#1230 Off Insulin with Mounjaro

Jim, an 8-year Type 1, has discontinued insulin use since incorporating Mounjaro into his regimen. 

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DISCLAIMER: This text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record. Nothing that you read here constitutes advice medical or otherwise. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making changes to a healthcare plan.

Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends and welcome to episode 1230 of the Juicebox Podcast

Well, I think today some of you are going to be mad at this episode might even get a little pissed off, but some of you are going to be amazed and some of you are going to think this is a miracle, it's probably not one way or the other. Please don't forget that nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice, medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan or becoming bold with insulin. guys seriously, why don't you hear Jim's story? It's bananas. And I'm talking to like be a Na Na S that is bananas. If you're living with diabetes, or the caregiver of someone who is and you're looking for an online community of supportive people who understand, check out the Juicebox Podcast private Facebook group Juicebox Podcast type one diabetes. And if you'd like to help with T one D research go to T one D exchange.org/juicebox. complete the survey and just like that you'll be helping they're looking for US residents who have type one or are the caregiver of someone who does. I got the opening done so quickly. I ran out of things to say so I'll just wait with you quietly told musicans Dun dun dun BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM here humps nice guys. Today's episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by Omni pod and the Omni pod five. Learn more and get started today at Omni pod.com/juice box. This episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by ag one drink ag one.com/juice box. When you use my link and place your first order, you're gonna get a welcome kit, a year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs. This episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by cozy Earth cozy earth.com use the offer code juicebox at checkout to save 30% off of the clothing, towels sheets off of everything they have at cozy earth.com.

Jim 2:16
So Hi, I'm Jim D from Boston mass. I'm a type one diabetic.

Scott Benner 2:22
Tim, I appreciate you doing this. You don't know this because you're completely new to the podcast and everything. But you're probably the quickest person to ever book and get on that I've ever talked with. Usually it takes six months to get on to the podcast. Wow, I

Jim 2:34
feel like an Olympic champion and I'm just sitting here at my job. Well,

Scott Benner 2:38
you should, because you have a very specific story that is, I think significant. I'll tell people that you appeared as a new Facebook group member and put up this kind of like not long but detailed thoughtful post about your situation. And it became instantly the most popular, almost polarizing posts that I've seen in a while. I want to work backwards and get back to that post at some point. So before we get to that, tell me how old are you? How old were you when you were diagnosed with type one? I want to hear that bit first.

Jim 3:13
Sure. So first of all, Scott, thank you for having me. I'm glad I was able to bring some topic to the table that people seem to be excited about. So I'm happy to share my story. And so I am about to turn 58 In two weeks, and I was diagnosed as a type one. When I was 50 years old on Valentine's Day of 2020 diabetes doesn't run in my family at all. There's no history of it. I wasn't pre diabetic. This literally came out of thin air for me and I live a relatively healthy lifestyle. I was not a huge snacker not a regular Coke drinker. It just literally hit me like, like a bag of sand to the side of the head out of nowhere.

Scott Benner 3:56
Tim, tell me Jim's Okay, right. Yes, absolutely. 2020 Or did you get the date wrong? Dustin was

Jim 4:03
eight years ago. And so it was 2016 I'm sorry, my room. My bad math?

Scott Benner 4:08
No, no, that's fine. Because I'm like, had it my head. I'm like he's had type one for eight years. Then he said 2020 Oh my god. Did I misunderstand. I'm sorry. Okay. Don't be don't be sorry.

Jim 4:15
So it did happen to people at my age. Listen, I'm

Scott Benner 4:19
52 and I'm not doing the like walk into the room and forget that I came to pee thing yet but I'm getting closer. So you said came out of nowhere. So let's go through it first. Sure in your family, any other type one diabetes, and

Jim 4:35
not nobody who has a close close relative I have some second cousins but their their diabetes runs in the other other side of the family. So you could really argue that there is no biological connection to anybody in my family who had it. I'll explain to you sort of how I was diagnosed. My wife and I were away on vacation. And I've always been somebody I ran cross country in high school. My legs have always had a lot of muscle on them. And I opened up the window curtains one morning and my wife said, Oh my gosh, your legs are so skinny what what's happened? And I burst into tears and said, I don't know what's wrong, but I can't stop drinking water. I'm thirsty all the time. I feel like I have sand in my mouth. I'm sure there's something wrong. And I hope this vacation isn't our last hurrah, but I'm not really sure what's happening. And my wife, who is my non clinical medical adviser, said to me, well, let's call your doctor right now. And we call them we set up an appointment for when we got home. And we got home on a Monday, Tuesday morning, I was in my doctor's office at 830. And by 915, that morning, I was diagnosed with diabetes. They believed it was going to be type one at the time because my a one C was 13.7. I had some other factors. And so they run ran a panel of tests. And lo and behold, I already had the type one antibodies present. So they could confirm that in fact, I was a type one. And starting that afternoon, I was learning how to prick my finger and use a glucose monitor and starting both short term and long term insulin and it just turned my whole life upside down on that. That Valentine's Day.

Scott Benner 6:12
Jim, were you also in the drama club in high school or Turkish humans made me cry? Did you go off on that vacation thinking I'm dying? This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Omni pod five. A lot of people in my private Facebook group talk about their love for Omni pod five. Have you seen those posts and thought, Oh, I wish I could have that experience with an insulin pump too.

Lija Greenseid 6:37
If you have and you answered yes to that question.

Scott Benner 6:39
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Scott Benner 9:08
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Unknown Speaker 10:32
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Scott Benner 10:35
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Jim 11:38
I actually did, I truly in my heart thought there's something terrible going on. And this will be the last wonderful vacation I have with my beautiful wife before you know the hits the fan and whatever we're about to have to deal with, we're gonna have to deal with together. And although I don't keep really secrets from my wife, I felt like this was so potentially devastating that it was important for the two of us to have a nice romantic three day weekend in Miami.

Scott Benner 12:04
How long had you been hiding your symptoms? Probably about

Jim 12:07
three weeks to a month is what I can recall. Now there is Scott a story that I'll share with you briefly that happened about eight months before that, which is I was running a conference in Chicago. And I got the flu the day before the conference started. And I was very, very, very sick with the flu like I had never been sick before. But I didn't realize because I was alone in my hotel room that I was getting very dehydrated and how sick I really was. And so after four days of being stuck in a hotel room, I was talking on the phone with my wife who was in Boston and said either I'm flying to Chicago, or you need to go to the ER and figure out what's going on. And so I took an ambulance to the ER, and they checked me and they told me that I was extremely dehydrated. And that in fact, some of my my core body functions were either on the verge or about to start shutting down because I was so dehydrated. So that experience was in my mind at the time totally unrelated to paying diagnosis. My endocrinologist has a theory. And it's only a theory, of course, but that I was so dehydrated that my body started to become compromised. And your pancreas apparently in your beta cells in particular, are very susceptible to sort of stop working from dehydration, and they don't always come back to life the full way. I never like to say that's what gave me diabetes, because we don't really know. Sure, but they thought that maybe I had a predisposition to it. And then this may have been the trigger for it. Did

Scott Benner 13:32
you have once the testing happened? Did you have auto antibodies for type one? Yes, I don't. Yeah. And are there any other autoimmune issues with you or in your close family like celiac, hypothyroidism, fit a Lago? Anything like that? No,

Jim 13:48
nothing like that. The only thing that that I carry is on a cystic fibrosis carrier. That's the only sort of interesting medical piece about me otherwise I am as plain Jim as you can get. run of the mill. Absolutely. Just normal average run of the mill kind of person. Your mom

Scott Benner 14:06
have arthritis. Ra No,

Jim 14:09
she did not have that. That.

Scott Benner 14:10
Okay. You get the flu?

Jim 14:11
I said she did not. She does not she's still with us.

Scott Benner 14:15
Jim didn't want to write his mom off too soon. No, now she's gone. No way. You know what she's not but when the last time you saw your mom, geez. How old is she?

Jim 14:26
My mother is a very Spry 84 year old. Good

Scott Benner 14:30
fair. That's excellent. Okay, so you go to the hospital, they pump you full of fluids. Is that enough to get you on your feet then that

Jim 14:36
it was so I spent about 12 hours getting pumped full of fluids. They sent me back to the hotel. And then two days later, I was finally well enough to fly home and spent another probably five days of recovery at home, getting stronger and sort of rehydrating getting my energy back. But when I felt better, I thought it was a one and done. I never thought it would potentially have any long term impact. And that's why I say you know, we can't ask absolutely say yes this cause that it's a belief that I have in my life that I was apparently so sick that could have potentially triggered this. Yeah,

Scott Benner 15:07
well, you've never been around autoimmune or type one either. But you know, my daughter had Coxsackie virus before she was diagnosed. Having a virus for instance before diagnosis with type one is incredibly common. Sometimes even stress. I've talked to people who have gone through like traumatic things, then they're type ones come on. But you know, in the end, like you You alluded to, you had auto immune antibodies, they just hadn't been triggered to cause your type one yet. Then after that you have type one diabetes. There's a reason I'm skipping through all this. You have type one diabetes, how are you managing then, like, what did they give you to to deal with this? So

Jim 15:42
I immediately on the day that I was diagnosed, started taking both short term or mealtime insulin and longtime, longtime insulin. So I was taking three shots a day with my meals for about half an hour before I would eat a meal. And then and they put me on a straight flatlined dose. So I was starting with four units of mealtime, insulin. And then I started with six units of long term insulin or over, you know what I would take it right before bed at night, or sometime early in the evening, as well as I also started Metformin at the time, okay.

Scott Benner 16:14
And they told you, you had type one diabetes, nobody misdiagnosed you as type two or anything like that. At

Jim 16:21
the very beginning, like for the first maybe 10 minutes that I was talking to the doctor, in on that fateful day, he said, you know, maybe it's type two, but based on your a one C, which at the time was 13.7, when I had some blood drawn in the office that day, you're presenting as a type one, but let's do the lab work. And so it took a few days, obviously, to get the antibody test back and a few other things, but within short, a very short term. We knew I was a type one. Yeah,

Scott Benner 16:46
lab work, confirmed it. Okay. So now you live, how many years with type one diabetes before you intersected GLP. medication?

Jim 16:59
It was about six and a half years. Okay, so I started Manjaro in October of 2022.

Scott Benner 17:06
Why was it given to you? Or why did you ask for it? So

Jim 17:09
I didn't ask for it. It was nowhere on my radar screen. But I'm lucky enough to live in Greater Boston where we have some of the strongest and best medical facilities in the country. And my endocrinologist who I see quarterly, I would say is appropriately aggressive with both technology and medicine. And she said, You know, there's this new medicine that's come out, it's really designed for type two, she said, but we're seeing some success with type ones. And if you're open to trying it for probably two or three months to see what it could potentially do for you, I think you might be a good candidate for it. And because I trust my endocrinologist implicitly, till the end of the day, I listen to anything that she tells me to do. Follow her guidance. I said sure. I'm happy to try it. And so that's what triggered the initial 2.5 Manjaro shock.

Scott Benner 18:01
Okay, now, let me just go backwards for a second because I really want to hammer this home before we move forward. Every day six and a half years Basal insulin covered every carb that you ate if you didn't your blood sugar went up the whole thing, right? Oh, yes,

Jim 18:15
absolutely. And I would even sometimes think let's say I was going to have a heavy carb meal so maybe I would take six or eight units of insulin before meal and then I would have you know, What would surprise me to be less than carb or someone would serve me whole wheat when I wasn't expecting and so I sometimes you know, would go down based on my insulin into the 50s and even once down as low as the high 40s which was very scary. But yes, I was absolutely taking my excellent as I should my Metformin as I should every meal looking because they had me on because I was in what what we thought was our what was could be described as my honeymoon period. I didn't have to go through the whole calculation of how many carbs Am I gonna eating? And how many does my body need for that yet, it was still kind of a flatline helpful dosage. Do

Scott Benner 19:02
you think that you ever experienced what people call a honeymoon?

Jim 19:05
Yes, I do. And in fact, I think that I was in my honeymoon period for at least a good four to four and a half years before I started to need more insulin, both at mealtime and at night for the long term.

Scott Benner 19:22
Okay, so you probably had, I don't want to call it a lot of light, but you were using a fair amount of insulin already. But it went up about four, four and a half years into it. Then you lived a couple of more years like that with the increased need. Then the Manjaro came on. Exactly. Okay. Did you have any weight issues at the time? As

Jim 19:39
a youth I was always skinny. I was a college kid. I enjoyed donuts and ice cream and cheese burgers. When I hit my late 20s I would say I started to put on weight. But I'm 511 with medium sort of build so I should be around 180 And I got up to as the when I was taking the insulin before I start To the Manjaro, my weight went up almost to 220 pounds. And some of that was because I could eat more with more insulin. And I was trying to live what I quote unquote normally would eat. And so I was probably not quite as self aware of where my weight was going as it should have been. However, I also think that the insulin helped me gain weight. Did you get

Scott Benner 20:23
caught up in that? That feeling of wow, I learned how to Bolus for all this, I can eat whatever I want, and then forget about food as nutrition and calories.

Jim 20:32
It's as if you just read my mind. That's exactly right. Yeah,

Scott Benner 20:34
that's a pretty common jump. So this podcast, which I know you don't listen to talks, you know, when we talk about management stuff, we talk about using the right amount of insulin at the right time and keeping your a one season your variability low by understanding the timing and amount of insulin. But at some point, there are people who lose the you start seeing food so much as this like thing you conquer with insulin that you stopped seeing it the way other people think about it, which is calories that could if I eat too many of them caused me to gain weight. Exactly. Yeah, it's really interesting how it happens. So okay, so you are a couple of years, hot and heavy using insulin, you're gaining weight, etc. and so on. Your life's moving on, doctor comes over and says, Hey, we're hearing about how this drug is helping people. Why don't you give it a whirl? They don't have any problems with insurance, because back then insurance wasn't hassling people about it. Isn't it interesting. And I want to point this out to him, I don't want to make your your episode a political statement. But if Jim would have had this experience two years later, than the rest of the story you're about to hear it never happens, because Jim's doctor would have said, hey, I want you to try 2.5 of a GLP. And his insurance would have said no, he has type one diabetes. And that's not what this is for. So you get the two, five, you start to inject it. What do you notice in the first week,

Jim 21:55
like probably many of the listeners, not only did I start the injection, but I found a Facebook group, I did some research online. And I thought I was going to take the shot and sort of wake up the next morning and not be hungry and maybe be down five pounds, like I had no expectations of what to expect, other than what I was reading about. So I started the shot on a Friday because I did read that people said that the side effects seem to be worse in the first 24 to 48 hours after taking a shot. And so I thought, well, that will give me the weekend to sort of figure out how I'm feeling and what's going on. And I took the first shot with both a level of excitement that thinking wow, I wonder what this is going to do for me. And could this change the my trajectory of how I have to be you as a diabetic, but I was also nervous. And I would say the first week I had 00 impact on me zero, I ate the same I felt the same my body process food the same. My glucose numbers were the same. I didn't see anything. And I thought okay, well, one weekend, we'll see, you know, maybe the second week, something will happen. And so next Friday, again, I took a 2.5 milligram shot. And probably within about 12 hours, I started to feel this slight sense of nausea. And I am not somebody that generally I don't get seasick. I don't get motion sick, I don't generally get nauseous. And I thought oh, this is kind of an interesting feeling in my stomach, I wonder if I maybe ate too much. And now the medicine is telling me Hey, slow down, you know, your digestive tract is slowing down. And so your stomach is giving you a signal. And within another 24 hours, I had lost interest mentally in most foods. And the best way that I describe it, when I've talked to my friends and colleagues about it is it went from like always being hungry and always thinking about what's my next meal? What am I going to have for a snack, but am I going to drink? What am I doing to the flip switch went off. And food just evaporated from my stream of consciousness as always being that number one topic in my brain. And instead, it flipped to everything else that was going on me I felt like it was as if I had foggy glasses on. And then one day I used a little lens cleaner and everything became sharper and crisper. Because the noise from the food and thinking about what my next meal would be what would my snack be? Just went away and everything else came clear into picture in my life. It was just unbelievable.

Scott Benner 24:23
How did you find the experience because you don't know this, but I don't have diabetes. But I began using GLP. April last year. So I've been major and I've been on it like 14 months and I've lost 47 pounds. I would go as far as to say that there was some time where I had to reevaluate how I spent my days because I was suddenly met with extra time in my mind and extra time physically because I wasn't constantly with food. Does that make sense? Like I actually woke up one day and I'm like it almost felt like boredom or loneliness because I suddenly there was more than 24 hours in the day for me.

Jim 25:04
Yeah, I totally agree with you, Scott in the way that I frequently have described it as I felt like I got more bandwidth in my day, that it was as if a piece of the pie of what used to fill up my week or my day was removed. And now I could start to focus on other things and do them in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Scott Benner 25:21
I'm able to better do that thing that that fit. People always tell other people all the time that like foods, just, you know, fuel for your body, and you're like, okay, like, that sounds good. And then I look at them, and they're all jacked up, and they've got abs and stuff. And I go, obviously, it's working for you. So I'll try. And then I tried to think of food as fuel. And I'm like, I mean, that's nice, but I would like a cookie. Now, it's not like that. Now, like when you and I get done recording today, I'm gonna go downstairs, take a piece of steak, probably two ounces, I'm going to slice it thin. Throw it in a pan with two eggs, scrambled it together and eat it for protein. And I don't know, I might put something else with it. I'm not sure exactly what. But I'm going to eat it because I know I have to for nutrition. But it's 1030 in the morning right now. And I am not hungry. I haven't eaten anything today. I got up. But my dog because I did the thing. I got a shout or it's freeing in a way that I think some people would hear that and go, Oh my God, that sounds horrible. And I think if you were to fight it when it happened, it probably would be horrible. If you started lamenting the loss of something, I can see where you could get into like a psychological battle with it. But I just gave myself over to it because I was like, I am healthier than I was yesterday. I want to keep doing this. You know, interesting to hear other people talk about it like that. So yeah,

Jim 26:40
Scott, I'll tell you another interesting nuance for me, which is I used to find cooking, very relaxing. So it would not be uncommon for me to cook, maybe four out of seven dinners for my family, or for my wife or kids are older and moved out. But my wife and I had to sit down and have a relatively nice meal that would be somewhat complicated to make. But I enjoyed that process. To me that cooking was a relaxing process, I would turn on music, and I would enjoy the whole piece of it. And one of the things that really changed for me is that even the preparation of food lost interest to me. And so really anything related to food and nutrition just sort of moved to the back of my mind because it was no longer the joyful experience of eating or the joyful experience of cooking. Yeah, and the other piece, I would say to your steak and eggs breakfast, by the way, if we would look closer, I'd be there for your leftovers. So it sounds delicious, is that I realized that I can't eat salad anymore. I used to enjoy salad quite a bit. But now it doesn't have enough nutritional value in it for me to eat, even when I add some protein because I do still need carbs. Of course, like we all need carbs to survive. And so you know, I'm not a doctor, I'm not giving you medical advice. But to me, I feel like I need carbs to survive. For me, I've had to really think about what is the nutritional value of everything that goes in my mouth. So before it used to be How sweet is it? And how salty is it? Because those are the two flavor profiles that I would sort of lean towards. And now it's all about how much is it going to feed? What I need to keep my engine going.

Scott Benner 28:17
I have the same thoughts. It's really it actually put me where those health nuts wanted me to be when they were saying it to me, you know, and everybody else is Food is fuel. You know, and only so much fits in here. So put in good fuel. Exactly. And yeah, no, it's fantastic. Okay, so, but this isn't even while you're on the podcast, although we'll jump ahead and jump back again. In the how many years have you been on Manjaro?

Jim 28:41
It'll be two years in October October 1 of 2024. So I'm about 18 months or so into it now.

Scott Benner 28:48
How much weight have you lost?

Jim 28:49
I've lost almost 60 pounds good for you. 60 pounds. It's a life changing amount of weight. Yeah,

Scott Benner 28:57
somebody in my family started using it. And they started to they went the other way they started lamenting Oh, I don't like the food doesn't bring me joy. And I'm like, it's funny. It's like I don't think Food shouldn't bring you joy. But we've gotten to a weird place now where the food's so supercharged was salt and sugar and all that other stuff and you know they probably bringing you more joy than it's supposed to, you know, they're having that thing and I said I'm gonna say something I think they used to say in the 70s around like the dieting phase and I don't want to trigger anybody but nothing tastes as good as skinny feels is how I think of how things now I'm like, because the visuals nice. Like looking better. Is nice putting on a t shirt that doesn't grab me as nice not you know, having fat like in places that I shouldn't that's all nice. Like don't get me wrong, but it's the knees don't hurt more energy better sleep, feel healthier skin looks better. Like it's the other stuff that I that I'm happy to have. The vintage part

Jim 29:53
is a bonus. I wonder how you feel. I love that I feel generally more like I have more energy See, I will say, however, sometimes I struggle to eat enough calories to keep my energy level. Okay, so that's the one thing for me, I absolutely agree with you like the whole idea that I'm healthier, I'm lighter, my clothes are tight on me all feels good to me. The thing that feels best to me though, is when I look at my blood work numbers, and know that not only do I physically look better, that I'm healthier now than I was before. And that's going to lead to, hopefully a long life of being a parent, maybe God willing, someday a grandparent and the life that it is giving me too. And the ability to look long term forward, as opposed to short term forward has been a game changer. Because if you're diagnosed with diabetes, and you're in your 50s, or 50, like I was, you know, you tend to read about the bad stuff, because people don't tend to talk about it or write articles about, oh, I have diabetes, look at these wonderful things that are happening to me to me. So I read all the negatives and was preparing for those. And now I feel like this medicine has given me a new a new outlook on life blast time, my agency I don't I don't know, I don't think I mentioned this before. But my last day when Soucek was 5.7. Like, right, it doesn't get much better than that for a type one diabetic. I couldn't hope for more than that.

Unknown Speaker 31:16
Yeah. How were they

Scott Benner 31:18
throughout the six and a half years? Did they vacillate? Were they pretty stable? They onesies?

Jim 31:23
I generally was somewhere in the sixes for most of the time. Okay. Yes. All right.

Scott Benner 31:29
Here's the real reason you're on the podcast, you start doing the 2.5, did you stay at 2.5? Or did you ever go to five milligrams. So

Jim 31:36
I did 2.5 for a month. And then I moved up to five, and then I kept going up, and I've gone up to as high as 15. And now I've gone back down. So we can talk about that, too.

Scott Benner 31:48
What number did you get your most weight loss at? A combination

Jim 31:51
of 10.0 and 12.5?

Scott Benner 31:55
Okay, because I'm on 10. Right now I use that bounce. So same drug. And I know the name is different, but same drug, my doctor is like, I think we gonna try the 12 next. And she keeps saying like you really see a 1012 even up to the highest dose and said the same thing. Like once we get the fat off of you, we'll we'll go back and find a maintenance level. So how high did you you made it all the way to 15.

Jim 32:18
So I went all the way to 15, I will say that I was only on 15 for a month, and I had significant side effects much worse than I had had on any of the other doses. And so we decided to go back down to the 12.5. And so I was on 12.5 for probably about 10 months straight. And I also feel very lucky. Although I know a lot of people have trouble finding the medicine locally, I was able within a 30 minute drive of my house, I was never out of the medicine at any time, I did have to drive half an hour to get it to me, you know, half an hour of my life, I was well worth some time spent to pick up the medicine. So I I did do 12. And now I'm back. So I stayed on 12 for a long time. And then I started having some additional lows. And so my blood glucose was going down to 60 Sometimes at night. And so we thought I should go down. So I've been back on 10.0 for the last just two weeks. Okay. And so we think that maybe 10 is going to be my maintenance dose, but we're not sure yeah, we have to wait and see, you

Scott Benner 33:22
would have laughed extra hard more than other people on Friday afternoon. If you were at my house, when you saw me come out of here after working all day, and I looked at my wife, I was like, I gotta go, I gotta get my medicine. And then I drove, I drove like 45 minutes in traffic to this little pharmacy that I know, carries it all the time. Go in pleasantries, get it taken care of, look at the guy go, I will be back in a month. Remember me? Like you're actually you're actually working out a little system with them where you're like, look, you can trust me, I'm gonna buy a box of this every month. And therefore they kind of hold it for you. There's like a whole back end thing that's going on around this. It's not I'm not doing anything wrong. I've just I've literally had to build a rapport with a pharmacist to make sure that my medications, they're covered by my insurance lovely like, and again, just say you feel lucky is crazy. I paid $25 for it. But here's the big part of your story, though. How much insulin are you using?

Jim 34:17
So I am very proud and happy to say that I am off all insulin, zero insulin. Let me say that again. No long term, no short term. I now take zero insulin on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis and basically annual basis. And that happened. After about six weeks of being on the Manjaro. I started to titrate down. And I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. It started after two weeks, I started to titrate down and by about five or six weeks, I was fully off of all of my insulin.

Scott Benner 34:53
So does your brain explode like you're only you're halfway into a five milligram shot and you're I'm assuming you're on the phone When was your endo going? I mean, we've been moving my insulin down the way I expected. But how, how much further down? Could this go?

Jim 35:06
Well, it was a, it was a great question. And I when I first called and spoke to my endocrinologist and said, I don't think I need this month's insulin and what this is what's going on? She said, okay, you know, maybe you'll have to go back up. But let's, let's start to move you down. And so we moved down two units at a time of both the long acting and mealtime insulin. And because I was on relatively low doses, it happened pretty quickly. And so I was able to get off of all of my insulin. And I have to say that when I meet diabetics, quote, unquote, out in the wild, and you know, I, if I see somebody with a Dexcom on I am just one of those people, I just go and start talking to them. And it happened on Saturday night, I was out poor Friday night, we were out for dinner at a Mexican restaurant. And I saw somebody wearing a G six and went over and said, What did you eat for dinner tonight? I'm just curious. And then we started talking, and she asked how much insulin I take. And I told her my story briefly. And that the look on this woman's face was I have to call my endocrinologist. And if it wasn't a Friday night at nine o'clock, I'd probably call her right now, because it is so unbelievable that I have proven through antibody testing that I'm a type one. And yet, I do not currently take any insulin. Here.

Scott Benner 36:14
I don't know how many people you know, with type one diabetes, but have you been met with like skepticism when you say this to people say things like you don't have type one, you had type two, like that kind of stuff?

Jim 36:23
All the time? Yeah. All the time. I hear that. And what I say is, you know, first of all, you know, you don't know me, you know, I don't know you to the to the stranger that I'm having a conversation with. But I can assure you that in fact, you know, I have the testing to prove that I'm a type one. And we have to live in a world where we, we allow for the evolution of medicines and treatments to take place without punishing the patient. And when you tell me that, you know, Oh, I must have been misdiagnosed or you don't know what you're talking about. You're a type two, I just look at them and say, you know, you can believe what you want. But let me tell you my experience I haven't testing done. I know that I'm a type one diabetic. And yet here I sit in front of you today alive without insulin.

Scott Benner 37:08
And a five seven fair in fairness, you're a once he didn't go back into the like high force or something like that. But are you? Are you wearing a CGM still or do you periodically?

Jim 37:17
I do I wear it every day. So I'm somebody that wants to make sure that I'm doing everything I can for my health. And so to me, a CGM is just part of my life that I accept and willingly wear one. Because it helps me there are times where sometimes I won't realize that I'm going low, and it will tell me oh, you know, you're you're in the low 80s. You're heading towards 70. You know, now's the time to have something because Scott, as you probably know, even though you're not diabetic, sometimes you can when you're on these medicines, and totally forget to eat even sometimes drink. And I tend to try to drink a lot of water. But, but I have gotten an entire from waking up until dinnertime without thinking about food like it is that removed from my brain, that I will just keep working all day long. And even though it's lunchtime, and I see people getting up, like, Oh, I'll go to go in five minutes and five minutes becomes an hour. And then I'm on to my next meeting. And it literally as is as if my brain has said, Oh, you must have eaten already, because we're not telling you you're hungry, but I haven't eaten. And so I'll go a whole long time without eating anything. And then of course, there's a you and probably many of the listeners know, that will drive your blood sugar levels down and so that so that my CGM reminds me Oh, I have to eat. Yeah,

Scott Benner 38:33
it's fascinating. That thing that you that you describe, I still don't know how to completely convey it to people. It's so significant that it's caused me to, like, existentially think about food. And, like wonder, like, how do I spend so much of my life? Just captured by the idea that like, I have to, like plan for my next meal? And what am I going to eat now and I haven't eaten in a couple of hours, I have a snack and I feel hungry and you're feeding the hunger all the time. And your body's getting my body was getting like bigger, you know, slowly bigger and bigger, and I was less than less healthy, healthy. And yet, there's no way like you can say have willpower. It's it's a nice thought. But I did not have willpower. I wasn't like gorging myself or anything like that I just ate when I was hungry. I was pretty reasonable about it. I don't eat like a lot of crazy stuff throughout my life, my body was just going the wrong way. And it's almost like the only way I can describe it and I don't think this is technically sound but like, it feels like I have a GLP deficiency. And and now that I have more, my body appears to work the way I think it's supposed to the one thing that I will tell people and I've talked more about this on the podcast, but you have to teach yourself how to eat again, like how to like say to yourself, I know I'm not hungry, but there's an amount of calories today in nutrition today that I need and I'm going to go take it in and there's an amount of water that I need. I'm gonna go take it in, not because I'm being told by some unseen force, but because I know it's necessary, that's a leap you have to make. And it's not going to be the same for everybody, right? Because everybody's digestion is going to be different. And you know, especially with diabetes, you could, we could run into people who have gastroparesis. And I don't just mean like slow digestion, but they could have damage to the nerve that that, you know, handles digestion. And, you know, that would obviously change things. It's not for everybody, but you have to teach yourself how to eat again on it. I'm in the middle of so my daughter uses that. And she's type one. And her her uses, how much her insulin is gone down. It's not going to stop it like it did for you. But significant decrease, I think 16,000 fewer units of insulin this year, because of the GLP.

Jim 40:41
Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, I'll tell you going back to that, training your brain that you need to eat. The way that I think about it is I used to eat because I loved food. And now I have to eat because my body is an engine and it needs fuel. Yeah. And so that switch to fun to fuel helps me eat. However, it will sometimes take me two and a half hours to eat a small turkey sandwich for lunch. Because it just won't go down easily. My brain is saying you're not hungry. But my brain is also telling me Hey, Jim, you need to eat you need these calories. You need this protein. This is the thing to do. And so it's a little bit like that Ying and Yang and your brain saying yes, no, yes. No. Yes, no. And your rational self saying, Yeah, I know I need to eat something. I know I need this fuel. But it's sometimes hard to to get get it all get all in what you need. In a reasonable time.

Scott Benner 41:38
You don't you don't stop at the gas station. For fun. You stop because you need gas. So exactly. Right now it's something else. So like I asked you about the CGM. For recent Do you see a spike in a meal?

Jim 41:49
I do. So I'll give you an example. I mentioned Friday night, we went up to a Mexican restaurant, I had multiple blamo, or chicken mole a sauce, rice, cabbage and black beans. And so I estimated that that meal probably had based on my portion size, somewhere between 60 and 70 carbs, because there was a lot of a lot of stuff in that. And about an hour after the meal, my blood glucose was up around 180. And it stayed there for about 30 minutes. And then it came back down to about 115. Within the next, I would say 90 minutes or so. And so I was back at my baseline, I tend to be between 100 and 105 to 115. That's sort of my norm. And I was back in my normal baseline sort of range within, you know, two hours or so of eating the meal. Like it was just, it's amazing.

Scott Benner 42:46
I can't imagine that if you had that CGM on your wife, it would have looked much different if she ate the same thing. I

Jim 42:50
totally agree. And that's actually part of what my endocrinologist said, which is look at these charts, like when you mark that you're eating something and you're estimating your carbs, yes, you're getting that spike, but you're coming back down as if your body was functioning like a quote unquote, traditional pancreas normal person.

Scott Benner 43:07
And if you don't eat Mexican, if you have a more normal that turkey sandwich, do you see any kind of rise at all, as

Jim 43:15
much smaller, so maybe I'll go to 131 40, something like that. If you ever said to me that in my lifetime, I was going to go from taking four shots a day, to no shots a day, or one shot a week. And my eight one C is going to be lower. I'm gonna feel better. You're gonna look better. I would have said, you know, Scott, nice to meet you, but go sell it to somebody else because I'm not buying

Scott Benner 43:38
Oh, no, for sure. It would have sounded like I was like, Jim, do you know what happens? If you take cinnamon and put it on your food? It's gonna make your blood sugar better? Like no, it would have sounded like crazy. And that's see this is where we are right now. June 10 2024. We don't really know what this medication is going to do yet. Like right now out in the world, right, you're seeing it starts off as a type two medication. And by the way, it's been out for years longer than people think like just because the first time you saw that Mindy Kaling was thin. You heard the word ozempic doesn't mean that's when it started happening. Like there's before there's been rebel sis and other other stuff, you know, other like, there were daily shots of GLP s for for diabetes, you know, back in the day is the senza stuff like that. It's been out for a long time, right? They're obviously they've made some new molecules with the ozempic and the Manjaro. They're working better, but there's more coming. And right so now they go okay, type twos it worked for in the studies, they see weight loss, they make a weight loss drug, you said you know, you use Manjaro. I use that bound. It's they're both drugs that Lily make. They're the exact same molecule. They're just one was run through the FDA for type two diabetes one was run through the FDA for weight loss they give I have to give them different names. Now what we need is studies for people with type one like and we need it Fast and and we need to well, because your experience is insane like there's part of me gym that thinks that the government should come and get you and take you to a lab and you shouldn't even be able to say you don't want to go. Because we need to know why this is helping you. Like, why is this doing this for you? Why is my daughter gonna use 16,000 fewer units of insulin this year? She's had type one diabetes since she was two. She's 20.

Like, yeah, like what's believable? Yeah,

Jim 45:30
it is absolutely unbelievable. And for people that are listening to the podcast, you know, go go to the Facebook group and look at some of the comments from some of the people who reacted to my post. And, you know, there's dozens and dozens of people who are telling me I was misdiagnosed, or be that it's impossible, I must be doing something else. Or one person even said that, you know, I'm like a charlatan selling a witch potion, people on the street. What I want to say and if we if there's one message that anybody sort of takes away is, we're at the tip of an iceberg of understanding something new and different. So we can't let our belief system from the past impact our belief system for the future. And we need to accept that there are new medicines that open up new possibilities and seem to do different things in our body than we knew were always possible. And so I sit here, you know, as a type one, five years ago, if you said to a type one, you know, there's something coming out in a few years or something that's going to become more available next few years, that's going to take you off insulin, you know, they would have laughed at you and said, Oh, that poor guy. He's He's a nutcase. Because that's never gonna happen to him. It's

Scott Benner 46:35
possible that five years ago, you would have said that if I said it to you, oh, 100%, I think your point is just so worth, like, shining a light on, we don't know what this is. And we're still finding out. Like, I'm not saying if everyone goes out gets Manjaro and starts taking it, you're type one diabetes isn't going to need insulin anymore. I'm not saying that. I don't think that's true. I don't think that would happen for everybody. But you're the second person that I've interviewed that this has happened for. So

Jim 47:02
I will tell you, Scott, that I know somebody who is a type one diabetic, who it didn't work for. And so he's all upset, right? Like, you know, what, why is Jim getting all of these wonderful benefits? And I'm not. And so you're right, we do need to do more research, we need to understand what is it that makes it work in patient a but not in patient B, right. So that we can try to understand is it about when you were diagnosed? Is it about how far along you are in a honeymoon period? Is it something else that maybe I carry that helps the Manjaro do its job better? Or in a different way than it may for somebody else? Yeah, there's a lot of work to be done to try to understand this. The other thing that I would say is that Oprah did a special a couple of months ago on weight loss. It's available. Now, this is not a it's not a sponsorship plug. But I'll tell you it is available on Hulu, if you want to watch it because I recommend it to a lot of people. She also talks about how, you know, weight loss is very similar to the way we looked at alcoholism a few decades ago, which is, you know, we thought well, why can't you just put down the bottle it stopped Well, we realize it's a disease that your body has. And there are things that we can do to help you mitigate the condition. And weight loss is exactly the same, right? There's sort of three buckets of people. There's some people who diet and exercise work really well for, there's some people that only diet works really well for. And then there's this third bucket of people like myself who diet and exercise didn't work for me. And in fact, that's one of the frustrating things in my life is that for many years, I tried diet and exercise and it wouldn't work for me. And so I felt like I must be doing something wrong. And what a what is it that Jim has to do to apply more effort or more time or more commitment to make this happen, and now I realized it wasn't about my mindset or my energy that I put into it or my desire, but instead it was something genetically sort of miss programmed in my DNA that wasn't allowing that to happen. And now this new medicine is helping to fix whatever was broken in a way that is allowing me to live a more traditional, non diabetic lifestyle.

Scott Benner 49:09
You see people you know, famous people were like, it'll just work hard, you'll look like me, I'm like, well, a you have $9 billion. And your day isn't like mine is I don't you know, you don't get up at six o'clock in the morning and have to like take a shower and take out the dog and then drive an hour to work and then you know, work nine hours and then drive home and like you don't I mean like your life's not the same let's not like pretend that lives also. I've heard you in an interview say you use testosterone which by the way, if that's working for you, I think that's great, but I don't have access to that and I you know, and your body just happens to work with this process like this process that you choose of working out hard and and you know, taking your supplements and doing all the things that you do like it worked for you. Jim's points, right. You could take a different person and make them do those things. And it's still work. workout for them the same way, like everyone's body doesn't work exactly the same way. There's got to be different pathways for different people. Yeah, you're 100%.

Jim 50:07
Right. And not everybody is the same. What works for you may not work for me. And I also tell people don't believe everything you say, I tend to be a little bit of a disbeliever when it comes to some things. And when that person on TV that celebrity is saying, oh, you know, you just diet and exercise, you can look like me, well, I don't have a private chef, I don't have a gym in my house, I don't have a trainer that comes to my house. Oh, and by the way, I'm not having super plastic surgery on the side that I'm not talking

Scott Benner 50:34
likely cries at night, I get up with them. Like, again, all the other things that are happening that they don't tell you about, like 100,000,000%. Like, and moreover, I don't get Jinta. If I if I got preachy for five seconds, I don't I understand, like some of the responses you saw to your posts, like I really do. And at the same time, I don't understand them at all. Like, why wouldn't you look at this guy who's like, Hey, here's my story and go, Oh, my God, tell me everything you did write it down. Please send it to me. I want to go try to mimic this and see if this will work for me. But my big question for you is your insurance started to cover this. I imagine because it was back before they got the before they realized they could screw people with type on over and say no to it. But is it still covering it? Are you paying cash?

Jim 51:20
No. So it still is covering it? I fortunately have not run into my insurance coverage being an issue. Yeah. Now you're grandfathered in. I have no idea. I really don't know exactly how it works. But maybe maybe because it's a renewing prescription they figure you know, it's it is what it is I just, I can't speak to the back end part of it. What I can tell you is that every time I go and pick up my prescription, and it costs me, let's say $20 for a month or $30 for a month, I'm thankful that it's continuing to work. And I appreciate it very much that I live in a world where I have insurance, and I have access to medicine. And it is it. For me, it's life saving.

Scott Benner 52:08
My wife is the one who carries our insurance for our family. And she switched jobs recently. And I would say that one of the main forms of stress that came to us for this like process of when she was applying and looking like she was going to get the job, and is she going to take the job and all that stuff is happening in there, most of the stress was about their health care, versus the one we had. And when my zip bound, got moved over to the new insurance, and it went through. I felt like angels were singing, you know, and I was like, Oh, thank God, because I actually found myself thinking, I can't pay $25,000 a year for this, but I have to don't lie, like how am I gonna do that? Like, am I gonna have to rob a bank? Like, I'm seriously like, I started having that feeling like, like, you know, Jim, if somebody just came to you one day, they're like, hey, there's another $25,000 bill this year, I would have been like, I can't I don't know how to accomplish that. But I actually found myself thinking, but I would have to, like, I don't know how to like, I don't want to be 50 pounds heavier? Again. Yeah,

Jim 53:08
I think your experience is very normal. And I would only validate that I feel the same way. Like I I really feel like you know, every calendar year as the as the calendar moves from December to January, and my company's insurance rolls to the next year. I pray and hope that I don't have an issue. But you're 100% Right. It's, it's not an insignificant amount of money by any share by any stretch of the imagination. But at the same time, for people like me who, you know, you could argue it has changed my entire life of how I look at food, how much energy I have, when I can do what I want to do. I don't know how I would live without it. And so, you know, it's it's a scary proposition, but I figured some some way shape or form. I'm gonna have to figure this out. Listen,

Scott Benner 53:54
my situation aside, you're gonna get insulin dependent type one diabetes back without it. Like that's bonkers. Like, you cannot Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Have you ever missed an injection on the weekly? Yes,

Jim 54:07
I have. I missed one shot. On purpose. It wasn't a forget. Right. It was purposeful. Yeah. So so my son's in a band and my wife and I try to follow them when we can on tour. And so we knew that the travel schedule was going to just be a little bit crazy over a weekend. And so I decided to not take the medicine. And then when we got back, I decided I wanted to go for a week without it just to see sort of how quickly I the feelings would come back both the emotional and the physical and the need for insulin. And what I can tell you is after one week, I didn't see any change, and I wasn't willing to try for two weeks. There was no reason for me to sort of push it. But skipping one dose for one week seemed to have zero effect on me.

Scott Benner 54:49
You didn't need insulin. I did not Damn.

Again, I'm sending the government to your house. You have to I'm sorry, Jim. I know you love your wife. and everything, but you're not allowed to have real life anymore. We have to study you. I'm sending the aliens to get your gym, that's all. But I mean,

Jim 55:08
it is amazing Scott, your your, your reaction is not unique, like people will people who I tell the story to are like, it's hard to believe it's real, it's hard to believe that what you're telling me based on everything I know about diabetes is true. And I'm like, Look, you know, here's my refrigerator, I've got a whole drawer still filled with insulin. And every month, I have to check to make sure that if I need it, and it hasn't expired, but I don't need that. It's just amazing.

Scott Benner 55:33
Has a doctor approached you about a study yet? Not really

Jim 55:38
know that I was asked, my endocrinologist asked to make sure that I signed up for the type one registry and do the surveys that come out through them. So I do that. But otherwise, no, I haven't been asked her approach to do anything unique. Or somebody

Scott Benner 55:51
should figure out what the hell's special about you. So we can duplicate it?

Jim 55:54
Well, I'll tell you what I tell to anybody that's willing to listen, which is I'm happy to have any conversation. And if I can play some small role in helping others deal with their diabetes, I'm happy to do it. That's the whole reason I said, I'd be happy to talk to you today. Because maybe my experience will make someone else's life a little bit easier. And that you personally I would find that very fulfilling

Scott Benner 56:14
in the short term. I feel badly for all the people who are going to try this and not have the same experience. I don't think it's a dialed in experience, obviously yet clinically, I even I have a friend, just a friend who started it for weight loss. And I'd get the texts. When am I not going to be hungry? You know what I mean? Like, and it was weeks into a month, like, this isn't working for me. I've lost three pounds. I like you know, I'm still hungry and sucks. And no, I want I want what you got, like that kind of thing. And we're having this like real conversation back and forth. And one day, she just sends it to action. She's like, Well, that's it, I can't eat. I'm like, okay, she was I stopped thinking about food, it just magically happened for like two and a half months into it. But then she started seeing different issues, which was, it was slowing down the absorption of some of her pill form medications. And her doctor didn't know how to like, She then lost maybe 14 or 15 pounds, she was like on her way. And then her doctor kind of panicked and said, I don't know how to like fix this absorption problem for your medication. So you have to go off to though, off the GLP

Jim 57:17
you're 100% right, it's it's so new. And not a lot of doctors have a lot of training on it, they all focus on the weight loss part of it. But you know, my I'm lucky enough that my endocrinologist was willing to put me on it early and see how it worked and you know, the stars aligned and I wouldn't change anything for it.

Scott Benner 57:35
Yeah, a lot has to go

right for it to work out for you have to have a smart doctor who's on the kind of the bleeding edge of all this, you got to get lucky with insurance, you have to but I mean, hopefully I just did an interview Friday that hasn't come out yet talking about hopefully like some of these biosimilar companies that are going to make GRPs. And maybe they can become more plentiful and cheaper and stuff like that for people maybe get more insurance, but what we really need is for people to do clinical testing on type ones. Absolutely.

Jim 58:06
I couldn't agree more. And I would also say that if you try it, and it doesn't work, you know, it's upsetting. I fully understand how upsetting it could be. But it doesn't mean that there isn't another innovation coming around the corner. And so I think as particularly as diabetics, we really have to be thinking about tomorrow as much as we think about today, and hope, hope for recognize the reality of today and hope for something new tomorrow. Because whether it's Manjaro helping a larger swath of type one diabetics, or it's some new XYZ medicine, you know, there's so much research going on right now. And there's so many people trying desperately to help us type ones and type twos live the longest, most healthy, normal, traditional life that we can, that I have to believe that whether it's a non GLP GLP one or something else, that hopefully there's going to be something that's going to work for you, the person who is not working for today. And hopefully that will come sooner rather than later. Yeah,

Scott Benner 59:05
you also have to take whatever you can get out of it. Like for my daughter, for example, like she made it up to five milligrams, but it was too much. So she lost, like, her weight got too low. And so we're moving her back to 2.5. Hopefully that will continue to impact her insulin use the same way. It's like a science experiment. You're just trying to figure out what it is because her insulin usage was like way down. Fantastic. But then, you know, she's like, she was away at school and we didn't have as much contact with her. I would have been talking to her more about like, Look, you got to teach herself how to eat but she was just like, eating like once a day or something like that. Because it just, you know, her her she was during finals. And she's like that as you know, like, I'm just not hungry. And I'm like, I know but you need to eat something and we kept like, you know, giving her stuff that she would eat like don't get me wrong, she was eating but she wasn't eating consistently enough. But then the other side of The gym was like while she's beating through finals and these all nighters that were going on for weeks and weeks and weeks. Her blood sugar's were incredibly stable and she wasn't experiencing any lows and her spikes weren't bad. And like, you know, like, so it was allowing her not to think about type one diabetes management put more effort into college and like, you know, so there's kind of a now she's home for summer, of course, and we're going to change the dose and try to get it back in I'm hearing about people online. I haven't I haven't heard one doctor yet say this is okay. But there are people online are starting to microdose it to like, just try to like, like, make a dent into their insulin needs without the other stuff because they can't handle the side effects of some of the bigger doses. And I just don't know where this is gonna go.

Jim 1:00:39
It feels like we're just at the very tip of the iceberg of understanding what it can do and how it does it. And I'm sure as that learning happens, they'll make tweaks to it and right you could I make made this joke, but it's true, like you could almost envision a lineup of are you taking it for weight loss? Are you taking it for type two? Are you taking it for type one, and each one being slightly different to kit the right receptors that our body needs? In a way that makes it very meaningful and results focused? Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:01:09
and you and I, because we don't have any real like, idea of what we'd be talking about. Don't don't aren't talking about what you're seeing for women with PCOS and GRPs, which is starting to look like it might be significant inflammation in general. And I've seen some people without ears Danlos Syndrome, talk about their joint pain going away on GLP is now maybe that's because they lost weight. But maybe it's also because of inflammation loss. Maybe your beta cells are working better because of reduced inflammation. It's

Jim 1:01:37
anything is possible, right? We just don't know. I've also seen on some of the Manjaro Facebook groups, I've read some people who say that they've had drug and alcohol problems that this has helped them break that need and that obsession with whenever they're they're viewed was there. They're gambling as well, there. Yeah. I mean, there's there's just it seems like there's sort of no end to seemingly there's no end to the possibilities of this medicine. I'm sure there are, of course, but But for today, it's it seems to be doing magical things for people in magical ways.

Scott Benner 1:02:11
And we don't seem to know what they are exactly. Like so. So this is a time of discovery. And I hope that Listen, I've been talking about it more frequently a because I'm using it be because I saw what it did for my daughter. But then because I had a mom of a 15 year old type one Come on, who is like, almost completely done with insulin went from like 70 units a day. I think she's down to like four units of basil now. And like, that's insane. Like, and she has the same kind of graphs as you're talking about.

Jim 1:02:41
Yeah, it's it's amazing. It's it's a game changer. It's, it's just unbelievable.

Scott Benner 1:02:47
No, I couldn't possibly agree more. But Jim, I appreciate you doing this with me is there anything I didn't ask you about that I should have or anything you wanted to say that we didn't get to,

Jim 1:02:55
I would only say that I encourage everybody to have an endocrinologist that they really trust and love. Because to me when that relationship right now is one of the most important relationships in my entire life. And so my endocrinologist is, you know, core to my, my well being, and somebody I look to for all kinds of support, and ask help questions too. And so if you're unhappy with your provider, find somebody that that's helpful and that you feel like is going to be able to give you what you need. So if you're a traditionalist and you want someone who's more old school, that's great. If you're looking for somebody who's maybe thinking about more cutting edge technology, that's great. Some people focus on the medicine, whatever it is that you think is going to be the right sort of match for you is what you should go and do. Because there are so many possible scenarios by which you may be able to get help, but you can't do it alone. And you certainly can't do it by doing your own research, you really need to partner with a professional.

Scott Benner 1:03:54
Yeah, especially with the landscape of the insurance right now. Like the way it sits right now around GLP. Specifically, like insurance and just getting a doctor to like, consider a medication that's not labeled for your need right now. I mean, you're looking for special people, you know, you really are, I'm glad and lucky to have found a doctor like that for my family. And it sounds like you have a similar situation, because there are plenty of people who will are gonna go to their endos after this and say, Hey, listen, I just heard a guy's story blah, blah, blah, this guy Jim going to tell them the whole thing and a doctor is gonna go, it's not for type ones. And that's gonna be the end of it. Like they won't, they won't talk to you about it anymore. But you think that that's because it's a rule and they can't but it's because they don't have the balls or the imagination or the knowledge or or that kind of a thing. So exactly,

Jim 1:04:43
or they don't have the bandwidth to really learn for the for the medical professional, right? Because our medical professionals are now so taxed with the patient, patient after patient that they don't even have the professional learning opportunity to say, wait a minute, what happens if I do put a type two on it? Excuse me a type one. On this and it's not you know, that's that's writing sort of off script. I forget what they call that but awful

Scott Benner 1:05:05
Yeah, label. Yeah. And you're right, they might not even know like, they might think you're wrong. Like when you say, Oh, you misunderstood Jim story, or he probably has, like, you know, they could genuinely not be turning you down because they're like, No, I'm not doing that they could be thinking like, that's not right. But you know, I don't know I'm in here all day seeing patients I'm not out there listening to the podcasts and reading, reading, you know, NIH articles and that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, they're busy being clinicians.

Jim 1:05:32
There's one other thought that I'll share with you, which is someone told me when I was first diagnosed, that I had to find an endocrinologist who is a type one diabetic, because they're the only ones who really understand the struggle. My and I've had to endocrinologists in the last eight years, neither one of them are type one. And they're both incredibly passionate and understand my condition and what it's like. And so to me, whether your endocrinologist does or doesn't have type one, diabetes is inconsequential to the care that you can get. What's most important is you find somebody that you trust, who's an expert in the area that you want to be, and

Scott Benner 1:06:06
you can get a good end of that doesn't have type one, if they're Listen, it's just like everything else. There's good ones, and there's bad ones. And some of the good ones have type one, and then you kind of go, oh, it's because they have type one they understand. But that's not a prerequisite. I've met a lot of NGOs that don't have type one, they're astonishingly good at helping people with it. Exactly. I've also met heard stories that are, you know, curl your toes about people who don't understand that at all, and are still, you know, directing people about how to take care of type one diabetes, so it but it's no different than anything else in the world. It's just exactly right. Well, I mean, I can't I can't thank you enough for doing this. And congratulations on, on what's happened to you. It's just wonderful. I didn't ask you. But let me ask you here at the very end, like, what was it like to functionally not have to use insulin anymore?

Jim 1:06:53
To describe it as emotionally freeing is an intense understatement. I used to carry a backpack around with me a little backpack that I would always have sugar pills in and my insulin in and you know, I'm sort of prepared for the crisis at any moment. And I don't carry that bag anymore. Like that is mind blowing to me that I am able to just seemingly live a traditional, quote unquote, normal lifestyle as a type one diabetic and eat what I want to eat. And my birthday is coming up in two weeks, and I used to love to go to the beach on my birthday, and have a salty bag of pretzels and a full sugar coke. And I haven't had it for many years. But this birthday, I was actually thinking, you know, it might be time to do a little celebration, and recognize what I've been able to accomplish and go and have that full coke and those pretzels on the beach and celebrate my birthday. That's excellent.

Scott Benner 1:07:45
Of course, Jim is going to be for pretzels and three sips of the coat before you go. It's enough.

Jim 1:07:49
Exactly. That's exactly right. I can barely finish anything anymore. So you're 100% on the spot. I

Scott Benner 1:07:55
was driving home from the grocery store the other day, and I had bought a bag of like, pretzels. And I was I was hungry. I'm actually I'm hungry right now. But like I don't want people to think I don't get hungry. But I was hungry on the way home and I opened up that bag of hard pretzels. And I might have eaten like they weren't that big. You know, they were maybe like two or three inches across. And I got to like the third one. And I was like woof. Like, that's enough. I gotta stop. Yeah, like I actually I was like I Oh, I feel full. And I think it's completely possible that prior to a GOP GLP I could have eaten half of that bag of those pretzels.

Yeah,

Jim 1:08:32
I think you're you're 100% right, what used to take me an entire slice of cake to satisfy a craving that was a bite or two.

Scott Benner 1:08:40
Yeah, I have this some I have this pint of Mango Sorbet in my refrigerator, that I now eat a half a teaspoon at a time or a teaspoon at a time. Whereas I would have prior opened it up and been like, oh my god, this is good and had to stop myself from like eating half of it. And I get the same satisfaction out of it. Which is really exactly lovely.

Jim 1:08:58
And I don't know about you, but I don't feel like I'm missing anything. It's not. I mean, I miss cooking. But otherwise, the benefits for this just far outweigh any of those kinds of negative side effects that you might suffer with. It's just, it's just so worth it.

Scott Benner 1:09:12
I can freely agree with that. 100% Yeah, no, I mean, like, Listen, I'm sure people are gonna, like I've had people come at me online and say things like, Oh, you're pushing the GLP agenda. I actually had somebody say that to me. And I'm like, Listen, I'm just sharing with you what's happening to me? Like I'm not like I don't have a GLP sponsorship. Although I want to say something right now. Eli Lilly, I would happily I would happily be exempt bound sponsor, but I don't think they need I don't think they need the marketing. It's something that the word is spreading out on its own but I was interested because that person's perspective. To me seemed like this is not a real answer. This isn't how it should be done. Whatever their their, you know, political line of thinking is around Weight Loss. serve whatever, they you know, maybe I should be dieting and running or something like that, or you know, like, and they don't know, I already tried all those things, that's fine. The anger there about like, You're cheating. And don't tell other people that cheating works. Like I was like, Oh, wow, is that how you think about this? I just think about people being healthier and less encumbered. And what a joy that is for them.

Exactly. Right. So okay, exactly.

Jim 1:10:26
Well, Scott, I, before we close, I think that it's important for me just to say thank you to you, I've even in the few episodes of your podcasts that I've listened to, I feel like I've learned a lot, you are a voice for those who need education and are interested in learning more and hearing these stories and sharing. And so behalf of you know, all the type ones that I know, and I'm sure 1000s and 1000s of others, thank you for doing such a great job and keep up the good work. Oh,

Scott Benner 1:10:54
you're very kind. Thank you, I appreciate that very much. I will, I will, indeed, I have nothing else I could do, Jim, I will end up being a cashier, literally at target if I don't do this. So I don't know what else I'm qualified for, except to make a podcast about diabetes and talk to people about their lives. It's been a real pleasure helping everyone so far, and I sincerely look forward to continuing to do it. And I'm trying to morph along with where things are going. And that is why I'm covering more GLP stories, because I've tried to take a thoughtful step back and look at it. And this really looks like it's going to be a large part of how people with type one type two diabetes are going to manage their lives. So I'm just trying to make sure that people understand it. Because as it unfolds, in all the ways that's going to unfold clinically, insurance, you know, all those different ways. I want people to be ready for it when it's their time not have a drop in their lap and do the like Why are you pushing this GLP agenda on me and then miss out on what my daughter is experiencing what I'm experiencing what you're experiencing, etc. So anyway, I appreciate it. Don't worry, I'm not stopping the thank you so much.

Jim 1:12:02
Keep up the great work. And I hope maybe this conversation helped some people understand that you can be a type one and not be on insulin in the new world that we live in. I

Scott Benner 1:12:11
appreciate your story. I really do. Jim, thank you. Hold on one second for me. Okay. Yes, sir.

I was sent back and I realized you might not be able to hear the crickets. So you might actually think I'm crazy. But I swear Can you listen? It's here, I promise you. Listen, if you're in the private Facebook group, there's going to be a post about this episode. And Jim said he check in and answer questions. So if you have questions for Jim, go ask him. If you'd like to wear the same insulin pump that Arden does, all you have to do is go to Omni pod.com/juice box. That's it. Head over now and get started today. And you'll be wearing the same tubeless insulin pump that Arden has been wearing since she was four years old. I'd like to thank ag one for sponsoring this episode of The Juicebox Podcast and remind you that with your first order, you're going to get a free welcome kit. Five free travel packs in a year supply of vitamin D. That's at AG one.com/juice box. And if you like rubbing comfortable, high quality things on your body, cozy earth.com Go there, fill up your cart with towels and sheets and everything they have. And then save 30% using the offer code juice box at checkout at cozy earth.com. I know that Facebook has a bad reputation. But please give the private Facebook group for the Juicebox Podcast. A healthy once over Juicebox Podcast type one diabetes. The group now has 47,000 members in it, it gets 150 new members a day. It is completely free. And at the very least you can watch other people talk about diabetes, and everybody is welcome type one type two gestational loved ones, everyone is welcome. Go up into the feature tab of the private Facebook group. And there you'll see lists upon lists of all of the management series that are available to you for free in the Juicebox Podcast, becoming a member of that group. I really think it will help you it will at least give you a community. You'll be able to kind of lurk around see what people are talking about. Pick up some tips and tricks. Maybe you can ask a question or offer some help Juicebox Podcast type one diabetes on Facebook. If you're not already subscribed or following in your favorite audio app, please take the time now to do that. It really helps the show and get those automatic downloads set up so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The Juicebox Podcast. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording. Wrong way recording.com

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