Crazy to think it was only a month ago I made the decision to switch to being a full-time Barefooter! Since then, I've noticed a lot of incredible things, some ups and downs, and where this journey should go forward.
The CGM data, before in a sedentary lifestyle (left), and after exercise while barefooting (right). On the right, basal was reduced 11%, correction doses reduced 7%. On the left, more insulin and many large correction doses failed to bring my glucose down, leading to overdosing and sudden drops cutting out basal for longer periods, and more highs an hour later that again failed to come down quickly enough. Basal also increased massively during sleep and required hours to correct elevated readings. After barefooting, correction doses are less aggressive but work, and time out of range is significantly minimized. I exercised midday Sunday, coming home to have lunch around 3pm. Even though I sat for most of the day, I had eaten some things without needing insulin. The correction doses and meal bolusing worked very well. This is a far cry from the many repeated doses needed and blood sugars just not coming down. Smaller doses can fix bigger problems more rapidly, leading to a much easier time staying in range.
I no longer need as much insulin as before: Instead of 1.26 units per hour basal, I stepped down to 1.12 units per hour. While after meals I was regularly hovering over 200, sometimes over 250 for hours before my sugar would come down, and 4 correction doses would fail to correct anything, I had a period where a single correction would actually be far too strong and my sugars ping-ponged! My carb ratio didn't change, but my correction was lessened, from 1 unit/28 mg/dL to 1 unit/30 mg/dL. And the correction doses work as long as I don't eat very heavy foods, or only eat heavy foods during exercise. While exercising, I switch my pump to exercise mode which drops basal delivery significantly, and on ocassions I'd eat without even entering anything! My sugars have never been more stable, and I feel more confident than ever that I can eat foods I want in good health! This is a massive change from feeling like a slice of pizza would send me into 4 hours of terrible health. Some regular exercise works wonders for insulin resistance.
Now onto barefooting: I could walk only a fraction of a mile in thick soled shoes before feeling pain and soreness all up my legs, specifically my calves and thighs. My feet would also be sore. Minimalist shoes improved my ability to walk for several miles. I was feeling the ground, and my muscles got stronger. My stride got shorter. I was taking softer steps. But still felt the same soreness. Barefooting is a whole other level entirely! My feet can feel texture. They can move in complicated ways they just can't in shoes. And I had to learn a new way to walk yet again: this time, my feet figured out how to "lift off" and move forward, then land softly, and make adjustments if there's anything sharp underfoot. My feet will roll around and avoid putting pressure over anything sharp. And if there's ever a spot causing pain somewhere on my foot from walking too rough, I can adjust my muscles and lessen the pain under any spot on my foot. My walk also ended up kind of funny - sometimes my ankle would full-on swivel 90 degrees. There is no standard walk, the walk completely 100% depended on the ground conditions. All that information was being sensed by my feet and teaching my body how to respond and move forward to avoid excess strain. So this is absolutely key to the reduced leg pain - Feeling everything under your feet, strengthening muscles, leaving them free to respond, adding no extra weight to your feet, and letting your legs move naturally.
My feet specifically developed muscles I didn't even know I had. One superpower developed from all this barefooting - I can no longer stub my toes! The muscles in my toes have developed strong, so simple things like accidentally kicking a wall no longer hurt. Those muscles carry me forward, and I'm not relying on a shoe to distribute weight from poor posture.
Of course, one of the biggest challenges with barefooting is abrasion. Concrete is highly abrasive, effectively sandpaper, which over miles irritates your feet and excites all your nerves. It can be necessary to calm down after too much barefooting on concrete, but there are ways to handle it better. I learned from an experienced barefooter to walk in a way that doesn't cause the abrasion. I was previously bending my foot on the ground, but it was better to lift my foot first. This fixed a lot of issues, and I was able to walk for much longer. But the issue of abrasion and excitement still happens. It takes time to build thicker soles, but I'm definitely able to walk over asphalt without crying. I just walk slower. Feet pain was a bit of an issue at first, but still the pain wasn't until after a few miles of walking. Now, that foot pain has completely subsided, and I can walk over awful, horrible asphalt and rough concrete for 3 miles without issue. Over time, I imagine my feet will be able to do it completely calm, as walking over grass.
The best surface to go barefooting is actually stores! Commercial floors are cool, flat, and consistent, all good things to make barefooting easy. I had gone barefoot into many stores, which have honestly the greatest experience for barefooters, if the people operating the store are tolerant enough to allow it. But I've been kicked out of Publix, Target, Lindtt, and several other places. The reasons they give are many:
Stuff on the floor
Health issue with food
Safety issue for me and customers
Insurance/Corporate/Store policy
Of course, it's hard to combat these misconceptions when someone can just say "that's our policy" and not care about the reality. I tell everyone I need to be barefoot to walk pain-free, and that's when they recommend I use an electric mobility cart. Thanks to barefooting, I'm more active than I've ever been, more pain-free than I've ever been while exercising, and able to do it regularly and consistently... if only it weren't for the people stopping me. Let's go through these:
Stuff on the floor (broken glass)
Walk around. Also, I never saw any broken glass anywhere on my travels, save for one location I walked along the street. Not an issue in any stores, this is just the most common excuse. Our feet have ways to naturally shift weight and avoid sharp objects. The muscles that do this gain strength while barefooting and lose it in shoes.
Health issue with food
How? Flip flops, sandals, and shoes are all accepted in resturants. When was the last time any of these were washed? Bare feet can't magically transmit germs to food more than any other part of our body. There's tons of bacteria in our breath, loads under our fingernails, we sweat under our arms, and there's far more bacteria at the spigot of a drinking fountain than on the edge of a toilet seat. These people aren't concerned with bacteria, the truth is some people just equate bare feet to dirtiness and smelliness and both to bacteria. Ironically, bare feet tend to be dirty, but dry and free of any smell. Clean feet tend to come from stuffy shoes and socks, hot and sweaty, riddled with bacteria and odor. If everyone regularly went barefoot, smell wouldn't be a concern. But if everyone wearing shoes took them off, the odor might be closer to a locker room.
Safety issue for me and customers
Could be related to "stuff on the ground," but it's never properly explained how my barefooting poses a risk to anyone else. People regularly barefoot together in communal swimming pools and spend decades of their life barefooting without issue. Scientists studied barefoot tribes and found the skin on their soles is 3mm thicker than those who persistently wear shoes. About the thickness of minimalist shoes. And the feet of these tribes do not suffer the same foot problems of the shoed world. Over time, aphalt can be walked without too much issue. The more dangerous thing to do is wear shoes.
Insurance/Corporate/Store policy
Some people claim it's a policy, but when I call corporate, it turns out it's not. A Lindtt district manager called me personally to apologize for my experience with an employee in one of the stores she oversees and wanted to set things right so what happened to me doesn't happen to anyone else. But there are some cases corporate policy is anti-barefooters, such was the case for Publix. I was kicked out by a security guard and a store manager. My case was escalated, but corporate declined the issue, citing the reasons above, and I wasn't given an exception. I was asked to use a 2 mph electric cart. A brilliant solution for my Diabetes: work from home, then drive a car, and sit in a chair to shop. At what point can I walk barefoot to improve my Diabetes without pain, then? Most embarassingly, I was harassed by Mote Marine staff for not wearing shoes just 10 steps from a bunch of kids running around barefoot next to the Manatee Quiz game I'd personally developed for them. Turned out it was an insurance issue.
Children used to walk to school barefoot in the 1940s following the Great Depression, and earlier. But in the 1960s, mass-produced shoes became affordable for most families, and barefooting got conflated with hippies: people who opposed racial segregation and the Vietnam war, and promoted sex-positivity, individualism, and recreational drugs like Marijuana. Conservatives couldn't lambast peace-loving hippies, especially at a time Martin Luther King Jr. made racial segregation extremely uncool. But they could lambast all the things they liked: opposing the war meant you were a communist. So McCarthyism was embraced. Sex-positivity was made fine for straight people, but indecent for LGBTQ. And lines were drawn in very strange ways so the acts Conservatives comitted were more permissible than anyone else. Individualism is Satanism: conform to the norm, or be outcast as an "other." Smoking cigarettes was fine, because that's what most people did, but Marijuana got criminalized. Nixon's advisor to the war on drugs confirmed it was used to arrest African Americans at significantly higher rates than Whites and show their faces on TV as criminals. Hundreds of thousands of lung cancer deaths later, we've eventually overturned our thinking on cigarettes, but many old people still cling to their old ways. Young people growing up with this old mentality do not fare much better. Conservatives attacked barefooting as people who deviated from societal norm, a sign of indecent parenting, one of poverty, homelessness, and destitute living. Hippies could no longer be open about any aspect of their lifestyle: the public shunned it. And while it went out with a bang, immediately after, the hippies had no choice but be forced to conform. As a result of all this, hundreds of thousands of people died from lung cancer due to smoking, including children and second-hand smoke. Millions of African Americans were unjustly arrested for things most people nowadays would not consider a crime. And many people in the United States suffer from serious foot problems that could be solved by barefooting at least half-an-hour a day. Women and children's feet deformed, squeezing toes inward, upsetting balance. Shoes cut off senses to people with Autism, hindering their mobility and quality of life. Our feet became soft, our muscles became weak, and our feet and legs became more prone to pain and walking became more painful. People jogged in shoes with massive cushions that allowed a form as bad as jogging to be possible. The modern solution to this pain and poor locomotion? Medication. Our cities weren't designed for people to walk barefoot, and our culture discourages it. The only answer is walking in shoes, suffering, adding even more thickness and orthotics, generating even more pain, and then medicating that pain. As a Type One Diabetic, no doctor can figure out how much liver damage is acceptable from ibuprofen or acetaminophen. I find less side effects with ibuprofen, but one of my doctors swore against it.
People lived easier before all this. Shoes weren't thickly cushioned. Children often went barefoot. And it wasn't a problem.
Depicted above: a Barefoot Contest held at Ocean View Elementary School, Norfolk, VA circa 1937. During the Great Depression, many families couldn't afford shoes for their kids who would constantly outgrow them. Families had many children, and mortality wasn't high. Shoes also weren't affordable. School principal Lucy Mason Holt came up with the idea for the Barefoot Contest to make less fortunate students not feel embarassed about their situation. The kids are admiring what being barefoot does: toughening their feet, producing leathery soles. Some kids depicted with squeezed toes wore shoes prior to this contest, while other students with wider toes have been persistently barefoot. And yes, children really did go barefoot in the snow! It was hard, but they managed. This was a time when being barefoot wasn't a choice. Policies during this time were changed to promote and accept barefooting in order to make kids feel included and welcomed. It is possible for them to change again, to permit this as an option for families who want their kid's feet to develop strong and healthy, for children with Autism to receive the sensory information they crave, for people like me, who need it to walk without pain, or even just simply because they want to.
My doctor refused to sign a note which I could give to employees who were intolerant, stating she can't go against people's policies. And the ADA was severely hindered in 2008 so something as simple as walking without shoes can no longer be considered a reasonable accomodation - the law only concerns access. Employees can be as intolerant as they want, the law allows that. Even if I am physically unable to walk in the store with shoes on, they consider me having access via a 2 mph electric cart. They are legally protected for their ignorance, and people like me suffer because of it.
My doctor recommended barefooting in parks and the beach. Unfortunately, both the soft, shifting sand and the wet, compact sand both make for very bad walking surfaces: either the shifting will cause leg muscles to strain and slow me down considerably, or the wet sand will cause abrasion faster than dry surfaces. And if you want to talk about sharp things on the ground - seashells! Surfaces in parks are mainly concrete and asphalt, some of the most abrasive and difficult surfaces to walk barefoot on. The rain erosion through trees makes these paths even worse than concrete out in the open. Thus, some of the most difficult and dangerous places to walk, ironically, are parks and beaches.
People's reactions to my barefooting span the gamut. My friends who know me know it's a good thing. Some people conflated it with the path to nudism... others compared it to vaccine-denying... and actually supported me from that angle! But the reality is simple: I need to walk more, and the only way I can do it without pain is barefoot. Despite everything else, my personal affinity for feet and sensations, and being neurodiverse, I still wouldn't go barefoot if I didn't really have to. But I tried thick-soled shoes, thick-soled shoes with custom orthotics, minimalist shoes, minimalist shoes with custom orthotics, thick-soled sandals, minimalist sandals, 5-toed minimalist shoes, and for the past 12 years went minimalist-only and fell in love with my Xero sandals. But nothing... absolutely nothing worked better for my leg pain and exercise than just walking barefoot.
Today (12/10/2023), I walked 3 miles barefoot, and did a Target run. But when I was kicked out and switched into my shoes... I could feel the pain again building in my legs almost immediately. All month long, over 50 miles of walking barefoot, I didn't recognize that pain. I'm sorry, world - I'm a barefooter. Anywhere I can, I will go barefoot 100% of the time. The reasons are for my own health, for my own safety, and due to my own personal policy. I'm sorry, but the more exceptions I make to those who void this policy, the more my own health will suffer because of it. There is no one else you can speak with about this, only me. You'll have to allow me to go barefoot if you want me as your customer. If you can't follow this policy, there is the option of wearing your shoes to walk far away from me. Or a 2 mph cart if you can't do that.
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