December is flying by already. Now that the girls are back to school every other day, time flies and school break is so soon. Our December plans:
- 5 days in Coron Palawan (supposed to be as idyllic as El Nido and potentially see sea cow)
- 7 days in Siargao few days after. This trip is with our favorite travel family and girls are super excited.
- Hubby’s birthday next week.
- My 41th birthday on Christmas while in Siargao.
- 3 weeks break from work.
CGM results after 2 weeks period. Key takeaways:
- Even conventionally known as good carbs (fruits, sweet potatoes, oatmeal) spike my blood sugar a lot!
- When eating first fat/protein, followed by carb like rice/bread 15-20 min later, blood sugar stays stable.
- Worse “offenders” I’ve experienced: bread, noodles, rice, pomelo, watermelon.
- Surprising non offender: ice cream. I had some at McDonalds and to my surprise it didn’t move my blood sugar at all.
- Exercise increases blood sugar, it’s more noticeable when it’s rigorous/explosive. This morning my golf lesson shoot it up 30pts.
- What I eat at dinner determines my sleep BS and wake up BS.
- As long as I start eating BS friendly food, it goes down quickly. Thus I haven’t seen long term impact of frequent spikes of BS caused by food.
- The biggest benefits of having a CGM is behavioral change. Because the response is instant, when I want to grab few bites of xx, I’d stop as I don’t want to see the line to spike for not so satisfying food.
During our trip, my BS was up and down as I intentionally wanted to try many things that I don’t normally eat at home. Now that I’ll be home for 2 weeks without travel, I just put up a new sensor and want to see if I can keep it stable while eating “healthy”.
This brings me my biggest skepticism about CGM is that it forces me to focus on BS, to keep it low and stable, even though i am not convinced that watermelon is worse than ice cream. I prefer to think that BS is just a pillar of a healthy lifestyle. Keeping it stable/low while eating whole foods would be preferred, but should compromise the quality of food. I know the keto/paleo trend is still on and they would be happy to have the CGM to tell them their BS is stable. Yet, too much animal food …. I am still not convinced it’s better than a balanced diet with abundant vegetables including root vegetables.
Nutrition is such a complex subject and personal. I like experimenting new things to improve my health along with my family’s, so I guess I’ll keep chasing the elusive perfect diet 🙂
Our New Journey 
Wow, so much travel!! It’s so funny because we NEVER travel over the holidays!! It definitely is a great time to do so, with the school and work breaks. I just really cherish the holidays at home, I guess. Maybe someday I’ll plan a great big trip over Christmas week and skip everything else! haha!
interesting results about your CGM. I guess my take would be to not worry about some periodic spikes from healthy carbs. That’s why our bodies produce insulin and is one of the major functions of our pancreas. 🙂 Luckily our bodies are designed to be able to handle those ups and downs. (usually- except in the case of the pancreas transplant patients I work with! 😦
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I was just thinking the same things as @Grateful Kae – that’s SO much travel over the holidays. I like to stay close to home, but I think a big part of that is because I live in cold-weather conditions and it’s just not that fun to travel in the cold/ice/snow.
That is really interesting about your CGM. Overall I’m trying to focus on good foods and not get as scientific on my diet – it can all feel overwhelming sometimes. When I did keto, I just didn’t feel like it was healthy to completely cut out fruit and carbs like sweet potatoes, bell peppers etc! Like you said, ice cream didn’t seem to impact your BS like watermelon (which still seems fascinating)…but one would think watermelon would be objectively better for your health overall!
I hope you have a great time off work. Three weeks sounds awesome! Enjoy the fun adventures 🙂
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