What I Learned from Continuous Glucose Monitoring

One month of wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and using an app called Levels gave me an inside view of how food is metabolized in my body.  

Everyone should use one for at least 2 weeks to see how what they eat is affecting blood sugar levels. Our blood sugar levels greatly influence the likelihood of disease, weight gain, hormonal stability, alertness, and stamina.  

When you see a graph of your blood sugar levels throughout the day, you want the range of fluctuation to be tight so that it looks more like slow, gentle rises and gentle dips.  If it looks like an EKG, it’s trouble.

The opportunity to get continual information provided me many insights and confirmations. I learned that stress caused sharp spikes.  The order I ate made a significant difference as well as the fasting windows (periods of no eating or snacking) between meals.  When meals were glucose stable, snacks were unnecessary.  FYI, snacking keeps glucose levels elevated throughout the day - bad for weight loss, pre-diabetes, and above normal A1C.

Here are the takeaways that you can use to further customize your daily eating to bring down A1C levels, reduce insulin responses, reverse pre-diabetes and diabetes, and to lose weight.

1. Stress causes immediate spikes in glucose levels. When I experienced acute stress, an instant spike.  Likewise, relaxation before or after a meal mitigated the spike.
2. To reduce blood glucose - walk after your meal - 15 minutes is sufficient.  If you cannot walk, doing 10 air squats every 20 minutes a couple times works.  
3. Eating a salad before a meal greatly reduces spikes - EVEN when followed by a high glucose meal like pasta.
4. NEVER have sugar or a naked carb on an empty stomach - that includes in your coffee, teas, or matcha.  A bag of Skinny Pop, a few pretzels, or a mini-candy on an empty stomach produces a big spike in blood sugar.
5. The Bunny Muffin and Chocolate Love Bar are bakery all stars - keeping blood sugar low and stable. 
6. Brown rice spikes glucose almost as much as white rice.
7. Avocado is the best salad add-in to keep blood sugar low - beans and protein produce a subtle glucose spike.
8. Oat groats - used in our food delivery and coming to the cafe soon - have the perfect fiber to carb ratio to give you the satisfactions of something carby without causing glucose to rise.

How did Jolie perform?

I loved testing out the jolie meals at the cafe and for the food delivery programs. I know the science, but there is always a chance that when you see the data things don’t measure up.  Sign of relief - the jolie meals provided stable blood sugar: minimal, very gentle rise and fall.  This is great news if you are pre-diabetic, diabetic, lowering A1C, losing weight, or on your longevity journey like me.  

I did do some head to head comparisons of jolie versions of juices and smoothies versus other places.  Jolie juices and smoothies, won by a landslide in the competition for not raising blood glucose.  

As to the delivery programs all stars were the Soup Cleanse, 10 Day Reset, and Broth Cleanse.  The Optimized and Paleo programs kept blood sugar lowest; in the jolielife and vegan programs blood sugar was kept low and stable by eating the veggies first and beans, rice, quinoa, oats last.

For eating at the cafe: 

For breakfast or a snack your best choices are the energy bowl, frittata, smoked salmon toast on glow Bread, avocado toast on glow bread, the bunny muffin, and the chocolate love bar.

Salads, no surprise, are great lunch choices with our no sugar housemade dressing.  The bunless jolie burger and garden tacos are good choices too.

Keeping glucose low in your blood will reduce A1C levels, improve liver function, curb energy crashes, speed weight loss, and reverse diabetic conditions.  Eating jolie will make it easy for you to do all that.

Love,
Julia
​xo