Meet Your Guide: Mila Clarke

As your Bezzy T2D guide, Mila is helping create a welcoming environment free of the stigma and misconceptions so commonly found in the online world.

When Mila Clarke was 26 years old, she received a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.

“It was kind of a shocking diagnosis to me because I had never known anybody my same age to get this diagnosis,” Mila says. “It was very jarring and just scary.”

She also didn’t really know that much about her condition, nor did she actually know how to live with it.

“I looked for people — as all millennials do — in an online space for this,” she says. She wanted to find someone like herself that was young and living with type 2 diabetes and talking about their experience online.

“Surprisingly, for type 2 diabetes, there really wasn’t anyone,” she says.

“I kind of learned that people were afraid of the stigma and afraid of the misconceptions that they would receive by disclosing their diagnosis, and they were afraid of the comments people would make that are awful about any illness — but especially awful about diabetes.”

So, she decided to do something about it.

“I thought, maybe I’ll start writing about my experience with it as just a way of coping and journaling and trying to get into a better mental health space,” she remembers. “And then I started creating recipes and posting them on my blog, showing people what I was eating and how I was exercising that week.”

Over time, her blog took off, becoming The Hangry Woman.

Her goal was simple: She just wanted to show people what life with diabetes was really like and help fight misconceptions and myths about the condition.

“Type in ‘diabetes jokes’ on Google and you find the worst,” she says. “There are so many labels and impressions of diabetes and why people have diabetes… and all these things just couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“So that’s what I tried to show people,” she says. “Because diabetes is not a one-size-fits-all kind of illness, and not all people with diabetes look the same or have the same body type or eat the same foods or are on the same treatments.”

Plus, she adds, “I wanted to show people that you can still enjoy life with diabetes.”

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Learning and sharing through a misdiagnosis

In 2020, Mila started struggling.

“I was going through a really tough time managing my diabetes and my numbers were never really on target,” she says. “I felt like I was trying everything that I knew how to try. I was on like six or seven different medications for diabetes, but none of them were working.”

Something wasn’t right, so eventually, her primary care doctor sent her to an endocrinologist, who, after listening to her struggles, tested her for type 1 diabetes. The test involves checking for certain antibodies — and her test came back as showing the presence of antibodies, which meant that she’d been given a misdiagnosis.

It turned out that she had something in between type 1 and type 2: type 1.5 diabetes, also called latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA).

“Getting this second diabetes diagnosis was, again, really jarring,” says Mila.

Once again, she had to adjust her life to live with this new diagnosis and relearn how to manage it. Just like when she was given her first diagnosis and she started her blog, she couldn’t find a lot of people talking LADA, either.

Once again, she turned to her blog to figure out her way through it — sharing her journey with others as she went.

Leading with empathy

In addition to her work as a blogger, content creator, and diabetes advocate, Mila is the guide for the Bezzy T2D community, moderating conversations, offering support, and leading live discussions.

She’s been instrumental in building a supportive, welcoming community, and is excited to greet new members.

“What I’m looking forward to most going forward is that being the guide kind of gives you the ability to be an informer,” she says. “I love having the ability to surprise people with information that they didn’t know before and give them a deeper understanding of what they’re living with.”

Plus, she adds, not only is there a lot of good information that is not judgmental, but Bezzy T2D also opens you up to a community of support.

“There’s a lot of empathy and support from people that can help you along your journey,” she says.