How to Rock the Gym While Keeping Your Diabetes in Control

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I recently met Christel Oerum in Los Angeles, and was -- in a word -- blown away at the fitness accomplishments of this longtime type 1 and former Medtronic employee in her late "30s.

A Danish national, Christel is now an LA-based personal trainer, fitness bikini champion, diabetes advocate, and blogger at TheFitBlog.com, which she founded with her husband Tobias.

She"s been living with type 1 diabetes since 1997, and does so by the motto “there’s nothing you can’t do with diabetes – if you have the right care, technology, and mindset." Today, Christel shares some of her best tips for fitness with T1D.

On Rocking Workouts with Diabetes, by Christel Oerum

I am all about empowerment. I’ve never identified with the role of the victim and that applies to everything in my life, not least to living with diabetes. It just doesn’t jibe with me. Sure, having diabetes forces us to sometimes face greater obstacles that others, but to me that just means we need to work smarter to reach our goals.

This may be easy for me to say since diabetes is the “only” health problem I have (I meet so many people who face much larger challenges), but I firmly believe that a “yes I can do this” mindset is the most important factor in living a healthy and happy life with diabetes.

How Working Out Empowers Me

I have not always been into fitness. I have always been active, but it wasn’t until my husband and I moved to Santa Monica in my mid-thirties that I discovered how much working out could improve my diabetes management and self-esteem (and the way I look). It’s in the weight room at my gym that I feel the most at ease, and it’s through this outlet that I have learned enough to be in the best control of my diabetes of my life.

I started working out in the original Gold’s Gym (where Arnold Schwarzenegger still pops by to say hi almost every week) and all of a sudden I had people coming up to me asking when I was competing in a fitness show. Me? On stage? In a bikini?! It wasn’t anything I had ever considered, but the questions spurred my interest and the idea of having a sport I can still compete in at 38 years old was very appealing.

So I set out to learn everything I could about how to manage my diabetes as a fitness competitor/athlete. I expected to be able to find plenty of scientific studies, useful advice, and people who had done the same thing. What I actually found was very little available information and most of it was pretty much useless. So I started experimenting on my own, and recording all the knowledge and tricks I have learned over the past five years on our blog. A few of my top lessons learned include:

Lesson 1: We are not that different from people living without diabetes

My first learning is that to excel at any sport, people living with diabetes can and should do the exact same things as people who don’t have diabetes. So if you are like me and want to build lean muscles, you have to lift weights and eat enough carbohydrates, proteins and fats to fuel muscle growth.

I really don’t believe in a “diabetes diet." If you are insulin-dependent, you can eat a normal healthy diet like anyone else, as long as you are careful to take the right amount of insulin for the food you eat. That’s why I don’t eat a low-carb diet. Yes, eating very few carbs can make dosing your insulin easier, but it also limits the amount of energy you have available for working out and for muscle growth and recovery (you can read more about my thought on carbohydrates in my article “Why Diabetics Also Need Carbohydrates”).

My advice: Instead of limiting yourself, find your daily calorie needs and use that information to create a balanced, healthy (and tasty) meal plan.

Lesson 2: How your body reacts to exercise doesn’t have to be a black box

If you work out consistently, you will see patterns in how your blood sugar fluctuates. By now, I know with a high degree of certainty how my blood sugars will react to a hike (fall significantly), a run (only fall slightly while running but may fall later) or resistance training (usually very little impact). I also have a good idea about how each workout affects my insulin sensitivity for the following 12-24 hours, so I can adjust accordingly.

This knowledge took a while to get, and the key that made it possible was tracking my food and workouts. I simply started logging my meals and workouts in a notebook or mobile app (I use MyFitnessPal).

After just a few weeks, I started seeing the first patterns, like the fact that if I didn’t have any active insulin on board when starting a resistance workout, my blood sugars would skyrocket. By looking at all the data I now had available, I could slowly change what I ate, when I ate it, and how much insulin I took to better manage my diabetes. The result was that my A1C dropped to the best level ever and I had a lot fewer lows and highs.

My advice: Track everything and learn from it! This may seem tedious, but it’s so worth it. If you want to read more about how I do it, check out my article on "Food and Insulin Around Workouts."

Lesson 3: Don’t be afraid of the heavy weights

For the first almost 30 years of my life, I focused more on cardio than weights. I would LOVE to go back in time and teach my younger self what I know now. I spent so much time on cardio exercises with very limited results that could have been better used in the weight room.

The truth is that lifting weights is one of the best things you can do for diabetes management. Adding a little muscle mass increases your metabolism, making it a lot easier to maintain a healthy weight. It also increases your insulin sensitivity so you need to take less insulin.

How you want your body to look is of course a personal choice, but I work out A LOT with heavy weights and I never feel like I am in danger of becoming overly muscular or losing my femininity. On the contrary, I like the way I look a lot more than I did 10 years ago.

My advice: Incorporate resistance training in your workout routine. A mix of lifting weights and doing cardio is the most effective for both diabetes management and weight control.

A Few Final Thoughts

To summarize, combining exercise and good diabetes management is very possible but it does require some upfront work. If you don’t put in the work, you’ll most likely become (or continue being) frustrated and have to cut exercise sessions short due to wacky blood sugars. So take notes and learn from your experiences.

You will get it wrong sometimes, we all do. You will have lows and you will have highs, but that’s OK in my book as long as you learn from it and go about it in a safe and controlled way. So head to the gym, bring your notebook, your BG meter, and your glucose tabs and go have fun!

Thanks Christel. Needless to say, we"d all like to look as good as you do!

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn"t adhere to Healthline"s editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline"s partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

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