A geeky thing you can do for your health

I’ve been wearing a continuous glucose monitor from nutrisense.io for the last couple of weeks. I’m getting ready to switch it out for a fresh one today, and thought I’d share a link with you guys. For no good reason that I can discern, glucose monitors require a doctor’s prescription most of the time, but Nutrisense provides the service without bothering your own doctor or insurance. I believe there’s a doctor involved in there somewhere, but you pay out of pocket, and it’s considered to be for educational purposes only. Certainly you could share the information you gather with your own doctor, but I honestly have so little faith in the average doctor’s understanding of nutrition and metabolism that I don’t know why you’d want to. You’re often better off taking these matters into your own hands.

There’s really no world-changing reason for me to be using a CGM at this point. I just wanted a window to my metabolism that’s a little larger than the sporadic finger-prick glucose test can give.

A couple of years ago, when I had been doing carnivore for about a year, I got three months’ worth of monitoring from Nutrisense for both myself and Get Along Husband, mostly because I wanted to see if his chronic headaches could be correlated with blood sugar excursions, but also for my own entertainment. To some extent, the headaches were correlated with high glucose, and the CGM convinced him that a high-carb diet was never going to be beneficial to his tender noggin. His general health has benefitted from that information, as well.

There’s nothing like seeing your body struggling to deal with sugar in real time to make you knock that stuff right out!

Now, I have my hba1c and other lab tests, as well as my keto-mojo and the fact that I feel good all the time, to give me all the information I really need to decide whether my carnivore diet is working for me. So I didn’t exactly need a CGM this time around. But I wanted to see a few things after a couple more years of getting 99% of my nutrition from animal products:

1. How high was my exercise raising my glucose? A couple of years ago, I would frequently see my sugars go up into the 160s after a hard workout or a run. How am I doing with that now? Does my body still need that much sugar, or am I running on fat more than I used to?
2. Am I metabolically inflexible? What does a meal with carbs do to my body? While my overall numbers look great in a one-time lab test, there is that nagging question of what is happening on those rare occasions that I include berries or fruit or alcohol. Would I be able to go back to eating beans and rice fairly quickly (after all, the Great Reset is being foisted upon us as we speak) without too much metabolic trouble? Am I so physiologically used to running on fat that my body is distressed when I reintroduce sugar?
3. It is often said by ketosis skeptics that metabolic flexibility goes out the window if you stay in ketosis too much, and that completely eliminating sugar is just as bad as having too much sugar. I doubt that inflexibility goes both ways. I think you can lose your ability to run on fat far more easily than you can lose your ability to run on sugar, but I wanted to see that happening, if it is. If I need to carb-cycle, I want to know that.

While these are things I thought I already knew the answer to because I’ve studied the dickens out of the subject, I really wanted to just see it. So far, I’ve had no real surprises, but I have a couple of weeks left to go in which I’ll probably put myself through some tests that I normally wouldn’t want to do. Hopefully I’ll be able to find the time to share the results with you.

This post is getting too long for a Monday morning, so I’ll be back with some graphs in another post to tell you what I’ve learned, and what I think I’m seeing. In the meantime, whether you eat a standard American diet, or paleo, or carnivore, or just live on air and sunshine like a plant, you might also be interested to see what’s happening to your blood glucose 24/7. If so, I have a referral link that will get you $25 dollars off your first order with Nutrisense. If you sign up, I would also get $25 off my next month, but I’m not going to be doing another month, so I don’t really benefit from this deal.

The cool thing about Nutrisense is that they have dieticians and coaches on hand to help you understand what you’re seeing. You don’t have to be a geek to get a lot of good information from this service.

Let me know if you decide to do it! Want to discuss this, or anything else? Find me any time on SG, Gab, or MeWe.