Happy & Healthy with Diabetes

Mindful eating gets dismissed as soft, but the mechanism is anything but. Cortisol, leptin timing, parasympathetic shift, post-meal glucose curves — here's how slowing down at one meal a day can lower stress, stabilize blood sugar, and quietly rebuild your relationship with food.

Stress isn't just a feeling — it's a metabolic event that raises blood sugar through cortisol and insulin resistance. In this fourth installment of my four-pillar approach to thriving with diabetes, I unpack the neuroscience of why mindfulness works, share a five-minute starter practice, and show how to use your CGM and wearable HRV data to watch meditation lower your numbers in real time.

Your insulin pump finally has a co-pilot. A plain-English guide to Control-IQ+, Omnipod 5, the 780G, and the iLet — how automated insulin delivery actually differs from injections, and the contrarian reason I keep mine in Sleep mode around the clock.

You step out of a hot shower feeling refreshed, glance at your CGM, and your blood sugar reads 240 mg/dL. Panic mode activated. Except… you feel completely fine. No symptoms. Nothing off. What on earth just happened? Welcome to one of the most underappreciated quirks of living with diabetes: CGMs and temperature are not friends. Let's break it down — because knowledge is the ultimate superpower when you're managing this condition.

Let's be honest: "10,000 steps a day" doesn't exactly get the blood pumping the way a HIIT protocol or a new CGM firmware update does. There's no dramatic transformation montage, no impressive weight room PR to post online. It's just... walking. And yet, if you're managing diabetes, that deceptively simple number might be one of the most powerful tools in your entire management stack. Here's why — backed by science, not hustle culture.

The Dawn Phenomenon is one of diabetes management's most reliable plot twists — and one of the most manageable. Read more about the reasons for the phenomenon and how you can best manage it.