Below is a short excerpt from the book I’m writing, “Immortal Till You Die.” It’s from the chapter called You Manage What You Measure, but the excerpt is current, as what I discuss below is something I just started doing last Friday — using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to watch my blood glucose fluctuations in real time.
I just passed the 50K word mark yesterday and still have a couple of big sections to write, but the plan is to have the book on Amazon by January. Anyway, here’s the (unedited) excerpt:
Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should
I know that was a lot of things to potentially keep track of. I’m not saying you need to keep track of all of it, and in fact, I think what you keep track of and how often to track it in the first place depends on your personality type.
I mentioned this phenomenon earlier when we discussed continuous glucose monitoring, but it’s worth saying again here: know thyself. Especially with the wearables, the fancy body composition scales, and other tracking methods with dubious accuracy, getting caught up in minute-by-minute changes can make you feel like you’re taking crazy pills.
If you can look at that data here and there and let it be a loose guide for your progress, well, that’s another story altogether.
As I write this, I have a CGM plugged into my lower abs, and the entire experience has been fascinating. The back story is that back in March (I write this section in August), I was lean and mean, and made the mistake of uploading a shirtless pic of myself to Grok to ask about body composition. Grok’s best guess was that I was sitting at around 13% body fat. Not bad.
So, instead of continuing on the path I was on, I got a little looser with my diet, cause, hey, I deserved that piece of pie or whatever. Then, the season of birthdays hit. My family, including nieces, nephews, and myself, have many summer birthdays, and I didn’t hesitate to indulge with the snacks and cake. In late July, I ran some bloodwork on myself, and things were way out of line compared to usual, including a bump in my HbA1c that caught me off guard, because that number is always in a good spot.
I made an appointment with my doc, where I mentioned the idea of a CGM, and he responded, “Hold on, I’ve got something for you,” then ran down the hall for a minute, coming back with a box of three CGMs for me to try. And, good news, all it took was for me to resume eating like the end of the world wasn’t imminent, and I saw my numbers looking like what they should.
So, knowing that I’m not broken, I’ve been having fun experimenting with different foods and how they affect my glucose levels, and how exercise clearly sucks the glucose right out of circulation. I was riding a stationary bike for 45 minutes just yesterday, and the alarm started going off saying I was getting too low. That means I was going too hard and past the lactate threshold I want to stay beneath, where fat is the preferred fuel source, but it’s still fun to watch the highs and lows of the whole show going on in real time.
The downside of the easy access to all of this information is that I’m constantly watching the numbers rise and fall. And I can see that if I got too carried away with it and all the other possible metrics we’ve been discussing, it could easily lead to distraction.
