Scrawny Boy With Type 1 Diabetes Becomes Mr. Universe

These days, Doug Burns is a modern Sampson. The reigning Mr. Universe, he’s two hundred pounds of sheer muscle and the picture of good health. Of the skinny little boy with type 1 who used to work out in the woods alone, all that remains are a wry sense of humor and an attractively self-deprecating manner. They’re unexpected in a man who’s triumphed in the uber-masculine world of bodybuilding, but there’s a lot that’s unexpected about Doug Burns.

Doug was born in Washington DC, into a family without a bit of type 1 history. His dad, who worked with NASA, moved the family to the backwoods of Mississippi when Doug was about eleven. By that time he’d had type 1 for four years, ever since a severe episode of keto-acidosis at age seven. He was what used to be called a “brittle diabetic,” taking multiple injections of NPH and Regular, and he had problems with the delayed effect of the Regular. On top of that, he was trying to handle his testing with urinalysis, which could be six hours off the mark. Consequently, he was frequently in keto-acidosis or insulin shock, with constant episodes of both extreme highs and extreme lows.

As a result of his sugar management problems, Doug weighed only 58 pounds by the time he was eleven. Known as “the bag of bones,” he was beaten up by pretty much everybody in school. He still remembers a girl in fifth grade who whacked him with her purse and “beat the hell out of me right in front of the class.” In Mississippi he wasn’t bullied as much, but as an emaciated kid with a disease no one had heard of, he was ostracized as an oddity.