Diabetes Doesn’t Mean Low Carb. It Means Smart Carb

A diabetic triathlete’s guide to fueling without fear

I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 1999 at age 32. For the next two decades, the message was consistent: limit your carbs. Keep them low. Don’t have more than 30 grams at a time. That was the playbook, and I followed it.

Then I decided to race a 70.3.

I recently sat down with Taryn Richardson of Triathlon Nutrition Academy to tell this story in full. If you want the unfiltered version, you can watch it here. What follows is the rest of the story.

The race that broke my brain (and my legs)

In 2021, I crossed the finish line of a half-iron distance triathlon after roughly six hours of racing. I had consumed 60 grams of carbohydrates. Total. For the entire race. That’s water and three gels stretched across a distance that typically demands 60 to 90 grams per hour.

I was miserable. I walked most of the run. I was dehydrated, under-fueled, and fried in a way that had nothing to do with fitness or the sun. I had taken everything my diabetes education taught me and applied it to long-course triathlon, which is approximately the worst place to do that.

The thing is, it worked fine in short course. A sprint or Olympic distance race at two hours max? I could get by. My glycogen stores were enough to carry me through with minimal fueling, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But a 70.3 is a different animal entirely, and I was treating it like a long training session instead of the multi-hour metabolic event it actually is.

That race was the first crack in the foundation of everything I thought I knew about carbohydrates.

The carb phobia problem

Here’s what nobody tells a diabetic athlete: the fear of carbohydrates is understandable and also, in the context of endurance sport, really dangerous.

Traditional diabetes education is designed for sedentary or lightly active people managing blood sugar throughout a normal day. That education is not wrong. It’s just incomplete for someone who is asking their body to sustain effort for four, five, or six hours at a time. When you’re training for an Ironman or a half-iron, your muscles need glucose. They will take it from wherever they can find it. If you don’t put fuel in from the outside, your body will find another way, and none of those ways feel good at mile 10 of the run.

I heard Taryn Richardson of Triathlon Nutrition Academy on a podcast in 2022 and I didn’t join immediately. I waited two full cohorts. Part of that hesitation was exactly this: I was convinced that a program built around fueling for triathlon was going to tell me to eat a bunch of carbs, and I believed that was dangerous for a diabetic.

I was wrong about that, but it took a video message from Taryn herself to talk me off the ledge. I joined TNA in July 2023.

What actually changed

The shift wasn’t “eat more carbs.” It was “eat the right carbs at the right times for the right reasons.”

When I’m not training or prepping for a workout, my carbohydrate intake looks different than when I’m in full Ironman preparation. That distinction, which sounds obvious in hindsight, was completely missing from my understanding before the program. Nutrition isn’t static. It responds to what you’re asking your body to do.

Some of the specific things that moved the needle for me:

Protein. I thought I was already eating a lot of it. I wasn’t eating nearly enough.

Fresh fruit. I wasn’t eating much of it at all. I was eating fruit snacks, which sounds like fruit but is essentially candy with a fruit logo on the bag. When I swapped processed snacks for actual fresh fruit, my blood sugar response was noticeably different. Fiber, micronutrients, and real food behave differently in the body than a packet of gummy shapes.

The junk. I work in an office. There are always pastries by the coffee machine, and I drink a lot of coffee. Learning to walk past them was a process, but cutting back on the junk food and dialing back on alcohol made an outsized difference, especially early on.

The mindset. This one is harder to quantify but probably the most important. Undoing 20-plus years of “carbs are dangerous” conditioning doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a work in progress. But becoming comfortable with strategic carbohydrate, knowing where it fits in my day and my training, changed everything.

The numbers that followed

Before I joined TNA, I weighed around 230 pounds and my HbA1c was sitting in the low 6s, roughly 6.3 or 6.4. My HbA1c is now 5.9, which has crept back up slightly from a low of 5.4. For context, 5.4 is the upper boundary of the normal (non-diabetic) range. That shift happened over roughly 12 months.

I also dropped 30 pounds, and a DEXA scan before and after the program showed something that genuinely surprised me: the visceral fat around my internal organs that showed up on the first scan was essentially gone on the second. Visceral fat is the kind that wraps around your organs and drives the worst long-term health outcomes. It’s also the kind that responds dramatically to eating properly.

I’m still on medication. I wasn’t cured. No one is ever cured, at least not yet. But the trajectory changed significantly.

The sleep chapter (still in progress)

There’s a part of this story I’m still actively working through.

For most of this year, I was averaging four hours and 32 minutes of sleep per night. I know that number because I pulled the data from my watch and my WHOOP band. My HRV was lower than it should have been given everything else I was doing, and when I asked about how to improve it through nutrition, Taryn redirected the conversation: fix the sleep first, then pull the nutrition levers.

I finally got a sleep study done about a month ago. The results confirmed what my data had been suggesting. I’m now on a CPAP and still adapting, but the first night I hit seven hours of sleep this year, my body noticed. Optimizing sleep before optimizing nutrition is the right sequence. Sleep is the big rock. Everything else is the fine-tuning.

What this means for coaching

I started coaching athletes in 2024, and everything I just described shapes how I work with the people on my roster. The 23 hours around the workout matter more than the workout itself. Data needs context. Easy days need protection. And for diabetic athletes specifically, the fear of carbohydrates is a performance limiter that can be addressed without throwing blood sugar management out the window.

If you are a diabetic triathlete trying to figure out how to train and race without constantly guessing, that is exactly the athlete I want to work with. Not because I read about it. Because I have been in your shoes and I know what the numbers look like from the inside.

One more thing: you don’t have to figure this out alone.

If you’re managing diabetes and training for endurance events, that intersection is exactly what I coach. Most athletes in your situation are working with generic advice that wasn’t built for them.

I work with athletes who want to feel better, race smarter, and stop guessing. Book a free 30-minute call at madanthonymultisport.com/booking.

I also run a monthly support group specifically for diabetic triathletes. We cover fueling strategies, medication interactions, interpreting your own data, and what questions to actually ask your doctor. Register here.

Coach Tony Hampton is a triathlon and endurance multisport coach based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with a growing focus on health and wellness coaching. He holds certifications through IRONMAN U, ESCI, Stryd Run Power, TriDot Pool School, and Precision Nutrition (PN Certified Master Coach).