Diabetes is a chronic, life-threatening disease in which your body fails to produce or properly use insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar or glucose. Being Type 1 means that you need to supply your own insulin—with far-reaching implications for your diet, your activities and your overall health.

Living with Type 1 diabetes is certainly not as carefree as living without it. But managing Type 1 diabetes doesn’t need to be all-consuming. With the right therapy, you can keep tight control, minimizing the risk of highs and lows in your day-to-day life—and of complications in the future. Moreover, you can eat, sleep and exercise just the way you want.

But you will still have practical concerns—from choosing the right therapy to what all those new terms mean. We hope the pages in this section can help answer those questions too.