Meet IDS patient Taryn Camp.
She’s had diabetes for about 30 years and is a busy working mother who loves to exercise.
Taryn is a busy working mother who loves to exercise. She is a “food influencer”, she is writing a dessert cookbook, and has a food blog (lifeandsprinkles.com) among her many other social media posts.
She has had diabetes for about 30 years and wears a Tandem X2 insulin pump and a Dexcom G6 continuous glucose monitoring system. Her biggest challenge has been to exercise and not have hypoglycemia. Her goal is to exercise 1 to 2 hours a day. She uses a rower, stationary bike, weights, treadmill, stepper, peloton bike, and she likes to walk with her family after dinner or go to one of the many amusement parks in Florida. She has tried numerous things to exercise including eating food without taking insulin, eating food and taking a partial bolus, turning exercise mode on, turning sleep mode on, but she often has to stop exercising because she has double arrows going straight down. For those of you who don’t wear a pump or a CGM, this means her glucose is falling dangerously fast.
In her own words, “Exercise has always been a challenge for me and an enormous obstacle that I wanted to overcome. I never quite figured out that balance between my blood sugar going way too high or plummeting too low. In the past, I stuck to “safe” exercise like walking slowly on the treadmill. When I was much younger, I would eat a ton of sugar to offset the intense exercise, and neither one of those gave me the results that I was looking for. When I started working with Terri Ryan, I told her my goals and she was more than willing to troubleshoot with me. I figured there would be a lot of trial and error. I soon realized that every time of day, every exercise, and everything that I ate made a difference. I now have tools that I can use in each situation and knowledge that I can apply for everything new that I want to try. I was never able to use my Peloton bike or rowing machine for more than 10 minutes at a time, and now I can do at least 30 minutes. I even got a gym membership, and I am lifting weights! One idea that Terri gave me to try was to set my pump to “sleep mode” instead of “exercise mode.” The exercise setting was giving my boluses and I’d have to stop the activity halfway through, whereas in sleep mode it’s been just enough to keep my numbers in range. I am excited to keep fine-tuning my activities and even add on more challenging workouts this summer!”
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