My First YouTube Video...!

What Happens When You Get Ill?

Hello to all and a Happy New Year!

Hope you all had an excellent break away and are fully refreshed for the start of 2016. I spent mine celebrating in Edinburgh underneath the castle with Biffy Clyro!

This Is It. You've Been Diagnosed - What Now?

The diagnosis.

Lying there in my hospital bed around 4 years ago with a very new piece of life changing information.

I was now a person with Type 1 diabetes and the emotions I was feeling ranged from numb, to being scared, to worrying about how it would effect the people in my own life.

It's a diagnosis that many of reading this would have had at some point in your life.

I remember that the first couple of hours and days were a complete blur. Plenty of information, lots of talking, a large amount of new fancy medical supplies and a simple how to guide of testing blood sugars, writing them down in a little book and being introduced to insulin. Being told that you'll have to do inject and prick yourself with various needles number of times a day. For every day. For the rest of your life. 

And I imagine if you're new to all this, you're feeling in a very lost place, very insecure and scared.

I certainly felt overwhelmed. 

But trust me on this. This will be the least you'll ever know about your diabetes, whether it be Type 1 or Type 2. 

Testing, testing. Always testing.

Nutrition Is Simple

So it's been about a month since I've produced a proper blog post - apologies - it's been manic what with work, being away with the girlfriend and trying to keep on top of things. But I've made a commitment to blog at least twice a week from now on. There's a lot I want to accomplish via this blog and there's a lot of work going on to try and make this as successful as it can be.

I'm working on a complete re-design of the website and various other social media outlets to try and increase awareness of what it's actually like living with diabetes!

Diabetes & The Workout Window

"So what do you do before and after you workout with your diabetes?"

I find this is the question I get asked the most after the obvious, generic "you have to prick yourself how many times a day?!?" kind of questions (sigh...).

To be honest, it's a fairly tricky one to answer because honestly, the finer details of it change almost every day.

Rant: #RealLifeDiabetes

I'm going to rant. So, deep breath.

Guest Post: Aaron & His Pump

I obviously want to write about all aspects of diabetes as much as I can. But sometimes it's difficult as my experience only goes so far! Especially when it comes to the insulin pump.

At the moment I use injections around 6-8 times a day depending on what I'm doing. I have zero experience with the pump and I really wanted to get someone's perspective on it so those of you who have it or are thinking about getting one can use it with your journey.

So, meet Aaron! Aaron and I have been chatting a fair bit via Twitter having first got in contact when I posted my Diabetes and Me post and I asked him this week to produce something on his experience with the pump! I'm delighted to say he's come up with something brilliant and I'm extremely grateful for his words. Please give him a follow on Twitter @AaronT1D.

So, without further ado...

Recipe: Awesome Double-Chocolate Proats

I do love carbs.

"Oh no a diabetic eating carbs.....!" Yeah, amazingly we can do that!

I like to workout first thing in the morning which means I need to fuel up before I do so! I have around 75 minutes from when I crawl out of bed to when I'm loading up the barbell with the first weighted plate.

Fruit, Fructose & Diabetes

I'm a big advocate of good, single ingredient eating as much as possible. Every good nutritional coach, book or article I've ever read on the matter agrees that eating real food is far more beneficial for you than anything processed. I've never been a fan of meal replacement shakes or anything similar - I don't believe it provides the same nutritional qualities as actual food.

And it makes sense really? Surely something grown out of the ground, plucked from a tree or has flown, ran or swam is better for our health than something created from a test tube.

Source: www.blogpyramid.com

Recipe: Mid-Summer Spicy Salsa

As we're currently in the midst of summer I thought it would be great to share this little recipe that I've adapted from Thug Kitchen.

It's full of amazing flavour and perfect little snack to have! You can either mix everything to leave it chunky or throw it all together in a food processor and get it to your preferred consistency!