The minute you stop the endurance training you need to cut out all the excess sugars from your diet.

Yep, but while you are training does it really pose a problem? Have to admit I shake my head on the long rides mixing my own drinks up with 100grams of glucose and fructose per hour, it's a shit load of sugar! But gets all burnt so... Meh?

I think in most cases you can not take in as many calories as you burn doing moderate to intense exercise, which is a caloric deficit. So if you are burning it up while you are consuming it and still in an energy deficit there is no diabetic issue to be had. On the other hand if you are consuming excess calories as sugar and in particular refined sugars, that can be bad and may be the path to diabetes. Very different situations IMHO.

That almost never comes up as a cause of diabetes. The two main risk factors are obesity and low aerobic fitness, with the former probably much more significant. I could see how once a person starts becoming insulin resistant and their pancreas needs to release increased amounts of insulin to compensate, that a high carb diet would exacerbate that situation and perhaps lead to the pancreas "exhausting" itself eventually and no longer being able to release the increased amounts of insulin (which is what happens) and thus the person ends up with Type II Diabetes sooner rather than later.

Once a person has become insulin resistant/diabetic high carb diets would probably make it harder to control blood glucose levels and thus lead to complications sooner.

I read an article around here from Dr Harrison and maybe he will weigh in but the analogy he used I believe was your body becomes a vacuum for sugars and sucks them up during exercise and burns them for fuel. They don’t have time to turn to fat and create the problems they would if you were not exercising before.

Have to admit I have started feeding myself more carbs during training - feel better for it - but have started worrying about how much sugar I am consuming. This was more in regards to cancer as sugar is meant to be fuel for the cancer but diabetes is a concern as well.

I would love Dr. Harrison to chip in if he finds the thread. Interesting video though.

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He who understands the WHY, will understand the HOW.

Carb turns into sugar in your blood stream and your body produces insulin to regulate. Too much sugar in your body will cause insulin production going out of wack and that’s it. You have diabete. Consuming anything too much will break the balance in your body and eventually you will end up getting something. Something bad.

Very much depends on the type of carbs and timing. During exercise your insulin levels decrease (generally speaking atleast) and your body is able to absorb glucose much easier. The stress response of your pancreas working hard to regulate that gel you just took, is probably not as great as you think it is.
Similarly low glycemic carbs won’t create that insulin spike.

Now if u were sitting on ur ass and just smacking sugary crap all day, then yeh, your pancreas is pumping insulin like crazy to try and regulate your blood sugar. Eventually the little turd could tire out lol.

The other positive in all of this though, is your body becomes more sensitive to insulin with regular exercise, even at rest. Thus, you require less to cover that bagel you just ate for lunch.

As a type 1 diabetic, when I have an off-season, even if only 2 weeks, my insulin needs sky rocket, simply because I have stopped training. Blood sugar becomes harder to manage for me, simply because of the increased volume required to achieve normal levels.

Diabetes comes from your tissue not responding adequately to the insulin signal and thus your blood glucose levels stay higher than normal for too much of the time.

If you have normal insulin sensitivity eating sugar may (or may not) make you feel like crap, but it's (probably) not going to give you diabetes.

Obese, out of shape people get diabetes, not skinny people who live on skittles and soda.

No.
And salt doesn’t give you hypertension.
If you have DM, you need to watch your sugar intake. If you have HTN, you need to watch your salt intake. I don’t know where society went from that to having sugar and salt as the cause of the diseases?

So, just out of sheer curiosity, do you not keep up some amount of training/exercise in your off season??? E.g., something like an easy 45 min swim and a long-ish (3-4 miles) walk???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I weight train. Take a few spin classes a week as part of work. But no, I give myself 2 weeks of no swim bike run. I need it mentally just as much as physically I think.

Two weeks off is not much but obv it affects your blood sugar since you are Type 1.

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Yep big time. I know I should have more time off probably, or extend to a month and do some unstructured easy ‘training’. But it really does increase my insulin needs a lot and it’s tougher to get a handle on for me. Especially in the morning where like many, I tend to be a little insulin resistant. For example, when training regularly, half a cup of oats may need around 3-4 units of insulin. With no training behind you thus a lack of insulin sensitivity, that may be 8 units. Larger numbers = greater margin of error. It’s hard enough during training let alone stopping lol.

So, again just of sheer curiosity, if you were to add say 2 tablespoons of real mayo to your oats (about 200-220 cal), would this enable a slower uptake of the carbs???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I gotta admit, I'm only an n of 1, but I'm one of I think many in my M45+ age group of serious triathletes that are borderline type 2 diabetes now despite training hard and being not slow on race day.

When I was younger, say, <40yrs, as long as I was doing some sort of sport 5-7 hrs a week, I could eat anything and everything and never gain weight. All you can eat buffets, hot dog fests, you name it, I could eat it, and never gain weight. I wasn't super skinny, but I'd never get fat. My appetite would stop me before that.

Once I got say over 42, and def now at 47, my appetite now well exceeds what my body needs, and I'm not alone. If I eat just to feel 'barely full', I'm setting myself up to become obese. As I speak, I have BMI of 28.5. Yes, I have a lot of muscle, but still, my recent HgbA1c shows me at borderline diabetic. It's almost ridiculous when the doctor asks well intentionally, "well, your weight is getting up there, I'll bet you can do better with your exercise, right? How much do you exercise?" and I answer "2-6 hrs per day, and pretty good efforts for all of it" and they don't know what to say afterwards.

I guess my long-winded post was just to say that it's not just 'obese out of shape people" who get type 2 diabetes, but "middle-aged to older fit people who might have suboptimal genetics" can still get it even if they're training a lot (like 12+hrs/wk.)

I've managed to corral my weight but it's taking constant monitoring of my caloric intake, as well as learning to cope with mild hunger for a good portion of the day. Never had this problem whatsoever <40yrs.

Nope. Wouldn’t make a difference. I assume if my pancreas worked, the insulin secreted would be less. But I have zilch, so it kind of doesn’t matter to me too much. End result would be the same. Other type 1’s may be different, I’m not sure. In saying all that I wouldn’t use that sort of food to treat a hypo. I’d want a faster spike.

OK, I see. How old were you when you were diagnosed as Type 1??? You prob know that Gary Hall Jr, Oly swimmer in '96,'00, and '04, was told he was Type 1 in 1999 at age 24/25. Thus he continued to swim at the world class level for 5 yrs after becoming a diabetic.

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I was 31. I’m now 43. So yeh kind of late and no family history. I am aware of Gary hall Jnr as well. I remember he also said he was going to smash the Aussie relay team ‘like guitars’ in the Olympics, and they got beaten. As an Aussie I prefer this memory lol. But yeh, he was a gun I know.

Ah, I see, did not realize you are an Aussie. Going back to training, I would guess that you do the weights year-round??? Were you a weight trainer pre-triathlon or vice versa??? How long have you been doing tri??? With a name like "IamSpartacus" I'm going to guess you are a pretty big guy???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

This was posted on Reddit as well and the gist of Dr Harrison's comment was "sponsored by SFuels...enough said"

No.

^^^ Answer to title question.

Here's an article I wrote that details why. TLDR: your pancreas functions differently during exercise than any other time.

That said.... if you eat a ridiculously low amount of protein all day, yes, your diet overall can cause diabetes.

If you eat a diet that is almost exclusively highly-processed carbs outside of training, contains little to no fiber, almost no protein, yes indeed you can make yourself prediabetic.

My wife and I tested this - on ourselves, of course.
(Context: She's a pro triathlete and sport scientist who also happens to be a board certified specialist in sport dietetics.)

We asked:
"Where is the tipping point? How low does protein intake have to be while doing high carb, to cause blood sugar dysregulation?"


Answer: Less than 40 total grams of protein per day for her. I quit before I got there.

We started at 100g and stepped it downwards by 10g daily protein intake, every 3-4 weeks. This was with 350-750g of carbs per day. It's an utterly ridiculous approach to nutrition.

This approach gets really hard to follow hard to follow without developing disordered eating tendencies because when you're chowing 700g of carbs per day, you have to selectively choose low-protein carb sources and intentionally not eat ANY protein all day, just to keep your trace protein from adding up to 40g/day. It means saying 'no' to wheat bread and opting for white rice with teriyaki sauce on it because there's too much protein in the bread. (When we were experimenting with a max of 40g protein per day). Anecdote: The cravings a diet like this will cause are unreal.

Warning: may crave a dry hunk of baked lean chicken breast.

At this point we started noticing the very first drift upwards of fasting blood sugar. Nothing even considered pre-diabetic, technically, but high enough that even our extreme-let's-test-the-limits approach to our personal decisions was put on the shelf. We canned the experiment because we were already below what we know is adequate protein intake for a human in general. :)

I wonder what Lachlan's diet was like. Let me check his prior video on that and see what he eats...

• 8 slices toast + bun + biscoff + butter → 13g protein
• Soy milk + sugar cereal → 8g protein
• Orange juice → 0g protein
• Banana → 0g protein
• Lots of Instant Noodles → 5-8g protein
• Corn Flakes → 2g protein
• 2 chicken wings → 15g protein (I'm being generous by the looks of it)
• Sweet potatoes → 1g protein

Total protein estimate → 45-50g, almost exclusively from trace sources. And an absurd amount of high glycemic index carbs outside of training. Where is the fiber and nutrient density!?

This is indeed a recipe for diabetes.

Folks, please eat 0.5-1.0g protein per pound of body weight per day. Type 2 diabetes risk will be near zero if you exercise and have healthy body composition. Aim on the upper end if you've ever struggled with obesity or blood sugar dysregulation. It's that simple!

Here's a more thoughtful take on protein for endurance athletes. It's 8 minutes. It'll tell you everything you need to know about how not to become diabetic while consuming a diet that fuels you best.

Or you can purchase SFuels and fix your self-induced diabetes here. WARNING: their marketing department is bigger than ours. The rabbit hole is deep as Lachlan found (and Sam Long, IIRC). My advisement is to steer clear. Lachlans links to Dan Plews, Andrew Koutnik, and Peter Brukner made me chuckle. SFuels is the video sponsor. Lachlan is also personally sponsored by SFuels, by the sound of it. As I mentioned on a thread in reddit, that says it all.

Disclosure: Our app recommends sugar as fuel. If you're concerned about blood sugar issues, just set the "satiety management" setting towards "whole foods" and you're good to go. That setting allows you to scales carbs WAY back on easy days. Kind of like the "right fuel right time" approach, just without the dogma. Sorry, Dan, it's Saturday, and I'm feeling feisty. Dan, I'd love to meet and chat with you someday. I suspect we think more alike than different. YouTube collab?? :)

Lachlan if you happen to read slowtwitch, another option for fixing your diet would be to double your daily protein intake to about 80-120g/day, triple your fiber intake by eating veggies and legumes a bit more often. Nothing stringent, and nothing "all or nothing" mindset. Triathletes (especially those working in finance) tend to sometimes get really black and white about their approaches to things. Keep your diet fun and liberalized and do some of the basics and your blood sugar will be fixed. You can get pre-cooked frozen chicken, and frozen veggies an throw them in the microwave a couple times a day, and you'll be most of the way solved here. One other tidbit might be to target consuming a few more complex carbs outside of training and making mostly just the fuel during training the sugar you consume. Sugar post-training is great. Sugar around the clock isn't helping things. All that said, chat with your MD (or RD, CSSD!).

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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Fantastic!! Thanks for taking the time to write all the information for us!!

Peter attia does an interview with inigo (tadej coach) and part of the interview covers this. and inigo was telling him that the tour guys are the most insulin sensitive of the lot.

you may find parts of the interview interesting if you haven’t already seen it

I don’t really know what Peter is going on about these days - just about how awesome he is