Welcome back to Blasphemous Nutrition—the podcast where we burn diet dogma at the altar and build real health from the wreckage.
My name is Aimee, and I’m a double-degreed functional nutritionist who doesn’t need a Bluetooth-enabled arm patch to know that skipping lunch and rage-snacking at 4pm might not be optimal.
Today we’re digging into one of the trendiest new rituals of the wellness world: continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs. CGMs have been used in clinical practice with diabetic patients for several years now, but with FDA approving direct to consumer use in September 2024, now it seems everyone is sporting them like they are a fashion trend. Maybe you’ve seen them on influencers, maybe your cousin’s wearing one, maybe you’re wearing one right now and trying to decide if your oat milk latte was a metabolic sin.
Here’s the deal: I’m definitely not anti-CGM. I’m against unquestioned obsession, bad science interpretation, and the slow spiral from awareness into anxiety.
If you’ve been wondering whether a CGM could be your holy grail—or your next health cult initiation—buckle up. We’re about to separate the data-driven insights from the digital distractions.
Let’s Go!
WTF Is a CGM and Why Are We All Suddenly Using One?
Okay, let’s start with the basics—because not everyone listening is deep in the Church of Biohacking, and even if you are, you might still be confused about what the hell you’re actually wearing on your arm is telling you and what it means.
CGM stands for Continuous Glucose Monitor.
It’s a small device—usually stuck to the back of your upper arm—that uses a teeny-tiny filament inserted just under the skin to measure the glucose levels in your interstitial fluid every few minutes. It does NOT measure your bloodstream directly, but the surrounding fluid. So there’s a little bit of lag, a little bit of nuance, and not the same number you’ll find if you use a traditional glucose monitor where you have to prick your finger.
These were originally designed for people with Type 1 diabetes or insulin-dependent Type 2—so they could monitor dangerous highs and lows and adjust their insulin accordingly. You know, medical necessity.
But in the last few years, CGMs have gone from clinical tool to wellness flex. You’ve now got CEOs, influencers, and “longevity experts” slapping them on like it’s the new FitBit. There are start-ups pushing $200/month subscriptions to tell you that your glucose spiked after you ate a banana. No shit, Sherlock.
So how did we get here?
I think it is safe to say this is a consequence of the rise of “precision nutrition.”
Don’t get me wrong—individualized nutrition is the future. But what I am seeing with CGMs right now is less about personalization and more about perfectionism in disguise.
We’ve turned blood sugar—a normal, fluctuating, context-dependent marker—into a kind of metabolic morality test.
“Oh no, I spiked!”
“Oh wow, I’m so flat today!”
“I only do Zone 2 Cardio because it doesn’t spike my blood sugar!”
And let’s be clear: some of the stuff getting shared on social media? Total garbage. Like people demonizing potatoes. Or bragging that their post-meal glucose stayed perfectly flat because they skipped the carbs altogether. That's not blood sugar balance—that's fear dressed up as discipline.
So if you’ve been curious, tempted, or maybe already logging your numbers and low-key spiraling, stay with me. Because if your health strategy has you afraid of fruit, I promise—it’s no longer a strategy. It’s a disorder with a data dashboard.
This is what actually happens when you start tracking every blip and bump in your blood sugar like it’s a stock ticker. It can quickly turn awareness into obsession.
The Problem with Metabolic Micromanagement
Here’s the thing: I’m all for information. Science is my friend. I love that we have a decent alternative to pricking one’s finger. And I love data - But only when it’s interpreted through a lens of context and critical thinking.
And that’s where CGMs can go sideways—fast.
Because when you start looking at that little blood sugar graph every few minutes, it stops being a tool and starts being a judge. Or a priest. And you gotta step into that metabolic confessional booth.
“Forgive me Father, for I have spiked.”
There are three primary dangers of metabolic micromanagement I tend to see:
🚩 1. Hypervigilance & Food Fear
It starts innocent. You’re curious. You want to know what your body’s doing. But then… you have one “bad” spike, and suddenly you’re second guessing the health attributes of quinoa.
You start avoiding certain foods—not because they make you feel bad, but because they make your graph look “bad,” you’re checking your phone mid-meal like it’s a glucose horcrux and eventually you stop eating out because you are worried your “numbers will go up.”
This is no longer healthy, at this point you are in a slow slide into orthorexia with a tech upgrade.
🚩 2. False Equivalence: A Rise is not Necessarily a Problem
A blood sugar rise isn’t inherently bad. This is counter to what you will see some influencers brag about on the internet. So let me say that again: A post-meal glucose spike is normal. It’s expected. It’s physiological. It’s not a sign of metabolic doom.
But CGMs and Bro Science don’t explain that. They just show you a line going up, and suddenly people are thinking:
“This means I’m doing something wrong.”
“My body is broken.”
“I need to cut even more carbs.”
Wrong, wrong, and maybe wrong.
A spike after a balanced meal that includes carbs? Normal.
A spike after a donut on an empty stomach? Still not a crisis—just context.
Blood sugar is a dynamic system. It is not supposed to be flat.
Flatlining is not how human biology works—and trying to force your glucose to stay perfectly level at all times is like trying to keep a campfire at the exact same flame height no matter what fuel you throw in. Just as it’s totally unreasonable to expect this, it’s also unnecessary to achieve metabolic health.
Blood sugar is dynamic. It's supposed to respond.
You eat something? It rises.
You move your body? It may drop. Or, it may spike up high! This causes lots of panic is my clients just starting a CGM.
You get stressed or sleep like trash? It might be elevated for these reasons as well.
That doesn’t mean you are in a state of dysfunction. It’s your body adjusting—doing its job.
Your blood sugar responds to:
What’s on your plate
How fast you ate it
How long you slept
How much muscle mass you have
Whether you’re ovulating, stressed, or stuck in meetings all day
...and about a dozen other things you can’t see on your CGM
This isn’t a closed system with a single dial. It’s more like air traffic control—there are planes landing, taking off, rerouting, and circling all day long.
And guess what? That’s a healthy system. That’s resilience.
Now, if you’re spiking like crazy, crashing hard, or walking around in a brain fogged rage every day? Yeah, we should talk.
But one post-lunch bump in your graph doesn’t mean your metabolism is failing. It means your body is alive and responding.
We need to stop chasing flatlines like it’s a prize. metabolic health isn’t aschieved through rigid control—it’s brought about by creating adaptability.
You don’t need your blood sugar to be still.
You need it to be responsive and adaptable.
And responsive, adaptable systems aren’t flatlines.
They’re flexible, messy, and smart as hell—just like the rest of your body when it’s supported instead of micromanaged.
🚩 3. Reductionism: The One-Number Fallacy
Some people start believing that as long as their blood sugar stays flat, they’re doing everything right, even if they’re under-eating, over-caffeinating, skipping sleep, and hanging on by a thread emotionally to get there.
If the line is flat, they think they’re winning.
That’s like saying your house is fine because the thermostat looks stable—while the roof is leaking and the basement’s on fire.
Flat glucose does not equal thriving. It can sometimes just mean… you’re not eating enough. Or you’re afraid to.
When a CGM Might Actually Be Useful
Okay. So far I sound like the anti-tech prophet with a vendetta against wearable glucose devices— so let’s come back to center.
CGMs are not evil.
I actually use them in my practice often. However, they are currently overhyped, under-explained, and misused. In the right context, with the right mindset, they can actually powerful tools for insight and health.
So let’s see when it makes sense to use a CGM—and how to do it without losing your mind, your meals, or your self-worth.
Use Case #1: You’ve been told you have insulin resistance, prediabetes, or PCOS
The first and most valuable use case scenario for CGM use is if you have been diagnosed with IR, Prediabetes, or PCOS. This is is the original purpose of a CGM— for clinical support.
If you’ve got legit blood sugar dysregulation and not just curiosity dressed up as biohacking, CGMs can be incredible tools to help you improve your glucose regulation or even pull yourself out of pre-diabetes.
If you’re in this camp, a CGM can help you:
See how your body responds to specific meals
Track true highs and lows
Make targeted, meaningful shifts to improve your health without guessing
But even then, I recommend doing this with a practitioner. Because interpreting this data solo is kinda like doing your own taxes blindfolded—with Latin instructions. And then knowing what to do with the data - and how to adjust your meals in a way that brings glucose levels back into more ideal ranges, is another task altogether best and most often effectively done with guidance.
Use Case #2: You suspect reactive hypoglycemia or you have wild mood/energy swings after meals
CGMs can help connect the dots between how you feel and what your blood sugar is actually doing.
If you’re getting shaky, irritable, brain-fogged a couple hours after eating
If you crash hard in the afternoon
If you feel like a different person depending on when and what you eat
A CGM can give you clues. Not commandments—but clues.
This is one of the rare times when real-time data might offer something your journal and calendar can’t. That data can then be used to adjust meals and find target macro ratios to prevent those spikes and crashes that leave you feeling useless after 2pm.
Use Case #3: You want a short-term experiment to build awareness
Used briefly, a CGM can be a great learning tool.
A two-week snapshot. A metabolic “audit.” Use it as a peek behind the curtain—not a lifelong confession booth.
and this is crucial—you’ve got to go in with guardrails:
No cutting out entire food groups because of one spike
No excessive fasting just to flatten the line
No judging your worth based on a graph
If you’re someone who’s triggered by tracking or tends toward all-or-nothing thinking, a CGM might not be your friend right now. And that’s okay. There are so many other resources to draw upon, you are better off getting to your goals without jumping on the CGM bandwagon.
The Big Picture: A CGM can be a great tool, but it isn’t your savior.
It goes without saying that a CGM is not a moral compass. It is also not a diagnostic tool.
And it’s definitely not a substitute for intuition and using what you already know about your body to make good decisions.
Rather than thinking “spikes are bad”, I want you to think of your blood sugar levels like packages in a delivery truck.
You eat a meal—especially one with carbs—and your body sends glucose into the bloodstream attached to insulin, like a truck heading out with a fresh load of Amazon packages. That rise you see on your CGM? That’s the truck leaving the warehouse. It’s not a problem—it’s part of the process.
Your goal isn’t to stop the truck. The goal is to make sure it delivers efficiently in a timely manner—to your muscles, your brain, your organs. If your roads are clear (aka insulin sensitivity, movement, solid sleep), the delivery is smooth.
But if there’s a traffic jam from stress, sleep deprivation, or insulin resistance? Then yeah—deliveries get backed up. And that is something we can fix that with supportive strategies.
While a CGM can offer insight, chasing flat glucose lines while ignoring your fatigue, your hunger, or your nervous system is not optimization. It’s more like metabolic micromanagement dressed up as healthy living.
What’s Driving the Obsession?
I want to segue into addressing the unspoken elephant in the room: What’s Driving the Obsession with CGMs. While it is very true that there is an outrageous rise in metabolic dysfunction and diabetes across the world, and it is true that this is a crippling and devastating problem that needs to be addressed, the rise of CGMs as we are seeing them in pop culture isn’t just about curiosity or even science. I think it’s ultimately about control.
We live in a culture that conditions us to believe that our bodies are a problem to be solved. It’s like being born in a human body is some kind of original sin that we have to strive to fix and perfect, be in in our weight, the lines on our face, or our perfect glucose curves. We are sold an idea that if we just tried harder, tracked better, biohacked more precisely… we could finally feel okay in own skin. We could be redeemed.
Enter: the CGM.
Here we have the latest shiny tool promising clarity, certainty, and salvation in a world full of hormonal chaos and health gaslighting.
And I get it. When your body feels unpredictable, those numbers on a graph feel like power. And certainty. And you get that graph without the hassle of dealing with the health care system!
But here’s the truth: Wellness culture has turned self-quantification into a substitute for self-trust and self-acceptance.
Let’s break down the drivers behind this obsession:
so when we look at what is fueling the obsession with CGMs right now, I see 4 primary drivers.
1. The Promise of Control
CGMs sell the fantasy that if you just manage one number closely enough, you’ll unlock the body you want.
But health doesn’t work that way. You are not a spreadsheet.
You’re a complex, dynamic organism that cannot be simply quantified. Having gorgeous glucose curves don’t mean the weight will automatically come off or you’ve feel younger than you have in years. But some of these ads I see make it look otherwise.
(I’m not naming names here….but, Made for EVERYONE?? REALLY???)
2. Diet Culture Rebranded as Data
We’re not tracking calories anymore (thank God)—but we’re tracking glucose curves.
And the anxiety, the restriction, the perfectionism? Still the same. I see this in clinical practice all the time.
CGMs can quickly become a moral compass: “Did I spike? Did I fail?”
When those thoughts take over, you’ve begun moralizing your biology and sliding into disordered eating behaviors.
3. Wellness Consumerism
Let’s not forget: this is a BIG business.
CGM wearables are predicted to be a 5 billion dollar market this year, and is anticipated to double in less than ten years. You’ve got startups monetizing fear, and turning normal physiology into a subscription service.
They’re selling you the idea that glucose stability is the pinnacle of health. But we need to step out from that and remember that it’s just one piece of a much bigger picture.
The reality is that health still comes down to the boring stuff—sleep, protein, fiber, movement - which ironically will do more for your glucose management without even knowing the numbers!
4. The Optimization Addiction
You’ve been told that being “good enough” isn’t enough.
You must optimize. Track. Perfect.
CGMs tap right into that belief and give you a number to chase. A new way to “fix” yourself.
But what if you’re not broken?
What if your blood sugar isn’t actually the problem?
What if the problem is that you’re exhausted, under-fed, under-muscled, and totally disconnected from your body’s cues?
And that’s the sneaky part.
For some people, the more they track, the less they trust.
The more we chase perfection, the more we struggle with just being human.
CGMs didn’t create this obsession. But they sure as hell pour gasoline on it.
let’s talk about what to do instead—whether you’re wearing a CGM right now or just feeling stuck in the cycle of overthinking every damn bite.
If you’ve been second-guessing every meal and the graphs, the numbers, and the constant analysis are leaving you more confused than empowered, take a deep breath with me.
Here’s the simple truth:
You don’t need to control every bite to support your blood sugar.
You need clear structure, consistent habits, and the patience to track patterns over time.
Let’s walk through what actually supports metabolic health in the real world.
✅ Start With Two Questions at Every Meal:
Where is my protein?
Where is my produce?
These aren’t gimmicks—they’re grounding principles. Focusing on these two questions puts the most metabolically supportive foods on your plate at every meal. They become the foundation of a blood sugar-supportive plate.
Protein slows digestion and blunts glucose spikes by triggering the release of gut hormones like GLP-1 and helping regulate appetite. It also gives your metabolism a solid anchor to work with.
Produce, especially fiber-rich vegetables, feeds beneficial gut bacteria—many of which play a direct role in blood sugar regulation, inflammation control, and even insulin sensitivity.
Fat slows the rate at which food leaves your stomach and helps regulate post-meal blood sugar levels. It also supports hormonal stability—especially in midlife, when those systems are already in flux.
No fancy gadgets. Just the basics—done consistently.
✅ Move Your Body After Meals:
Even a short walk after lunch can improve glucose uptake by your muscles.
Don’t mistake this as a need to earn your food—it simply supports your physiology. Movement is one of the fastest ways to put those post-meal nutrients to use. Here’s a bonus - it is also good for improving digestion! There’s a meme going on right now about fart walks, which is totally legit!
✅ Don’t Skip Meals (Unless There’s a Purpose):
If you’re using fasting as a tool, it should come with structure—not just coffee and willpower.
Skipping meals randomly can increase stress hormones and make your blood sugar harder to manage later. If you’re trying intermittent fasting, do it with intention, ensuring you get enough protein in your meals, and having a clear understanding of how it fits your life—not someone else’s protocol. As with everything else, more or longer is not better in this regard.
✅ Protect Your Sleep:
One bad night of sleep can temporarily raise blood sugar levels and reduce insulin sensitivity.
If you’re waking up tired, over-relying on caffeine, and skipping rest days—you’re brewing a blood sugar issue with that coffee even if your CGM says otherwise.
✅ Build and Maintain Muscle:
Muscle tissue is your body's biggest glucose sink. The more lean mass you carry, the more efficiently you store and use glucose—especially after meals.
Resistance training doesn’t need to be complicated. But it does need to be present.
✅ Watch for Patterns, Not Perfection:
The goal isn’t a flatline—it’s a stable rhythm.
You’re looking for meals that keep your energy steady, your mood level, and your hunger cues predictable— meals that perform well on a graph but leave you feeling deprived are not sustainable and not a key to long term health.
While none of this is nearly as sexy as sporting a CGM this summer, it will have you accomplishing more and feeling better than obsessing over your data.
🎯 Final Thought
And if your current approach has you constantly guessing, chasing symptoms, or stuck in cycles of over-correction, you’ve got to pause and reassess.
You don’t need perfect data. You need a strategy that fits your life and evolves with your body.
So whether you’re wearing a glucose monitor or not, supporting blood sugar starts with how you build your meals, how you sleep, how you move, and how consistently you show up for the basics. And remember - blood sugar is just one piece of your metabolic picture. If something still feels off, don’t ignore it—but don’t automatically assume the problem is you.
And if you’re still feeling stuck, this may be the moment to connect with a coach or provider who can help tailor your approach to what your body actually needs.
With that my friends, stay salty, stay curious, and I’ll see you next time.
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