Not everyone experiences the dawn phenomenon

What I learned this week #3

I've been listening to a new audio book, 'Good Energy' by Dr Casey Means and it's an eye-opening, incredibly heartfelt, and extensive tome of her super-human knowlege of metabolic causes of illness. One thing that particularly struck me is that not everyone experiences the dawn effect (dawn phenomenon). That's when there's a noticeable rise in blood glucose levels as you wake up in the morning and before any food or exercise. It's generally driven by hormones triggering release of stored glucose from the liver (glycogenolysis) as part of preparing you for the morning's activities. I'd always assumed everyone would experience this to some extent but that's not the case. Only about half of type 2 diabetics will have any noticeable dawn effect and around 9% of people with healthy glucose levels will experience it. Whether you experience this phenomenon or not isn't something to be worried about, but the more pronounced it is can be a marker of more severe metabolic disfunction. So if you do have this then it's important to keep an eye on how high your dawn effect spike is in the morning. Now you'll struggle to find that out with a finger prick test as the time it hits the peak will vary quite a bit so you can only really keep track of this with a CGM. I had originally set my target to 10mmol/L and the last week it hasn't nudged above 8mmol/L so I feel that's going in the right direction.

Two pint's the limit

I've generally tended to shift towards drinking red wine as it has a much lower glycemic load (GL) than my previous drink of choice - lager. At my previous diabetes review, I was advised to try moving back to lager as I will generally drink fewer alcohol units as it's quite bloating so I tend not to drink as much total alcohol volume as I would with wine. However, having a Father's Day outing to the pub in Bolton (where ordering wine is viewed as being a class traitor) I merrily blitzed away up to half way through my third pint when I checked my CGM which was up to 11.6mmol/L😬

The video that never was

I've seen a diagram doing the rounds on social media that involves a spiralling pathway from setting a goal to acheiving a goal and in between 'learning' and 'practicing' is 'failing' and I've managed a couple of utterly fantastic fails so far. The first being losing all of my food log data through a ChatGPT 'environment reset'. And now my latest failure is managing to not change my phone from photo mode to video mode when attempting to record a solid 8 minute rant about sugar, alcohol and UPF addiction so it was just me, stomping through a very damp field muttering away to myself.

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I struggled to find where to buy non-homogenised milk locally and eventually found The Modern Milkman. Their organic whole milk in my area is non-homogenised so I've been getting milk and eggs from them for two yeas now. Use this link to get 50% off your first two weeks and they'll give me 50% off my next delivery as well. Cheers!