What to do next

Reading about type 1 diabetes is the easy part. This page turns it into a short list of actions, points you to the deeper section that matches your situation, and ends with the most hopeful thing the evidence has to say.

Three things to do this week

1. Book one appointment. Eyes, kidneys or feet — whichever screening is overdue. That single action is worth more than everything else on this page. The schedule is in the long game.
2. Ask your team for a written sick-day plan. Sick judgement is bad judgement, and the person reading the plan may be a parent or partner. See sick days.
3. Show the emergency pages to two people who are around you often. A plan nobody else knows about is not a plan. Start with what the people around you need to know.

Two more, when you are ready:

• Ask about the other four levers — blood pressure, cholesterol, kidney protection and smoking. Most people with type 1 have never been walked through them.
• Say it if it's heavy. Distress and burnout are treatable and routinely go unmentioned. Bring it up the way you would a blood result. See diabetes distress.

Go deeper

Five sections go further than the overviews. Each is written for people with type 1 and the people around them, and each carries its own sources. You don't need to read all of them — pick the one that matches your situation.

• Food — food groups by speed, the delayed rise, insulin timing, glycemic index, fibre, Canadian labels, celiac disease, hosting and kids' parties.
• Movement — why exercise goes both ways, starting glucose, insulin reductions, fuelling, the overnight tail, competition nerves, kit, and what coaches need.
• Medications — steroids, beta blockers, SGLT2 inhibitors and DKA at a normal reading, sick-day hold lists, sensor interference, glucagon.
• Drugs and alcohol — nicotine, cannabis, alcohol, stimulants, MDMA and psychedelics. Harm reduction, not a lecture. Plus travel numbers.
• Complications — the full DCCT and EDIC evidence, each complication plainly, how far the rates have fallen, screening, and why outcomes are not a verdict on effort.

If you are passing this on to someone, share the link rather than a screenshot — the sources travel with it.

Your team comes first

Everything on this site is general education, not medical advice. Your doses, ratios, correction factors and targets come from your diabetes team, and where their instructions differ from anything here, theirs win. Every number on this site is a published starting point, not your dose. Take the patterns you notice to your team — that is a conversation they have all the time, and it goes much better with data than with guesses.

The last word belongs to the evidence

Two percentage points of A1C, held for six years in the 1980s, was still preventing heart attacks and deaths thirty years later. Almost nothing else in medicine pays off like that.

And the tools you have now — modern sensors and insulins — are far better than the ones that proved it.

That is not a promise about any one person's future. It is the reason the daily work is worth doing, and the reason a hard stretch is not a life sentence.