It’s 1 p.m. on a Wednesday, and I’m sitting at my desk, crunching a carrot like a horse. “No one laugh,” I warn my coworkers. “It’s for my glucose.”
For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to keep my blood sugar levels as steady as possible with help from Stelo, a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) produced by San Diego–based healthcare tech company Dexcom. The quarter-sized device has a hair-thin sensor that, when (pretty painlessly) applied into the back of your arm, constantly measures your blood sugar levels for up to 15 days. It sends all that data to a corresponding phone app (provided you’re within 20 feet of your device and the app is open), where you can also log your meals and workouts to help you understand how certain lifestyle choices affect your levels.
The FDA approved the first-ever CGM for patients with diabetes in 1999, and Dexcom released its own version in 2006. But the device only recently became available over the counter—and it’s increasingly popular as a wellness tool among people without diabetes, a trend that aligns with the ever-growing obsession with health data. The fitness and health tracking market as a whole hit more than $60 billion in 2024.
Insights from a tool like Stelo, which will set you back around $100 a month, may have a lot to teach us. “Almost 100 million people in the US have prediabetes, and most of them don’t know,” says Jake Leach, Dexcom’s chief operating officer. People with prediabetes have a fasting blood sugar level between 100 and 125 milligrams of sugar per deciliter of blood, or mg/dL (below that range is considered normal, while numbers above it signal diabetes), and the condition is associated with health concerns like cardiovascular and retinal diseases.
“And then there’s the idea of using a CGM to better understand metabolic health and longevity,” Leach adds. “There are a lot of potential uses around learning about how your diet impacts your glucose and how, over time, that can develop into a condition like prediabetes.”
Stelo prompts you to set a target glucose range—in adults without diabetes, the suggested spectrum is between 70 and 140 mg/dL. Charts within the app show you how your levels rise and fall throughout the day, and a spike above 140 will trigger a notification. Click it, and you’ll get tips for minimizing those spikes.
I wore the device for 30 days, electing to live my typical lifestyle during the first half of that period to get a baseline. According to Dexcom’s head of clinical advocacy and outcomes, Dr. Thomas Grace, who reviewed my data, I’m a “normogylcemic” 27-year-old woman: My fasting glucose is at a normal level, and when I eat carbs or sugar and glucose levels rise, my body produces insulin to even things back out. But I wanted to see if I could minimize the spikes I was seeing, so I put some blood sugar–steadying strategies to the test.
There are four major pillars of glucose management: diet, exercise, stress, and sleep. While sugar and carbs can send glucose levels soaring, non-diabetic people striving for glucose harmony don’t necessarily have to kill pasta from their meal plan. Starting every meal with protein or veggies, then moving on to carbohydrates, can help keep you steady (hence the desk carrot).
Moving after eating makes a difference, too. After meals, I’d take a walk or even dance around my living room, which had my glucose levels dropping as fast as they’d risen—or, in many cases, prevented a spike at all.
Want steadier blood sugar levels? Eat high-fiber and -protein meals, move your body throughout the day, and do your best to manage stress.
Articles in the Stelo app explain that poor sleep can increase insulin resistance, making it harder for your cells to effectively utilize insulin, and stress triggers hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which prompt your body to throw some extra glucose into your bloodstream (as evidenced by the spike I saw just minutes before a meeting I was anxious about).
Of course, anyone can follow these strategies without a CGM. But all the medical pros I spoke with agreed that seeing the data can help people make tangible shifts. “It is a wonderful reality check for the dietary and exercise changes that we recommend,” says Sharp HealthCare endocrinologist Dr. Neelima Chu.
Stelo, which is incorporating generative AI and partnering with fitness-tracking “smart ring” Oura to give users more personalized insights, still isn’t perfect. No biosensor on the market is right all the time (Stelo is at about 93 percent accuracy), and the app could do a better job of storing older data for easy, long-term access. (Though I can see that I experienced a spike three weeks ago, for example, I can’t yet click to access my note about what I ate just beforehand.) And I couldn’t help but wonder how much people who are normoglycemic really need to worry about it all.
“We just don’t have enough information [to know for sure],” says Scripps Health’s lead diabetes expert, Dr. Athena Philis-Tsimikas. “We’d have to do a study with two comparison groups— one that’s keeping things steady and one that’s doing whatever—and follow those groups for a fairly prolonged period of time, and then look and see if there was benefit or detriment of doing it one way versus another, and we just we don’t have that data now. So, it’s very hard to promote it one way or the other.”
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But with prediabetes remaining so underdiagnosed, there’s much to be said for a tool that can help you understand your body better. “At some point,” Grace hopes, “there’ll be enough people wearing a product like this, getting the education that they need, that maybe, instead of the exponential increase in obesity and type-two diabetes, we’ll be able to make some headway there.”
