To put on the Lingo, you unwrap it and place the cardboard in the dispenser. Clicking the dispenser on your arm, which sends the filament under your skin, stings only faintly. It feels like being poked with a finger. It is road less painful than pricking your finger with a a needle until you to bleed many times a day, and I was an idiot and should have done this before.
The sensor itself is good. I don’t feel it most of the time, unless I change my clothes with a lot of vigor and leave, in which case I do have to be careful. You can choose where you place the sensor; most people choose their non-dominant arm. It’s waterproof, so you can swim and shower with it, and you don’t have to charge it.
After I turned on the sensor, I opened the Lingo app, registered, and waved my phone next to it. Done! I was ready to start monitoring.
Sugar Rush
If you have never checked your blood glucose continuously, you are probably in for a few surprises. Eating in a way that makes sense for a glucose monitor 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. Since carrots and bread are carbohydrates, this raises my blood sugar to an alarming extent. An ultra-processed protein peanut butter bar, however, barely moves my blood sugar, although if you’re healthy, one isn’t necessarily better than the other.
If you reduce the number of carbohydrates you consume, you will achieve ketosiswhich is when your body starts burning your body fat instead of your readily available blood glucose for energy, because you have none. This is different, and less dangerous, than getting ketosis as a diabetic complication, but I still hate it.
I put the Lingo on during CES, where I did make one alarming discovery—I was walking too much for the amount of food I was eating, and I was hypoglycemic overnight. I thought my sleep disturbances were just due to work, stress and being away from my family, but no, I was at the very bottom.
