Continuous Blood Glucose Monitoring

This is mostly a post to say: did you know you can get a continuous blood glucose monitor for $50 for 2 weeks, without prescription?

Lingo by Abbott – Glucose Biosensor & App | Glucose Monitor

Lingo by Abbott tracks your glucose 24/7, translating the data into insights you can use to learn how to build new habits. HSA/FSA eligible. No prescription needed.

Glucose Monitor

My personal experience with it was a bit like Craig Venter, pioneer of DNA mapping, said of seeing his personal sequenced genome:

"It's not a 'so what,' but it's certainly not 'Aha!' either"

That is, I was hoping to get some major revelations from the monitoring, to discover that bread or dairy or something spikes my blood sugar unexpectedly, and therefore have a big impact on my future life and diet.

And hey, other people might have this experience!, especially if their diet is more sugar-spikey than mine – e.g. I'm told that people are sometimes shocked to discover how much a bowl of fruit for breakfast spikes their blood sugar.

Instead, I personally got a series of mild hmmms:

• walking around a bit immediately after eating really does seem to reduce blood sugar spikes
• blood sugar spikes are a complicated combination of the foods you eat, so it's not as simple as "toast = this much, egg = that much, toast + egg = this + that much"
• my intuitive sense of what a "blood sugar spike" and a "blood sugar crash" feel like, bodily, was pretty wrong
• if your blood sugar crashes overnight (per your monitor), that might be a real thing but also you might just be sleeping on the monitor weird
• logging what you eat all the time is extremely annoying

Overall, I mildly recommend trying it for two weeks if you're interested, it's a low-cost experiment that could have some a-has for you, or at least some u-hmms. Mostly I'm just pleased that this device is available for consumers over the counter at a seemingly-reasonable price, and wanted to tell you in case you didn't know either.