 Hello everyone today I have a very special guest for you. His name is Tom, he has type 1 diabetes and he has managed to bring his A1C down from 13% all the way down to 6% and he kept his A1C down at 6%. Guess what? He also has his own YouTube channel and he shares his experiences so check his channel is called type 1 talks. Now today I am bringing him on to share how he achieved to bring the A1C down from 13% down to 6% and kept it that way. Tom go ahead. Hey Dr. Ergen I'm so excited to be here and share with your viewers a few tips that helped me get my blood sugar under control and to reduce my HPA1C from a scary 13% to a relatively nice 6% where I have been for the past couple years. Now obviously I'm not a doctor and this is not gonna be medical advice. I'm just gonna share my real life diabetes experience and I will be totally honest with you. When I was a teenager my blood sugar was definitely not the number one thing that I was interested in. Sorry doc. If anyone who is watching this video is struggling with high blood sugars or high HPA1C the number one tip I would give is try to avoid those big blood sugar spikes after meals. The easy way to do that in my case was to avoid eating those high glycemic index foods like white rice, white bread, cereals, all kinds of fruits. Stay away from them or just eat a little bit not huge portions. There are so many foods with low glycemic profile that I absolutely love. All kinds of meat, steak, ham, all kinds of green veggies, legumes, avocado and many more. These hardly spike my blood sugar at all and quite honestly I realized I don't really need the bread or the rice anymore. The number two tip and probably the most important one I have for you is test your blood sugar frequently. Test, test, test. Your glucometer or your CGM is the most important tool in your toolbox. Now if you don't know what a CGM is, it's a continuous glucose monitor which consists of a little sensor that you place on your arm and it sends the data about your glucose to your phone. It can be Dexcom G6, it can be Freestyle Libre 3 or Freestyle Libre 2. There are many kinds of CGMs but all of them do very similar job and for me this was such a game changer because with the CGM I know exactly what my blood sugar is 24-7. I also know how my blood sugar reacts after I eat a carby meal, after I drink a beer or during a 10k run. The CGM shows me a nice blood sugar graph every day, even gives me a prediction in which direction my blood sugar is trending. I'm sure Dr Ergin will agree with me when I say knowledge is power. The more we know about our blood sugar trends, the more in control we are. I gained so much knowledge from my CGM and I believe it was the number one thing that helped me reduce my HBA1C. Now don't get me wrong, you can get a lot of knowledge when you test frequently with your glucometer, it's just not that easy, not that convenient. And kudos to all of you who maybe don't use a CGM but still achieve very good HBA1C results. Now tip number three I would give you is know your why. And guys I'll be totally honest here, diabetes sucks. We have to work hard every day and if we don't we might have to deal with nasty diabetes complications at some point in the future. I had been failing in diabetes, my HBA1C was 13% when I was a teenager and I think the main reason was I didn't care, I didn't know my why back then. This is a true story and I'm still embarrassed to say that, but I will anyway. A few nights my blood sugar was so high that I needed to pee but my body didn't wake me up and I just peed all over my bed and when my mom saw it she asked me do you think your girlfriend will want to share the bed with you like this? Is that really how you want to live? That was the time in my life when I said this has to stop, I found my first why. I didn't want to pee in my bed again. Now during these days my whys are different, it's my family, it's my youtube channel. I want to be here as long as possible in as good shape as possible for my family, for my followers and that's why I'm working hard on managing my blood sugar and keeping it under control. Your why might be totally different but try to think about what it is. Try to give it a name because once you give it a name it will be a lot easier for you to focus and get those blood sugars down and get that HBA1C down as a result. Now tip 4 I would give you and another thing that worked for me was setting realistic goals for my next HBA1C test. When I was a teenager and my HBA1C was 13.3% I set my next goal as 10% and I wanted to reach 10% in 6 months. Now this goal at that point was too optimistic, it was too ambitious and I failed to deliver and I realized over time that if I set a more realistic goal it is more likely that I reach it and that will motivate me to stretch my next goal a little bit further. I also realized that the goal itself is not enough, I need to plan how to get to this goal. So for example how many times a day I will test, what foods I will stop eating, what kind of physical activity I will start doing and how often I will do it. These kind of steps that can be really simple at the beginning but you can keep building on them one by one can really get you to your goal and you can stretch your goal further and further and you can reach HBA1C like a person without diabetes. Just need to be working on it. And of course everyone is different so it's best to develop your plan with your doctor, with your diabetes team. They know best what will work for you and you know if your HBA1C is 10% it is okay to set your goal for the next HBA1C test at 9.5%. You don't need to aim at 6 right away. If your HBA1C is 7 it is okay to set your next goal as 6.8 or 6.7%. Just take it step by step, you will get there. It's just important to not lose it and stay on track. Now tip number five is really easy. Identify what is already working and replicate it. So if you see you had a really good day in terms of blood sugars try to think about what you ate, what you did. Just try to duplicate it. Do it again. Do it again because if something is working on Monday it will probably work on Tuesday as well. And this is a really simple one to do and this is a really fast one to implement. Surround yourself with the right people and I'm not only talking about your medical specialist. I'm also talking about diabetes community. We have such a strong community with such a strong knowledge and knowledge as I said before is power. Try to connect with other diabetics and listen to their stories. What are they struggling with? What works for them? I learned so many things about blood sugar management just by reading comments from other diabetics under my videos on YouTube and there are great resources right here on YouTube like SugarMD. So if you're not subscribed to his YouTube channel definitely hit that subscribe button and check out his other videos. Tom out. Ciao. After hearing Tom I hope you feel more comfortable and I am sure that you will be able to achieve your goals as well. If you like this video give it a thumbs up, share and write a comment about what you think about him and his experiences. Make sure you check his channel. It's called Tight One Talks. We'll talk to you later guys. See you in the next video. Hey guys I hope you're enjoying this channel so far and I hope you subscribed already. If you didn't do it and if you did watch this video right there I think that will help you too.