Personal CGM Experiments

After a recent blood test showed higher Fasting Glucose & H1AC than I'd like, I decided to buy a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) to optimize my diet & lifestyle and lower these values.

Experiment Details

General Structure

Sensor

Mostly Dexcom G7 because it's cheaper than Libre3 via Levels App Research Study. Will be testing both. Would likely recommend whichever is cheaper, but we'll see after testing.

App

I'm using the Levels App because they were the best value (and seemed generally interesting). I also discovered the Veri app, and will likely enroll in both for testing & review purposes.

Experiment Ideas / To-Do List

• Metformin (Timing & Dosage)
• Olive Oil Shot Before Meals
• Brown vs White Rice
• Each Blueprint Meal
• Eating Before vs After Workout
• Different Types of Breads / Brands of Bread
• Fresh Food vs Reheated Food
• How Does Stress Affect Glucose?
• How Do Workouts Affect Glucose?
• How Does Gaming Affect Glucose?
• How Do Different Recreational Drugs Affect Glucose?
• How Does Alcohol Affect Glucose?
• Wine vs Liquor vs Beer
• Eating Fast vs Slow
• Mindful vs Passive Eating

Notes

• Overnight Oats w/ Milk seems to spike blood sugar
  • Testing with almond milk
• Light physical activity seems to reliably decrease blood sugar immediately
• Any type of sexual activity seems to spike blood sugar
  • This only happens sometimes. Strange.
• Stress seems to have a big effect on blood sugar (big spikes)
• One cool part of wearing the CGM is you can set up alerts for whenever your Glucose is over a certain level. Then whenever it goes off, you simply do some physical activity. It could be walking, household chores, etc. I am currently stacking with physical therapy (so I do my PT exercises whenever it goes off).
• The CGM itself can be pretty stress-inducing at first. I found myself checking it often and kind of obsessing over it for the first few days. It stressed me out more than I thought it would.
  • CGM no longer stress inducing after a couple weeks
• Makes you a bit of a buzz kill on vacations. But also interesting thing to talk about.
• CGM Leaves a mark with a big red pimple-like bump where the wire went in. Sometimes bothers you when it's on, sometimes not at all.
• Held up very well swimming/exercising heavily for 5-days straight (Cancun)
• Most reliable way to keep things down is exercising and staying active. Even moving around the house cleaning is going to bring your glucose down. Any movement at all, the bigger muscles the better.
  • Steady state cardio seems to drop/stabiliize more than weightlifting
  • If you don't exercise for 2-3 days straight, things start to get more unstable. I assume because the muscles glycogen stores are full again?

Levels App

• Levels App could really use a MyFitnessPal or Chronometer integration
• Levels App could really use manual sleep tracking (for nights when the watch is dead or whatever)
• I'd imagine most people either over-track or under-track. I started over-tracking, logging too many events.
  • General philosophy is track whatever you want to measure the effect of.
  • Once you figure out something is NOT effecting things, stop tracking it.
• There is also a reactive way to use the app. You'll get question cards that ask what happened at particular times. So even if you're not really on top of logging anything at all, you can still figure out what's causing the biggest spikes (which is probably 80% of the benefit).

Other Apps

• Happy Bob, Sugarmate, Shuggah
• There used to be something called Spike App, which allowed you to extend the lifespan of sensors. This seems to have ended with newest iOS/Dexcom updates. The G7 seems to be difficult to hack for extension purposes now. G6 still has several methods of extending lifespan of each sensor.

Reference: https://ilmostromberg.com/100-days-with-veri/