The Fitbit and Apple Watch are well upon us now – everyone is counting steps, heart rate, and maybe with Oura rings and Samsungs we are tracking temperatures and monthly cycles and sleep.
But the vanguard is off doing the human + machine thing with stickers, needles and RFID – which is to say I am finally trying a continuous glucose monitor (CGM).
You put a pretty small sticker (it has a super thin needle like a mosquito’s stinger) on your arm and it tells your phone every five minutes what blood sugar it sees. I feel like I am the last one to try this, as lots of tech folks I know are also secret biohackers.
So what blood sugar changes are interesting to know about?
“Healthy” is low and stable blood sugar of 70-100 mg per dcl.
The world we live in, in the US, is most people are at risk of diabetes – so “healthy” is nonsense.
So…what have I learned in 10 days of watching this thing?
Exercise (running, pull ups – real exercise) raises your blood sugar. because your liver makes energy for you I guess. Eg 100 becomes 180.
Nightime spikes. Not sure yet why but at 2am my numbers go up. 150 or 170 and only very slowly go down over 5 hours.
Morning spikes. And then they go up again! To help me have energy for the day? they stay up till noon.
This is all when I am fasting. I did a 2 day fast – and still the glucose fluctuates like mad.
Chilled out exercise – like walking for 5 minutes, doesn’t spike. It just uses the glucose in my blood and slowly lands the plane.
Fasting doesn’t add to my unpredictability, but when I eat at the end of it, the numbers go wild. What’s the point of fasting if there is no feasting?
My next experiments are going to be a) frequent light exercise, b) way more fiber to reduce the impact of carbs, c) less feasting, d) more regular intense exercise (run daily). And I’m going to try to get some CGMs from India since the US ones are overpriced.