In the few weeks after I got a gestational diabetes diagnosis and glucometer, I possibly had too much fun drawing blood to measure blood glucose after meals. Here’s a terrible hand-drawn visualization of all the meals where I made 3+ measurements. X axis is minutes after meal start. the bright horizontal line is 140, the point my doctor told me I should keep my one-hour-after-first-bite measurement under.
Following doctorly instructions and measuring just once at 60m would have given me an incomplete picture of how this stuff works. I learned:
- My current favorite soylents (gingerbread and pumpkin spice) are on the edge if I drink them in 5-10m, but if I drink them over 30m, the measurement was so low at the predicted peak that I didn’t bother measuring more
- The breaded fish curry bit my ass hard… this was early on when I thought reducing the rice would do it. But there were Secret Carbohydrates that I could not detect
- Conversely it was safer than I thought (light green) to have a salad with a some corn, a heavy-ish amount of sweet dressing, and a slice of bread
I enjoyed taking these measurements and building my intuition for [what types of meals, over how long an eating period, with or without a walk] affect blood sugar. I was interested to realize that if I’d gotten a blood glucometer years ago, I would (I think) have immediately started gathering this same data and making diabetes-delaying health choice. In the absence of such data, I vaguely felt I should avoid sugar, then failed to act on that feeling.
In fact, it turns out I had the stupid intuition that there was an exact correlation between how much I liked a food and how bad it was for me – at least with respect to type 2 diabetes, which runs in my family. As you might expect, that is not true. There were some foods that are impactful to give up that I don’t mind giving up, and some foods I like a lot that are fine. I snack a lot of cashews, keto cereal, and cottage cheese now, the same amount of ice cream, and fewer cookies. I don’t feel like I’ve made huge sacrifices on the snack front (although I’ve found meals harder to decarb).
In this case, I failed for a long time to solve a problem – to substantial detriment of my health – simply because I was not measuring the outcome. Usually if that’s an issue it’s partially because the outcome is hard to measure – but in this case it was not true.
It might be worth scanning your life for any problem you’re failing to solve simply because you’re not measuring the outcome and there’s no feedback or reward associated with working on it. (If your brain is amenable to this you can sometimes force a measurement on something – I find it pleasant to try to get a good grade on my day according to a Google Sheets formula I wrote.)
Some additional things about diabetes / blood glucose specifically:
When I was braindumping the above, Sarah Constantin said
I once went to a continuous monitoring workshop, and the glucose monitoring people said there are substantial inter-individual differences in which specific foods spike your glucose. so you might cut out a handful of foods and other foods that are nominally just as “carby” are fine for you.
A different person mentioned you can get a continuous glucose monitor without a prescription. I haven’t used it and can’t vouch for it, but if diabetes runs in your family or you want to keep your blood glucose for other health reasons, consider this $100 product: