Living with Type 1 Diabetes

Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

​

My name is Dan Sheehan. I'm 61 years old. I've lived in Victoria for the last 15 years or so, almost 15 years. I have three kids who went to SMUS, and the youngest of which is Parker. Prior to moving to Victoria, we lived in Los Angeles, and then before that, I lived in Hong Kong. So I've been an entrepreneur and a business person pretty much my whole adult life. Right after university, I started my first company and I've been self-employed or doing business of one form or another ever since then, so almost 40 years. And I've led a very interesting and amazing life and I feel truly blessed.

​

However, when I turned 50, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Most of the time, Type 1 is juvenile diabetes. It gets diagnosed when kids are younger. But there is also an adult late-onset version, which is what I have.​ So I became really, really ill and I didn't know why. And when I was admitted into the hospital, that's when they found out what had happened to me. I was in the emergency room for a long time, and I was hospitalized for three or four days.

​

I guess in a way, I thought I had something much worse than what I had. Diabetes is treatable. There's lots of other things that you can have that could be terminal or could be really, really serious. Not to say Type 1 diabetes isn't serious. It is serious. There's no known cure, and it's something that you have to live with every day.​ But it is treatable, and you can lead a very full and healthy life if you manage your blood sugar properly, and it really comes down to that. I felt a bit relieved to know that I didn't have something really bad, but bad enough. I was kind of excited about what the future could hold for me, but also realizing that I had been really sick and I still was sick.

 

I wanted the rest of my life to be about something different than what my life up to age 50 had been about, which was business and pushing, pushing, pushing, being very driven. That’s when I made the decision to ask if I could do something in the health space, around being more healthy and living a more healthy life, and also do what I love, which is business. I wanted to see if there was a way to marry my passion for business and my passion for health, creating some kind of lasting legacy for what the rest of my life would look like. That was the shift that happened in my head, and for the last 10 years, I've been working quite hard to build that next chapter of my life, as well as the next business opportunity. 

​

What challenges have you faced, and how have you overcome them?

​

Doctors always say you need to manage your A1C. It's a way of looking at your average blood glucose over a 90-day period of time. The science says the lower your A1C, or the closer it is to normal numbers for someone who doesn't have Type 1 diabetes, the better your health outcomes will be in your older years.

​

Some of the side effects of Type 1 diabetes include eyesight loss, heart disease, kidney disease, loss of limb, and circulatory problems. These are serious side effects of the disease. Knowing that and not wanting that to happen to me makes me focus about how to manage the disease.

​

There's never a waking moment when you're not thinking about it. I wear a continuous glucose monitor on my arm connected to my phone, and it tells me all the time whether my blood sugar is high or low. I can look at the graph and see how I'm doing.​ Do I need more insulin? Do I need to eat? It's constantly balancing. The biggest challenge is being in constant maintenance mode around blood sugar levels. If you ignore it or don’t manage it properly, that’s when serious health consequences happen.

​

How has your lifestyle and diet changed since your diagnosis?

​

Number one, I eat way more fruits and vegetables. I always ate a lot of fruits and vegetables because I enjoy it and I know it's healthy, but I eat much more now. My diet is probably 90% plant-based, including fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, nuts, seeds, and tofu. I eat very little meat and very little dairy.​ 

 

I love sweets. I love cookies, cakes, and ice cream. But sweet foods really affect blood sugar, so I have to be really careful. Even foods like pizza and sushi have a lot of sugar in them. A lot of restaurants use sugar in recipes to make food taste better, including salad dressings and sauces.​ Because I travel a lot for work, I often bring my own food or snacks. I'm always careful about what I put in my mouth. It's easy to eat poorly, but it's hard to eat well. My focus has been on eating well and eating mostly plants.

​

How did your diagnosis inspire you to start Nama Wellness?

​

Turning 50 and being diagnosed made me think about what I wanted the rest of my life to look like and stand for. I could keep doing what I was doing, or I could choose to do things differently.

I committed to living differently, not being as crazy about work, traveling less, spending more time with my family and friends, taking better care of my health, and learning how to say no when something wasn’t good for me.

​

I had a lot of business experience and a good understanding of health. I had been into juicing for about ten years. I thought about combining my love of making fresh juice at home with my experience of sourcing and manufacturing products in Asia, and selling in North America.

​

Nama started as a small side project. We didn’t know if it would work. Over time, we invested more time, hired people, built a team, and then COVID happened. People wanted to take better care of their health at home, and they found our product online, especially through Instagram. Now I have teams all over the world. I get emails from people with many different health conditions telling me our products helped them be healthier or live a better life. That’s what it’s all about.

​

What message do you hope to share through Nama Wellness?

​

Our primary message is the power of plants. Plant medicine is ancient wisdom. For hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, humans have relied on plants for survival. In modern society, people believe a pill will solve everything. The medicine found in plants, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, herbs, including Chinese herbal medicine, is powerful and helps sustain us.

​

The message of Nama is to help people consume more plants, eat more plants, drink more plants, and allow their bodies to heal themselves. Everything we do as a company is to make it easier and faster for people to consume more plant food. If people consume more plant food, they will be more healthy.

 

Do you have a message for kids going through a similar experience?

​

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It may seem overwhelming at the beginning, but you can live a normal life and do absolutely anything with Type 1 diabetes. You can be anything you want. It’s not a death sentence. You actually have the opportunity to be much healthier than other people because you’re focused on your personal health. I believe it’s a superpower.

​

It was the best thing that ever happened to me because it allowed me to live a life I might not have lived otherwise. You can use this as fuel to do something positive.

​

Thank you so much!

​

Thank you.