This is going to be a tough one. Snacking between meals and triathlon training seem to go together so well. A tough post-breakfast swim needs to be followed by a banana, or an energy bar, right? Not so fast. It might sound like a good idea, but for us diabetic triathletes it might not be such a great thing. Instead, it will get us on the glucose roller coaster, which is a tough thing to exit from. The highs and lows from regular meals and training are bad enough, but adding in snacks and then extra insulin to accommodate for the bounce make matters a logistical nightmare.

I’ve been reading an interesting book lately, “Think Like a Pancreas,” and it says that you should leave a few hours between meals and snacking. Basically, “grazing” is a bad idea. You need to give your body time between eating sessions for the liver and pancreas to do their things, even if it is drug-assisted. Once they have run their course and the blood sugar has come back to normal, the next meal or snack is a good idea, but not before this. Otherwise, your blood sugar doesn’t have a chance to reset and you continually build it up until it is a problem and requires more medication.

But how does this work when you have an intense training schedule, basically every day? I have to eat enough to keep my body going at a good level, but not so much that my glucose streaks to some crazy level the moment I stop exercising. And when I’m not exercising, I need to absolutely stay away from the snacks to give my body time to come back to a neutral state.

This is not going to be easy and will require a lot of self-discipline when not in the middle of a workout. This is one of my big goals this race season, staying fit and losing several kilos to get even more fit.