#ToolsofType1s - 013 - Paulius Podziunas

[00:00:00] Rob Howe: Tools of Type 1s, 13 episodes in. Paulius Podziunas. Paulius, also, if you're speaking a little bit more Lithuanian, which I am terrible at, but I want to make sure to respect Paul and his cultural background. system thinking. He and I did this episode, I believe episode like 60 on diabetics doing things, had a really great talk. He and I have a lot of similar experiences, both the way that we think about productivity and systems and entrepreneurial entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial endeavors. He's a good friend. I got to meet him in Chicago at our Chicago photo walk and kind of hang around the city throughout the day. So if you're in the Chicago area, definitely hit him up. I think he does have a call to action towards the end of his episode. Very cool, very professionally polished answers here. I'm not sure what audio rig he was using, but it was very good. I hope you guys enjoy it. It's quick. It's right down and dirty and really digs into some serious issues. So I hope you guys like it. As always, Paulius, thank you so much for taking the time and I hope you guys enjoy system thinking. Big news on the Tools of Type 1 podcast. We have a sponsor. You've heard of them before. They've sponsored the podcast in the past. Real Good Foods. Real Good Foods at Real Good Foods on Instagram. RealGoodFoods.com. You can actually order Real Good Foods products online and using code Rob Howe. That's me. Rob Howe. R-O-B-H-O-W-E. At checkout. You can save 10% and get free shipping. I believe the shipping is the biggest piece there because it can be quite costly at times to ship frozen products. but you get free shipping when you use code ROBHOUSE. So don't forget that. One thing that's really important to me are companies like Real Good Foods who are designing products that they don't know necessarily are perfect for people with type 1 diabetes, but then they discover and they get really involved and they kind of dive in with both feet. And Real Good Foods has done that. During National Diabetes Awareness Month, they donated a ton of money to Beyond Type 1. They design products that are great for our lifestyle and also taste great. So pizza is obviously one of many guilty pleasures that I have. But also, I know a lot of people in the type 1 community have anxiety about eating pizza because it can be really tough. You know, high spikes, you know, the fat and the crust, difficult to count the carbs correctly and for the fat as well. Especially if you're eating it at night, it can be very difficult. So Real Good Foods pizza, 4 grams of carbs per serving. That's crazy. so i believe in one of their pizzas it's three servings in a single pizza guys that's 12 carbs and you know what counting those carbs injecting for that pizza it's right my levels stay flat and it's it's really cool to just have that sense of well-being and confidence when you're eating a product so highly recommend that you try it also very good when i was on vacation with my girlfriend over christmas we ran out of food in our airbnb we're like well we got to go to the store we got to get some food. I'm craving pizza. Lucky enough in the frozen food aisle, Kroger, Walmart, your general grocery stores, check online if your local grocery store has them. But we're easily able to find the pizzas that we liked. And they also have these poppers that are made with chicken. They have jalapeno and they have pizza flavored, pepperoni pizza flavored. And they've changed the recipe on those. I pop them in the air fryer. They're delicious. So if you want to try a low carb, low glycemic index, easy to manage with diabetes, delicious food. Check out Real Good Foods. They're in your frozen food section in your local store. And if you do try them, let me know. Give me a tag on Instagram. We'll chat about it. Okay, guys. I hope you guys are enjoying Tools

[00:03:51] Paulius Podziunas: of Type 1s. Let's get back to the episode. Tools of Type 1. Again, Rob, thank you for doing this. You already do so many great things for the community, but this one stands out by far as one of my favorite and uh i want to thank you personally for even considering me having on here so um yeah let's get on with these questions well my name is polos polius if you're reading this or you could just call me paul that's also fine i've been a type 1 diabetic for eight years and i'm currently a ux designer working on two startups one of them is my own and another one is a blockchain streaming platform called Vimm.tv and i also train brazilian jiu-jitsu but uh for the past month i haven't trained and that's a very common excuse just because life has been getting in the way. But I made a promise that I'm going to restart again without missing a week for the next year. So that's going to be a huge commitment for myself. And I've connected with Rob about a year ago. I asked him to come on his podcast after having a very eventful week of, I guess, just a wake up call and just dealing with my own insecurities regards diabetes. So I said, why not be on a podcast and just talk about it? And I think that was one of the best decisions that I ever made in my life because it opened up a lot of new doors and it just gave me a new perspective on what is really going on in the community instead of just hiding behind the closed doors and not doing anything. So thank you, Rob, for even considering having me on.

[00:05:12] Rob Howe: What is your tool of type ones? And what's the one thing that a person living with T1D could learn from you or your experience? And I talked about this on the first podcast,

[00:05:24] Paulius Podziunas: but I didn't really have a comprehensive understanding of it, and I was exploring the idea of systems. Now, systems is a very general word applied to many different categories, so to establish some common grounds and, I guess, common understanding, I'm going to read off one of the definitions from Wikipedia about system thinking. So it's a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system's constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time within the context of larger systems. I personally think diabetes is the most important system of all because it has the greatest snowball effect on every other system in your life. So to get a visual representation of your system, start creating a mind map. And what I did for mine was write down the term diabetes and drew a whole bunch of arrows with subjects relating to it. So one of the arrows pointed to physical body, another arrow pointed to insulin, another arrow pointed to food. And under each subject, I just put down things that came to my mind first. So under insulin was sensitivity, resistance, timing. under food it was low carb micro macronutrients allergies in restaurants so there's infinite ways that you could go on with this but the neat thing about mind map is it helped me to pinpoint an exact problem that also alleviated many other issues and the problem i had was timing of injections since i don't carry an insulin pump i want to avoid fluctuations at all times because it inhibits my cognitive ability so instead of burning myself up by creating 100 things to follow you know diet it starts tomorrow, all this, I tackled one habit that wasn't really hard to adjust. And that's why I believe in system thinking because it provides us with a more logical approach to diabetes. I mean, we already have so much going on in our lives. So why not make it simple?

[00:07:00] Rob Howe: What is the simplest thing you've done that has helped you with the management of your type 1 diabetes? Where did you learn it or who showed it to you? And it's very simple. I started

[00:07:11] Paulius Podziunas: implementing walks after each time I ate. I think I discovered it through watching a Dutch bodybuilder vlog. And in the vlog, he emphasized on how digesting the food takes a lot of energy. I personally experienced fatigue after each time having a meal before, like needing to take a nap or just about to crash. So what I started doing is just implementing walks. The first week I noticed right away that there was less fluctuation, less spikes. Overall felt a lot better. I didn't have any more fatigue after that and the best thing about it is my dog gets a few extra walks during the day so I guess this hits out of the ballpark for both of us. What failures or apparent

[00:07:51] Rob Howe: failures with T1D have made you better at living the rest of your life or made you more well-rounded

[00:07:56] Paulius Podziunas: as a person? A few years back I was at the lowest stage of my life. I let go of management completely. I was partying, I was addicted to cocaine, consuming it on a daily basis. And one night I happened to be very close to overdosing. But I think the interesting part about that night, before all the drugs kicked in, I was driving and my tire blew off the wheel completely. Which made me pull over in a gas station. And that's exactly how they find me. Because the gas station clerk called the police saying there was a person passed out in the car. Now, the following few months after, I was extremely clean. I was working out. I was on my shed. I was doing everything I was supposed to do, but the relapse came very fast. It literally went from 0 to 100 and from 100 to 0 even faster. So that period only lasted a few months, but it was probably the biggest eye-opening event in my life because I was partying for almost 48 hours. I barely slept, and I was driving home right by my house. I fell asleep behind the wheel, crashing into my neighbor's lawn about 2 a.m., which was extremely embarrassing. So that made me rethink my life and also start paying attention to The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell. I told myself that I can't ignore the call anymore because I ignored it twice. And the third time, as we all know, is not going to be the greatest ending. So I dove into Carl Jung's work, Joseph Campbell's, Jordan Peterson's. Making diabetes is one of my biggest priorities in life. It should be number one. So I guess the whole story is by being in the darkest area of my psyche, it has tremendously helped me understand my own struggles. and I guess cope with my own existence in this so-called life.

[00:09:36] Rob Howe: What unusual or absurd opinion or approach regarding your diabetes do you have?

[00:09:43] Paulius Podziunas: You might think I'm crazy, but I do believe in psychedelics. Having a full-out session of microdosing personally has helped me with the coping mechanism, management of diabetes, and just accepting the circumstances in general. So I do believe psychedelic treatment will be common for diabetics because I do feel like a lot of diabetics do develop some form of PTSD, and it's such a huge psychological toll that would help a lot of people tremendously. But first, we need an open mind to even consider this.

[00:10:14] Rob Howe: What's your favorite thing? What gets you to smile or laugh almost every time?

[00:10:21] Paulius Podziunas: Dark comedy, and let me tell you why. Because it provokes discomfort, making us confront our own beliefs and just the understanding of life. I think the comedian is like a shaman because it makes us push ourselves to the boundaries of our own understanding and our own interpretation of the joke. So my heads go down to comedians in general, but dark comedy is one of those things that definitely get me to laugh and smile every time just because I guess it fits my personality.

[00:10:55] Rob Howe: in the last five years what new adjustment to your lifestyle has improved your life with diabetes the

[00:11:00] Paulius Podziunas: most all right so i'm gonna try not to make this boring but it was definitely the low carb approach right around that time when i was 20 my best friend was competing in the physique contest and i asked him for like general advice because i noticed that i was putting on a lot of water so i wanted to be a little bit leaner and also improve my insulin sensitivity and even though I was eating very healthy, no processed foods. I was eating like rice for carbs, quinoa, potatoes, you know, the general good stuff. I was experiencing side effects like acne and just general rashes all over my body. So I had to do something about it. What my buddy said is just start lowering your carbs a little bit. Count them first, what your average is. So it went down from about 250 grams a day to 100 grams a day. And within a few weeks, I made noticeable differences in my body. I think the abdominal wall just got really tight. My abs were showing some self-confidence went up, but more importantly, my blood sugars started becoming more stable. I reduced my insulin by almost like a half fold. I was only injecting like a few units per meal. And overall, I just learned a lot of things that go with carbs in general that I still use to this day. And even though I'm ketogenic right now, so to this day, I still use methods like carb cycling, refeeds, And depending on my workout, that will dictate what kind of carbs I will ingest afterwards. But I mean, overall, just a simple approach of low carb has helped me learn about my body and how it works.

[00:12:31] Rob Howe: What challenges related to T1D did you encounter or have to overcome while you were doing your thing?

[00:12:38] Paulius Podziunas: I think it's a very general one. My personality was not fit to be prepared. I always did things spontaneously. So just being prepared, especially when it came down to jiu-jitsu and training, that was something new to me. Checking your sugar before, making sure you eat the right stuff before training, making sure it's enough, checking during training, and just being prepared to bring in everything with you to post-training. When you're driving, having glucose tablets in your car, and if you have some longer plans during the day, kind of plan around diabetes. diabetes, when are you going to eat, what you're going to eat, what should I bring, if I'm going to eat anything. And I think that whole aspect of just being prepared was one of the biggest challenges in my life until I came across some thinking which made things a lot more clear for me just because it was one of my biggest weakness of being prepared. So overall, yeah, that was the biggest challenge I've had with type 1 diabetes, always being prepared.

[00:13:41] Rob Howe: What priority are you focusing on in your own life currently? This can be diabetes related or not.

[00:13:49] Paulius Podziunas: It's actually launching the low-carb CBD nutritional bars. I could give you a little sneak peek of what I got going on. There's going to be two flavors, Dutch chocolate and Mexican vanilla. It's going to contain 20 grams of protein, 20 grams of fat, and 20 milligrams of CBD. And it's actually low-carb bar. Like it's actually really low-carb. I think the total came out to 9 or 10 grams, and most of it is fiber, so that's amazing. I specifically designed it for people with diabetes to enjoy something without thinking of the consequences that come with enjoying something sweet and good. It's going to have little to no effects on your blood sugar, and I think that's amazing. So that's my biggest priority right now in my own life.

[00:14:30] Rob Howe: Who is someone that you look up to, and what have they taught you? How do you apply that to your life?

[00:14:36] Paulius Podziunas: I don't really look up to anyone specifically, but just thinking at the top of my head, people like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla. And I guess one quote that really stands out by Carl Jung was synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see. it's a very beautiful quote because i've experienced synchronicity many times which only happened when i truly accepted the situations i'm in and appreciated life i think that's when you tap into the universal love um and everything around you starts falling into place it almost becomes mystical and uh every person's name that i mentioned uh they all had something about them that almost seemed magical but at the end it was all commitment to their own work. It was pure love in the process. And when I overcame my own fears and insecurities just by understanding that I might sound a little bit crazy to other people, but at the end, knowing that I'm still passionate about what I do, that's the highest form of truth and realization. So I think just following your own path is the biggest lesson I've learned from all those

[00:15:46] Rob Howe: people that I mentioned. What advice would you give someone who has T1D and is trying to pursue

[00:15:51] Paulius Podziunas: a career in your line of work? It's really hard to even describe what I do, but if you're trying to be a UX designer and start your own business, I would say be prepared to be running at all times. But the best advice I could give you is learn how to take time off. For me, I experience a lot of burnouts just because my mind is just hooked to be working 24-7. It's just hooked to be sitting on a laptop. It's just hooked to be doing something. And it becomes harder. The more you do it, it becomes harder to take time off because you're going to get this anxiety that you're not creating, you're not doing this, you're falling behind. So taking time off, finding a hobby where you completely disconnect and indulging on it. You know, don't be don't be afraid of giving yourself a day off during the week or two days off. It doesn't matter. Don't don't be afraid of even calling your evenings early to have time for yourself. So don't listen to the whole stigma of, you know, hustling 24 seven. And I mean, you could learn from it, but as a diabetic, you have to take care of yourself first before you could do everything else, because I think that will reflect the outside reality that you're creating.

[00:17:00] Rob Howe: What's the one facet or trait that you think makes you uniquely you? Explain why.

[00:17:07] Paulius Podziunas: I think just able to absorb a lot of information and process it at once. I've had a issue with that growing up. A lot of people thought that I was arrogant. And when I lived in Lithuania, my last name was pronounced as Porjunas. And it also coincidentally rhymed with ginunas, which means the know-all. So I was called the know-all. But I was never trying to be arrogant. I just never understood what I did. And I guess a lot of people are a little bit slower to get to jokes sometimes or just slower in general in processing information. And that's just natural. We all have different traits. But it took me a while to realize that this is actually my strength. And this is not one of my weaknesses that people tell me I should change the way I think. So once I started putting that to use and just being myself, that's when all the doors opened up. So like I said, the biggest trait that I have is just absorbing a lot of information and looking for ways to improve things.

[00:17:59] Rob Howe: Plug yourself. Tell us where we can find you in the diabetes online community.

[00:18:06] Paulius Podziunas: Like I mentioned before, I'm working on CBD bars. the company is called CBD on Everything LLC literally I'm going to put CBD in everything so that's why I called it but I'm planning a launch right after New Year's for 2019 early on so you'll be hearing about that but that doesn't mean you can't taste them before go ahead and message me on Instagram if you're interested in doing a little user testing before I'll send you a sample and a little survey with them because I'm trying to adjust the taste profiles for them so I'm Paulius at Instagram I think the link is going to be down there. Rob's going to do his magic, whatever. And then the second startup, Vimm.tv. It's a blockchain streaming platform that rewards users in cryptocurrency, specifically Steem. And Steem is a social media platform, steemit.com. I invite you to register there. I invite you to start participating. And if you have any issues, just message me on Instagram. I'll show you the onboarding. I'm ecstatic when it comes to blockchain. I do believe that everyone should get rewarded for your content by providing value. And as a diabetic, you guys are providing the best value available. So I definitely want to see you on Steemit. That's where I'm at pretty much all day long, working on different projects, interacting with people. So I'll always be on there. This is the future that I see. So you can catch me on there and also Instagram. I'm Paulius. I'm usually in Chicago or Colorado. So if you're in one of those cities or states, just shoot me a DM on Instagram. Let's hang out. Let's collab. Let's do something good together. Let's get to know each other. I think that's the best way to connect and share our stories. And I want to thank you, Rob, for the passionate work that you do for the community and always pushing towards something great. But until then, everybody

[00:19:51] Rob Howe: stay gold. Thank you for listening to the Tools of Type 1's podcast on diabetics doing things. I'm Rob Howe. And every Tuesday and Thursday in 2019, we are posting the next Tools of Type 1 episodes. So follow us on Instagram, hashtag tools of type ones, or just on diabetics doing things. We will post these regularly every Tuesday, every Thursday. My favorite type ones are answering the questions I want to know the answers to. And hopefully you'll learn a few things as well. If you liked this episode, be sure to review us on iTunes. And if you didn't like it, go ahead and let me know that too. I want to know all the feedback is good to me. Thanks again for your time. I value that more than anything you could possibly give me. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.