People Are Monitoring Their Glucose to Lose Weight—Should you?
BY BETHANY HEITMAN
If you have diabetes, monitoring your blood glucose is an important part of staying healthy. But it turns out that keeping track of your blood glucose levels may also be a helpful weight loss tool.
Here’s why: Glucose (aka, the main type of sugar in your blood) helps to power many things in your body—including your lungs and brain. But if you have too much glucose it can cause problems like diabetes, accelerated aging and weight gain.
When you have too much glucose in your system from eating too many simple carbs or foods high in sugar, it prompts your body’s insulin response. Insulin signals your body to store energy in the form of fat.
Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) can give you insight into what foods spike your glucose and which don’t. Some people call this high level of insight into how various foods affect your body as “precision nutrition.”
Photo by Billie
You may be thinking that you know what’s healthy and what’s not, so why would you need a device to tell you? This is true, to some degree. You know slamming doughnuts for breakfast and guzzling a sugary coffee drink isn’t going to be great for weight loss or your health. And you also probably know that eating a balanced diet that includes lean protein and lots of veggies is the way to go.
But if you’re already a relatively healthy eater and want to fine tune your nutrition even further, CGM can help. This is because every person’s body reacts differently to food—even healthy food. One person’s blood sugar may go haywire when they eat a plum, while someone else’s may not. By monitoring what spikes yours and then avoiding those foods, you may set yourself up for some weight loss.
Want to Try Continuous Glucose Monitoring?
If you are interested in trying this method, you’ll need a continuous glucose monitoring device. There are a few on the market specifically created to help with nutrition. The first is from a company called Levels. When you sign up for their service, you’ll be shipped a one month supply of CGMs patches that affix to your upper arm—when you apply them, there’s a small, barely noticeable prick. These CGMs monitor your glucose at all times and send the data to an app for you to review. The app will then help you make sense of what’s going on and give suggestions on how you could improve your nutrition and metabolic health.
Nutri Sense is another CGM brand that is quite popular. It works similarly to the one above and their app will also help you track your sleep and stress—two other things that can impact your metabolic health.
Photo by Nutri Sense
While these devices aren’t painful to apply, wearing something 24-7 may annoy some people. But it can also be a really interesting way of looking closely at what you eat and how it may be affecting your weight loss goals. So, even if you do it for a short time, it could arm you with invaluable information that could help you lose stubborn extra weight
Bethany Heitman, Contributor
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