The Movement "Snack"
For once, a study on our actual people. Published in 2026 in Diabetes Technology and Therapeutics: adults with type 1 diabetes on insulin pumps sat for six hours straight on one lab day, and on another day broke up the same sitting with three minutes of simple resistance moves every 30 minutes...
The episode, word for word
Every once in a while, the research world hands type 1 an actual gift. Not a study about people sort of like us that we squint at from a distance. A real study. On real people with type 1. Wearing real insulin pumps. Today is that day, and it comes attached to the single most doable idea in this entire challenge.
I'm Neil Greathouse, this is Your Best T1D Year. People, let's talk about movement snacks.
A movement snack is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of one big meal of exercise that you keep rescheduling, and rescheduling, and then quietly deleting from your calendar like a dentist appointment, you take tiny bites of movement all day long. Two minutes. Three minutes. Calf raises while the coffee brews. A lap around the house between meetings. Standing up and sitting back down ten times, which sounds ridiculous, and okay, it is ridiculous, but it's also technically squats.
Here's the study. Published 2025, in Diabetes Technology and Therapeutics. Adults with type 1, on pumps, did two lab days. Day one: six hours of sitting, straight through. The full desk-job special. Day two: same six hours, but every 30 minutes they stood up and did three minutes of simple resistance moves. Count it: three minutes, every half hour. That's the whole intervention. That's it.
On the movement snack day, their insulin worked measurably better. Lower glucose response for the same insulin on board, higher insulin sensitivity by dinnertime. Nobody touched a pump setting, people. The insulin just... did more. Our people, our disease, our pumps, and the sitting breaks worked.
Honest footnote, always: small pilot study, eight people. Early science. But it's the first time anybody tested this specifically in type 1 bodies, and it pointed exactly where a decade of bigger studies in other groups has been pointing. Remember Monday's study? Two minutes of easy walking every 20 minutes moved real numbers. Same idea, now with our name on it.
And then, the mic drop. The American Diabetes Association's 2025 Standards of Care, the official rulebook, now recommends interrupting sitting at least every 30 minutes. Your calf raises are now evidence-based medicine. Put that on a shirt. Sell it at the merch table.
You know what I love most about this? Everybody's out there doing 75 Hard. Two workouts a day, gallon of water, progress pics, reading ten pages of a business book in an ice bath or whatever. And meanwhile the actual peer-reviewed science for our disease is like, "Please stand up for three minutes. That's the whole thing. We're begging you." This isn't 75 Hard, people. This is 8 Easy. I'm trademarking that.
And it's invisible! That's the other thing. Nobody on the Zoom call knows. Camera off, and you're doing squats between agenda items like a sleeper agent. You can complete an entire movement snack in the time it takes Craig from accounting to find the right tab to share. We all have that two minutes. We're currently spending it watching Craig type his password wrong.
// T1D SCOUT AD // Script B // ~30 seconds //
Here's the thing about being the only T1D at the dinner table. Everybody wonders, quietly, if they're next. Most families find out the hard way, with no warning at all. Knowing early doesn't change whether it happens... but it changes whether you're ready.
T1D Scout sponsors this podcast, and it's a cheek swab you do at home. No needles, no blood. It estimates who in your family may be at higher genetic risk. It's not a fortune teller... it just points out who to keep an eye on for early symptoms, and who might be worth testing more often.
Code NEIL 2026 at t1dscout.com gets you a discount. $129 down to $79.
// END AD //
Your challenge this week: pick a trigger, and run one movement snack an hour for one workday. Top of the hour, end of every call, whenever the coffee's brewing. Two or three minutes, up, move, back down. One day. Then look at what your afternoon line did.
Free tracker at yourbestt1dyear.com, it's got a get-up checkbox row built for exactly this. About 2,000 of us are snacking on movement together, which is a very funny sentence and also the whole point.
You're not behind. You're building something two minutes at a time, and the people who write the guidelines are officially on your side now.
We are the ones. Living with it, loving somebody through it, kiddos and all. We are the ones. My name is Neil. Monday, we cancel your gym guilt forever. See you then.
This is the episode script as read on the mic. It's education and encouragement, not medical advice. Talk to your care team before changing anything about your management.
