Diabetes Exercise Expert Honored, Launching Academy

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Whenever we think diabetes and exercise, Sheri Colberg-Ochs immediately comes to mind. A longtime diabetes educator, researcher and author, this woman knows what she’s talking about given her own five decades with type 1 maintaining a highly active lifestyle.

This is a big year for Sheri, as she"s starting a new chapter in her life and career and will also be honored this weekend at the ADA’s 76th Scientific Sessions in New Orleans as the 2016 “Outstanding Educator in Diabetes,” awarded annually to a distinguished health professional who "has made outstanding educational efforts in diabetes and demonstrated significant contributions to the understanding of diabetes education.” Congrats, Sheri!

For almost two decades, she’s been an exercise science and nutrition professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia. But she’s recently retired and taken emeritus status, embarking on the next phase of her career, which includes launching a new continuing medical education (CME) program for health professionals centered on... exercise and diabetes, of course.

The lecture she’ll be giving on Saturday is about her journey as a diabetes educator, and Sheri says it’ll be quite different than most of what’s happening at this big science-heavy conference.

We have to applaud her and echo our support for what Sheri does, across the board.

ADA"s Physical Fitness Focus

Sheri’s proud of the award recognition, and is looking forward to helping the ADA and her CDE peers to learn more about the effects of exercise. Believe it or not, this is a poorly understood area where much work remains to be done.

Sheri has been consulting for the ADA, helping to set up a new physical fitness program within the ADA’s newly-created Lifestyle Management Division.

The Nutrition group already existing falls under that umbrella as well as a new Psychosocial Behaviors focus and this exercise-related program.

“This is semi-retirement,” Sheri says with a laugh, “I just won’t be on the academia side anymore... I won’t be teaching college students anymore, but will still be able to do research through the university.”

Sheri will be discussing the ADA"s new focus and her role during her lecture this weekend, along with her personal journey and as an HCP and patient herself.

Then following ADA at the end of June, Sheri"s excited that she and her family will be moving from Virginia to California, where she originally hails from.

Lots of change, indeed! But she emphasizes that her work as an educator isn"t over, it"s just changing a bit.

Diabetes Motion Academy

Aside from her work with ADA, Sheri will continue her own educational endeavors related to physical fitness and diabetes with an exciting new program.

We’ve written before about her online educational website called Diabetes Motion launched in 2014, and this Spring she’s expanded that to launch what"s called the Diabetes Motion Academy – geared specifically toward continuing education credits for healthcare professionals (HCPs), health educators, and fitness professionals doing this kind of work.

The way it works is these HCP"s download and read through Sheri"s PDF materials, and then take a test at the end to earn credits. Next up she plans to add an online webinar. Different organizations – from fitness-specific groups to the big national American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) – can adopt the program to offer certification credits to their members.

“All of this ties into how people get accredited for fitness programs, and I want to make sure (HCPs) have more training specific to people with diabetes,” she said.

Eventually, Sheri hopes to offer materials for PWDs (people with diabetes) themselves, including an email subscription service that would cost $50 a week to provide tips and reminders on fitness-related aspects of diabetes. That seems quite pricey to us, but there are surely diabetic athletes out there who would consider it money well spent.

D-Tech Evolution (and Exercise)

From a personal POV, Sheri says it’s fascinating to see what"s evolved in terms of diabetes tools since the time of her diagnosis as a young child in 1968, through the time when she began working in the D-education field.

Knowing she’s approaching Joslin 50-Year Medalist status, she laughs about taking a break from her insulin pump and CGM at the moment. Still, she likes to point out how she helped iron out some of the “exercise kinks” in various pieces of technology – from CGMs to an approach in one of the burgeoning Artificial Pancreas systems being tested in more recent years.

On the CGM aspect, Sheri says she did a “sprint study” to see if the continuous monitor could pick up a 10-second sprint or if it was just too small a blip to register. Basically, it just presented a whole lot of problems thanks to the many variables, she says.

As to AP tech, Sheri sees more progress needed in how exercise is factored in.

“I was just not impressed with its ability to handle exercise better,” she says. “There’s a ways to go, and I think we’ll see a series of developments in AP where you have a system that turns your pump off at night and then also turns it off if you’re too low (any time)... and eventually where you don’t have to announce exercise or anything to reduce insulin.”

Despite her current reservations, Sheri says she"s a huge fan of all the diabetes tech advancements. Hell, she went the first 18 years without a glucose monitor because they didn’t exist yet. So today"s tools are a boon, to be sure!

“I’m just grateful to be able to check my blood sugar at any time with a fingerstick. That doesn’t bother me,” she says. “That’s the difference between getting diabetes in a high-technology age versus getting it 48 years ago when there was nothing, and you had to check your urine. You"re just darn grateful for the basics.”

We thank Sheri for her many years of service to our community, and once again congratulate her on the #2016ADA honor!

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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