7: "Do I Need To Track My BLOOD SUGAR To Lose Weight?" [ASK DR. ANNA]

Blood sugar tracking is having a major moment right now. CGMs are showing up on everyone's arms, influencers are obsessing over glucose spikes, and suddenly it feels like monitoring your blood sugar is the secret to losing weight. But is it? 

In this episode of ASK DR. ANNA, Dr. Anna breaks down who actually needs to track blood sugar, who doesn't, and why for many people this trending approach can do more harm than good.

Dr. Anna shares real patient stories — including some surprising glucose readings that had absolutely nothing to do with food — and explains why blood sugar is far more complex than anything you ate for lunch.

Listen in to learn:

• Who genuinely needs blood sugar tracking — and who is probably overcomplicating their weight loss
• How A1C works as a three-month average and why trends matter more than a single number
• A real patient story where overnight snacking was silently driving high nighttime glucose
• Why low blood sugar can actually be more dangerous than high blood sugar in the moment
• The non-food factors that quietly change your readings — sleep, stress, illness, hormones, medications, and even time of day
• Why misreading glucose data can lead to unnecessary fear and unhealthy food restriction
• Why fruit keeps getting blamed for blood sugar spikes — and why that's usually the wrong conclusion
• A client story where tracking actually increased anxiety and disrupted both eating and training
• A surprising glucose spike from exercise — and the biology behind why that happens
• When blood sugar tracking might be worth trying — and when to skip it entirely
• Why getting the fundamentals right will always beat expensive biohacking for sustainable weight loss

Drop your thoughts on this topic in the comments and keep your questions coming — Dr. Anna may answer yours in a future episode!

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Transcript

Do You Need A CGM?

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A viewer just asked me, Dr. Anna, do I need to be tracking my blood sugar to lose weight? And with all these ads everywhere for continuous glucose monitors or CGMs right now, I realize we kind of need to talk about this. So this video is for you. If you're wondering whether you should be monitoring your blood sugar, buying one of these CGM devices, testing after every meal, or not just to lose weight, because you've seen the influencers are wearing them. Companies are marketing these things for weight loss left and right, and people are posting their glucose spikes on Instagram or Facebook like it's something to flaunt. This is becoming one of the most common questions that I get from patients and people online. And the thing is, the answer is probably going to totally surprise you. My honest take on this? Well, here's what it's not. It is not a magic tool that everybody needs for weight loss. But for some of you, it actually may be a good move. And we're going to talk about that. Plus, what most people do not understand is that there are so many factors that affect blood sugar besides just food. There are factors that are going to make you think that you're doing something wrong when maybe you're not. And I will tell you actually about my own shocking personal experience with tracking my own blood sugar. So be sure to stick around for the entire video because by the end, you're going to finally understand the whole story here, probably better than almost everyone else

When Tracking Is Truly Necessary

SPEAKER_00 1:26

around you. Hey, I'm Dr. Anna. Welcome to my series where I answer real questions that I get from viewers like you. These are honest conversations about weight loss, real life, and cutting out all the BS from these topics. Yes, I'm a medical doctor, but know that these conversations do not constitute formal medical advice. This is really just my personal take on these things being a medical doctor. And it's also important to keep in mind that your personal health situation is unique to you. So if you have personal questions about what's going on for you, I cannot encourage you enough to talk to your own healthcare provider. But I just hope that these conversations are going to help us all think through these topics in a little bit more depth so that it can help you out. Let's talk about first when blood sugar tracking is actually important. Let me start by saying for some people, tracking their blood sugar is absolutely necessary and life-changing. So I'm gonna tell you a story, and this is something that I actually see frequently in my patients that I work with in my clinical practice. So once upon a time, I had a patient who was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and she had the diagnosis for years. So she had been dealing with checking blood sugar for a while. She came to me as a new patient. She was really frustrated. So I had to kind of unpack the whole situation with her from the get-go. So she was on medications for her diabetes. She was really trying to eat healthy. She was trying to lose weight, do all the things right. But in the months preceding seeing me, she noticed her A1C was just going up and up and up, even though she was putting in all her effort and she was doing everything she could to try to control her diabetes. So the doctor she had seen before had been telling her to be checking her blood sugar. And it took her a while to get in the rhythm of that, which is something that we see pretty commonly. It can be really tedious for people to check their blood sugar multiple times a day before meals. So after a long time, she did get the hang of it, but she was honest with me. She wasn't always perfectly consistent. That's normal. We see that a lot. So I said, okay, I need to see your numbers. We need to look at the data together because in order for us to really understand why your A1C number keeps going up, we gotta see the trends. It's not enough to just see that summary point. I have to see kind of what's happening underneath the hood and why is this important? So if you're somebody listening and you are maybe you have diabetes, maybe you have pre-diabetes or it runs in your family, what is the A1C telling us in summary, without being too technical? The A1C number is basically a 90-day or a three-month summary of how well controlled your blood sugar has been. It is just an average. It does not tell us the actual fluctuations in blood sugar throughout the day. That's why there's an importance of seeing both our A1C number and actual trends because it gives us the full picture. So remember, your A1C does not tell you the nitty-gritty details. It just sort of tells you like a bird's eye view in general, how well controlled is your blood sugar. So this patient of mine, she, after showing me the trends in the A1C, she went back to the drawing board and she started checking her blood sugars very regimented so that we could look at them together in her next appointment. So that meant first thing in the morning, she was fasting before eating anything, blood sugar check. Before every time she wanted to eat, before a meal, before a snack, blood sugar check. Before she went to bed, blood sugar check. It can be annoying, it can be a lot of work, but it's so helpful for you and for your healthcare provider to understand so that you can come up with a better plan. So here's what we saw at her next appointment. During the day, her numbers actually looked really good. And it honestly surprised me because her A1C number wasn't really in a healthy range. So I expected it to be kind of all over the place throughout the day, her sugar. But here's what we saw. During the day, she was pretty well controlled. She was pretty much in the range we wanted her to be. But she was super high all night long. There would be huge spikes in her blood sugar in the middle of the night. Sometimes her blood sugar was into the 300s at like two or three or four o'clock in the morning. And so I said, What is going on at nighttime? This is what she told me. She was keeping snacks next to her bed, and she actually had an alarm set in her phone, and she would wake herself up every couple of hours to eat some snacks. Crackers, grapes, sometimes chocolate or candy in the middle of the night. I asked her, why was she doing that? What was going on? So what she told me was a friend previously had made her really scared that during nighttime, while she was asleep, her blood sugar could drop. And for any of you with diabetes, you might know low blood sugars are much more dangerous than high blood sugars on average. So we counsel people, like doctors, care a lot about your blood sugar never getting too low because this is very dangerous. So she had a friend who told her that, hey, what if when you're asleep, your blood sugar would drop really low and that freaked her out? And so she made a commitment to herself to never let that happen to her. And so what she was doing was forcing herself awake in the middle of the night, eating something and going back to bed several times a night every night. So this was the clarification that I needed as her doctor. No wonder her A1C looked kind of bad because it really wasn't a good plan. What she was doing was actually not healthy for her body, and it did not mirror at all what the body is supposed to naturally be able to do when it comes to blood sugar processing. Her blood sugars should not be high throughout the time we're sleeping, because that's supposed to be a time when we're not eating. So, of course, this made her medication management so much harder for her prior doctor. And so when she told me this, now we could actually address the underlying problems for her. And we got to the bottom of it, and that was super important. So understand when your doctor is asking for this data, I know it can be really frustrating to check your blood sugar. If you're somebody with diabetes and your doctor's asking you to do this, please understand this is actually necessary if you're in this situation to keep you safe. Because if we're not, let's say you're on insulin, if we're not able to understand your eating pattern correctly, we are not able to dose your insulin correctly. And so that is where scary consequences can actually come in. But we only know what you share with us and what you tell us. So, back to the patient, what happened with her. So the information that she gave me in our appointment completely changed how we were able to plan her medications and how I was able to talk to her about healthy eating for her diabetes. So we stopped all that night eating, that wasn't really working for her, and I was able to re-time when she took insulin throughout the day so that we address her fear of not getting too low at night. So her long-acting insulin, if any of you have diabetes, you know what I'm talking about. Instead of her taking that at night, which a lot of people do, I just had her do it in the morning so she would never be afraid that randomly in the middle of the night her blood sugar would drop. So anyway, we fixed the insulin timing, we fixed her eating pattern, and lo and behold, three months later at my appointment with her, her A1C already dropped by 2.5 percentage points. That's pretty good. So obviously, it was working for her. The blood sugar tracking in her case was absolutely essential, as you probably can tell. So now, if you have diabetes, whether it's type one or type two, and you're on insulin, blood sugar tracking is crucial, probably for you. So if your doctor told you to check your blood sugars, please do what they say, especially if you're on some of these medications. You really do have to understand what your blood sugar trend is doing, again, to know if the medications are dosed correctly to keep you safe. That's the reason this matters. It's not to try to pump you full of drugs you don't need. It's actually to keep you safe because there are consequences when blood sugar is too low. And there are also long-term consequences when blood sugar is too high for too long. I don't think I have to tell any of you what the classic consequences of uncontrolled diabetes is. They're really bad. People lose their toes, they lose their limbs, they have really bad kidney problems, really bad vision problems, on and on. So if you're somebody who has prediabetes and you're actually in the situation where you're not on any medications yet, because you're only in the prediabetes range, and you're trying to prevent this from going full-blown diabetes, for you, it's possible that tracking could be helpful. So this would be a great question for your doctor. Or if your doctor, for whatever reason, just recommended that you be checking your blood sugars because of maybe it's just how your labs are or your family history, please listen to them. For these kinds of situations, the glucose monitors that are the CGMs, the continuous glucose monitors, the ones that people have kind of on their arm that stay there for two weeks. Yeah, those have been game-changing for people. Literally life-changing. They don't have to be sticking their fingers dozens of times a day. So that is where I would say it's perfectly appropriate for somebody to have a CGM. This could be an amazing tool for you. You would learn then also which foods can spike you, which foods can keep you stable, different times in the day when your blood sugar is high or low. Maybe it's close to when you've eaten or far away. It's you get so much amazing data from it. So it's honestly really cool to kind of learn your own body. Plus, then you can make tweaks and adjust your diet and adjust your daily routine, your medications, everything. It's just so much helpful data for you, for your doctor, and it ultimately is there because it protects your health. But here's the actual key question. If you don't fall in these categories, let's say you don't have diabetes, you're not on any of these medications, your doctor never told you that they think you should track your blood sugar, then it's kind of a question mark. Do you need to even be tracking at all? This is where it gets complicated. And this is, I think, where the really juicy part of the conversation starts.

A1C Vs Daily Trends Explained

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Because what nobody tells you is this your blood sugar is affected by way more stuff than just what you eat. And if you don't know that, the numbers are gonna drive you absolutely bonkers. So you have to understand this. Your blood sugar does not just respond to meals and snacks, it responds to sleep and tiredness, to stress, to illness, to exercise, to hormones and medications and so many other factors. So I'm gonna tell you a personal story. I don't do this that often in my content where I talk about my own health journey, but I think it's important here because I learned a huge lesson, and I think a lot of you will also learn a lot from hearing the story. So when I was pregnant with my daughter, I had to do the classic glucose tolerance test. So any of you ladies out there who have had a child, you've been pregnant before, you'll remember this. They make you schlug this really sweet, kind of nasty tasting drink, and then you have to sit there, and then one hour later, they're gonna check your blood sugar, and then they're screening you for something called gestational diabetes or diabetes that's diagnosed while you're pregnant. So when I did this test, now full Monty, I do not already, or at this point, I did not already carry a diagnosis of diabetes. I was coming into this test with no history of any of this. The test came back and it was flagged as abnormal. I actually got like a high, a high result, and I was shocked. Now, if any of you follow my content online, you know that I am obsessed with nutrition and healthy eating. I'm a medical doctor. This is literally my favorite topic of the world. I take a lot of care about what I eat and my activity. So I really would never have expected to get a high result on a test like this. And actually, I was really angry when this happened because I thought, like, of all people like me, this is impossible. How is this, how is this the case? And then I thought about it. And I thought about when I took the test. Now, to take this blood test, or you know, the test for the screening of gestational diabetes, you have to take it fasting in the morning. So I woke up, I had eaten nothing yet in the day. You drink the drink, one hour later, they test your blood sugar. And so you're kind of going in with a clean sleep. So I thought, I did, I did what they told me to do. Why was my result high? But I thought about what was actually going on. What was that day like for me? Well, the night before, I only slept three hours. Horrible. I got a horrible night of sleep. Duh, pregnancy. This is what happens to us. And at the same time, I was fighting off a virus. I was still dealing with a head cold that I was having trouble getting rid of. And of course, a bad night of sleep was not helping me feel better faster. So my body was just under a lot of stress. So when I went to my next doctor's appointment and we talked about these results, she said to me, Hey, Anna, I think you really need to repeat the test. I actually want you to do the longer one. And um, we just let's just double check. Because I told her, I said, I I really find these results kind of shocking. And maybe there's an error. Maybe the lab made an error. She said, I don't think the lab made an error, but I agree. Let's repeat the test. So the next time I was going in full guns blazing, I thought, I'm gonna get the best night of sleep of my life. I'm gonna wait till I'm not sick and schedule it on my own time when I'm feeling super zen and relaxed. That's exactly what I did. So what happened the second time? I actually took a longer version of that test the second time. The first one I did the one hour where they only check your blood sugar one time. The second time I did the test, I did the three-hour version. So they check your blood sugar four times at the start, then you drink the drink, and then one hour, two hours, and three hours after that. So you get a lot of data. And I looked at the results and I said, wow, what happened? Every single number was literally perfectly in the center of the normal range at every single time point. And I thought, this is actually insane because I am the same person. I still did the same things, except the difference was I changed how much sleep I got and I wasn't sick. So I have the same genetics, the same family history. I am the same person. I kind of did a perfect uh research study against myself. I overall eat the same diet in general, but I had totally different blood sugar test results from one day to another because the conditions were different. So this taught me an absolutely critical lesson, and it really woke me up to not just thinking about blood sugar in general, but also how I talk to my own patients about blood sugar and how I want you to think about it today. While I knew these other factors mattered in theory, I had never seen hardproof before. When we talk about blood sugar in a clinical setting, so let's say when you go to the doctor, your doctor talks to you about your blood sugar. My guess is that 95% of that conversation is about your medications and what you're eating. And that all these other things are probably not the focus of talking about what's keeping your blood sugar numbers, you know, low or high, wherever they're at. So here's the lesson: sleep deprivation, we know this, it raises our blood sugar, partly because it affects our hormones. So when we don't sleep enough, our body releases more stress hormones, things like cortisol. It also affects the insulin response in the body. So something called insulin resistance, which is what causes type 2 diabetes, it gets worse if we undersleep. We actually do know this. Research has already told us this. So, for example, if you're sleeping just five hours a night, then you test your blood sugar the next day, likely it will be higher than if you slept a solid seven and a half, eight and a half, nine hours, whatever your number is, where you wake up feeling super refreshed. We also know that illness, having a cold, a virus, being sick, raises our blood sugar. Again, similar to the reasons why being underslept is going to affect it, raising the stress in your body. And it's also all that inflammation that your body is fighting while it's sick. How about psychological stress, like life stress, work stress, emotional stress, family stress, again, raising our cortisol, raises our blood sugar. Same thing. The hormones, how about women's hormones when they fluctuate different parts of their menstrual cycle? I'm not an expert in women's health. I really just focus on other topics in clinical practice. I'm not a gynecologist, but at the same time, for sure, they're going to be affecting different things in our cycle and different things in our body and very likely our blood sugar. Certain medications we know affect this. Even

The Night Snacking Diabetes Trap

SPEAKER_00 18:31

the time of day when you take your blood sugar makes a difference. The irony is we like to have people doing a lot of blood sugar tests when they're fasting. And the time of the day when it's most convenient for people to fast is right when they wake up in the morning after they've not eaten anything all night. But we also know that we get a cortisol spike in the morning. That's a natural thing that our body does. It is part of the mechanism to help wake us up. So maybe that's also skewing the results, right? Here's why this all matters and why we're digging into such detail today. If you're somebody who's wearing one of these continuous glucose monitors on your arm or such, and you see your blood sugar spike suddenly, you might start to think, oh my gosh, I ate the wrong thing. What am I doing wrong? But it actually could be from something completely other than your food. Maybe it was because of your sleep. Maybe it was because you're dealing with stress. Maybe it was because you have been sick. Maybe it was because of something else going on, or you're just stressed about work, or you just ended a workout, or you're, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's other things that are affecting our blood sugar, as we just talked about. Now, if you don't understand how to think through all these other factors, you may wrongly start to blame your diet or the food that you've eaten. And that might have nothing to do with the problem. The risk is you start cutting out foods unnecessarily. And I see people do this with fruit so much. Fruit is, yes, it's sweet. There's naturally occurring sugar in there. But unfortunately, I see people with diabetes all the time in comments online talk about how fruit is so bad for your diabetes, but it's actually in according to all the science of the research, we know it's net positive because it's a whole healthy whole food. It's got lots of fiber in there. It's not anything like drinking straight juice or having a piece of candy. And so that's always a shame when I see people cutting out a really healthy food because they think that that's the problem and the culprit, and it's probably not at all. The risk is that you'll obsess over every little spike in your blood sugar if you have one of these continuous monitors without understanding the context, if we're not thinking about this right. Blood sugar tracking really only makes sense if you understand what you're looking at. And so, what I recognize from my own experience with this test for most people who are not in a category like we talked about at the beginning, where they have diabetes or they're on one of these medications, or their, you know, their doctor actually recommends it, they may actually get more harm than good from seeing all their numbers because fluctuations throughout the day are completely normal and expected. Our body is designed to handle fluctuations. Of course, we don't want them to go too high or too low, but we should have fluctuations. So, for example, a spike to let's say 140, 150, even up to 200 after a meal, if you don't have diabetes, that actually might be okay and normal for you. Your body's gonna bring it back down. There are mechanisms at play in your body that are doing that. If you are staring at a graph all day long, watching every single rise and fall, you will drive yourself crazy over what might be considered normal physiology. So if you do not have diabetes, if you are not in the category of people that we talked about earlier who should be checking their blood sugar, and your blood sugar is affected by all these other factors beyond food, do you think you actually need a CGM for weight loss? Okay, let's talk about that because this is where people, I think, unfortunately are wasting a lot of money. So, continuous glucose monitors. Let's dig into this. They are really hot right now on the market. I see companies all over the place telling people that they need to track all their data, have all these wearables. We live in this age of technology. We should use it to our advantage. It's amazing. You can study your metabolism and all this stuff, right? They're marketed really hard, especially for weight loss. But unfortunately, if it's not clinically indicated for you, you probably have to pay out of pocket. They are not cheap. They are, they tend to be expensive. And the risk is they're actually making things worse for you, and you're just becoming obsessed and neurotic about it. So let me tell you this story. I had a client I worked with online, and she told me she had bought one of these CGMs, and I was not working with her in a clinical setting. So we were not doing medications and labs and stuff. We were just doing the lifestyle stuff, just talking about her diet and exercise routine. But she shared with me that she thought, and she was recommended by a friend to buy one of these CGMs for the benefits of weight loss. And she told me she spent between $200 and $300 a month to have these sensors. And so I said, you know, people are allowed to do whatever they want, and that's fine. She was excited about it. But I knew the back of my mind, like, eh, this might become problematic if it gets in the way of her seeing the big picture. So she was using this thing and we started working together within two weeks. She was literally getting obsessed with the numbers, and she was almost freaking out over every little peak and valley, every little spike and then drop. She would eat an apple and then she would see her blood sugar go up and she freaked out. And then she also told me like she didn't think she could eat certain pieces of fruit. And then she would do a workout and she would see it spike even higher than if she ate the sugary snack. And she thought she was doing something wrong. So she changed up the moves she was doing in the gym. And she would have some rice with her dinner. And then she would see, oh, if she had rice instead of potatoes that were cooked in oil, she she was nervous that the rice was worsening her blood sugar and making her fatter. And so she said, I can't eat rice anymore. And she cut that out. So after a couple of appointments, I tried not to intervene too much with her analysis of this because I find it really important for people to kind of come to their own conclusions. I never like to be the food police with people I work with. That's not my style at all. Instead, I want us to come up with a regimen for you that makes sense with your life, but also brings you peace and harmony. So eventually she was basically in tears, said, I don't understand. I'm doing everything right, but then my blood sugar's all over the place and it makes me think I'm actually doing everything wrong,

CGMs For Diabetes And Prediabetes

SPEAKER_00 24:56

and this isn't working for me. So when we really looked at her blood sugar numbers together, because again, I was just working with her online. I wasn't really seeing her numbers. I was only seeing what she told me. But I said, you know, I actually think we need to talk about this because this is affecting things for you. All these spikes, like her numbers were totally normal. These were typical physiologic responses. They even when they would quote go high, they weren't really that high. They weren't high and in a concerning way from a doctor's perspective. So this is all to say that her body was just bringing everything back into its normal range in the amount of time that it needed to. She didn't really have a blood sugar problem like she was telling herself. She just created a lot of anxiety over the over-monitoring. So I want to drive this point home because I see a lot of people dealing with stuff like this. Another quick story. Once, and this is a personal anecdote, I actually got to wear a CGM. They weren't giving them out at work, and I thought, yes, I want to have the experience of wearing one as well. So I got one, they last two weeks. So I had it on for two weeks. And I said to myself, you know, I want to change literally nothing about my normal routine and my eating. So I just wanted to know how my normal stuff was affecting my blood sugar. And a big assumption that a lot of people make is that, for example, smoothies are really bad because they'll spike your blood sugar. And I enjoy a lot of protein smoothies. I make them at home. They're super convenient, easy for me to take to the hospital. So when I make a smoothie, I always include protein, whether it's yogurt, protein powder, whatever I'm feeling. I add in fiber. Sometimes it's oats, sometimes it's chia seeds. I always have some chunky nut butter in there at the end. Um, so sometimes there's crunchy nut bits. And then there's always healthy fats, whether it's almond butter, peanut butter, etc. So, and fruits and sometimes spinach. So different kinds of produce. So, long story short, my version of a smoothie is really like a complete meal. It just ends up getting liquefied. I expected this to make my blood sugar go up a lot because people make this argument all the time. Well, you're blenderizing all the fiber, so you're losing the benefit of the fiber and the smoothie, which means it's not going to prevent your blood sugar from spiking as much as if you just ate the whole fruits. And I can kind of wrap my head around that argument. So when I had this CGM on and I was having my normal smoothie, I was honestly super shocked that my blood sugar basically didn't go up much at all after eating the smoothie. When did I actually have my biggest glucose spike of the day? It was very surprising to me. It actually did not correlate to any of my meals. The time when my blood sugar was highest was right after I did some weight lifting. It spiked way up, and within like 30 minutes, it dropped super back down. And I was so surprised because I didn't even eat a snack before doing this workout. So what I intuitively understood because I've studied the body and I kind of know how things work, I said, oh, this actually makes sense when we are lifting weights and we are squeezing our muscles. We're releasing something called glycogen or stored sugar from our muscles into our bloodstream. That's part of the process that allows our body and our muscles to have enough energy during exercise. So I said, that's kind of cool. Like the reason this happens is X, Y, and Z. And I also recognize at the same time, I bet a lot of people don't understand this. Again, like my other story, I was the same person. I had the same genetics, but two different contexts. One was a food-related context, one was an exercise one, totally different results. And results that I didn't even expect. So here's the thing if you're listening to this, you have to understand these CGMs, if you're buying them commercially, they can cost a couple hundred bucks every month for most people if it's not clinically indicated and insurance isn't going to pay for it. Now, it is fine if you want to shell out the money and you have fun with it and it's not causing you anxiety, but let's put this in perspective, it can cost up to maybe $5,000 a year. And if it's

Blood Sugar Is Not Just Food

SPEAKER_00 29:12

not really indicated for you and it's not helping you feel better and giving you actual results, what is the point? A lot of people who are trying to lose weight, I would argue that money is better spent on so many other things. Go to the gym, work with a trainer, even one gym trainer session to learn how to really move your body in a healthy, safe way. That's actually going to give you weight loss results. Try some cooking classes. Work with a dietitian or a nutritionist if you've never done that. Buy higher quality food. Come join me online with our fun programs where I can help you navigate how to do all these things easier. And so my point is CGMs are really designed for patients with diabetes. They were designed for people with a diagnosis who need real-time data to manage medications and prevent dangerous swings of their blood sugar. For somebody without a diagnosis of diabetes or another indication to be checking their blood sugar regularly, there's a risk that all this data and all this info is just noise. So, yes, you're gonna see your blood sugar go up after you eat some carbs. That is what is supposed to happen. That's actually considered healthy and normal. Because in order for your body to release the hormone called insulin to get the sugar into the cells, you need to have your blood sugar raised. That sends the signal to the pancreas, the organ that makes that hormone. And then it should naturally bring it back down. Again, that's normal. That's what we want. Seeing the graph does not change the fact that eating whole foods, balancing your plate, moving your body with the right amounts of exercise and the right types of exercise are what matter most for weight loss. You do not need a graph to tell you that eating a donut is going to spike your blood sugar more than eating salmon with vegetables and rice. You already knew that. That is common sense. So remember, with my story, my blood sugar after I did weightlifting, if I had not been wearing a CGM and I didn't understand this context, well, I'd have thought that weightlifting was maybe bad for me. But it's actually one of the best things for metabolic health, blood sugar regulation overall, and weight loss. We know this. So the spike was just my muscles using the stored energy inside of them for their normal functioning. And that is a good thing. So here's my honest take on this topic. If you can't tell, this is like a hot button topic for me, that it's kind of it's hit a nerve. What you need to do are still the basics for weight loss. There's no going around eating healthy foods, whole foods, vegetables, fruits, high-quality proteins, managing your portion sizes, getting enough sleep, moving your body enough, managing your stress. Those are the fundamentals that will never be false. A CGM is not going to necessarily teach you to do those things. It will give you data on the results of your behaviors and your habits, but there's a risk it's just going to create a ton of anxiety if you don't understand the context of what you're looking at and you don't know how to sift through all that data. Plus, for a lot of people, seeing every single spike is just going to create an unhealthy relationship with food. There's a term for being obsessed with our health routines, it's called orthorexia. And unfortunately, I see this a lot in the online nutrition community, people who are pushing all of this, like get all the data stuff. I don't think that's mentally healthy for most of us in general. More data is not always better. So if you know that you've tried a CGM or you're thinking about it, but you run the risk of feeling anxious about having all this information and it wouldn't be helpful for you, then you can skip it. Just because your friend likes it doesn't mean you have to get one. Now, are there exceptions to all these situations? Sure. If you're very curious and you just want to have one for a little bit of time just to learn about your body more, I think that's so empowering. That's what I did. I wore one just for two weeks to have the experience, and I'm glad I did because I learned a lot. So that would be a good time to do it. But if you know you're somebody who's gonna start obsessing or you worry that you don't know how to interpret the data adequately, it's okay to just skip this trend. Some people will find it interesting and educational, but for most folks I work with, and it's possible you are one of these people, it is an expensive distraction from the basics and it's just anxiety-producing. So, what is the best approach for weight loss? How should we think about our blood sugar for weight loss? I really just am going to drive this home every episode of the series and all my content. I really believe the focus is on building healthy, foundational habits first. Nothing negates that. If you do that and you're still struggling, then maybe consider the more advanced tools. But please don't skip the fundamentals and then jump straight to these expensive biohacking devices. You're putting the cart before the horse with that. And that's a big risk. So let's just put some of these pieces together because we just dove into a lot. Blood sugar tracking is crucial if you're a certain person. If you have a diagnosis where it's important, like diabetes, even potentially pre-diabetes, if you're on a medication where it's important to know what your blood sugar numbers are, if your doctor told you to do this for whatever reason. But if you're just thinking about one of these devices for weight loss, it's not necessary. You can be so successful with weight loss without knowing any numbers. And there's a risk. Knowing more numbers about yourself and knowing more data may create a lot of fear and anxiety, and it may actually distract you from the important things that you really do need to be doing to lose weight successfully. The other thing we have to keep in mind is that our blood sugar is affected by so many factors beyond food. Remember, sleep, stress, illness, exercise, not just apples or rice or whatever sexy video online you've seen that has told you to be afraid of this or that food. Focusing on the fundamentals first will not only speed up your results, it'll probably save you a lot of money on not buying things you really don't need. So I want to hear from you guys. Drop your thoughts on this topic in the comment section and please give me more questions. I want to answer more of these questions for you because I actually have a lot of fun making these videos and I love diving into topics where a lot of people ask me things over and over and over, and I realize it's a classic point of confusion for most folks. So I want to make these episodes as useful as possible. And so once you do that, comment them below and then jump into the rest of the series up here where I answer more questions that you have, and I think you're gonna like those episodes. I'll see you over there.