Non-diabetics using glucose meters

Since there were some people interested in this:

I downloaded the free baselining spreadsheet for the Data Driven Fasting posted about on p1 and have been doing that this past week. For the baselining phase you're meant to just check your blood glucose when you get up (ie fasted), then before each time you eat, and one to two hours after eating. Three days' of data gives you what they call your personal trigger. Then you move to 'hunger training' (this isn't part of the free spreadsheet, but you can have a go at it based on what the free version gives you) - that's where you wait until you are hungry, then test your BG. If it's below your trigger, you eat, if it's not, you wait. Pretty simple. Over time, your personal trigger gets lower.

A big part of it is teaching people to recognise when they actually need to eat (hence hunger training), as opposed to just thinking they need to (we all know hunger signals get messed up when you're overweight). And obviously there's the fasting aspect, if that's your thing. It focusses essentially on 'minimum effective dose', rather than extended fasts, with the idea being that people doing extended fasting are more likely to overeat and/or reach for calorie-dense rather than nutrient-dense foods when they break their fast.

Before anyone points out the blatantly obvious that you can just count cals to lose weight, well, yeah. This is another tool and I can see how it could be really useful for some people (particularly those with insulin resistance, pre-diabetic, etc). And as shocking as I know this concept is, not everyone wants to track calories and/or weigh their food. This would actually work really well in conjunction with a portion size estimate approach, I think.

Anyhoo, there you go, thoughts based on a mere week and not actually doing the full version. I did gain some insights and it helped me dial in some things in terms of meal timing. I thought about doing the 30 day challenge that starts tomorrow (they run these pretty regularly), but am planning to do their nutrient optimisation masterclass in Feb and have a diet break scheduled starting late Jan that would just throw everything out of whack.

Again, not affiliated with Optimising Nutrition in any way. I do recommend having a poke around their site though, they have a load of free stuff for getting more nutrition for your calorie buck, for anyone interesting in ensuring they actually are eating a well balanced diet.