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My friend has been diabetic for 20 years and he can't walk to his mailbox without his feet burning for the rest of the day. I've been diabetic for two years. And I'm not going to let that happen to me. I'm obese. I want to just say that out loud because it's part of this. The gym was never happening for me. You know how you walk into one of those places and you can just feel people clocking you? I couldn't do it. Every diet I tried I quit within two weeks. But walking I could actually do alone. I started going at 5am before anyone else was outside. Before the neighbors were up. Before the cars started. Just me and the dark and the sidewalk and nobody watching me huff through the first quarter mile. Nobody to see how slow I was going. Nobody to look at my body and do the math on it. Just me. 1.66 miles almost every morning. Two miles on Saturdays. I track every single one. I come home sweaty and out of breath and I sit on my front steps and I feel like I actually did something. It is the first time in I don't know how long that I felt like I was fighting for myself instead of just watching myself lose. There's been a little tingling in my toes some mornings when I first stand up. I figured it was just part of the deal. Everybody with diabetes has something, right. Then I watched my friend cancel another hike and something about it wouldn't leave me alone. He's not dramatic about it. He just says he can't. A blister on his foot last year took six months to heal. Before that he had an open wound that didn't close for almost three years. He had a toe removed. He bought an expensive mountain bike thinking things would turn around and told me it just sits in his garage taunting him now. I kept thinking he just had bad luck. Then I found out it wasn't luck at all. Your feet are the last place blood and nutrients actually reach in your body. They're the furthest from your heart. So when diabetes starts messing with your blood vessels, your feet are the first place that stops getting what they need. The nerves down there start going quiet. The skin dries out and cracks. A blister that any normal person heals in a week just sits there on a diabetic foot because the blood that's supposed to fix it can barely get through. One guy in a forum said hot feet stuck in tight shoes all day feels like straight up torture. And the worst part is it happens slow. You don't feel it coming. You're fine until one day you're not, and by then some of it doesn't come back. My friend was walking every day at two years too. I started researching because I couldn't stop thinking about that mountain bike sitting in his garage. About my own 5am walks and whether I was running a clock I didn't know existed. I found a diabetes forum and just started reading. Hours of it. People talking about their feet the way my friend never did out loud. One woman said she used to run 5ks and now she checks her feet every night with a mirror because she can't feel them well enough to know if something is wrong without looking. A man said he got a cut on his foot from a rock while paddle boarding and it took a full month to heal. Another one had been dealing with open wounds for three years and had a toe amputated, and he said it so matter of fact that I had to put my phone down for a minute. These weren't people who gave up. These were people who walked and hiked and biked and did everything right and the damage came for them anyway. So I started asking a different question. Not why does diabetes damage your feet. But why does it happen to some people faster than others. And whether there was anything you could do about it before you ended up with a garage full of equipment you can't use anymore. The answer kept coming back to the same two things. B1 and B12. Your nerves need both to stay alive. B1 keeps the signal firing between your brain and your feet. When it drops, the signals start cutting out. You get numbness first. The feeling your sock is twisted when it's completely flat. Then tingling. Then burning at night when you're lying still and there's nothing to distract you from it. B12 keeps the protective coating around each nerve intact, like the rubber casing on an electrical wire. When that coating wears down the nerve underneath starts misfiring. That's where the pain comes from. That's where the damage that doesn't come back comes from. Diabetes drains both. Steadily, over months and years, while you're tracking your miles and thinking you're covered. Most diabetics are deficient in both and have no idea. Your doctor checks your A1C, checks your glucose, tells you your numbers look okay, and sends you home. The nerve damage builds in the background and nobody looks for it until you come in complaining. By then some of it is already permanent. I thought about my friend at two years. Walking every day. No idea what was quietly happening under his feet. Then I thought about the tingling in my toes every morning that I'd been calling nothing. I went back to the forum and found the same frustrating answer at first. Take B vitamins. Get your levels up. So I went to Walmart and bought a B12 supplement off the shelf. Took it every day for three weeks. Then someone in the forum replied to my update and said something that made me feel stupid for not knowing it sooner. She said the pills don't work the same way for diabetics. When diabetes has been in your body long enough it affects how well your gut absorbs things. B vitamins especially. You swallow the pill, your gut tries to pull the nutrients through, and it can't do it the way a healthy gut would. The vitamin leaves your body without ever reaching your nerves. She said it was like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom. That is why people in that forum had taken B12 pills for years and still ended up where my friend ended up. Not because the vitamins don't work. Because the pills can't get through. She said you have to skip the gut entirely. There is tissue under your tongue where blood vessels sit close enough to the surface that B vitamins pass straight into your bloodstream. Nothing to digest. No compromised gut lining to fight through. She called it sublingual, a word I'd never come across before, and said once she understood it she couldn't believe nobody had told her sooner. She had been using a sublingual B complex serum called Nuvel. B1 and B12 in one bottle. A few drops under the tongue, hold for a minute, done. The tingling at night dropped off within a few weeks. Within two months her feet felt more like her feet again. I looked it up that same night. I sat there looking at the price and did the thing I always do. Told myself I'd think about it. I'm not made of money. I'm already buying the walking shoes and the glucose meter and the test strips and all of it adds up when you're managing this without a lot of cushion. But then I thought about the mountain bike. Three thousand dollars sitting in a garage. My friend bought it thinking he'd get better. I thought about my front steps at 5:15am. The only hour of the day that feels like mine. I ordered it before I talked myself out of it. The first two weeks nothing happened and I almost convinced myself I'd wasted the money. Then one morning around day 16 I was lacing up my shoes in the dark and I realized my feet felt normal. No tingling when I stood up. No weird buzzing in my toes I'd been ignoring so long I'd stopped noticing it. I just stood there in my hallway for a second noticing how quiet my feet were. I did my 1.66 miles and came home and sat on the front steps and cried a little. Not sad crying. The kind where you didn't know how scared you were until the scared started lifting. By week four the burning that had been waking me up once or twice a week stopped. I hadn't told anyone about those nights. But they were happening and then they weren't and the sleep I got after was different. Week six I walked a different route. Longer. Hills I'd been avoiding because my feet would ache the rest of the day after. That morning I did the hills and came home and my feet felt fine. I sat on the front steps longer than usual just because I could. At my next checkup I told my doctor everything. She said B vitamin deficiency in diabetics is extremely common and extremely under-tested. That the nerve damage starts building long before anyone checks for it. That sublingual delivery makes sense for anyone whose gut absorption is compromised. Then she said she wished more of her diabetic patients knew to ask about it before the symptoms got serious. Before the symptoms got serious. I'd had symptoms for months. The tingling every morning. The burning at night. The ache after the hills. I thought that was just being diabetic. I thought that was just doing my best with the body I had. I didn't know that was my nerves telling me the coating was already wearing down. My friend texted me last week. Asked how the walking was going. I told him good. Really good actually. Then I told him everything. The B vitamins, the gut thing, the sublingual serum. He went quiet for a while. Then he said he wished someone had told him ten years ago. If you're diabetic and your feet tingle in the morning or burn at night and you've been calling it nothing, it's not nothing. It's a warning. And the longer you wait the smaller the window gets. Here is where I found it: https://trynuvel.com/pages/nerve-repair I'm just a woman who walks at 5am because she can't afford to lose that. Don't wait. PS. Since so many people keep asking me what happened with my friend, here's the update. I got him on the serum about two months after I started mine. He was skeptical at first, the same way I was, but I think watching me do my hills route finally got to him. He texted me last week and said the burning in his feet has been easing up little by little. He's not hiking yet. But for the first time in years he's talking about it like it's a when and not an if. We already picked the trail. I'm not saying that to sell you anything. I'm saying it because two months ago he wouldn't even let himself talk about that trail, and now we have a date circled.