What Is Continuous Glucose Monitor Device?
A CGM (continuous glucose monitor) device is an instrument that tracks your blood sugar levels, comprising a transmitter and a disposable sensor to be worn under the skin. This system, instead of using a finger prick to test your blood glucose at timely intervals, shares the electronic readings of your blood glucose in real-time, through different intervals of the day.
It is to be noted that continuous glucose monitor systems have been designed mainly for the benefit of type 1 or type 2 diabetes individuals to monitor their blood sugar levels consistently. It can be lifesaving as well for geriatric or older diabetics who may have low blood sugar levels at the time of night, especially. Similar benefits apply to epilepsy patients with sugar fluctuations, diabetic children or adolescents (type 1 diabetes), and end-stage renal disease.
Though CGMs may definitely be able to help detect your individual risk or onset of diabetes or prediabetes, they should not be used as a means to regulate your food patterns. Also, the common myth is that an increase in blood sugar would mean an increase in weight or vice versa. This is untrue according to current research because weight and blood sugar are two completely different factors influenced by an individual's diet, lifestyle choices, and physical activity. Being overweight is just one of the many factors that can predispose an individual to type 2 diabetes.
How Can CGM Lead To Disordered Eating in Healthy Individuals?
Most individuals who often read or look up too much health information in the media may often try new trends in pursuit of weight loss or for improving systemic health. While it is good to experiment with healthy lifestyle patterns and tips that can increase your overall metabolism, following fad diet patterns or influencing your diet through unscientific trends can result in long-term systemic imbalance. One such trend is the continuous glucose monitor that usually is advised for keeping track of blood sugar levels for all individuals who do not have diabetes.
While continuous glucose monitors can actually be lifesaving to chronic or severe diabetic individuals, when adapted for nondiabetic individuals, medical research shows that it can instead lead to overestimated expectations about weight loss, a negative impact on diet, and influencing daily diet by continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). This can lead to disordered eating or even restrictive eating that can take a toll on your long-term physical health, especially in individuals who are healthy otherwise and do not have diabetes.
Why Blood Sugar and Body Weight Are Distinct Factors?
Most people who are not aware of the difference between blood glucose and body weight further might delude themselves into thinking that they are making positive lifestyle choices by inducing dietary changes in their daily schedule. By linking continuous blood glucose monitoring with weight, these individuals who follow dietary plans or foods may instead,, in contrast, deprive themselves of essential nutrients or consume a balanced and nutrient-dense diet. It is important that every individual differentiates and is aware of the fact that while blood glucose fluctuations exist in almost everyone, there are multiple factors that influence a person being a prediabetic or a diabetic.
Further, weight gain or loss cannot be linked, particularly to blood glucose fluctuations all the time. In healthy individuals (with random blood glucose levels that are consistent and in range), the focus should be on consuming a nutrient-dense and varied diet. On the other hand, diabetes as a lifestyle disease can affect any age group in the modern-day trend or lifestyle patterns. Hence, keeping a check on your weight would prevent you from being predisposed to sudden weight gain or obesity that can be linked to type 2 diabetes or diabetes mellitus.
How Does CGM Affect Your Thinking?
For those individuals after getting a blood count and diabetic checkup done, you would get an idea regarding your random blood glucose, fasting blood glucose, postprandial blood glucose, and glycated hemoglobin (Hba1c) tests that are reliable indicators of your pancreatic health. Early detection or diagnosis of type 2 diabetes would ensure that your long-term health can stay influenced by positive changes or implementation in all the factors that are mentioned above. Most people who wear a CGM usually do so without even getting their basic tests of blood glucose monitoring or without checking if they are diabetic or not.
For example, many individuals who do not have diabetes mellitus may still use CGM to prioritize their dietary or eating plans or patterns. This would be one of the major flaws done by individuals in terms of their systemic health goals because, without even detecting the diagnosis of diabetes, if healthy individuals start compromising on their daily eating patterns and instead use CGM as a way to dictate their dietary schedule or as a scheme for weight loss, then it can lead both to mental and physical imbalance in an individual.
For healthier individuals who are prone to blood sugar fluctuations, while the exact cause would remain unknown, a healthcare professional like a dietician or even a registered healthcare provider like a nutritionist can guide you and personally advise you based on your body composition and systemic health status on what type of foods and schedule is best suited to you.
In contrast to benefits, you would instead be more paranoid about your sugar levels or fluctuations, and especially for those individuals who link their food patterns to CGM, it is an absolute error in your thinking. For example, some people tend to eliminate or reduce their overall intake of specific foods to lose weight, thinking in accordance with the daily CGM.
Conclusion:
What you would need to understand, according to the rationale given by world-renowned nutrition and dietary experts, is that blood sugar levels are not linked to weight at all and can be affected by more than just consuming your daily food. It is affected by your individual exercise patterns or level of activity, your daily hydration status, your sleep schedule, medical history or predisposition to any systemic diseases or illnesses, lifestyle or work stress and even based on simple factors like overexposure to sunlight and your daily caffeine intake as per current medical and nutrition research. Clinical research studies have completely disproved any working theories of CGM being impactful on weight loss. Neither can it help in weight management or control, nor can CGM help in tracking or making decisions on what foods you can consume in a day. This can further lead to eating behaviors like obsessing about healthy food only and restrictive eating that can result in nutrient imbalances.
