Martin Santise

Insulin does not make you fat. And the fear that it does is quietly costing people their health.

A lot of T1Ds believe insulin is why they gain weight. Some even take less of it to stay thin. So here is what should end that myth.

Every person without diabetes makes insulin. All day, every meal, their whole life. If insulin made you gain weight, every human on earth would.

Insulin is not a fat hormone. It is the key that lets your body use the food you eat. Without it, your body starves and sugar pours out of you. That is not health, that is your body breaking down. So when the scale moves after starting insulin, that is often your body recovering what it was losing.

And weight comes from the same place it does for everyone. Calories in versus calories out. Insulin is not a loophole around that.

So insulin is not the enemy. Taking less to stay thin does not make you healthier, it makes you sick. Keeping your blood sugar in a good range is what protects your health. That is the real goal.

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Martin Santise - T1D Coach

The insulin you inject does not work where it lands. It takes a whole journey first, and nobody ever draws it out for you.

It pools under your skin. Breaks apart from clusters into singles. Crosses into your blood. Then works, then slowly clears. Every step adds time, and warmth, cold, your site, and depth all change how fast it moves.

That is why the same dose hits early one day and late the next. You were never dosing wrong. You were fighting a trip you could not see.

Swipe through, I drew the whole thing out.

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Martin Santise - T1D Coach

If you are insulin resistant, this is the part nobody actually explains. what is physically blocking your insulin from working.

here is how it is supposed to work. insulin knocks on your cell and sends a message inside. open the doors, let the sugar in. when that message travels cleanly, your sugar comes down. resistance is that message getting blocked. two things block it.

the first is fat inside the cell. when fat builds up inside your muscle and liver cells, it does not just sit there. it creates byproducts that jam the insulin signal directly. one blocks the receptor, one shuts down a step further down the line. picture the message traveling down a hallway inside the cell, and fat as clutter piling up in it. the more fat inside, the less of the message gets through.

the second is inflammation, and it works differently. it scrambles the insulin relay, flipping the wrong switches so the message gets garbled on the way. if fat is clutter in the hallway, inflammation is a cut wire. the knock still happens, but the message never arrives.

so this is what resistance actually is. not weak insulin. not you failing. fat clogging the path and inflammation cutting the wire, so the message cannot get through.

and this is why the same things keep mattering. the more you lower the fat inside the cell and calm the inflammation, the clearer that message gets, and the better your own insulin works again.

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Martin Santise - T1D Coach

Why does the exact same dose work one morning and wreck you the next?

It is not you. One unit of insulin does not do the same thing all day. You are most resistant in the morning and most sensitive at night, and stress, sleep, and illness move it even more.

Your correction factor was never a fixed number. It is a moving target.

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Martin Santise - T1D Coach

T1Ds, have you noticed some of your lows scream at you, and others barely warn you at all? That is not random, and it is not in your head. There is a real reason.

Here is what's actually happening when you drop.

Your brain runs almost entirely on glucose. It can't make its own and it can't store much, so it needs a constant supply. The second that supply falls, your brain is the first thing to feel it.

But a low doesn't create one set of symptoms. It creates two, from two different causes.

The first is the alarm. Shaking, racing heart, sweating, anxiety, sudden hunger. That's not your brain starving yet. That's adrenaline, your body catching the drop and screaming at you to eat. It's the warning. And the warning is a good thing.

The second is the starve. Confusion, can't focus, slurred words, weakness, the fog. That's not adrenaline. That's your brain itself running out of fuel. That's the one that gets dangerous.

And these really are two separate systems. In one study, researchers blocked the body's alarm response during a low. The shaking went away. The confusion did not.

Here's why the order matters. The alarm is supposed to come first, early enough to catch it before your brain is affected. But with frequent lows, your body can stop sounding the alarm, and you skip straight to the fog with no warning. That's not you being careless. That's a warning system going quiet.

So the shaking you hate? It's actually your best friend. It's the early warning. The goal was never to feel nothing. It was to still be able to feel the alarm.

Here's my question: do your lows still warn you the way they used to, or has that changed over the years?