I am a phony morning person.

By that I mean that I pretend that I like getting up early in the mornings, but truth be told…I hate it. Oh how I long for the days that I could sleep in as late as I wanted and shun my very few responsibilities…

Even though I clearly don’t love waking up early, there is one benefit to it that truly lasts all day long. And that is getting my workouts done within the first hour or so of my day.

Listen, I’m not a fitness freak. I don’t have a ripped bod. More often than not, I’m working out so I can eat and drink the things that I like without feeling as terrible about it (only light sarcasm used in that previous sentence). But I do like exercising and try to do so every single day because, well, it’s good for me and definitely helps me to produce better blood sugars.

Exercising is a thousand times harder than it needs to be, though, when my blood sugar crashes halfway through a routine – which happened a lot more than I wanted it to when I was working out in the afternoons or evenings.

Fed up with the lows, I changed up my routine and that’s when I discovered the beauty of fasting morning workouts.

I learned that if I work out soon after I wake up in the morning and wait until after I’m done to eat breakfast, then lows almost never happen. It’s like magic. I’m able to get through my exercise routine (which is usually a half hour circuit of some sort) without having to modify my basal rates whatsoever. Since I don’t have any insulin on board (because I haven’t eaten any food yet), I’m only working out with my basal rate running in the background, so there’s a much lower chance that my blood sugar will really fluctuate when I’m exercising. Of course, mornings that I wake up with a low or a high blood sugar are a little more challenging, seeing as I either have to bring it back up to a good level for working out or get some insulin pumping in my system, but I wake up most mornings with my blood sugar in a range that makes me feel comfortable working out in.

All the diabetes business aside, I gotta say…my other favorite part of working out first thing is that it’s over with and done for the day. Ba-da bing, ba-da boom. It’s not looming over my head for the remainder of the day, and that’s a really nice feeling.

A.M. exercise is A-O.K. to my diabetes and me.