Aside from the fun, how did it go? Find anything surprising or insightful in the process?
It sounds like an experiment I’d like to do for the purpose of optimizing my daily habits and establishing a better mental model for how my eating habits impact me throughout the day. But I really dislike needles.
If the needle in the CGM bothers you, don't let it. It's a quick, painless jab with a tiny needle at the beginning and then the needle comes out. The part that stays in your body is just a flexible filament made of plastic.
I did this experiment as well, and the main thing it did was completely stop me from snacking. My habits got better because I could see how my BG could never return to baseline if I allowed myself to snack between meals.
Other than that, it was also interesting to see certain things would badly spike my BG and other things wouldn't, and they weren't always what you'd expect. A lot of "keto" and "diabetic-friendly" products are terrible for most people's BG and were for mine. I found that some things, like black tea, actually made my BG drop as well.
That's good to know. I think my aversion to needles is so strong that it stopped me from going beyond basic research. Bad on me.
But this does sounds like an interesting thing to try, if only to get a better idea of how my body works.
I've been tracking walking vs. resting heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen levels, and sleep for a few years using the Apple Watch, and while I know these measurements are imperfect, they've helped me better understand the impact of certain choices.
There's something that seems really beneficial about feeding my brain data about myself as a way to do the healthier things I've always wanted to want to do. The more data I have, the easier it feels to implement positive habit changes in a way that doesn't involve sheer willpower. There's something very satisfying about seeing the very tangible changes on a graph over time that indicate better health, even when it doesn't feel like the changes have done anything noticeable yet.
My understanding is that for healthy individuals, spiking blood glucose levels is not a problem. Did you get in to any of the research on that? Glucose is a problem for diabetics because they can’t regulate it, but healthy people can. At least this is loosely what I have heard, somewhat third hand. Any information is appreciated.
I'm not the OP, but I had a CGM several times through Levels. I can tell you that the major spikes (glucose over 200 after sitting between 80-90) really made me feel like shit. The 2 times I can remember it getting that high were when I had too much sushi, and a huge bowl with white rice from Chipotle. Brown rice never seemed to spike me nearly as bad, especially if paired with something high in fiber like black/brown beans. From a long term health perspective, I have no idea if it's a problem or not. I didn't like how bigger spikes felt, so there's probably something to it being bad for you long term. Obviously the more often you spike as a "healthy" person, the less sensitive your body is to insulin. Staying even on my glucose levels is always where I felt the best.
straight rice and bread break down into sugars -very- quickly in the stomach, that's why mixing them with stuff like you mentioned (heavy in fat and/or protein) can really dampen the spikes in my own observations. Those are just anectdotal though and what works for me doesn't work for everyone. I do like to eat a salad first with some good fibrous veggies though OR something like eat some of a chicken/fish entrée or steak if I'm having that as part of a meal.
Not a doctor, but from what I have seen, there is a healthy amount of spiking from eating normal foods, but our modern diets are so sugar and carb heavy that the glucose spikes are way outside the range that our bodies evolved to handle. Hunter gatherers would maybe eat some berries here (much smaller and less sweet than modern berries) and there. The modern human eating pizza, tons of bread, ice cream, soda, etc. creates such massive glucose spikes that they are unhealthy and unsustainable for the pancreas to handle for 60+ years.
Again, not a doctor and not sure if this is accurate, but this is my very limited understanding
> Hunter gatherers would maybe eat some berries here (much smaller and less sweet than modern berries) and there.
Archaic humans had access to plenty of wild fruit that were high in sugar and tubers that were high in complex carbs. They even had access to concentrated forms of sugar like sugarcane and honey.
They obviously didn't have refined sugars in everything they eat like we do but that they had access to limited sugar in the form of berries is a persistent myth. They would have been exposed to large glucose spikes regularly whenever they came upon a new tree that was in season while migrating.
Not to mention humans 150 years ago who ate plenty of bread and still didn't have the problems we have with obesity and diabetes. Or even 50 years ago...
That’s not really a fair statement. Many problem who would die of diabetes today would have died of something else 200 years ago long before the diabetes got them. Non-juvenile diabetes is a slow killer, it’s really hard for it to kill you before the age of reproduction.
A diagnosis today that is imminently manageable like asthma was far more readily in a world without antibiotics, steroids, or even medical oxygen.
Even something like a CPAP that many of us take for granted has only been readily available for 30 years or so.
Plus, diabetes is much like AIDS in that it’s more of a systemic thing than acute. It doesn’t really have symptoms that kill you. It just slowly weakens your body until your heart gives in, or you have a serious infection, or something like that. No one dies “of” diabetes, they die with it.
light bread starts turning into sugar almost instantly in the mouth and stomach. It's only one step removed and saliva can break it down quickly because it has amylase. Sour dough and whole wheat/grain breads tend to break down a bit slower. You can freeze bread overnight and make it a bit more "resistant" to breaking down quickly and I pretty much do this with all my breads along with toasting them a bit for sandwiches. Pasta can similarly have its glycemic index lowered by first making it "cold"
Do you mean that they need to be cold when they are consumed, or is it the process of freezing itself that does something, even if it's later reheated?
fruit and berries do have sugars but in their wild state they tend to have much less than their modern equivalents bred to be sweeter and tastier. Even then they still typically are 75-95% water and often have some fiber, antioxidants, and vitamins which all can help with inflammation unlike snickers bars.
It's not really that the pancreas itself can't handle it (though this may be true also). What happens is that having high blood glucose, even if it's not continuously high, is just bad for you by virtue of the high concentration of glucose in your blood. Having high blood glucose leads to the creation of "Advanced Glycation Endproducts" (AGEs) which bind to certain receptors (RAGEs). The AGE-RAGE interaction is linked to downstream diabetes side effects like atherosclerosis.
There's also research that indicates that cancer thrives in high-glucose environment, and that starving cancers of glucose reduces their size over time.
With Type 1 Diabetes, your pancreas is no longer producing insulin, with Type 2, it's typically that it's not producing enough insulin. My child is healthy, but his pancreas stopped producing insulin years ago. He lives with T1D.
> A lot of "keto" and "diabetic-friendly" products are terrible for most people's BG and were for mine.
Absolutely, there are a lot of companies trying to cash in on this new-ish market, and they'll do anything to their products to get the net carbs down to 0-2g "per serving" -- scare quotes around that because this is a particular annoyance of food labeling in the States: food labels declare the amount of various nutrients per "serving", but 1) they get to choose the serving size [0] and 2) they get to round numbers, so if they just pick the serving size such that it's 1.499g of carbs per serving, they get to put that it's "1g", and so on.
It makes it impossible to compare food labels between different items even among the same manufacturer (and even the same SKU but different/later packaging, because they don't have to issue a new SKU when they change the food label). If instead they were required to show amounts in g per kg (or ml per l for liquids, or whatever), they could be compared more easily.
[0] The FDA provides "Reference Amounts Customarily Consumed" and asks manufacturers to refer to them when deciding their serving sizes, but (from [1]):
> FDA's guidance documents, including this guidance, do not establish legally enforceable responsibilities. Instead, guidances describe our current thinking on a topic and should be viewed only as recommendations [...]
so really they can pick almost anything they like
> [...] unless specific regulatory or statutory requirements are cited.
unless the food is medicinal in some way, I guess?
The sensor typically goes on the back of your upper arm (your tricep). You can accidentally bump into things with it, but it was infrequent enough that it didn’t bother me.
The needle is only used in the application of the sensor. It’s spring-loaded and retracts after the sensor is attached. I hate needles, but I found that the tape on the sensor provided enough stimuli to overwhelm my brain and not really feel the needle when it went in.
No it never gets in the way. I would not recommend doing it unless you are a diabetic, the results are not that interesting. It took me two years to get used to smacking that needle into the upper arm/stomach/leg, spending up to 20 min -40 min getting over the fear was not a fun time.
T1D here, needles are nothing compared to everything else an insulin dependent diabetic deals with. I guess only maybe 1 out of less than 100 shots hurt that much. It only happens when a nerve bundle is hit, then it smarts but it is still less bad than either high, or low blood sugar as well as how insane most every part of American 'health care' is. The main tricks for comfort are go with 29 gauge not the narrower more fragile types with the higher number gauges. The narrower ones have more fragile needle points and they can get damaged by bending during the insertion into the bottle. The other trick is to make sure the alcohol is dry before you take the shot.
I did it for fun about a year ago and found out I had T2 diabetes.
I was shocked but obviously glad I found out. I use them from time to time just to see how I’m doing and how different foods (and amounts of them) impact me.
I found I can control it through diet alone and exercising when there is a spike by using a GCM for the constant feedback.
They are very expensive here though (UK) and my doctor won’t prescribe me one because metformin is cheaper, so it’s not something I can use all the time.
I hate needles, this really isn’t like a needle though, it’s a small filament which sits just under your skin, you can’t feel it, I thought it hadn’t gone in until I saw the reading appear on my phone.
Some things I found out besides what foods and amounts give me big spikes are that I have a blood glucose spike in the morning just before I wake up, and that if I eat a small enough portion of white rice, ice cream, bread, whatever I can reduce the spike quickly by going for a walk. If I had a lot though, a walk isn’t going to help.
Freestyle Libre 3 only has a plastic filament and the plastic applicator pushes it in without pain. Very different than metal lancets (stick test). I can't feel it at all when its in the back of my arm. If I were worried about sweating too much and it not sticking I would get one of the third party over-patches that create a lager adhesive area. I might do that in the Summer.
My girlfriend uses the Libre 3 and I was wondering how it worked with just that plastic filament. She doesn't feel it at all when I apply it. We found that if she washes the area with soap and then just relaxes her arm and lets it hang freely, I apply it to the back upper arm, it just stays on and doesn't get in the way.
I almost completely forgot about the monitor itself, and only paid attention to the numbers on my phone. It's that unobtrusive (at least the Libre 3 one that I used).
I let the needle (actually: annulus? see sibling comment) get into my head because I was curious and looked at it. It looks a lot scarier than it is, kind of like using contact lenses for the first time: before you've used them, you get into your own head about it, but once you've done it a couple times it's just rote and easy.
I had started the first one a day before I started a few weeks of (6-days-on, 1-day-off) keto. Keto guides will say that you should have <= 25g net carbs per day, but I specifically wanted to see how front-loading (having almost all the day's planned carbs in one meal) affected blood glucose, and also whether the number (25g) is accurate for my physiology. I found that my number was closer to 30g and that when I stayed under it, my blood glucose spikes had very short duration but when I went significantly over it, blood glucose stayed higher for longer.
edit: One more thing, I used this time to play around with various sugar substitutes and see how they affected my blood glucose. Allulose came out as the winner (if money is no object) based on not having any noticeable off-taste or aftertaste and on measuring gram-for-gram the same as sugar (well sort of, it's only like 80% as sweet as sugar, so you get the same mechanical effects of sugar if you weigh it gram-for-gram and your baked goods or whatever come out not quite as sweet, which is perfect for me. Creaming butter with liquid stevia extract or something just plain doesn't work.
what other sweeteners did you try? Can't get allulose in canada (unless you buy it from a shady importer) because Health Canada says there isn't enough data to say its safe, so its not approved sweetener.
If you want to know more about it you can just read about how diabetics treat different foods. Short version; high GI is fast high blood sugar, lots fat and sugar can results long period of with high blood sugars.
It is a CGM more or less what you would expect, insulin is the only hormone that lowers blood sugar, then you have all the stress hormones that raise it like adrenalin, growth hormone and cortisol plus glucagon for long time storage of sugars in the body. So measuring blood sugar with a CGM gives you a value between 2.9-13.5 mmol/liter that is supposed to give you picture of a rather complex system. A CGM also needs perfect access to your free flowing blood which in it self is a difficult task.
I'm more curious about the experience a non-diabetic person has. For one, the purpose of using the device is quite different, and not related to a life threatening situation. And because the focus isn't to manage this specific issue, the insights and potential utility seem like they'd be of an entirely different variety.
e.g. I know that the things I eat impact my blood sugar, but don't have the same kind of intimate awareness a diabetic person would have, nor would the changes in my levels have the same meaning/impact.
Put another way, and setting aside the issue of oversimplifying a complex system (so is measuring RHR, HRV, blood oxygen, etc.), the benefit of CGM for a diabetic person is obvious. The benefit of CGM for a curious person less so.
It is probably easier to find interesting things curious people with diabetes has done, sure you might want help to sort out the interesting bits.
Optimizing sugar in take for exercise might be an interesting thing todo as non diabetic. There is no tool to continuously measure ketons though which is the fun part. CGMs are so slow. I really see no use at the moment.
I'm asking out of curiosity here: I've always heard that fat doesn't spike your glucose at all and protein only if you a considerable amount of it. So from what you said if you ate a fatty cheeseburger (plated like a steak and without the bread) that your blood sugar will spike? I'm currently doing a Mediterranean style diet during the week and slacking off a bit on the weekends friday evening through Sunday morning. I have done keto in the past though with the readings I've done on it saying that lots of fat, some protein, and just a little bit of carbs should basically keep any glucose spikes very low. I could only handle the keto for a couple months though.
It sounds like an experiment I’d like to do for the purpose of optimizing my daily habits and establishing a better mental model for how my eating habits impact me throughout the day. But I really dislike needles.