Sneak Peek: Hack Your Blood Sugar, The Book
🤫👀A sneak peek from Chapter 1 of Hack Your Blood Sugar, coming in November 2025
Chapter 1: Understanding Blood Sugar: Why It Matters (But I don’t have diabetes?)
Jack was a 65-year-old, semi-retired engineer. He loved data and came to me to help him with his blood sugar because he wanted to use a CGM to figure things out. His doctor had told him years ago that, while his blood sugar levels were in the prediabetes range, he didn’t need to do anything until they got higher. They’d recently reached the magical point of diabetes so Jack was on the case and ready to fix things.
A plea for help!
Welcome to the world of blood sugar management. While things are changing, historically nothing was done until a person actually had diabetes. In this chapter, we'll delve into why blood sugar is a crucial aspect of your health and why it warrants your attention, regardless of whether you've been diagnosed with diabetes or not.
Unfortunately, too many people have not been getting regular labs or have failed to heed the warnings from their early labs. What you may not know is that for many, prediabetes isn’t pre-anything. It’s a sign that your metabolic health has already been diminishing for years and your risk for other chronic diseases has been rising unchecked for decades.
Type 1 vs Type 2 diabetes
Throughout this book, when I talk about diabetes, I will be talking about type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a very different disease and is not going to be covered. Type 1 diabetes, also thought of as diabetes of childhood, stems from an autoimmune disease where our own immune system destroys the pancreatic beta cells (which produce insulin). This makes the person with the disease dependent on insulin medication for life. Type 1 diabetes tends to come on more rapidly than type 2, and there is no known cure yet. We also don’t know how to prevent it.
A person with type 1 diabetes can develop some of the same metabolic complications as those with type 2 and prediabetes if they eat the standard American diet (SAD) and have other risk factors. If you are a person living with T1D reading this book, please follow the guidelines with the usual caution you use when managing your blood sugar. I will not be providing guides for your particular condition.
Type 2 diabetes is what we used to call adult-onset diabetes because the disease comes on slowly and historically occurs in older adults as a result of some combination of genetics, lack of exercise, poor diet, medication, toxin exposure, etc.
Prediabetes is that build-up state when you’re thought to be on the slippery slope leading up to type 2 diabetes. The cut-offs for prediabetes are somewhat random. But the purpose of them is clear. It helps doctors and insurance companies easily know when to take action and when to cover the cost of your care. But I’m here to tell you that you should not rely on that magical moment when you suddenly have type 2 diabetes to act. As you’ll learn, type 2 diabetes can be just the tip of the iceberg.
In the case of my patient Jack, he was just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Had he acted 20 or even 10 years ago, he could have prevented or significantly delayed the damage to his blood vessels, liver health, blood pressure, and cognitive health. It’s unfortunate, because 45 year old Jack would have got a kick out of using a CGM and in another life, he would have been cruising into retirement in fantastic health with just a few tweaks in his 40’s.