The MEN1 Mosaic

#45 - The Truth About Carbs, Cravings & Control (Christina Lile: Diabetic Health Consultant, Registered Nurse & Diabetes Patient)

• Lizzie Dunn • Season 1 • Episode 45

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What if blood sugar swings aren’t just about what you eat—but how and why you eat it? Christina Lile is a diabetic health consultant, registered nurse, and type 1 diabetic with over 40 years of lived experience. In this episode, we talk honestly about food, freedom, blood sugar, and how to stop letting health advice make you feel small.

We cover:

Why eating carbs isn’t the enemy

What binging and guilt really mean

How exercise, hormones, stress and weather affect blood sugar

Why personalised care must include mindset and curiosity

How Christina built a life and business around what the system didn’t teach her

Christina’s approach is refreshingly real, radically empowering, and rooted in community. Whether you’re navigating MEN1, diabetes, or just sick of cookie-cutter solutions, this episode will give you the permission you didn’t know you needed.

Learn more about Christina’s work:
https://mynurseadvocatecoaching.com

Join my MEN1 community & receive the free guide that helps keep me out of surgery, off medication and asymptomatic. Click here.

*Here I share my personal experience as a MEN1 patient. Nothing is intended to provide medical or holistic health advice. All opinions are personal, including those of my podcast guests. Always consultant a qualified medical professional.*

Hello and welcome back to another brand new episode of the MEN1 Mosaic Podcast. Today I have with me my guest Christina Lile, who is a diabetic health consultant, a registered nurse, and also has experience of type 1 diabetes herself. Now I’m going to say it straight away—MEN1 and diabetes are not the same thing. However, there is huge crossover. MEN1 patients might experience insulinomas in their time, hypoglycaemia, and also just be mindful of glucose spikes, which we know is something that can really affect our general health. So I’ve asked Christina to come on today and share about things like what can really help stabilise blood sugar—factors like timing of meals, food, and factors like stress as well, which can affect blood sugar—and also how to support the body through something which can be really, really unpredictable, and I know that a lot of patients struggle with. So I’m really excited to have you on, Christina. Thank you so much for your time, and yeah, I’m excited to get chatting.

Thank you so much! I just want to say I’m so excited to be here and I cannot wait for everything we’re going to discuss today because it’s going to be absolutely amazing. So I’m so excited as well—so excited to have you on. And particularly because, as I just explained to you before we started, you are someone with experience as a diabetes patient yourself, but you also have experience working with other diabetes patients. And I know from the feedback I’ve had from listeners, this can be so valuable because you’ve got both perspectives—you can really appreciate the struggles, but you can also be, you know, you’re able to give advice from a very compassionate and empathetic place. So I think it might actually help us if maybe you explained a little bit about your journey—how you’ve got to where you are so far, maybe starting with your diagnosis whenever that came, and yeah, how on earth you became a diabetes health coach, and obviously through being a registered nurse too.

Yeah, absolutely. So I’m just going to start at the beginning. At the age of five, I was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic. One of the main things that I realised pretty quickly is how much of a community we need. And people laugh when I say this, but one of the cool things about my diagnosis is that I was diagnosed in June—I turned five in May—and I was diagnosed a month later. The hospital told me and my family about a diabetes health camp, a kids’ camp. My parents were really hesitant to let me go because we’d just got this diagnosis—they didn’t even understand it yet. But the doctors and the staff were like, “You don’t realise this right now, but Christina needs this,” and it gives me chills. So I went to camp at six—I did it at five years, and then I did it the following summer at six. I can’t remember if it was a week or two weeks long, but everybody at that camp was a diabetic: the counsellors, the janitors, the groundskeepers, the cooks—everybody. At the time, I didn’t really understand support systems or feeling empowered, but looking back over 40 years later, that’s exactly what that did for me. It kind of got me into: you need to surround yourself with people that are exactly like you.

Let’s fast-forward to my early twenties, and I kind of fell into a group of diabetics that were from the age of 15 up to 60 or 65. We would literally meet once or twice a month—we would sit down and have dinner or whatever, but we’d talk about struggles, obstacles we were facing, “Hey, have you tried this? This really worked for me,” tips and tricks, things like that. “What’s the craziest low blood sugar story you’ve got? What’s the highest your blood sugar has been? What’s the lowest?” And through that, a community of support. Looking back at it now, it didn’t matter if you were 15 or 65. All of our struggles—they may not have been exactly the same, but they were very similar. That again goes back into that community of: I’m not standing out here in left field all by myself. These people understand what it’s like—they understand the frustrations.

In my late twenties I decided to become a nurse. During nursing school, and then shortly after I graduated and got my first nursing job, it became very clear how much I enjoyed and thrived at helping people. I just—I excelled at it. I loved it. I’m very much a person that thinks outside the box, so if you tell me I can’t do it—man, I’m going to find a way. It’s going to be super creative and maybe a little crazy and out there, but it’s going to work. I’ll figure out all the little details as we go along.

In 2022, I decided I was going to go back to school and get my master’s degree in nursing education. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with that degree—I just knew I wanted to do something with teaching diabetics. Usually with that degree you help nurses, and I’m open to that, totally, but my focus was—I didn’t know what it looked like at the time—I want to help diabetics. I took the programme, finished in about nine months, and when I graduated, friends and family were like, “Christina, you need to be a diabetic educator.” So I started applying for any jobs that were diabetic education, nursing education with diabetics. I did like 80 interviews in a year. I got offered several amazing jobs—and I couldn’t find anything that was what I was looking for. So I really started to question and doubt: is the job I want not out there?

One day at the gym, a very smart friend of mine—gym buddy—we were talking about my frustrations. I’d been looking for a year. “Do I just…? It doesn’t have to be the perfect job, but I know I’m supposed to do this. In my heart, in my soul, down in my core, I am supposed to help diabetics. I have no idea what that looks like, but I also don’t want to start going down a path that I know is not right.” And I vividly remember it—she turned to me and said, “Christina, if the job you want isn’t out there, then make it.” And I was like, “Joy, I’m a nurse, I’m not a business owner.” And she just looked at me and said, “Girl, if the job you want is not out there, then make it. You can learn the business stuff.” And she literally turned on her heel and walked away.

My head was spinning. It took me about two months of really going over—what would this look like? How do I be a business owner? Just going through all those steps. And I can proudly say, in October of 2023, I launched my business—My Nurse Advocate, LLC—and I am a diabetic health consultant. And that’s kind of the short version of how we got from diagnosis to where we are today. And now it’s 18 months later, and we’re doing podcasts, I’m educating my clients, and I am absolutely doing what I’m supposed to be doing now. Congratulations, first and foremost. And may I just say—I relate very much with so many parts of your journey, and I know that there’ll be people listening back who probably do as well. Maybe they’re feeling a calling to help people like them. And to understand and learn your story—how important community is and feeling surrounded by the right people—is so important, and it’s such a beautiful note to have started from. It really springboards, I think, into one of the first questions I wanted to ask you, which was: in your capacity as someone helping diabetes patients—and bearing in mind, as I said earlier, there’ll be a lot of crossover with MEN1, particularly around sugars that mess around—what are some of the key principles that you help people with, that you teach to people when they’re managing their blood sugar, particularly if these sugars might be very unstable?

So, and this is probably the hardest thing—people look at me like I’m crazy when I say this—make yourself the priority. And it’s very simple. It’s not easy, but it’s very simple. I think just as people, we’re taught growing up: you take care of other people. Especially if you’re a mum with four kids—you don’t have time. Well, can you carve out an hour? Or when your partner gets home from work, can you just have it agreed that you’ve got an hour or two? If you’ve got two hours, that’s even better. But just to set time aside and make yourself a priority.

That looks different for everybody. That may be going to the gym, that may be really getting into what variables are making your blood sugars do what. And that’s a key point of my programme. We literally—and my programme is very personalised—we go through the steps, the same steps with everybody, but if you’ve got the education part down, we’ll touch on it, but I won’t spend a month on it. Whereas if you’re like, “My blood sugar is up and down and up and down and I don’t know what’s going on,” we literally separate every single variable. We take it down to step one. We decide whatever that wants to be that works for you the easiest, and we figure out: is it the variables like what you’re eating, when you’re eating, how you’re eating, and the order you’re eating your food? Because that matters.

And these are all—I'll be honest with you—things I’ve learned from other diabetics, not from my endocrinologist. I’m not dogging on the doctors, because they are a necessary piece to the puzzle. I’m not bad-mouthing—I’m just saying they are usually not diabetics. Their pancreas works the way it’s supposed to. They don’t have insulinomas, and so they don’t know the frustrations when you’re trying to do everything right and you keep failing. And how, after several days of failing, it’s just like: why even try?

So for me, in my programme, we really get into isolating your variables. It could be two or three, it could be twenty. And we literally say, “Okay, how does this variable affect your blood sugar? If we do this and we add a second variable, how does that affect your blood sugar?” It takes time, and I don’t want anyone to think, “Oh my gosh, Christina’s going to put me through school again if I hire her.” But it’s literally a couple of days of hard work. And then we figure it out.

The cool thing is that every time you figure out a variable with your blood sugar, it’s like: point one for Christina, zero for diabetes. And when you get eight or ten of these points on your side, that makes all those other decisions—you now know what your body’s going to do in each of those situations. So it just makes everything from that point on a lot easier. When you can say, “Okay, well, I know if I eat breakfast and I have this much protein, this many carbs, this is what my blood sugar’s going to do. I know that if I have a really hard workout, my blood sugar’s going to go up by 150 points—this is how I can pre-plan because I know that’s what’s going to happen.” It just sets you up for success.

I hope I answered that.
Absolutely. And you keep giving me the springboard for the next question, so as I said before—you are one of my favourite guests so far. Thank you. 
My next kind of thing I wanted to ask is: in terms of these factors that you look at when you’re working with a client—you’d mentioned things like what you’re eating, when you’re eating, the order in which you’re eating—can you maybe just dive in on one of these, for example, and give us a little bit of context? If someone came to you and they said, “Look, my blood sugars are all over the place,” and you looked at, I don’t know, the order in which they’re eating their food—what might we see that causes one response, and what might we see that causes another? Oh, it gives me chills. So this is something I learned from another diabetic: the order you eat your food. And that’s sometimes not always easy to do, but I’ll give you an example. My breakfast most days is two scoops of protein powder, some berries, and 81 grams of Honey Nut Cheerios—it’s about a cup and a half, give or take. I had a friend of mine, and I said, “I don’t understand why some days my blood sugar goes high after breakfast.” And you want rolling hills with your blood sugar—you do not want spikes with peaks and valleys. You just want more of a rolling hill experience to be under good control—whether you’re diabetic like me or a person whose pancreas works normally.

And she said, “Do you realise the order in which you eat your food factors into your blood sugars?” I said, “What do you mean? I’ve been a nurse for over 20 years and, although I’m sure I was taught this, it’s not something that’s talked about a lot. I’ve been a diabetic for over 40 years and I’ve never had anyone tell me this. What are you talking about?” She said, “If you eat your food—first fibre, then fat, then protein, then carbs—the fibre, fats, and protein slow down the absorption of the carbs.” And, you know me, I’m a sceptic. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to try this.”

So the next morning, I got up, blood sugar was 125. I thought, okay, I’m going to control as many variables as I can. I didn’t go to the gym that morning—I planned to do that in the afternoon. I ate my breakfast like I normally would: bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, strawberries in the bowl, then I drank my protein shake afterwards. Within an hour, my blood sugar was 260. I keep my blood sugar between 80 and 120, so it spiked. I stayed at 260–280 for about 3 to 4 hours. Let me back up—I took my fast-acting insulin and then I ate. So I knew that once the insulin kicked in and caught up, I’d be fine—but again, I had that peak. About 6 hours later, I was back down to 150. I screenshotted my Dexcom readings on my CGM. I thought, okay, that’s what usually happens every morning.

So, the third day, I thought, okay, I’m going to do it her way. I ate my berries for my fibre. I didn’t really have a lot of fat per se. I drank my protein shake, then immediately had my bowl of cereal—same amount of time eating, same variables. I got up that morning, blood sugar was 118—so relatively the same. I took my insulin right before I started eating. Within an hour, my blood sugar had gone from 118 to 152—gives me chills. Then I stayed around 150–135 for about three hours, and then came back down to 98 and stayed there—just kind of the rolling hills.

On the fourth day, I said, let’s try one more thing. I did everything I did on day three, except I took my insulin and waited about 20 to 30 minutes. I never peaked. I never—like, I literally, don’t quote me on the exact number—but I started around 120, went up to maybe 135, and just stayed there. Then I came back down to about 90 within four hours. I called my friend and said, “Oh my gosh, you are a genius. Why does nobody talk about this?”

So how can you incorporate that? Let’s say you go out and have a cheeseburger—you go to McDonald’s. Well, there’s not a whole lot of fibre at McDonald’s unless you have a salad first, and that’s always a nice option to have. But say you just get a cheeseburger, fries, and a diet drink. If you eat your cheeseburger first—and I’d recommend maybe taking off one of the buns, just to limit the carbs a little—that protein, even though you’re eating it at the same time as the carbs (and of course, McDonald’s cheeseburgers, nothing against McDonald’s, but they’re loaded with fat), you’re still getting fat and protein with the carbs. That will still cause you to have less of a spike than if you ate the burger and then the fries. Whereas, if you eat the fries and then the burger, you’re going to have a much more dramatic spike.

It’s amazing how just little things can make such huge differences. 
I agree—and I think there will be many diabetics and MEN1 patients possibly listening who have received maybe oversimplified advice when it comes to what to eat, when to eat, how to eat it. Maybe they’ve not even been told anything about food. So I think just hearing something very small and very easy to apply is going to be so helpful. The next thing I wanted to ask you—you mentioned the gym. So I know from my experience when I had my insulinomas, and even now as I'm conscious of my blood sugar but don't have blood sugar problems per se, there are factors other than food that can affect our blood sugar. What might those be? I know I've spoken to diabetic friends—they have to be careful in hot weather, they have to be mindful when they're exercising. Are those important when you're working with a client? Are those the kinds of factors they need to be paying attention to? Yeah, absolutely. Something as simple as the weather—whether it's hot or cold. My insulin demands in the summer are a third less than they are in the winter. Part of that is I'm just more active. But things like, if you get nervous—I'll be honest, I was nervous last night going to bed. I did several calming things that I know help decrease my anxiety. I'm not an anxious person, but I anticipated my blood sugar either spiking high or going low. Now, that didn't happen, and I was so excited. I was like, “Your calming is working, you're doing a good job.” But things like if you get into an argument with a friend—generally, if you're someone that gets into a lot of arguments, you will notice that either your blood sugar goes high or your blood sugar goes low. There are just so many variables. It is very important. I know for myself, I work 7:00 in the morning till 7:00 at night at my nursing job. So for me, I didn't want to get up at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning to work out before work, so I chose to go after work. By the time I got to the gym it was 8:00, by the time I got home it was 9:30, and my blood sugars were bottoming out in the middle of the night. And I was eating—I mean, a substantial amount of food before I went to bed—and I was just like, okay, your body is not... this obviously is not a good solution for you. So I learned that for me, I don’t go to the gym on the days I work. I don’t go at all. I go on my off days. For me, I get up at 6:30, I'm in the gym by 7:30, I work out for a few hours, and I come home. And you just have to find what works for you. I found that I do not at all—and I teach this in my program—no foods are off limits. Some people say, “Well, you're a diabetic, you can't eat that.” Girl, you can eat whatever you want. Now, do you need to eat a dozen cookies? No. But can you have a cookie every once in a while? Absolutely. And it’s amazing—just that mindset of “I can't have that”—when you change it to “I can,” you no longer crave it. I used to... I love donuts. I love any kind—cake donuts especially—but I love donuts. And up until about six years ago, I would literally binge eat two dozen donuts about once every three months. I cringe saying that, but I did. Because I told myself—and my doctor said—“You can’t have that, that’s got sugar, an abundance of sugar.” Well, you tell me I can't have something and you know I’m going to eat it. I would literally get two dozen donuts and eat them within three days. Horrible. Don’t recommend doing that. About five years ago, I got a coach, and she said, “I want to work on your mindset around this.” And the moment we changed it from “I can’t have a donut” to “I can”—I can’t have 12 donuts in one sitting, but if I want a donut, I can have a donut—that simple mindset change, I don’t crave donuts every day. I have what I call my cheat meal—I don’t like the word “cheat”—but if I’ve had a really big, heavy lifting day at the gym, I get a donut. I get one. I might eat half of it. I might eat it all at the same time. I might eat it over two days. But you can work a donut into what you’re eating for the day and it not throw your diet or your eating habits out of control. You just maybe don’t have a piece of bread at dinner. Okay? Like, it’s totally workable. So back to your question—it can be the weather, it can be when the barometer changes. I mean, little things that you don't think about. I know that where I live, it's been raining for the last week and a half, and I've had to bump up my basal rate—the amount of insulin I take every hour—by about 20%. Now, part of that I think is because I'm more sedentary, I'm not outside walking around, and that's definitely playing a factor. But part of it is it's just gloomy and my attitude is down—I'm not as easily my light, perky self. There are so many of these little small variables that are just life, that we don't really think about, but every single one of those can potentially affect your blood sugars. And the thing that's so amazing about it is—the variables that affect you, Lizzie, may not even affect me. Everybody is so different. But when you take time for yourself and you really sit down and do the time to figure out, “Okay, when I feel this way, this is what my blood sugars do,” or “When I feel that way, this is what they have a tendency to do,” that’s why it’s so important to come back to making yourself a priority. Being curious about, “Why does this happen?” And the amazing thing, at least with my diabetes and myself, is that once I think I have it all figured out, something changes. Then you’ve got to tweak things again—but the thing is, once you've built that good foundation, you'll move through it so much more quickly. It'll be a piece of cake. I love so much about what you've shared there—particularly your honesty and your vulnerability with what is so acceptable and normal as a human, which is to love sweet foods—or salty foods if that’s your thing—and to have a binge. I mean, I’m putting all my limbs up; if I could put my legs up, I would. I'm sitting cross-legged on the ground—I’d show you my feet with my hands—because it is so acceptable. And I know in my own journey, one of the biggest problems that’s affected me more than the binging itself is the guilt that comes with it—the horrible emotions. One of the questions you’ve already answered is how much emotion and stress can really play in with things like blood sugar and general overall health. Not only have you answered that, but you’ve also helped bust a myth: just because someone has been given a diagnosis of diabetes, or they might be an MEN1 patient dealing with blood sugar problems, that doesn't mean cutting out all sugary foods. If someone wants to do that because it suits them, that’s okay—but it's not a hard and fast rule. As you say, everyone is so unique. What works for one person—as I know myself—is not going to work for another. That’s such a perfect myth to have busted. I’m sure many people are reticent to listen to diabetes-type information because they’re worried about hearing, “You have to cut this out, you can never have dessert,” and actually, that’s not realistic—that’s not the life we want to lead. I’m really grateful that you’ve shared that.
“No, I’m happy,” you say—and you are. There’s a diabetic myth that says, “You can’t eat carbs,” but let me tell you something: I’m a powerlifter. A week ago, I lifted almost 65,000 pounds of weight in under three hours. Carbs are energy. I’ll say that again: carbs are energy. I’ve never suffered with anorexia, but growing up, I watched my mother struggle with her weight—yo-yoing up and down. I never really had a weight issue; I was never super skinny, never chunky—just very athletic and active. But in my 20s and 30s, and now in my mid-40s, I’ve yo-yoed from 100 lbs to 230 lbs. In 2021, I got back into the gym because I’d gained about 40 lbs. I thought, “This is not acceptable.” I could go on some crash diet and lose the weight—but I’d gain it all back plus 20 lbs. So I said, “Get back in the gym. Start moving your body every day.” And I did. After about nine months, a coach invited me to a powerlifting meet. At the meet—and this goes back to community—it didn’t matter if someone was 20 or 60. Everyone supported everyone. There was a 90-year-old woman squatting 100 lbs. And my trainer said, “Girl, your body responds better to lifting lower reps and heavy weights. I think you’d be good at powerlifting.” So in February 2023, I started strictly powerlifting—just over two years ago. I thought I was eating enough, but I was eating less than 800 calories a day. My body needs at least 1,400 to survive. I was starving myself. Of course I was holding onto weight—my body was in starvation mode. It took me 18 months and one gym owner looking me in the eye saying, “Christina, you’re not eating enough. You won’t grow your muscles. You won’t get stronger if you don’t feed yourself. Carbs are energy. Protein is muscle mass. Don’t make it complicated.” I fought that idea—but once I shifted, everything changed. I eat a lot of carbs now. I lift massive amounts of weight three days a week.
But when I go to my endocrinologist, she tells me I’m morbidly obese. I’m 5'4", and I weigh 210 lbs. I’ve lost about 20 lbs recently—and for me, it’s not about the number on the scale. I want to lower my body fat percentage. I want to lose fat and gain muscle. But every time I see her, she tells me, “Per your BMI, you’re morbidly obese.” I think BMI is crap. Bodybuilders, powerlifters—many are “morbidly obese” by BMI, but they’re 6% body fat. Some are 3%. So yeah, I got on my soapbox—but it’s important to ask: what are your goals? Screw what the doctor says. If I weighed 140 lbs like she wants, I’d look anorexic. I’ve not weighed that since I was 18. That’s just not me. And I finally said to her: “18 months ago, my blood pressure was borderline hypertensive. You were threatening to put me on meds. My resting heart rate was 110. I couldn’t walk a flight of stairs without being out of breath. Now, I spend 45 minutes on the stair climber three days a week—my heart rate doesn’t go above 90. My resting heart rate is 60 to 70. My blood pressure is 113/60. I’ve lost almost 20% body fat. You say I’m morbidly obese, but I am 90% healthier than I was. It’s not all about the weight.” And that’s the thing—it’s not. You’ve got to see the big picture and the small one. There is not a fibre of my body that wants to be 140 lbs. There is no part of that I want. I’m sorry I went off on a tangent, but it’s about what’s important to you. Yes, you need advice from physicians. I’m not downplaying that. But if I did what my doctor said, I’d still be 60% body fat, still not walking up stairs, still needing blood pressure meds. I take enough already. Find out what’s important to you—and find someone who empowers you and supports you. That’s why the diabetes community is so amazing. I know a guy with type 1 who does Ironmans. We have professional swimmers, marathon athletes—I’ve done two half marathons. Did I think I was going to die? Yes. But it was amazing. I learned about myself and what my diabetes does. Does it take extra planning? Absolutely. But is it worth it? Absolutely. It builds your confidence. It’s empowering. 
Thank you for bringing light, in such an amazing, open way, to what I think is a very systemic issue—not just in diabetes or MEN1, but across health. It’s this idea that one measure or one rule is “right” and that it’s unquestionable. As someone who’s experienced diagnosis, I’ve had to learn to sit with uncomfortable information and let it land—deciding what I want to hold onto and what I want to let go. If there’s one thing I hope listeners take from this episode—and I’ll ask you yours in a second—it’s this: really tap into what feels right. What’s right isn’t always comfortable. There can be resistance. But anything that empowers rather than drags you down—that’s where healing happens.
So, over to you one last time. If there’s one thing someone listening could take away—whether they’re an MEN1 patient, a diabetic, just curious, or here by accident—what would you want to leave them with? 
I’m going to try not to get emotional. You’re not alone. And I would empower you: if you’re not getting the answers you need, be curious. Invest in yourself. That doesn’t always mean spending money—it can just mean making time for yourself. Really dig in. Find your goals. Like you said, sometimes you have to sit and be uncomfortable. And give yourself grace. You can only act on what you know. But as you get curious—as you invest in yourself and buck the system a little bit—you’ll collect tidbits and big pieces of information that you can put in your toolbox. That empowers you. You can say, “This is my goal.” And maybe you get there and realise it’s not what you thought. It’s okay to change. It doesn’t make you a failure. Fail means “first attempt in learning.” If you’re not stumbling, you’re not really trying. It’s in the stumbles that you learn most—about yourself and your condition. So be curious. Take time for yourself. Those are two things you’ll never lose. They’ll only make you stronger. 
Christina, thank you for that parting piece of advice. Thank you for being so open and honest. You’re not only knowledgeable—you’re very real. I’ve done this podcast for a couple of years now. I’ve had many guests. And the episodes that really land are the ones where there’s no gap between me and the person opposite me. The title before or after your name doesn’t matter. What you’ve shared is real. And I know people listening will apply it to their lives. Medicine often happens on paper. But real healing happens in life. I’m grateful for all the tangible tips you’ve shared. I’ve learned loads—and I know everyone listening will have too. I wish you all the best with your community. You’re doing amazing things. And I hope to have you back again soon. 
Absolutely—this has been such a great experience. It’s been a pleasure.