Spring cleaning is more than a practice of tidying one’s home. It’s also a great way to keep blood sugar levels down, as I was reminded when I decided to take on the long overdue task of cleaning out my closet.

Ever since I moved into my home (nearly 3 years ago), the clothing and random other junk taking up space in my decently sized walk-in closet has largely remained untouched. Not in the sense that I don’t take things in and out of my closet every day, because I do. Rather, I haven’t sorted through anything in my closet since I decided what would go in there and what order it would stay in. Forget clearing out clothing with seasonal changes or refolding items as they got jostled out of place, no way! It’s really no wonder that over time, my closet grew more and more cluttered until finally I couldn’t take it anymore and devoted a few hours to cleaning it out.

It was an exhausting exercise – and yes, the word exercise really applies here because I was sweaty, huffing, and puffing in no time. I had to take everything out, lay it in heaps on my floor, go through each pile individually to see what I wanted to keep and toss, and either refold or rehang garments as I filed stuff back into place to my liking. I’m not sure how many pounds worth of clothing I actually sorted through, but it was definitely a sizeable amount as my arms ached from pulling clothes down from shelves and my hanger bar. And it definitely made sense that I was getting overheated, as I kept walking back and forth between my closet and my bedroom floor with my arms weighted down and in a space that was overly warm due to insufficient air conditioning.

So when my blood sugar levels started tanking 30 minutes into my organizing process, I shouldn’t have been particularly surprised. But in hindsight, it makes perfect sense as the cleaning was basically an extended moderate-intensity cardio AND strength session. What I should’ve been was more prepared for the possibility of going low by enabling activity mode on my Omnipod so that my blood sugar target could be increased from 100 to 150 for the duration of my cleaning, but instead I was crashing and cursing that I had to interrupt my workflow with a fruit snack break.

Maybe next time I’ll do better and coincide my spring cleaning with a high blood sugar so I could reap the benefits of the extra exercise, thereby turning the unexpected blood sugar buster into a welcome one.