Dancing With the Stars pro Rylee Arnold exclusively opened up to Us about her journey with type 1 diabetes — revealing that she initially feared she’d never dance again after being diagnosed at age 15.
“Right when I was diagnosed, I didn’t think I was going to dance anymore,” Arnold, now 21, told Us in an interview on Wednesday, August 5. “I thought I was going to have to stop doing it and fully just devote my life to managing my health. But then I realized I didn’t [have to quit dancing].”
Arnold acknowledged that it was “honestly really hard in the beginning” to balance her health and the physical demands of dancing, especially since she was a teenager at the time.
“There’d be times where, I mean, as a teenager, I would be embarrassed to give myself a shot in front of friends at school or at dance, and there were just little things that I was like, ‘If I don’t prioritize this, I will not live a long and lengthy and beautiful life,’” she recalled. “Just balancing that and learning how to balance my life was really, really important. But ever since I got on [DWTS], I feel like I’ve really focused on balancing that and having that healthy balance.”
“Even more so now, I feel like I finally am at a point where I understand how to manage my type 1 diabetes,” she noted. “It’s taken … a while to understand your body and how it works. So it was about six years it took me to really, really get adjusted [and] understand how I react to things, how my body reacts to things, and I finally feel like I’m, like, ready to go.”
Rylee now uses a continuous glucose monitor called a Dexcom G7 CGM to track her glucose levels. The dancer wears her device on the back of her arm, allowing the Dexcom G7 CGM to send real-time glucose readings directly to her mobile device.
Rylee’s Dexcom G7 is integrated with her insulin pump, which helps the DWTS pro and her family constantly monitor her health through using the Dexcom Follow app.
Along with Nick Jonas and Lance Bass, Rylee is one of millions of people worldwide living with diabetes. She has partnered with a community of Dexcom Warriors to help show young people that their dreams don’t have to be defined by their type 1 diabetes diagnosis.
Addressing her journey with diabetes, Rylee recalled, “It was super hard [at first]. But I feel like, again, I looked at other people with type 1 diabetes, and I have learned so much through TikTok and Instagram, people’s videos, and although my body is my body and it’s different from everyone else’s, there are so many people’s experiences that are so similar to mine, and I’ve been able to learn so much from others. So that has helped tremendously. But it’s one of those things. It’s just like you go through it, you figure it out and see how you can do it yourself.”
Last October, Rylee made the “really hard” decision to step away from the Dancing With the Stars Tour to prioritize her health.
“Making the decision to step away from tour this last year was really hard, and because it was because of my health, it made me really sad,” she told Us. “But it was something I needed so badly. I needed to get home. I needed to rest. I’m now on, like, a continuous insulin pump. I recently got, like, my blood checked, and there’s this A1C number, and it basically tells you, like, how healthy you are, and it’s, like, dropped down tremendously. And just fixing that part of my life is going to make things so much easier this season.”
She went on, “I’m just excited to have that, like, alleviated a little bit because I hate when that adds to my stress and just makes things so much harder. But I feel like I worked so much on, like, my mental health and my physical health this season, and I was able to just get ready for that. And I’m so grateful that I did because I think if I would have just jumped into the next thing and kept going this year, I think I would have not been ready for this season coming up. And now I’m excited and I feel refreshed.”
Dancing With the Stars returns on ABC this fall.
