Levels Experiment Day 5

It Aint Easy Eating Clean

This is a marked up screenshot of yesterday’s glucose levels. I was all over the map. I began the day with a spike and never recovered. Not horribly, but I received a below passing grade for my lack of metabolic stability.

I got a late start to the day, so no yoga stretching or any activity before or after breakfast.

Breakfast was one of my favorite low carb meals, an inside out eggroll. It was ground bison and broccoli, carrots, red cabbage, kohlrabi, and cauliflower. Sounds fancy, but the veggies came in a bag.

I thought it was safe to pair my sugary vitamins with breakfast. It was not. At least not safe to sit instead of walking or peddling after eating.

There are 6 grams of added sugar between the vitamins and probiotic gummies that I take.

What Does This Mean

Compare yesterday to today’s levels in the screeshot below. I ate the same breaksfast in the same quantity. I didn’t exercise before eating, and I didn’t take my sugar filled vitamins. But I did gently peddle my bike for 10 minutes after eating. And there is no spike in my glucose levels.

Taking 10 minutes to move about after eating seems to make all the difference in the world to my glucose levels. What’s really neat about that is it only takes a gentle movement, not some intense, hard-core exercise.

Lunch today was a bowl from Chipotle with chicken, pinto beans, fresh tomato salsa, roasted chili-corn salsa, tomatillo-green chili salsa, cheese, and romaine lettuce. I ate the whole bowl, and you can see there was no glucose spike.

You can also see I had a snack of chocolate followed by a bowl of chili for supper. Bison again, kidney beans, tomato, tomatillo, okra, onions, garlic, and celery.

It’s pretty handy to be able to take a picture of what you eat so that you can easily see what works and what doesn’t.

What About That Crash

This is interesting. It’s the second time I’ve rowed since I started wearing the glucose monitor, and it’s the second time my levels have crashed in response to rowing.

I think rowing is stressful enough - even easy rowing - that it uses up all my freely available glucose. That means my body should be trying to use the ample amount of stored energy I carry around with me. Rowing looks to be ideal for fat burning - once my body starts doing that again. And it will when it notices there isn’t a bunch of easy energy available.

In the meantime, I’m taking it easy because those crashes feel terrible.

Stay Tuned

I’ll keep posting my observations and results. I hope you are finding this experiment as interesting as I am.

• Levels
• Metabolic Health
• Health Experiment
• Healthy Diet
• Chronic Inflamation
• Exercise