Using a continuous glucose monitor can help you decode your daily eating habits

Diabetes is incredibly common. According to the American Diabetes Associationabout 7 million people in the United States are undiagnosed, and 1 in 3 Americans are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. If you’re not taking medication, you can manage the condition (a chronic metabolic disease characterized by high blood sugar) by exercising and watching what you eat (very, very closely).

In recent years, tools used by diabetics to help them manage their disease have become more widely available. Continuous glucose monitors (CGM) such as Abbott Lingo and the Dexcom Stele Previously, they were only available by prescription. Now that you can buy them on Amazonmore and more people are realizing that eating like a diabetic is not a bad idea. It’s not revolutionary to say that prioritizing lean proteins and fiber-rich vegetables and developing an exercise habit helps you become slimmer.

You can buy a Stelo or Lingo sensor a la carte, so to speak. Each comes with its own proprietary apps, and both also pair with a wide variety of fitness trackers to allow you to easily track your blood sugar. Signos is a separate service that partners with Dexcom to use Stelo sensors. A monthly Signos subscription includes two sensors (you need to replace the sensor every two weeks) and access to the AI-based weight loss management platform that offers insights and plans, in addition to 24/7 blood sugar tracking.

Full disclosure: I’m not actively trying to lose weight, but I am aware that my eating habits could be healthier. I expected to be more skeptical about this, given that when I’ve tried CGMs in the past, I absolutely I lost my mind. But speaking with a dietitian during the Signos test gave me a different perspective.

How to use

First, you install the Signos app on your phone (iOS, Android). Then you put the CGM into your skin. CGMs work by using a dispenser to insert a small needle just in your subcutaneous tissue to measure the glucose in your interstitial fluid (ISF). (Every company calls this a filament to make it less scary, but yes, it’s a needle.)

CGMs are a little trickier to use than traditional finger prick blood tests. (The gold standard is venous blood sampling, but I’ve had quite a few enough of these for now.) It takes time for glucose to diffuse into your ISF, and readings can vary greatly.

According to the professor and dietitian Dr. Diane Stadlerprofessor at Oregon Health & Science University, there are some general rules when it comes to investing:

• Put it in your non-dominant arm.
• Put it somewhere where it won’t be compressed at night.
• Put it in a place where it won’t be knocked around too much.

For example, I know you’re supposed to put it in your non-dominant arm, but I’m also wary of putting too many needles in my tattoo. This time I placed the Stelo in my dominant (non-tattooed) right arm and got readings that were, alarmingly, 10-25% higher than they were with my left arm. I just used my readings as a reference to note the peaks.

In general, as a non-diabetic person, you want your fasting blood sugar (when you haven’t eaten for at least eight hours) should be between less than mg/dL. You want your peaks to be below 180 mg/dL, to reduce the number of peaks per day, and to return to your baseline within two hours.

Thousands of peanuts

When you log in to Signos, it shows you your continuous blood sugar readings and prompts you to log everything from your meals, exercise, weight, sleep, water, and other tags. (It also connects to other third-party apps so you don’t have to record everything by hand.) These features aren’t something you can’t get from the Abbott or Lingo apps, which also offer similar AI-enabled food logging, where you take a photo of what you eat and estimate what and how much you ate, and how it will impact your glucose levels.

What Signos offers is very personalized information and activities. As you record your behaviors, it begins to spot patterns and prompt you to change them, such as certain meals that regularly produce big spikes in your blood sugar. This also begins to unlock small challenges. I got really stuck on an early challenge of taking 30 minutes to eat a meal. It’s one thing to sit around a table with your family for an hour during dinner, but I don’t do that. eat all this time. I skipped this one.

As someone who isn’t used to tracking what I eat so closely, using Signos felt like it added an overwhelming amount of mental work to my day. Signos AI is smart, but not that clever. During dinner, my daughter and husband yelled at me for tapping my phone to correct Signos’ AI meal summary (I was eating a cheddar biscuit, not eggs; green onions on chicken slices, not asparagus) instead of talking to them.

I also sometimes had difficulty correcting the amounts. Signos absolutely refused to believe that I ate less than 35 peanuts per serving. To be honest, my family also has a hard time believing this about me.

As someone who exercises regularly and is a normal weight, I’m not the target audience. For more perspective, I contacted Dr. Stadler. To my surprise, she and many other dietitians are very supportive of CGMs for managing weight loss. Dr. Stadler noted that about 90 percent of his graduate students approve of their patients getting this data.

“I’m a big proponent of using technology to increase the amount of information people can manage to better make lifestyle changes,” Dr. Stadler said in a phone call.

Of course, it’s possible that using a CGM could cause you to adopt unhealthy habits, just like any health technology. So can we smart scales Or fitness trackers. “People with eating disorders have a disorder“, Dr. Stadler kindly reminded me; they do not represent the general population. A diabetic diet is a lot like a DASH diet or a Mediterranean diet, both of which are generally recognized as healthy diets that help you lose weight.

“I really hope that this technology will be used widely and with support, either through this app or through dietitians or primary care providers,” she said.

Every time I wear a CGM, I learn so much about my personal metabolism. For example, stress, including stress of having to record your food all the time!—can cause your glucose readings to skyrocket. Your glucose readings also increase when you suffer from premenstrual syndrome (this is why you crave salty and sweet things and want to sleep all the time!).

Unlike following a standardized diet or exercise program that is not designed for you personally, a real-time biosensor like a CGM can give you very personalized advice. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been buying cottage cheese for breakfast to replace my glucose-raising Raisin Bran. I started walking up and down the stairs or walking around the block after every meal to lower and shorten the tips. Eating smaller meals also reduces the duration of peaks. These are all easy habits that don’t require medication for life.

Like the reviews health and fitness editorI cover many products of questionable veracity and usefulness, but clinicians and consumers point out that a glucometer can truly improve the quality of life of many people. It’s truly rare to speak to an expert who is so enthusiastic about a technology. If you need weight loss and advice, a CGM is a more promising technology to try.

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