How Monitoring Your Glucose Can Help You Stay Energized
Key Takeaways
A stable blood sugar is important, even if you don’t have diabetes.
Avoiding glucose spikes and crashes helps improve energy levels, focus, and overall well-being.
CGMs help track blood sugar fluctuations, allowing you to optimize diet, exercise, and lifestyle choices for steady energy.
Blood sugar or blood glucose comes from the food we eat. It is also produced by our liver. Glucose, being the main source of energy for the body’s cells and, is transported throughout the body via the bloodstream.
We feel our best when our blood sugar is stable. But monitoring your glucose and avoiding glucose fluctuations is essential… even if you don’t have diabetes. Why?
This is because stable blood sugar levels help in maximizing performance and improving energy crashes throughout the day. Fluctuations in blood glucose can lead to energy crashes, brain fog, and fatigue, making it harder to stay productive and active. In people without diabetes, every glucose spike increases the risk of heart disease.
The Link Between Blood Sugar and Energy
Ever felt tired and sleepy after a meal?
This post-meal slump is a common experience, and it is often triggered by a high-carbohydrate meal. When you eat refined carbohydrates, your blood sugar spikes, giving you a quick burst of energy. In response, your body then releases insulin to bring blood sugar levels back to normal. This “crash”, known as reactive hypoglycemia, can leave you feeling sluggish or even sleepy.
The more insulin your body releases, the more dramatic the “crash” will be. Since refined carbs cause the biggest blood sugar spikes, they also lead to the most intense energy crashes.
High blood sugar (or sugar spikes) do cause temporary energy boosts, but they often lead to crashes as insulin rapidly lowers glucose levels, resulting in fatigue and sluggishness.
Meanwhile, low blood sugar can result in dizziness, weakness, irritability, and brain fog.
In addition to that, imbalances in blood sugar can also negatively impact one’s mood. This is because refined carbs are digested into the bloodstream very quickly, which then leads to a rapid and dramatic spike in sugar levels, This then results in an initial jolt of energy, thereby giving you a mood boost. However… Once the body secretes insulin to counter the blood rise, blood glucose will fall quickly creating a “crash and burn” effect that is linked with fatigue and irritability.
Time in Range
Time in range (TIR) refers to the percentage of time a person with diabetes spends within their target blood glucose range. For most adults with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, this range is typically between 3.9 - 10.0 mmol/L or 70 - 180 mg/dL. The higher the percentage, the better the control of your diabetes is.
Healthcare providers generally recommend maintaining a TIR above 70%, which translates to at least 17 hours within the target range over a 24-hour period.
The most accurate way to measure TIR is with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), which provides real-time glucose readings throughout the day.
How CGMs Help Maintain Steady Energy Levels
Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) offer a real-time solution to tracking glucose fluctuations. It is an important tool to help you make informed choices about diet, activity, and lifestyle to maintain steady energy levels throughout the day.
As CGMs provide continuous, real-time data on glucose levels, it allows you to identify patterns in how your activities or food intake affect your blood glucose, and therefore make the necessary adjustments to maintain stable energy.
There are many other factors that can impact your glucose levels, such as:
Food. Consumption of carbohydrates can cause your glucose to rise, especially if you consume a lot of refined carbohydrates such as white rice or white bread.
Exercise. If you exercise without an adequate snack beforehand, your blood glucose may drop, as your muscles are using up glucose.
Stress. Stress often raises blood glucose levels.
Medications. Diabetes medications lower blood glucose. In addition, certain other types of medications (e.g. steroids) can affect your blood glucose.
If you are interpreting glucose levels from the CGM, always look at them in the context of your health status, and the events that occurred beforehand. For example, a sudden increase in glucose level could be due to a carb-heavy meal you just had, or an intense exercise.
Benefits of CGMs
The main benefits of CGMs include:
Real-Time Tracking. CGMs help you monitor glucose trends throughout the day, and provide you insights into blood glucose fluctuations before they cause noticeable changes in your energy.
Identifying Energy Crashes. It helps you identify dips in glucose before fatigue sets in, so you can proactively consume balanced snacks to prevent an energy crash.
Optimizing Nutrition. Personalized glucose data helps you identify foods that cause spikes and crashes, so you can adjust your meals accordingly for sustained energy (or even avoid these foods during your lunch break altogether, especially if you need to go back to work!)
Understanding Personal Responses. Different foods and activities affect individuals uniquely; so CGMs help tailor dietary and lifestyle choices to help you optimize energy levels.
Ready to purchase your CGM sensor?
But, it can be difficult and overwhelming to make sense of the rich data from your CGM - especially when you are new to it. While it is exciting to learn how your body responds to your daily habits and figure out ways to improve your blood sugar control, the process could sometimes be frustrating if you don’t know what the data means.
Speak with your healthcare provider before you start monitoring so that you get the appropriate support and guidance throughout the process. You should also share your data with your health care provider to better understand your condition, and to get personalized advice on how to better manage your condition.
Do you have diabetes, prediabetes or think you may be at risk? Learn how to use CGM to get your blood sugar under control. NOVI Magnum combines doctor consultations, health and lifestyle coaching with CGM data to help you achieve your health goals.