Nutrition tracking and biofeedback with Supersapiens

Equipment
1

So I won a 3 month supply of continuous blood glucose sensors and I have had all sorts of issues related to fuelling. I’ve chosen to eat predominantly low carb just because I have a gluten sensitivity, sensitive teeth and a really poor family history for diabetes.

The monitor has only been on for a day so far but I’m intrigued to see what different fuelling strategies do for my performance. Does anyone else have experience of nutrition tracking/ blood glucose monitoring during and after workouts? What have been your insights?

2

Curious to hear about your 2 month experience? Unfortunately, supersapiens is not available in the US, but I’m VERY intrigued by what insights can be gleaned from a CGM for long endurance fueling. Just spoke to my GP today, and hoping to begin my course of discovery on how food choices affect my glucose levels in the next week. I’m not diabetic, nor pre-diabetic, but I’ve been convinced this is a “must have” device to “crack my fueling cod”.

3

We tested it a bit. A few downsides:

  • signal is quite delayed / dampened because you don’t measure in the blood, rather in the tissue.
  • when you are not diabetic, glucose regulation works quite well, so there are rarely clear spikes up and down.
  • when the sensor shows a low signal you are usually already really feeling it yourself.

I would not throw money at a company who wants to use marketing to sell a product for diabetics to a bigger audience.

2 Likes
4

My experience has been a little different, not all bad but certainly not all good.

The pros:
For someone like me who is a chronic under-fueller, it gave me clear parameters to improve
The information does inform RPE (for me at least) and helps me make sense of when I feel rubbish because a workout is simply hard rather than underfuelled.
The real-time feedback on different nutrition sources is INCREDIBLE, and I now know why some things don’t feel as good as others, and roughly how long my favourite items will last

The cons
The device can be a bit fickle and the tech support for easy blood glucose data interpretation mid-workout has only ever worked for me indoors.
Better trained/adapted athletes than myself probably don’t notice as much benefit
Getting into the high intensity zone is really tough (probably because I am quite highly fat-adapted), especially while working out.
Finding sources of carbs that don’t upset my sensitive teeth, give me “palate fatigue” or irritate my gut somehow feels worse when the monitor is constantly chastising my poor fuelling overall and reminds me that it’s just one facet of performance

All in all, I can clearly see benefits, but the tech issue is probably the biggest reason I’d struggle to justify long-term use.