Shelomi Sanders has had to deal with type 1 diabetes since a young age, having been diagnosed at age 13. Since then, she has made it her goal to raise awareness about the condition and its treatment. You can easily see it through her choice of NIL deals, when she usually partners up with brands involved in giving diabetics a better lifestyle.
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Sanders most recently partnered up with Dexcom, a leading company for glucose monitoring in the United States. On Wednesday, she shared videos on her Instagram of her participation in the Dexcom Sports Camp. Her mother, Pilar Sanders, was there with her for the trip to Baltimore and also hyped her up in the comments section of her reel:
“My gorgeous babygirl! We had lots of fun! Thanks @dexcom you’re helping so many of our young athletes.”
According to Shelomi Sanders’s caption on her reel, Dexcom was a game-changer for her treatment of type 1 diabetes. Dexcom is a company that has built glucose monitors for over 25 years.
How did Shelomi Sanders find out about her type 1 diabetes?
According to an interview with “Beyond Type 1”, Shelomi Sanders found out about her condition through working out with her father, Deion Sanders, and feeling great amounts of thirst. Thirst is one of the first symptoms people feel when they have type 1 diabetes, and it’s called polydipsia. It can be easily dismissed, as Shelomi’s case demonstrates:
“I’m talking about drinking like two gallons of water a day,” she says. “I wasn’t really that hungry, but I also just looked drained. But I was working out with my dad a lot around that time, so we didn’t think anything of it. We just thought the weight loss was just because we’re just working out and stuff.”
Pivoting to how diabetes affects her life as an athlete, Shelomi Sanders shared a weird fact. When she works out, her sugar goes high, and it tends not to bother her while playing on the court:
“When I work out, my blood sugar tends to go high,” she explains. “I heard most people’s blood sugar goes low, so that’s different. But where I’m at, all the trainers make sure I have everything I need. I have my pump and everything on the side.”
Having high blood sugar would certainly give her the energy to play, but it has to be managed to avoid creating too many negative side effects.
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