I’ve put on weight and I find the cgm to be a way more objective and practical metric than calorie counting. It’s simply hard to consume enough low GI foods to put on weight.

There are certain foods that my body seems to process poorly. My blood glucose spikes as much from crackers and rice as it does from more traditional sweets. My heuristics for other foods that I assumed were sweet (often fatty foods with mild sweetener) were also wrong. And I’m not weighing everything, counting calories, etc. I just tap my phone onto the device a few times a day.

Other things have also been surprising. I smoke hookah fairly regularly and found that it raises my fasting blood glucose by almost ten points (80 -> 90).

I find it’s an easy North Star metric with a single exception being intense physical activity which releases glycogen stores.

There are other factions within the community that believe that blood glucose spikes are responsible for things like abdominal fat storage and you’ll see that they continually try to game the number with things like nut consumption and drinking vinegar. This seems less useful to me.

Family history of developing type 2 diabetes. I take the CGM results as a sign of my pancreas having to pump out insulin to counter the blood sugar. From what I understand, consistently exceeding certain level (110/120? forgot) for prolonged periods (an hour was the warning given by the device) eventually leads to insulin resistance.

That's not what this person is saying. "Big glucose spike(s)" actually are the cause of diabetes. The more regular spikes a person has, the more resistant to insulin they become, which is where type 2 diabetes starts. The point of the comments I believe was just to say that certain foods cause different responses in different people. If plantains cause a large spike in a person, I would say that person should probably not eat them every day all the time.

Do you remember who made it? I didn't think they had one! It might be worth the trouble to keep it on just to get the data.

If I asked my doctor about using a CGM as a runner that likes to eat fruits and vegetables he would look at me like I'm an idiot.

I imagine he would say, "So you aren't having any health issues and bought this $100 device anyway?"

People who get pre-diabetes or diabetes (type 2), well, it's usually because they are overweight or obese. There's just not a lot of people getting diabetes in a mysterious way.

Also, saturated fat is linked to diabetes. And cutting that out improves heart health anyway.