Diabetes is a creature of habit. It rarely appreciates disruptions in its expected routine…so when they happen, it likes to make its displeasure known.

This probably explains why I’ve dealt with a number of diabetes curve balls since I started working from home (as opposed to an office) full-time.

I’ve been working remotely, 40 hours per week, for just about a month now. This was a choice I made as I prepared to move from Massachusetts to Virginia. I like most things about my job, from the people I work with to the skills it has helped me develop. But I don’t particularly love that my job forces me to be a self-described “cubicle rat”. When I work in the office, I’m parked at my cubicle for a solid portion of the day. As a semi-fidgety person, this was a tough reality for me to swallow nearly five years ago when I started my job. However, I was able to adapt to the old ball-and-chain that is my desk, and learned to break free from it every once in awhile. Before long, I discovered that getting up every 60-90 minutes to either wander into the kitchen for a drink, walk up the stairs to another floor in the building, or in nice weather, stroll around the building in laps, were all excellent ways to cope with my desire to move as well as keep my blood sugars at bay.

So that’s close to five years of having a very specific routine that my diabetes and I were used to…no wonder it was pissed off when I changed things up.

Working from home affects my diabetes in ways that I expected and others that caught me off guard. First, the things that didn’t surprise me: I knew that I would likely be even more sedentary at home than in an office. I’m not walking across a parking lot, up a set of stairs, and down a long hallway just to set up my desk each day. All I’m doing is walking five feet into the living room in order to power on my laptop. So there’s a lot less daily movement, and I’ve had to work hard to incorporate as much of it as possible because my diabetes responds incredibly well to exercise.

I also knew that my relationship with food would change a bit. Since I was living with my parents before the move, I was lucky enough to have 99% of my food preparations done for me by them (thank you for feeding me, Mom and Dad). Not only would I need to take care of cooking my own food in this new situation, but I would also need to become responsible for making smart choices and stocking the pantries with healthful things…because when you work from home, ALL the food is available to you. And since there aren’t any coworkers nearby me to chat with and take my mind off snack time, it’s much easier for me to just traipse through the kitchen whenever the heck I want and eat a gratuitous number of chips, crackers, cheese, and any other sort of goodies I can find. I don’t like admitting it, but I don’t always bolus for said snacks…making it that much more of a struggle for my blood sugars.

But what I didn’t know about working from home and how it might impact my diabetes is that there’s an emotional side to it that almost certainly comes into play. The first few weeks of my move were absolutely draining. I was homesick and trying to adjust to this strange, new place at the same time, and honestly, I think it was all a little too much for my diabetes to deal with at once. There were three straight days in which I had to fight hard to get my blood sugars to come down from stubborn highs, and there was another string of days in which I felt like I had to eat everything in the kitchen just to keep my numbers up. Between the numbers that my blood sugars represented and my emotions, each day felt like a seesaw and I wasn’t sure what to expect next.

What took me by surprise the most, though, about my new work arrangement was how quickly I acclimated to it. By the end of week two of working remotely, I had a routine – with a few fluctuations here and there – that I’ve since tried to stick with: waking up around 6:30, exercising, showering, getting dressed, eating breakfast, logging onto work, working for 4 hours, eating lunch, taking a break to do household chores/errands, working for another 4 hours, then logging off for the day. So far, I’ve found that following this pattern helps me move around as much as I did when I worked in the office, and it establishes a flow that my blood sugars and diabetes can follow. I’ve also, for the most part, remained mindful of the foods I eat during the working hours, after making mistakes with a bag of pretzels and banana chips in the first couple of weeks.

Even though my diabetes wasn’t happy with remote work in the beginning, I think I’ve arrived at a place in which it’s coming to terms with it…and, I daresay, warming up to the concept.