To put the Lingo in, you will unwrap it and place the carton in the dispenser. Clicking on the dispenser on your arm, which sends the filament under your skin, stings only weakly. It’s like being poked with the finger. It is path less painful than pricking your finger with a needle until you bleed, several times a day, and I was an idiot and should have done this before.
The sensor itself is fine. I don’t feel it most of the time, unless I’m changing clothes with great vigor and abandon, in which case I have to be careful. You can choose where you place the sensor; most people choose their non-dominant arm. It’s water resistant, so you can swim and shower with it, without having to charge it.
Once the sensor was on, I opened the Lingo app, checked in, and waved my phone next to it. Do! I was ready to start monitoring.
Sugar rush
If you’ve never monitored your blood sugar continuously, you’re probably in for a few surprises. Eating in a way that makes sense to a glucometer doesn’t always mean eating healthier, objectively. For example, consider a typical lunch for me, which is a bowl of homemade pureed carrot soup and whole wheat bread. Because carrots and bread are carbohydrates, it raises my blood sugar alarmingly. However, an ultra-processed protein peanut butter bar barely moves my blood sugar, although if you’re healthy, one isn’t necessarily better than the other.
If you reduce the amount of carbohydrates you consume, you will achieve ketosisthat is, when your body starts burning your body fat instead of your readily available blood sugar for energy, because you don’t have any. It’s different and less dangerous than getting into ketosis as a complication of diabetes, but I still hate it.
I put the Lingo on during CES, where I made an alarming discovery: I was walking way too much for the amount of food I was eating, and I was becoming hypoglycemic during the night. I thought my sleeping problems were just due to work, stress and being away from my family, but no, I was totally at the bottom.
