When you think of diabetes, you do not imagine that it will strike an elite endurance athlete at the peak of their powers.
However, it is not as simple as that, and Canadian superstar Lionel Sanders has revealed that his glucose levels put him in the pre-diabetic range as he prepares for the 2025 triathlon season.
That’s right, a world-class endurance athlete who can complete brutal 140.6-mile races in under eight hours, is considered to be on the brink of diabetes.
Sanders in prediabetic range
In November 2024, the Canadian star, after years of suffering from symptoms such as poor sleep and a constant need to visit the bathroom during the night, decided to get blood work done to find out what was going on in his body.
“I’m getting older, and also like I don’t feel good, I sleep horrible and I have this chronic cough – I hadn’t had blood work done ever. So I went to the doctor and asked for the Cadillac of blood tests, I wanted to test everything,” he explained during his latest YouTube video (watch the full version at the bottom of this page).
He had an A1C reading taken, also known as a hemoglobin A1C (HbA1C) test, which measures average blood sugar (glucose) levels over the past three months – a key diagnostic tool for determining both prediabetes and type 2 diabetes.
“For the most part, everything looked decent, healthy, except my A1C. I came up at 5.9, which is in the pre-diabetic range. 6.4 is the threshold to being diabetic, that was quite surprising and something serious because diabetes is not a disease that you want to mess around with.
“I have been showing symptoms, it would not be uncommon for me to pee eight times in eight hours of sleep, which means I am not sleeping. We are talking about having little sleeps of 45 minutes and eating candy and sugar in the middle of the night while having intense cravings. Sleeping absolutely horrible when I do sleep – I am at like 14 straight years of horrible sleep.
“I put on a glucose monitor and it was accurate, my A1C was accurate. I wore the monitor for 10 days and even after making some dietary changes – eating lower glycemic food to control blood sugar – my 24 hour average was around 123 mg/dL which is in prediabetic range.
Dietary concerns
Sanders appeared to immediately lock on to his overarching issue, a poorly thought-out diet. “The last time I ate well for an extended period of time was beyond my memory at this stage, potentially 20 years ago,” he said
“I’m fully immersed in the culture of processed foods – high calorie, high macro, high in sugar and high in salt. I am as lazy as they get with regards to eating. It’s all related, my laziness is related to the way I have been training.
“I do have to eat a ton of carbs because I do burn a load of carbs, but I started thinking about it a little bit deeper. I started to realise that, for instance, on an easy ride of an hour in duration I would burn maybe 60-80g of carbs, but during that ride I’d also eat 60-80g of carbs per hour.
“The part I didn’t understand was that if you kept up to the carb burn during the ride, you don’t need to eat a ton of carbs after that session. I’d slam a ton of carbs after the session, 100g+ of which I didn’t really need and my body had to process that.
“Prior to understanding this, I was also going about it in the opposite way to how I should have been. That would be eating very little for breakfast, a little bit for lunch and then a huge dinner.
“Because I ate so little for those first two meals I would prioritse a massive amount of carbs and as the day goes on insulin sensitivity, and I saw this in my data, goes down and thus the blood sugar remains elevated. Then I’d have dessert, snack on candy all night and then I’d also eat Nature Valley bars during the night.
“I realised I could do things differently and wanted to see the results of that.”
Changing the culture
“I was quite happy with how much I was able to elicit change. I had that blood test done in November, so I began this process in mid-November to December and we are knocking on the door of two months of behavioral change.
“As I have slowly learned more, I have moved towards eating less super-processed carbs and more carbs with fats and proteins in their natural form.
“I made those changes, and by the end of the 10-day period with the continuous glucose monitor I was able to get my blood sugar average for the seven days down to the low 100s.
“I’ve literally felt my whole life and reality begin to change. I felt something I couldn’t remember the last time it happened, I was just walking around about to begin a bike session and I felt good.”
Sanders continued to criticise his laziness when it comes to food, highlighting a near addiction to ultra-processed food.
“I live in a society where ultra-processed foods is the norm. My joke has always been to say ‘I’m cooking tonight’ and then pull out my phone and ordering takeout, that’s my idea cooking.
“The next phase of my journey is realising I created this sh***y eating culture, lazy eating, eating grab and go garbage and snacking on peanut butter cups.
“The next step is to change that culture, understand what I have been doing to myself by fuelling my body on ultra-processed foods and changing the culture – start going to the farmer’s market, the grocery store to pick up food rather than food like substances.
“Then creating a culture spending more time and energy on these things, because it’s holistic. I’ve not spent time and energy on these things because, very likely, I am tired and not recovering properly, and therefore I am lazy and I eat like s**t which adds to me being tired and not recovering properly, it’s this snowball, a cyclical thing.”
“That’s the culture I want to create because I don’t want to die young of diabetes, and I’m headed down that pathway right now.”
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