#80 Tracey, Ashlee & Dr Jody


#1

Originally published at: https://ketowomanpodcast.com/ashlee-kimberley-transcript/

This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Michelle Richter.

Welcome to a very special edition of Keto women podcast. I have here with me today not one guest but three. Ash.

(Ashlee) Hi

Tracey and Jody, welcome to the keto women podcast. How are you all doing today?

(Tracey) Very well. Thank you.

(Dr Jody) Wonderful to be here. Nice to meet you.

(Ashlee) I'm feeling awesome.

And Ash is my youngest ever extraordinary woman on the podcast. So, we're here really to talk mostly about you. So let's hear from you, tell me a bit about you, your story.

(Ashlee) Well my name is Ashlee. I am a type one diabetic and I have been for two and a half years. I am eating keto, which is low carb. We started a bit before I was diagnosed except it wasn't completely keto. A few meals we had every now and then were keto, but we really started doing the real low carb one month after I was diagnosed.

And you enjoy eating this way?

(Ashlee) Yes, because we can have alternatives for different foods and meals and yeah,

I just had a squizz at the contents of your fridge and you got quite a few tasty looking things in there.


(Ashlee) Yes, they are very yummy.

So let's hear a bit from Mum and just elaborate a bit on the story and you know how it all came about. Must have been very worrying for you, the diagnosis and the treatment and what's been happening.

Well Ash was diagnosed on the 25th of August, 2016. She was sick leading up to it. She actually was sick. She had chicken pox about maybe two months before that. Um, she seemed to have got better from that, and then a couple of weeks before that she was sort of just was a bit lethargic, not feeling very well. So, I packed the kids up and went up to Queensland, which is nice and sunny and I thought we've just got to get away from this cold winter. We went away, everything was fine.

When we came back I started to notice little differences and I thought they were girly hormones cos we just cry over something or we'd do something. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that this was signs of type one diabetes. But looking back now, there were signs, it came to a couple of days, It was about a Thursday. She had um, a year seven orientation. She was fine, she was happy, she was great. By Saturday morning she was starting to not feel great and I thought we've just had a big week, have a sleep. She slept all day again Sunday. By Monday she was, "Mum, I'm not really well" and I thought something's not right here. Like you’re never really this sick. So I booked a doctor's appointment for Wednesday cause that's all I could get in. Never thinking we should rush this.

By Tuesday afternoon she wasn't crash hot. She wasn't really talking to me. I'd have to say her name very clearly like "Ashlee", and she'd wake up and she'd look at me and fortunate enough, my husband is in army reserves. He came home that night on the Wednesday night, thank goodness. And we would just sort of sitting, chatting in bed about what he'd been up to and she got up to go to the bathroom and she missed the bathroom because this is a sign of, ‘cos you drink so much water when you're in the state of being diagnosed with type one. And she missed the bathroom ‘cos she was unaware, also too ‘cos her bloods were probably sky high.

By Thursday morning when we woke up, her breathing was odd. I cannot explain to you what it was like to listen to her breathing. Um, her eyes were rolling in the back of her head when I was speaking to her. So, my first thoughts were going through like, she's got meningococcal meningitis, diabetes, just never, we didn't know anyone with diabetes. Um, I had never come across, we don't even have type two diagnosed at that stage in our family. We rushed her up to the GP because we'd had that appointment, thank goodness that I made. However, he had no idea what he was looking at when we got there. And he said, "I think you need to go to the hospital." And I said, "Well, if you don't know, we need to go find somebody that does". Annd off we went to the hospital driving.

I kept saying her name to her as we were in the car ‘cos I was so scared because she's sort of passing in and out. Um, we got to the hospital and it was just very thankful that the nurse behind the counter knew what she was looking at and she goes, is she a diabetic? And I went, I don't know. She yelled out she needed a glucometer and it came quickly. She pricked her and the next minute there was a bed. Ashlee's thrown on a bed and she's being rushed up the whole way. Pete's grabbed the other two kids. Lucky he's like six foot five and he's got these kids under his arm and we're just running after Ashlee, and I was sitting in this room with about 12, nine to 12 doctors and nurses.

She had tubes coming out of everywhere. Machines were beeping and buzzing tests were going on and I had no idea what was happening, people going she's a diabetic, and I went, what does that mean? The only thing I knew about diabetes was amputation of limbs. So of course. So then I started panicking and then after that she got much better cause we had insulin and things like that. And, and then I had a dietician come around and talk to me about the fact that I'm, now that Ashley has insulin and we know this beautiful thing that she was hiding from us. "She has diabetes and now she's got it, she's got insulin, everything's gonna be fine because she can eat whatever she wants, she can even have Mcdonald's".

Oh, okay. And I stood there and thought, this is odd, Mcdonald's? She's the sickest child I have but now you're telling me I can have Mcdonald's. So, things like juice, jelly beans, chips, all this carbohydrate foods started coming home because, well, one, I was told I needed it. And so you're very, uh, you’re taught so much about Hypos, um, hypoglycemia events that you stress out about the thought of saying the word. So, I had, you know, massive jars of jelly beans ready for these horrible events. Children doing meltdowns on the floor because well if Ashlee gets one, we want one. And I, I was losing my mind because here is a mother trying to give nutrition to my children, having a type one diabetic and needing apparently needing these foods.

So eventually, after a horrible event where Ashlee's glucose levels just dropped one night, I decided I needed to go on a, I needed to go back to my roots, which was food. And we started low carb, which was really good. Um, we were doing really well until her HBA1 C’s started going up and I thought, well, this is what, what's, what's going on here? What am I doing wrong? I've changed the food. Then I worked out after elimination and things that we don't actually know what insulin is. What is insulin? What does it do in the body? What does she need it for? And so many times I've been bullied by endocrinologists, laughed at by doctors, nurses, because why bother teaching me? I'm just a mom. You should just listen and do as you're told. I'm not that kind of person. This is my baby here. I need to know what's going on.

For months and up to a year. I had no help, nothing until my wonderful dad, bless him, he watches all his, I call them his Keto gods, but he has these beautiful people that he watches and he's learnt so much for himself. He watched an episode with Mike Mutzel who runs high intensity health and it was on this wonderful type one diabetic specialist that he met, I think in his father's town, and He did an interview with her, my dad, myself, and Ashlee because dad had come down for Christmas. We sat on the couch and we just think I had tears and I think my eyes almost popped out of my head and Ashlee just sat there and she goes, "I want to talk to her". And I went, "Okay, let's make this happen".

I got straight on my phone, I booked in an appointment, a 20 minute get to know you session. And from then on, it's just been onwards and upwards because I met this fantastic, beautiful women Dr Jody, who's just taught me, I mean, our first session was on the importance of Basal Insulin. My knees went weak. I just, I'm sitting there, I'm looking at my husband, I'm going, Oh my God, Oh my God, we're talking about insulin. I need to know this. And I was there with my pen and paper like I was, you know, ready to go into university. I'm studying and I, I still remember our first session together. It just gave me so much hope, but someone was teaching me, someone was finally teaching me what my daughter was diagnosed, and I had this feeling of I can actually be her Mum again for a whole year, I felt completely lost that I couldn't be her Mum, but she was given to me. How can that be? How can I be given this beautiful child who's now going through this horrible thing, but I can't be a Mum. So that's where we are and we've now 18 months or almost 18 months, and we're just, we're all thriving. I'm a Mum of four children now to a type one diabetic to the other three and we're just, we're bopping along. She's got an HBA1C now 5.4. And I'm really proud of her. She's amazing.

Well that's fantastic. There was something I just wanted to ask you about, just to go back a little bit, when you said going back to your roots and the food and that's what you know about and the low carb so this is something that you'd been involved with before, you know, how did you know to go to that? What led you there?

When I was about 13/14, I became anorexic. I was obsessed with food and wanting to be really healthy. I was into sport and I went down a very dark path with food, um, more so it was just, I wasn't eating enough. And after I was diagnosed, my father said to me, that's it, you're not swimming. And that was my life. Swimming was my absolute life. And I thought, well, I've got to get myself better. How am I gonna get better? I've got to work out a relationship here with food. So, I turned those horrible thoughts into a passion and that's where I've just myself have been learning what fuels me, what fuels my body. And I've done that for years and years and years. When I was 18 I was in a very stressful household. My mother was very stressful. Um, I ended up getting sinus infection after a sinus infection and I then started researching and looking into natural medicine things.

And so I combined my love of food and natural medicine and I've just sort of always criss-crossed those paths on my own. Just reading. I mean YouTube is an absolute blessing. I love listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos because I can learn on my own accord. But six months before Ashley was diagnosed, my father started watching sugar videos, things about sugar and then he put two and two together and you know, oh my goodness, carbs are sugar. And we, so we sat down together and worked out some recipes. I love to cook. I've always loved to cook since I was about seven, the kitchen and I were just best mates. And so, he called me and said, "Let's work out some recipes". So, I started dabbling into what low carb foods was, what it meant, meals. And so I thought this is great, I can incorporate it into our family. And so, I started learning about low carb through more of a metabolic syndrome type two diabetic approach.

But I just knew that night when I was really upset and I knew I went back to my roots, I knew I needed to go back to food because food has always been that really important part of me, I've always understood that.

Yeah, really interesting. And so, to go now to the woman who, it sounds like, has had a major influence on your life. And I can see now listening to you talking about the way you like to learn and really drive your own knowledge and how that influences your life and I can see how it really appealed to you to, to reach out to somebody like this. And I think we're going to have to have you back on a podcast, a separate podcast just of your own to hear your story 'cos I bet that's going to be an interesting one. But for now, to just talk about your involvement with this family and the different things that go on it at a lot of people. And we're here at the conference and it's type two diabetes predominantly that that gets talked about and type one gets sort of left in the corner a little bit, although coming much more up to the forefront. You know, I've been talking about it with people like Jess Turton, there's a lot more, research and an understanding about it in the low carb community isn't there? So, perhaps we could hear from you now then Jody.

Absolutely. So, I'll just say my name again. My name is Dr Jody Stanislaw and I was diagnosed with diabetes in 1980 so almost 40 years, which is surreal cause I don't even feel 40, and I knew the only diabetic I knew was at summer camp because there was no internet, there was no, I mean there was no connection with any other type ones. So, um, it can be very lonely. And once I became a teen, I started asking my doctor a lot of more challenging questions and I'll never forget the day that when I asked my doctor about blood sugar level with exercise, he just patted me on the knee and said, oh, it's too difficult for me to explain it to you, you would never understand. And I'm quite certain that he actually didn't know the answer.

And that's what I’ve realised is that the majority, hands down of family practice docs or just general medicine docs absolutely are not skilled to truly give a type one the care they need. But the sad thing is, is I've also found that many endocrinologists who are supposed to be the experts and diabetes, um, many endocrinologists are also not adequately trained. And I just truly think that the training is not out there. I mean, I've been asked, you know, what textbook for type one did you use in med school and I was like, oh, there's, there's not a textbook. Everything I've learned is really from my own experimentation.

There are a few other type one medical professionals that have written books and they're just catered not to med schools, they're catered to patients. So, all of us type ones, we have that bond, where as soon as, even if I see, you know, somebody wearing an insulin pump or a CGM in public, suddenly I'm like, Hey, hey, hey, you know. So, there's this a really deep bond. And I, um, I learned so many incredible valuable things about how to get better blood sugar level just from my own experimentation over 20, 30 years that I, I went to med school and I also am a very adventurous person. So, I didn't want to be in a classic, you know, standard hospital job. So, I created an online virtual practice. I have patients in 10 countries and all over the U.S. and I'm so lucky that Tracey and Ashlee found my video. It's truly a miracle. I mean, I was a little teary when you were telling the story because this is my job to help change lives and help improve lives. And it's so needed. And we, you know, after a year of being on Skype together, we just met face to face today for the first time ever.

That must've been quite an incredible experience. I mean, I met you two. Ash and Tracey, and you are so excited Ash, weren't you, waiting, waiting to meet this woman. I remember seeing you in your face and you just, you just kept looking, looking at the door, looking at the door. She come yet, is she here, is she here? Uh, yeah. It must've, it must've been quite something to all get together. I've experienced that. We're talking to people online, but the actual, when you, when you get to meet them, when they're there in front of you, it's something else, isn't it?

Yeah, very special. So, I feel very fortunate that I get to help people like Tracey and Ashlee and my big passion now is to really help millions or I don't know how many type ones are online. There's, I mean there's only, they say maybe 10 million in the U S or I'm, I mean in the world in the U S it's anywhere from one to 2 million. Sometimes I hear 3 million, but people don't really know. The reality is hands down, the education for type one is very poor and standard conventional recommendation is eat as many carbs as you want and take more insulin and this is devastating.

This is absolutely, it creates such poor health for the children it's very dangerous because they have to give such high doses of insulin that then you can't necessarily know exactly how much and when you need the insulin, you're always guessing when you give a shot and if you give too much insulin you can go into a coma and die, you know, and then the high blood sugar levels are creating blindness, heart disease, kidney failure, strokes, gangrene, Alzheimer's Moodiness. If a child's blood sugar level is high, they have recognised that you can be excused from taking an exam because the brain doesn't work. So here they are saying eat as many things as you want and take as much insulin as you want. But the reality is they're at risk for dying from a low and slow death from highs.

Now I understand why they say that though because before that it was an incredibly strict diet. I weighed and measured every bite of food I ate my entire childhood and so eating disorders are much higher risk of eating disorders when you have type one and so they are justification for why they say, oh, you want to eat like all the rest of the kids is to avoid that. But it's still, you know, it's just the pendulum has swung from strict to nothing and neither extreme is good.

Perhaps you could explain exactly how it works and how the whole system works with dealing about your food intake and judging how much insulin you need to inject and when and how the whole system works.

Well, I normally work with people for three months to answer that question, but the conventional doctors will say, count your carbs and for every one unit or for every approximately 15 grams of carb you eat, you need one unit and 99% of type ones, that's the full education that they get. So, if you eat 30 carbs, you need two units, 45 carbs, three units, like that. That's it. But the reality is you also need a background dose of insulin.

That's the first thing that I worked with Tracey with on day one, because your liver is actually putting glucose into your body all day long. So you actually need, I did a seven day water fast once and I still had to take insulin because you absolutely have to have insulin to be alive and your liver is actually feeding your glucose. Insulin, I like to say is the pickup truck for glucose, once you eat, the glucose is absorbed into your bloodstream and then insulin is needed to pick up that glucose and feed it to yourselves, right? So without insulin, the glucose stays in the bloodstream, which is not good, and your cells starve, which is not good.

The first thing I work with patients is just figure out their baseline need, which is to counteract the livers glucose. So we haven't even talked about dosing for food yet. You have to figure out that first. Then we're going to look at, there's many aspects to how to dose a meal. Carbohydrate is one of them, but if you're going to have a banana versus black beans, it could be the same amount of carbs, but you're going to have to change the timing, right? Because what's a banana gonna do? Immediate Spike. A black bean, not immediate spike. So you have to think about glycaemic index.

Then if you're just eating protein, protein itself actually can raise blood sugar. So many patients think they can just have, you know, all this protein and they don't have to worry about it. They have one little piece of bread and they think, oh, I only need one unit because I only had 15 grams from the bread, but protein actually can turn into glucose, so I have to teach patients how to dose for protein, which is very different than dosing for Carb, and then actually fat can have an effect on glucose as well. So that is just food.

The size of your meal also is dependent on your dose because the timing, right? You could have this many carbs, but if you have this huge holiday meal, it's going to be digesting for hours, so you're going to have to spread out your dose over hours, right? So that's just food. Stress raises blood sugar, getting sick raises blood sugar, hormonal swings raise blood sugar. Then there's just life. Insulin can go bad, it can get too hot and then people are dosing. Then they go high and they don't know why. Well, your insulin was in the sun, right? Absorption when people dose a really big amount, if they're eating a lot of carbs, absorption from day to day can vary, especially the bigger dose of insulin you given any one time, the less consistent the absorption.

So these are all the fine tuning details that I teach patients that truly I don't see, yeah, it's life changing because all we're told is dose one unit for 15 grams of carb. And if you go, low eat sugar,

It sounds mind-blowingly complicated. I have to say, I'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed as listening to the thought of, you know, the thought process I'm going through and I'm just, you know, with everything you're saying, I can just see potential issues with all of it. You know, I talk to people about not completely trusting labels and they're you know, they're always going to be an average of the contents. I always cite the packs of Bacon that I buy, you know, and it lists how much protein and how much fat is in there. Well that's an average. I always pick the ones that's got a load of fat on it and leave the ones that are really lean. But you can't tell me, the macros are the same. The macros that are written on the nutritional information on that pack well they can't possibly be the same. And uh, you know, and that's the same for everything, isn't it? So you know, what size is your banana? And it can vary, an apple can be different sweetnesses, and when it's off season, I mean..

Exactly.

So presumably it's only going to be a sort of a guesstimate at best.

Every time and this exactly is where low carb comes in. So the biggest driver of high blood sugar is carbs. So you can see this whole array of conditions and variables that we have to manage every day that if you just reduce your carbs, your job's going to be a lot easier. It's still a lot of work and I still go up and down, but my life is so much easier. If I'm going to have a chicken salad, I'm like probably need a unit. I might need another unit later. If I have pasta and bread, I'm like, Oh Gosh, do I need 10 units now? And then I wonder if though, what if they all hit at once and then I go low. So, but then if what if I go high later, well then, if I have a high carb meal, I will only have it at lunch because there's so many variables for hours after you eat carbs that you have to be on your toes to manage. Are you going to go low, are you going to go high? If you go low you have to eat more sugar. If you go high, you need more insulin. Dinner is always, if there's ever, I allow myself treats every now and then and I try to always have him at lunch because I don't have to worry. But yeah, low carb, it just makes sense. And this is not conventional medicine.

Well that's the thing, logically to me it absolutely makes sense. Just thinking about those highs and lows, that anything you eat is going to cause a rise of some kind instead of having those, you know, nice rolling hills, you know, you have these huge great mountains spikes that and I can see how very difficult it would be to treat those because as we were just saying is it's really difficult to get the right dose and whenever you go up high you're gonna come down really low. So, so tricky. Logically it just seems the perfect way to eat.

Diabetes camps, summer camps for kids. They completely embrace, eat whatever you want. I've been to diabetes. I mean I'm on staff diabetes camps cause it's, it is such a huge life changer but unfortunately now I have to kind of, you know hesitate before I recommend them because all my families are low carb. Right. And then they send their kid to diabetes camp and they serve them every carb you can imagine.

I was going to say with the, the swings, the blood swings, they, it's not only, you know what like for a parent having to watch those blood swings and correct them and change them and do it, it also does mentally challenge and physically challenge your body. Ashlee if going into lows, t's so draining, it's exhausting. And even the highs, the body goes into stress mode as you've taught us. After you go into like once you pass blood glucose level 10 the body starts going into this mode where it's going to pee out the calories because it wants to get rid of that sugar that's now in the system. That sends, the body doing things that it's got to, quick, we've got to get rid of this, we've got to get rid of this.

And those highs and lows, those swings, it's not just the bloods that you worry about, it's mentally too because they, you know, she feels low, she can't go and play, she can't, and then when she's high, she's still can't go play. She can't go swimming, she can't concentrate and she gets frustrated with herself. So it really upsets me when I see these bloods because I know from a mum side of things what those little children are going through or anybody with type one, watching them go from a high to a low to a high..

And that is the majority of type ones. That's how they live their life.

Very tricky. And what about you Ash? How have you adjusted to this complete life change and it must have been a massively steep learning curve.

(Ashlee) Mm yeah sort of.

Sounds like you're the kind of person that really just takes it in your stride.

(Ashlee) I kind of just go with the flow, you know.

Yeah, she's got a good Mumma, helps her out.

(Ashlee) Yes. Mum does a lot of work. She tells me when to do insulin and how much I need most of the time at school and whenever I'm home alone or something like that, I normally do it myself. But whenever Mum is near me or around me, she will tell me what to do.

That's so great.

So specifically what was your involvement with these guys? Just educating them a better way to be doing it.

Exactly. Yeah, so I work virtually, so anybody listening they can find me at website and sign up for a free call. In the free call I assess are we a good fit? And then, um, I do series of Skype or phone calls. So I do a minimum of three hours with patients. So that could be three one hour calls or six 30 minute calls. I think we did six one hour calls or something like.

Yeah, we did fortnightly one hour sessions.

One hour every two weeks. Yeah. I always encourage people to really invest in a minimum of three months of working with me because in the past I would give as much as I could in an hour and nothing, it was too overwhelming. Nobody, then we'd have our second appointment and it's like I just said everything again in appointment number two. So, I've actually changed it to 30 minute calls for majority of people now and I spread them out over three months. There's so much to digest.

And you need to adapt and practice what you've learned, then come back and probably reinforcing those lessons, but then gradually learning new things as you go.

Absolutely. And, as a holistic physician, I am not only interested in how their blood sugar level is doing and that they totally understand insulin. I want to know how you're feeling and you know, how are your bowel movements and what supplements are you on and what are you eating? And are you exercising? I mean, I truly, I'm a holistic physician, which means I want to take care of the whole of you.

I became the kind of physician I was wished I found, which I still have never found. I want somebody that takes care of all of me and asks me how I'm doing. Maybe have an appointment where we don't even talk about blood sugars. We just talk about, oh my gosh, this is a lot. It's overwhelming. I know. You know, and it's so beautiful that I have type one because I have that immediate bond with my patients. There's a lot to work on.

That's what I loved about Jody so much is that she could connect with me, talk to me about everything, but she also could connect with Ashlee, which is something I can't do. There's this little small part. I'll never, I'm not a type one diabetic, and it was so nice to have someone that I trusted to be able to be there for my daughter. And the best thing, I still remember clearly, I think it was about session three we were cold, which is not cold to doctor Jody because she's has snow, we don't in Canberra, so were all rugged up in our blankets and Ash was just sort of sitting there and the last 15 minutes of our session, it was all about, Jody just brought it into Ashlee, "How are you feeling? How's school?" We were talking about some stress levels at school. It wasn't really anything to do with diabetes, but Jody made it all about Ash, which was just perfect because that's what it needs to be.

I mean I need to learn. I really do. I'm the mum. But Jody remembers that Ashlee's the one with type one. Ashlee is the one dealing with this day in, day out, you know I can go and have a shower and forget about it for five, 10 minutes. These two can't. It's always there and that was what was really special for me is that Ashlee has someone she can turn to that I trust that can help her with any stage of her life.

Sounds like a really important resource you offer.

Thank you.

We were talking a little bit before we started recording. Can we talk about that then? This new Facebook group and the potential that has to reach so many more people.

Right.

Cause obviously you deal with people as you've explained, working one on one, but the power of the Internet is often to be able to extend that reach massively. So perhaps you could tell us a bit about that ‘cos it sounds really exciting.

I'm very excited and it is, I'm so passionate about helping people really, you know, have the transition and the transformation that Ashlee and Tracey have in just a year or two. I've had patients that have had this transformation as well, but they had diabetes for 40 years and it took them 40 years to find me. So, year after year of just hearing how much my work has changed lives, I was like, I need to reach the masses. So I've spent actually the last two years recording videos and making handouts, and then I had to re-record all the videos and then I made some new handouts and I've put my heart and soul into these online courses and they're actually available now on my website.

Which is?

It's Dr Jody ND [drjodynd.com] - so that's d r j o d y n as in naturopathic and then d as in doctor. There is a membership tab there. All the courses are there. I have a course on getting off the blood sugar roller coaster, what to eat and how to dose mastering your blood sugar level with exercise, how to stay positive and avoid burnout because that's a whole other topic when it's just like too much and people give up. The three essentials of lowering your a1c, I do group calls. Um, I also have an annual retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho.

But yeah, the Facebook thing is going to be launching in I think it's March 14th, which is like in a week and it's basically a monthly subscription for $20 a month and you get access to all of my courses. There's two live calls a month and I do a weekly live video and I can't give you details to where to go because the page doesn't exist yet. But if you go to my website.

Presumably yeah, though there will be updates on your website.

Yeah. Well if you just go Jody A Stanislaw on Facebook, that's my Facebook page and then drjodynd.com is my website, so you can definitely find me in those two places already.

And then presumably with this Facebook group you're going to be building a community.

Yes

That's the beauty of it, I mean that's what I love about coming to conferences like this is the community and making that connection and obviously you’re going to be there to help and teach people, but there'll be that comradery and the community where the people can help each other as well.

Exactly and I'm sure Ash and Trace feel like, I mean I feel like I've already known them for a year ‘cos I have known them for a year. Although we just physically met today, it certainly doesn't feel like we just met today. You know, that's the beauty of the Internet. And so that would be my goal. My goal is to have a thousand people in that membership program within the next three months and then 2000 and I mean given the millions of type ones. My goal is that it's that easy.


A million by the end of the year.

Yeah, that's it, right.

That's your challenge!

Right? I'll take it. I dream big so,

Well, it's been really wonderful talking to you three, my first ever four-way podcast

Okay.

And my youngest ever extraordinary woman

14. I don't think we ever said her age.

(Ashlee) Yeah, I'm 14. I was born December 31st, 2004

I'm a December baby too. Well I traditionally wrap up the podcast with a top tip. So as I've got three of you, maybe I can get three top tips. Who wants to go first? So a tip for the listeners, it can be anything you like.

If you know anybody with type one please have them reach out to me

As a parent of a type one, don't be afraid to keep asking questions and keep learning. Just because you're a parent, just because you may not be a doctor or a specialist, that doesn't mean that you can't learn.

Tracey, you know more than most endocrinologists now

As a teenager and a type one, what would your top tip be? Think of it this way. What would your top tip be to fellow teens who had just had a similar diagnosis?

(Ashlee) Try Low carb. Low carb is the best. It's healthy, that one. And also ,for type one diabetics, it's easier to manage bloods.

So yeah, just like we were saying earlier, it actually just makes your life easier.

It makes sense.

And it tastes so good.

It's much easier for Ashlee when she's at school because she's by herself. She's dealing with things, you know, going in and out of class. She doesn't have to add up these copious amounts of carbs. She just actually, most of the time at school, she just, what we call like sugar surfing. She just eats morning tea and lunch and then she just watches her CGM. I mean with, thank God for CGM’s.

Continuous Glucose Monitor

She just watches her glucose monitor and she just doses accordingly as she needs to throughout the day and it makes her life. She can just be a teenager and bop along as her bloods are bopping along.

Well. Fantastic. Thank you all very much. It's been a great pleasure and wonderful to be sat here with you all, not just across the computer screen which is what I usually do so, thank you very much.

Thank you.

(Ashlee) Thank you.

Thank you.