I wrote about my first two weeks with the CGM here, and here is a short update with new data. The overview of the data below, the new dates marked in yellow:
I wanted to try some things to reduce the average fasting glucose (FG), so here’s what I did.
Experiment 1 – keto diet
On Saturday May 5th I started a ketogenic diet , and as I’ve already been doing intermittent fasting, and generally I don’t eat a whole lot of carbs, I figured this would be easy to try. Here the results for three days:
Ok, that didn’t go as planned at all 🙁 The massive spike on Sat May 6th is from having one tiny slice of cake…
Apparently there is something called ‘adaptive glucose sparing’ which essentially means that since your muscle cells prefer fat when you are doing a low carb/keto diet, there will be more glucose floating around in your bloodstream.
I lost two pounds over the 3-4 days this lasted, and I generally feel leaner. The FG was very stable, but I don’t want to have FG that high in general. There are ‘extenuating circumstances’ (e.g insulin could still be low), but I would’ve needed a blood measurements of fasting glucose and fasting insulin to verify this, so I have try something else..
Experiment 2 – regular, smaller meals
After this I thought “hey maybe I’d just introduce smaller amounts of carbs, eat some breakfast and smaller portions”. This would allow my cells adjust to having carbs again, and with the smaller portions I don’t get as large spikes, here the next four days:
Ouch, not good either. And I wasn’t feeling too great this time, I could really feel sluggish and a bit more tired than usual.
Experiment 3 – back to intermittent fasting
So after this I thought I need to get back at least to where I was before. Here the next four days:
It’s really cool to see that after ONLY one day back to intermittent fasting, my FG normalizes again. I honestly don’t know any other health related measurement where one can see the results this quickly!!
Again I’m not worried about the higher readings around 16-17 as that is where I train, and interesting to note that movie night + salty popcorn does raise FG overnight -as can be seen on 05/15.
Conclusion
Overall I’m learning a lot re: how my body processes glucose/carbs, how intermittent fasting is really helpful for me – and it does make me want to try out some longer fasts (e.g. OMAD – one meal a day) style. Stay tuned.