“Wellness is not a ‘medical fix’ but a way of living – a lifestyle sensitive and responsive to all the dimensions of body, mind, and spirit, an approach to life we each design to achieve our highest potential for well-being now and forever.”
- Greg Anderson
I like tracking things. As a professional athlete, your ability to perform is your currency and taking care of all the things that could potentially impact that is your job. I lifted weights, did cardio, got treatment or massages, tracked my sleep, took supplements, and paid attention to hydration levels. I loved keeping track of data that I could play with, tweak, in order to find the best result. I’m a researcher by nature and I like learning about things that I can apply. Now, even though I don’t devote all my energy to my performance on the volleyball court, I still pay attention to the things that impact my overall wellbeing and future longevity, like in the last blog, which discussed the products I put in and on my body and the people that I turn to help me know more.
There is a lot of emerging research that talks about how our health and wellness is connected to how well we are able to regulate our blood glucose and insulin sensitivity. Usually, when we think of blood glucose or insulin, we think of diabetes, but even people that aren’t in that category can still have high blood glucose variability (meaning it overall is low but it spikes often throughout the day). I am not a medical professional, so remember that, but I like learning about what I can do to help my own body.
I started a journey to lose some weight and pay more attention to what I was eating. I started tracking it on an app called Noom. They pair a diet strategy of balancing eating things with varying caloric densities, with the psychology behind habit formation and having a growth mindset around weight loss. I was tracking, paying attention and I found it helpful. If you want to know more about that experience, let me know.
“Your body holds deep wisdom. Trust in it. Learn from it. Nourish it. Watch your life transform and be healthy.”
– Bella Bleue
Within my first week or two, I was still wanting to know more about how the food I was choosing was affecting my blood glucose. There is a woman named Jessie Inchausepe who has an instagram account named @glucosegoddess where she explains the data around controlling blood glucose and all the potential benefits from it. Glucose can spike and when it does, it has cascading negative affects on our bodies, and that if we pursue strategies around reducing that spike or like she says ‘flattening your glucose curve’ you can start to notice significant gains in multiple areas of health and wellness, like decreased hunger, decreased fatigue and irritability, improvements in mental clarity, skin health, weight loss, and a wide array of female specific issues like fertility, PCOS, endometriosis.
“I think every person who eats and has a body should know how their glucose works.”
- Jessie Inchasepe
She also likes data and experimenting and she has come up with several strategies or ‘hacks’ that help reduce the spikes. For example, the order of foods you eat, drinking apple cider vinegar, physical activity like simply taking a 10 minute walk after eating, eating a savory breakfast vs a sweet one. All of these can reduce the amount of times your glucose spikes. Her information is weighted heavily in research and studies but she presents it in a very easy to digest manner. If you aren't on social media, she wrote a book called Glucose Revolution which I just started and I’m already a fan.
“What is the right order? It’s fiber first, protein and fat second, starches and sugars last.”
- Jessie Inchasepe
There’s a point in the beginning of her book where she points out that the problem with dieting is that within each type of diet, there’s a spectrum of what is healthy and what is not. I can be vegan or vegetarian and still eat unhealthy things. I can be more keto focused but choose options that aren’t great for my health, but when you pay attention to the things that spike your glucose and you work towards reducing them, you gain benefits regardless of what type of diet you adhere to. It can work in the framework of whatever diet you prefer to adhere to as long as you pay attention to your body.
I ordered, through the app Levels and a prescribing physician, a continuous glucose monitor. Due to the emergence of this research and data, the CGMs are more available mainstream, not just for diabetics. I get to track my blood glucose in real time and notice what happens when I eat certain things, if I change the order, if I walk after, if I drink lemon water before or apple cider vinegar after. It’s been really eye opening. I’m in the testing phase but I’m learning a lot.
“Take care of your body, it’s the only place you have to live.”
– Jim Rohn
I don’t know where you are in your health and wellness journey, whether are like me and like tracking data and want to wear a CGM, or you’d like to read the book and learn tips and strategies, or if it’s easiest just to follow the @glucosegoddess on Instagram and learn from there, but I think this information can be really transformational and I just want to pass it along. Let me know if you want more info from me or more details about my experience wearing the CGM. We all are doing the best we can, and the more we help each other out, the better!
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