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Since I'd been experiencing low blood sugars, and since the tests I had been performing on my urine were wholly inadequate (sugar that showed up in the urine was already on its way out of the bloodstream), I figured that if I knew what my blood sugar levels were, perhaps I could catch and correct my hypoglycemic episodes before they made me disoriented and irrational.

I marveled over the instrument. It had a 4-inch galvanometer with a jeweled bearing, weighed 3 pounds, and cost $650, which in those days could have been a month's salary. I tried to order one, but the manufacturer wouldn't sell it to patients—only to doctors and hospitals.

Fortunately, my wife, as I've said, was a physician, so I ordered one in her name. I started to measure my blood sugar about 5 times each day, and soon saw that the levels were on a roller coaster. Engineers are accustomed to solving problems mathematically, but you have to have information to work with. You have to know the mechanics of a problem in order to solve it, and now, for the first time, I was gaining insight into the mechanics and mathematics of my disease. What I learned in my frequent testing was that my own blood sugar levels swung from lows of under 40 mg/dl to highs of over 400 mg/dl about twice daily. A normal blood sugar level is about 85 mg/dl. Small wonder I was subject to such vast mood swings.

In an effort to balance my blood sugar levels, I began to adjust my insulin regimen, and went from one to two injections a day. I made some experimental modifications to my diet, cutting down on the carbohydrates to permit me to take less insulin. The very high and low blood sugar levels became less frequent, but few were normal.

Three years after I started measuring my blood sugar levels, my diabetic complications were still progressing, and I was still a 115-pound weakling. My sense of gaining insight into the workings of my diabetes had diminished, and so I ordered a computer search of the scientific literature to see if exercise could prevent diabetic complications. In those days, computer searches were not the simple, almost instant searches they are today. In 1972 you made your request to the local medical library, which mailed it to Washington, D.C., where it was processed. It took about two weeks for my $75 printout to arrive.

There were quite a few entries of interest, and I ordered copies of the original articles. For the most part these were from esoteric journals and dealt with animal experiments. The information I had hoped to find didn't exist. I didn't find a single article pertaining to the prevention of diabetic complications by exercise in humans.

What I did find was that such complications had repeatedly been prevented, and even reversed, in animals. Not through exercise, but by normalizing blood sugars! To me, this was a total surprise. All of diabetes treatment was heavily focused in other directions, such as low-fat diets, preventing severe hypoglycemia, and preventing a potentially fatal extreme high blood sugar condition called ketoacidosis. Thus it had not occurred to me that keeping blood sugar levels as close to normal as possible for as much of the time as possible would make a difference.

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