Glucose Monitoring Update
It’s now been just over a week of wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and I remain fascinated by what I’m seeing. In the past few days I’ve had a few incidents that are worth sharing.
Cappuccino Crash
On Sunday morning I woke up and put in 60 minutes on my assault bike (majority low intensity, with 10 high intensity intervals mixed in). I didn’t eat after and instead grabbed a handful of blueberries and raspberries and we ran out the door to run errands.
We sat down at a coffee shop around 1 pm. My girlfriend had hot chocolate and I had an oat milk cappuccino, and then we took our dog to the park to run around. The ground was fresh with good packing snow and so we proceeded to run around like little kids, throwing snow balls, and tackling one another to the ground. But about halfway through our fun, I started to feel really woozy and nauseous. I figured it just had something to do with not eating yet, but I mostly dismissed it.
On the way home we stopped at Walgreens. While I waiting in line to check out I pulled out my phone and opened my Levels app. This is what I saw.
I was amazed. A 30 point crash was no doubt the reason I felt sick. The culprit? Not eating, combined with having oat milk, which I later learned is the worst alternative milk option for blood sugar, in my coffee. I was disappointed to learn that because oat milk is so delicious. But I thought it was cool to see the data correlate in real time to how I was feeling physically. How wild!
Chocolate Peanut Butter RX Bar
The second incident (later in that same day) was more of an experiment. RX Bars are my go to when I’m hungry and in a pinch. Not only are they absolutely delicious, but I’ve always appreciated the minimal ingredients (typically 5 or less) as well as the balance offered by it macro nutrient ratios.
The bar I ate this day, Peanut Butter Chocolate contains: egg whites, peanuts, dates, chocolate, cocoa, natural flavors and sea salt (yum). It macro nutrients profile is:
Fat: 10 grams
Carbs: 22 grams
Fiber: 4 grams (almost 1/5 of the carbs, an ideal ratio)
Protein: 12 gram
So I was excited to see what this bar did to my glucose and if I could continue to enjoy them or if I needed to look for an alternative.
Over the 1.5 hours that followed, my glucose levels rose, albeit gradually, and managed to stay just under the upper 110 mg/dl threshold set by Levels. After the slow rise, my glucose subsequently descended at an equally steady pace before returning to baseline.
This reaffirmed to me that this is a balanced bar, that I can continue to eat without concern.
Two Bad Spikes
After a couple of my most stabile glucose days, Wednesday turned out to be a bad one.
It started good with a 7 am agility session. But, like Sunday, I didn’t end up eating my first meal until the early afternoon, setting me up for disaster later in the day. All morning I chose coffee over food because I didn’t want to break my work flow. Which was obviously the wrong choice.
The first spike (+51 points, yikes!) was caused by a “snack”; dark chocolate espresso beans, Mary’s Gone Crackers, and one Jojos chocolate square. It seemed harmless at the time, but in retrospect it was a lot of sugar and carbs and no nutrients to aid in their digestion. I was hungry, and didn’t want to pull myself away to make something nutritious, and my body paid a price as a result (second mistake of the day).
The second spike (+34 points) came at dinner. By the time I came up to eat at 7 pm I was feeling ravenous. So I did what any ravenous person does. I made a huge bowl of food (third mistake). Pasta, zucchini, mushrooms, tomato, avocado, tofu, chicken and onion. And then followed it up with another bowl 1 hour later. Arugula salad with sardines, onions, blueberries and more mushrooms and zucchini.
The spike is significant, but it also comes on the heels of crashing from my snack a few hours earlier. So I’m giving myself a little bit of a break. I think the pasta and vegetable dish outlined above was fairly balanced, and I think had I eaten it alone, without the earlier snack, that the results would have been different. Regardless, all of my poor eating choices set me up for a day of yo-yoing glucose.
The longer I wear the CGM the more fascinated I become by the data. As I’ve mentioned before, it scares me to think about all the spikes and crashes that are happening internally, while externally I mostly feel nothing. The body is constantly working overtime and we really don’t give it enough credit for all it does. We run around abusing it, hoping it doesn’t crap out on us. And when it does, we wonder why.