A daily field guide to blood sugar

Your breakfast is doing something. I wear the monitor that shows what.

Every weekday I eat one ordinary food with a glucose monitor on my arm, then show you the chart. Smoothies, oatmeal, pizza, wine. No food is off limits, and nothing gets a free pass.

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The same dinner, eaten two ways. Illustrative glucose response.

How this started

A phone call from my doctor, and a very ordinary plate of pasta

A routine blood test showed my blood sugar drifting the wrong way. Not diabetes, but heading in that direction. With my family history, that got my attention.

So I stuck a glucose monitor on the back of my arm and started with my weeknight dinner: pasta, garlic bread, a side salad.

First I ate it the way most people do, bread and pasta first. Then I ate the same dinner again, salad first, carbs last, with ten slow squats in the kitchen afterwards. My kids thought I had lost it.

Same plate. Same food. A completely different line on the monitor.

Carbs first, then sit

+72

points

58%

smaller rise

Salad first, then squats

+30

points

A 2015 study in Diabetes Care found that eating vegetables and protein before carbs lowered post meal glucose by around 35%. A 2025 study from Zhejiang University found ten squats after eating cut the rise by a further 21%.

Try it right now

Three foods I ate every week without thinking twice

Tap each one to see what my monitor actually recorded. The smoothie is the one that got me.

"That smoothie raised my blood sugar higher than a plate of white pasta."

Monday to Friday

A different question every morning

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Food on Trial

I eat one food while wearing a glucose monitor and show you how much it raised my blood sugar. Then a simple way to enjoy that same food so it raises it less.

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