Sugar Surfing

Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age nine, Steve grew up with its routines, uncertainty, and constant decisions. He later became a pediatric endocrinologist, but Sugar Surfing is not a clinical textbook. It is the autobiography of a person with lifelong diabetes encountering an entirely new way to see his glucose.

Early CGM required careful calibration. There was a right way and a wrong way to use the sensors, and Steve took that work seriously. He glanced at the display as often as 50 times a day—not to follow a formal system, but to stay present and understand what the new information meant in ordinary life.

As Steve watched glucose rise, fall, flatten, and turn, he began recognizing situations that repeated. Meals, insulin timing, stress, movement, and daily routines did not produce identical outcomes, but experience could still teach him what to notice.

He described the rhythm in plain language: glance often, stay in the moment, wash, rinse, and repeat. When something did not work, the answer was not to beat yourself up. Look again, learn what you can, and keep living.

The surfing analogy gave Steve a vivid way to describe the rising, falling, flattening, and turning he saw on the screen. It made a new technology easier to talk about without pretending diabetes had become predictable.