidence from three weeks of this challenge: three short walks beat one long one, two minutes of strolling every 20 minutes moved real glucose numbers, three-minute movement snacks worked in actual T1D...

For once, a study on our actual people. Published in 2026 in Diabetes Technology and Therapeutics: adults with type 1 diabetes on insulin pumps sat for six hours straight on one lab day, and on another day broke up the same sitting with three minutes of simple resistance moves every 30 minutes. On the movement snack day, their insulin worked measurably better. Nobody touched a pump setting. That's...

Stop looking for 45 free minutes. They don't exist, and it turns out they were never the assignment. A 2013 Diabetes Care study by Loretta DiPietro compared one 45-minute walk against three 15-minute walks after meals, same total time. The three short walks won on 24-hour blood sugar control, and the after-dinner walk did the most work of all. For everyone with type 1 diabetes who works, parents,...

Arnie Bunch has been living with type 1 diabetes since 1992, the same year Neil was diagnosed. He's a runner, the creator of the #bloodsugarninja, and the kind of friend who gives you the straight answer about the gear because he's actually worn it at mile 18. Two weeks into the Keep It Moving challenge, the science gets a face. This is the lived-experience episode. Before the researchers and the...

The fact this whole challenge is built on: when you move today, your insulin works better tomorrow. For 24 to 48 hours after movement, the muscles you used stay more sensitive to insulin. One walk buys you a bonus that's still paying out tomorrow night, like a Costco membership for your pancreas. And this year the receipts got enormous. A 2026 study in Diabetologia analyzed 428,058 real exercise s...

The coolest piece of machinery you own, and nobody ever handed you the manual. Normally, sugar leaves your blood through a door that only insulin can unlock. That's type 1 diabetes in one sentence. But your muscles have a second door, a side door, and it opens when you move. No insulin required. It's the Home Alone house: the front door is booby-trapped and complicated, and the side door is just.....