This extra chapter was cut from The Journey Back to keep the book focused. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping. Any $17 PDF-and-audiobook bundle is a separate optional digital add-on, not the price of the paperback.
The first time I tested exercise against my glucose, I was certain I knew what was going to happen.
That certainty is what made the result so perplexing.
In my mind, exercise had a simple job. My blood contained more glucose than I wanted. My cells needed somewhere to put it. If I made my muscles work, they should pull that glucose out of my blood and use it.
Exercise in. Glucose down.
That was the equation.
I had read enough about insulin sensitivity and glucose uptake to know that physical activity was beneficial. I understood the broad mechanism. When muscles contract, they need fuel. Exercise can help the body use glucose and improve insulin sensitivity.
So I expected the meter to reward me immediately.
My baseline that day was approximately 132 mg/dL.
I went to the treadmill in the apartment building and exercised for ten minutes.
Today, ten minutes does not sound like much.
At that point, it was a major physical effort.
I was badly out of shape. After ten minutes on the treadmill, I was huffing and puffing like a two-pack-a-day smoker. Then I had to walk several minutes back to the apartment and climb a couple of flights of stairs.
By the time I reached the apartment, my heart was working, my breathing was heavy, and my body knew it had exercised.
Alex was there with me, and he recorded the test on video.
I was certain of my prediction. I was not merely hoping the number would be lower. I knew it would be lower.
That is how confident I was.
If I had started near 132, perhaps I would see 110. Maybe I would see 92. In my imagination, the number was about to fall like London Bridge.
The muscles had done the work. The meter was going to confirm it.
Then I pricked my finger.
The number had not behaved the way I expected.
Instead of delivering the dramatic drop I had already celebrated in my mind, it was higher.
I do not want to manufacture precision where my memory has blurred. What I remember clearly is the direction and my reaction.
I had exercised, and the glucose reading had risen.
That felt backward.
It felt as if I had pulled the correct lever and the machine had responded in the wrong direction.
I had just struggled through ten minutes on a treadmill. I had walked back to the apartment. I had climbed the stairs. I was breathing hard enough to prove that the effort was real.
Where was my reward?
Why had the meter not congratulated me?
That was the first time exercise forced me to confront the difference between understanding a general principle and predicting one immediate measurement.
Physical activity often helps lower glucose. A moderate walk may produce a lower reading afterward. But exercise is not one single input, and the body does not respond to every intensity in exactly the same way.
When the effort becomes strenuous for the person performing it, the body may release stress hormones such as adrenaline. Those signals can tell the liver to release stored glucose so the working muscles have fuel available.
The meter may therefore rise during or immediately after certain intense efforts, even while regular physical activity is improving the larger system.
The treadmill did not know that ten minutes sounded modest on paper.
My body knew how hard those ten minutes felt to me.
For the person I was that day, it was strenuous exercise.
That distinction mattered.
I had been judging intensity by the clock. My body was judging it by the demand.
The reading did not mean that exercise had failed. It meant I had taken one measurement at one moment during a process that continued after the workout ended.
I had captured one frame and mistaken it for the entire movie.
The glucose response can continue changing after exercise. The effect may depend on intensity, duration, fitness, the meal before the activity, medication, hydration, heat, sleep, stress, and the individual person.
A single immediate reading could tell me what the meter saw at that moment.
It could not tell me the complete value of the exercise.
That was hard for me because I wanted the number to behave like a grade.
If the reading fell, I had done exercise correctly.
If it rose, I had done something wrong.
But a glucose meter is not a teacher holding a red pen. It is an instrument measuring one variable at one point in time.
The body was not betraying me by releasing fuel.
It was trying to meet the demand I had just placed on it.
That did not mean every exercise-related rise should be dismissed. It did not mean any number was automatically safe merely because I had been active. Readings that are unusually high, remain high, occur with concerning symptoms, or fall below a person’s safe range deserve appropriate attention and guidance from the medical team.
It meant that I needed to stop making a final judgment from the first number I saw.
I needed to understand the pattern.
What was the reading before exercise?
How intense was the activity for me?
When did I test afterward?
What happened thirty minutes later?
What happened an hour or two later?
What had I eaten?
Was I hydrated?
How had I slept?
What medications was I taking?
Was this an isolated response, or did it happen repeatedly?
Those questions were more useful than asking whether exercise had won or lost.
The first treadmill test also gave me a physical baseline I could not argue with.
Ten minutes left me gasping.
The walk back to the apartment felt significant. The stairs felt like another stage of the workout. I could not hide behind what I had once been able to do or what I thought a ten-minute session should feel like.
That was my condition then.
Now place that scene beside what happened today.
Today I ran 3.8 miles in 92-degree heat.
When I finished, I was red as a beet and washed in sweat. I recorded another video and tested my glucose again.
The meter read approximately 123 mg/dL.
That was not the number I wanted.
I would have loved to see 92. I would have loved to see something below 100 and hold it up as a clean, immediate reward for the miles.
But I did not panic when I saw 123.
I understood that I had just asked my body to run 3.8 miles in serious heat. My muscles needed fuel. My heart was working. Stress hormones and liver glucose could be part of the immediate response. Hydration and heat could matter too.
I was no longer looking at the meter with the same simplistic equation I had carried into the first treadmill experiment.
I still paid attention to the number.
I simply did not let that number erase the run.
That may sound like a small change in interpretation. It represents an enormous change in me.
During the first experiment, I needed the glucose reading to validate the exercise.
Today, I know the exercise does not become worthless because one immediate reading is higher than I hoped.
Regular movement is part of the larger work I am doing with my physicians, medication, nutrition, sleep, stress, blood pressure, triglycerides, weight, and conditioning. Its value is not confined to the number displayed seconds after I stop moving.
The meter provides information.
It does not provide the entire verdict.
I also understand now that I do not control my body as directly as I once imagined.
I can choose to run.
I can choose what I eat.
I can take my prescribed medication.
I can protect my sleep, stay hydrated, monitor my readings, and work with my medical team.
But I cannot order my liver to release a precise amount of glucose. I cannot command every hormone. I cannot make my kidneys, heart, pancreas, muscles, and brain follow a spreadsheet I designed.
Thankfully, I do not have to think through every one of those functions consciously.
If staying alive depended on my remembering every heartbeat, every breath, every kidney function, and every chemical signal, I would eventually become distracted and forget something essential.
The body does an extraordinary amount of work without asking permission from the conscious mind.
Sometimes it responds in a way that is protective and necessary but looks confusing when reduced to one number.
The post-exercise rise taught me humility.
My body was going to do what it needed to do. My responsibility was not to micromanage every second. My responsibility was to create better conditions, observe the pattern, and respond wisely with my clinical team.
That included learning not to confuse a temporary response with a long-term conclusion.
Exercise can improve insulin sensitivity and help muscles use glucose. Those benefits can extend beyond the moment the activity ends. Certain strenuous activities can also temporarily raise glucose.
Both things can be true.
The immediate rise did not cancel the larger benefit.
The larger benefit did not give me permission to ignore every rise.
The correct response was curiosity, context, and continued medical supervision.
That is what the first experiment changed.
Before it, I expected my body to behave like a vending machine. Insert ten minutes of exercise. Receive a lower glucose reading.
Afterward, I began understanding it as a living system adapting to demand.
Sometimes a gentle walk and a hard run could produce different immediate readings because they were different physiological events.
Even the same workout could affect me differently depending on my conditioning, food, sleep, stress, temperature, and hydration.
The question was no longer, ‘Does exercise lower glucose, yes or no?’
The better question was, ‘How does this kind of movement affect me across time and under these conditions?’
That question could produce knowledge instead of disappointment.
It also allowed me to keep moving.
If I had treated the first higher reading as proof that exercise did not work, I could have stopped. I could have told myself that the treadmill was pointless or that my body was too broken to respond.
Instead, I learned that the unexpected result was not a dead end.
It was data.
I kept exercising.
Ten minutes became more than ten minutes.
Huffing and puffing back to the apartment eventually became running 3.8 miles.
The man who struggled up those apartment stairs and the man who ran in 92-degree heat are the same person at different points in the journey.
That is the result no single finger stick can capture.
The first video with Alex showed a frightened man trying to force his body into a predictable equation.
Today’s video showed a man who could test, see 123, wish it were lower, and still understand that the run mattered.
I had not stopped caring about the number.
I had stopped requiring the number to praise me immediately.
That is a very different relationship with measurement.
The old version of me wanted one good reading so I could declare victory.
The recovering version of me wanted enough readings, taken in the right context, to understand a pattern.
One number could surprise me.
It did not have to define me.
One workout could produce a temporary rise.
It did not have to become an excuse to abandon movement.
The first treadmill experiment taught me that my body would not always respond on my preferred schedule.
The 3.8-mile run proved that I could continue showing up anyway.
Exercise was still doing something important even when the meter did not congratulate me at the finish line.
Want to see how I connected the dots?
I wrote The Journey Back to share my experience and explain the Four Metabolic Loads framework. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping.
→ See The Journey Back Paperback ($12.95)
Educational only, not medical advice. Charles’s experience was alongside physician-supervised care and prescribed medication. Individual results vary. Talk to your doctor.