Using glucose tracking for faster metabolism

In this article, we'll uncover how tracking your glucose for just two weeks can unlock mysteries of weight gain, bloating, low energy and even anxiety!  

How to glucose-track to improve your diet

A continual glucose monitor (CGM) is a little painless wearable device that you just stick on your arm, tracking your blood glucose (blood sugar) levels throughout the day. It provides real-time data, allowing individuals to monitor how their bodies respond to different foods, food timings, stress and sleep. It also happens to be an excellent way to tell us at Advanced Nutrition why your metabolism has gone awry. This is because your metabolism – i.e. how your body works out what energy to store and which to use – is broadly speaking the same thing (in very simplified terms).

We want to see this health data, so we can tell what it is specifically that you’re doing in your life, whether it’s habits or foods, that is overall sabotaging all the fruits of your hard efforts. There really isn’t another test as important as this in our view that is so powerful that it can tell us exactly which foods and at what time we need to be paying attention to.

Improving your metabolism should be your first priority

Have you ever done intermittent fasting or dieted but felt that it didn’t work? If this is you, you want to pay some attention to your metabolic rate. Get that assessed, so that you can get to the bottom of what’s standing in your way of better success with your healthy eating. Optimising your metabolism should be the first priority before even thinking about fasting or dieting if you want more long-lasting success. It can also be used to check if fasting is actually working for you, or if you need to change the way you do it.  

Although originally designed for diabetics, using glucose tracking to assess your metabolism is, in our view, one absolute most important health actions you can take today. There are few other health priorities more important than this. In fact - we would argue that it is the biggest challenge we (and the NHS) currently have, where we once were worried about infectious disease. How your glucose behaves through the day and night, gives a really good indication of how insulin resistant you are, or how hard your body is finding it to keep a good metabolic balance. 

How poor metabolism can underlie some of your other symptoms 

Poor metabolism (which we can also more accurately refer to as insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome or high blood sugar) in fact underlies a ton of diseases and health concerns. Poor metabolic health raises the risk of some cancers, is a driver in dementia, and tends to worsen a range of pain and inflammatory conditions, like osteoarthritis (back or knee pain anyone?). In fact, in diabetics, frozen shoulder is five times more likely. Higher blood sugar also tends to aggravate symptoms like lower urinary tract symptoms (UTI’s), thrush, menopause symptoms - and even acne!   

Non-communicable diseases, i.e. lifestyle conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes now account for 90% of deaths each year in the UK, with insulin resistance being a strong driver. This really helps illustrate just how many of us are affected without knowing it.

Tracking glucose is an incredibly valuable health tool that can even give us insights into whether your metabolism is starting to work against you, and why that is. Metabolic imbalance is a driver of most modern diseases, driving inflammation, and many of the most common symptoms we see in our clinic. 

It’s important to measure this so that we can get some shortcuts, and discover whether skipping breakfast, for example, is driving poor blood sugar control and thereby slowing down metabolism. Typical scenarios we see in young people is much dietary sugar and hypoglycaemic events (low blood sugar drops). In older people, we see more signs of insulin resistance overall. 

With such a simple tool, we recommend everyone carry out this trial. To get started, drop us some information on your concerns about your metabolism and we’ll tell you if we can help. This is true preventative, and wellness medicine!