alt Hacker NewsCan you be specific about what your bloodwork results showed and what special insights your CGM gave you and what behavioural changes it led to?
My anecdotal experience from doctor colleagues giving CGM to patients is that it does 3/5ths of fuck all to everyone except those with actual insulin dependent diabetes (T1 or T2) because when you get down to it the insights aren’t that great and most people actually aren’t that invested in shifting the dial on their health that much. But I’m fascinated by examples to the contrary
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For sure it's going to depend on the person, but I bet a lot of the hacker news crowd here appreciates observability and metrics.
In software we're wiring up stuff with prometheus and making grafana dashboards and changing code and configuration based on what we see happening. CGMs in a way give you insight into one aspect of your body and diet.
I've been trying Lingo, and it's been super-interesting to see in almost realtime how your body reacts to different foods. Sure you read all the time about "watch your carbs..." or "don't eat so much sugar", but it's hard to know how seriously to take that advice.
It's a whole different thing though when you eat one thing for a snack and see a big spike in a graph on your phone, and eat a different thing the next day and see hardly any change at all. It makes it much easier to rationalize your food choices.
I did it for a month and learned what kinds of things led to spikes and what did not and it wasn’t always obvious without the monitor.
My story is: I had a really bad crash after eating a chocolate, which never happened before. That prompted the bloodwork, which shown that A1c was not where it's supposed to be.
I bought CGM myself, without any doctor's input. Didn't know they exist before reading some selfhelp book which my wife found.
Echoing another poster, it's eye opening how some of the foods you'd never think of, are spiking glucose levels.
Overall, after both me and my wife adjusted diet, much better energy through the day, no crashes.
Seeing just how much rice can impact your blood sugar is eye opening. Sticking to a "half the normal amount" of rice when eating Indian/Asian food can help a lot with blood sugar. And keeping blood sugar in check _seems_ to have a fair amount of researching backing up the idea that it's healthier and makes you feel better