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Flat and boring

Published about 2 months ago • 1 min read

Hey Reader, Dr Karl here.

Flat and boring.
If you have ever worn a continuous glucose monitor, you already know what I am about to show you, and you probably did not know it was the point.

Four years ago her CGM trace was jagged. Peaks, drops, more peaks. Today it is a low flat line that barely moves all day.

Flat and boring. That is the target. I have been saying it since before CGMs were fashionable, and I still say it.

Put two people in front of the same ice cream cone. Both spike. But the insulin resistant one goes up higher and stays up. The other one rises like a sea swell and comes back down. Same food, two completely different curves. Give them both a slice of pizza and the difference gets worse: one is back to baseline in an hour, the other is still elevated hours later.

That is what insulin resistance is.

It is not a number. It is a shape. It is the inability to come back down.

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Here is the part I like about the CGM and why I ask for one when it is available. People cannot fake it. Someone can eat carefully the day before a blood draw. Nobody eats carefully for twelve straight days without it showing. I can eyeball a two-week trace and tell you which side of the line you are on before I look at a single lab value.

Her body did not just get better numbers. It changed what it believed about itself. Four years ago it was running the insulin resistant program. Now it runs the other one.

The traces are on screen in the video at about the three minute mark.

>> WATCH:

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Dr. Goldkamp

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