The hacks are not a diet. You don’t change what you eat, only how. “Keto and low-carb diets rely on the same concept – they flatten glucose and insulin spikes – but with my hacks, you don’t have to cut out all sugars and starches. Nobody wants broccoli for their birthday.” Cake and healthy weight loss? It’s no wonder that Inchauspé now has over 370,000 followers on Instagram. “When we focus on steadying glucose, weight loss happens naturally, without calorie counting,” Inchauspé says. “Studies show that people who focus on flattening their glucose spikes can eat more calories and lose more fat more easily than people who eat fewer calories but do not flatten their glucose spikes.” There are four key biological mechanisms underpinning this natural weight loss. You not only feel less hungry, but you have fewer cravings and you feel more satisfied. Glucose control reduces levels of insulin, the fat-storage hormone, too.
Inchauspé discovered the science behind glucose after taking part in a pilot trial of a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) while working at a health company in Silicon Valley. These were invented for people with diabetes, to allow them to see their glucose levels responding to food in real time.
Jessie shows me her CGM, the FreeStyle Libre made by US company Abbott Laboratories. It’s a white disc on the back of her upper arm, around the size of a macaroon. Underneath, a tiny electrode inserted into fat reads the body’s glucose levels from the fluid between the tissues. In the UK, the FreeStyle Libre is a regulated medical device that’s only indicated for people with diabetes. Each monitor lasts two weeks and costs about £50.
Inchauspé wasn’t diabetic or overweight when she began the pilot. But she did have trauma-related mental-health issues from breaking her back four years earlier, as well as bad skin, poor sleep and afternoon energy crashes.
She decided to use herself as a one-woman experiment, trying out ideas coming from the new research. “As I started playing with the hacks, I’d wake up feeling refreshed. My skin cleared up. I understood what I could do to affect my energy, my mood, my happiness. It was really transformative.” Inchauspé wrote a program to translate her findings into the graphs that she shares on Instagram (see right). When she began three years ago, her fasting glucose, a standard measure of health, was 5.2mmols/l (5.5 is prediabetic, 7.0 is diabetic). Three years later, it’s down to 4.3mmols/l.
Perhaps we’ll all become more familiar with our blood glucose levels soon, just as we know our weight. The Zoe programme (joinzoe.com), whose co-founder is Professor Tim Spector, is using blood glucose as one of its measurements in its new personalised eating plan. And it seems likely that CGMs will soon become a common sight on people’s arms. In the US, they were first adopted by biohackers for optimising athletic performance, and there are now a few apps that pair with them. Perhaps the biggest uptake will come when the monitors have no electrodes at all and live in our watch; Apple and Samsung are reportedly working on this.
Next month, British app MyLevels will be launched, synched with the FreeStyle Libre. It was founded by Laura Douglas, an AI engineer. You input what you eat, and an algorithm then scores each meal. “It’s for people who want to lose weight, but who’ve tried and failed with diets,” says Douglas. People in the testing group have lost up to 22lb over two months. “But the biggest difference we’ve seen between this and dieting is that people keep the weight off,” she says. It’s £150 for a two-week programme (mylevels.com).
I wore a CGM for a week to test out Inchauspé’s hacks. The day I ate fruit for breakfast, my levels went up and down all day and my cravings were intense. The next day, I ate a savoury breakfast of avocado, then bacon, then a piece of toast (the order matters, see below). It worked: my blood glucose stayed level all day.
There were a few shocks. I’d thought my hot chocolate, made with coconut milk, was a good alternative to eating chocolate. But it made my glucose levels spike as much as half a bar of Green & Black’s. The other surprise was wine. I often wake in the night after drinking and the CGM showed me why. After three glasses of wine one evening, my 3am blood sugar was down in the red zone on the glucose graph.
Seeing what’s going on inside you is undeniably powerful. When you eat something that causes a blood-sugar spike, see the graph of your blood sugar rise on the app, then feel the slump and cravings two hours later, it really joins up your head with what’s going on in your body. And it felt liberating, finally to find a way to dampen down the sugar cravings that have plagued me for years, without having to give up carbs.
“Everybody should try a CGM, if they can,” Inchauspé says. “But you don’t need to buy one.” Because she has done the hard work for you. If you follow the scientifically proven hacks in the Glucose Revolution, you can flatten your glucose spikes.
The Glucose Revolution: The life-changing power of balancing your blood sugar by Jessie Inchauspé (Short Books) is published on Thursday
