Sugar Daddy

My wife is in the process of building our first manzanoling. I was tempted to start with "My wife and I are in the process..." but my input to the creation process was over quite a while ago...

Before my wife was diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes I didn't even know that it existed (my bad!). Depending on the severity it can be more or less of a problem. The hospital provided us with small machine to measure my wife's blood sugar before and after meals. My wife*, being the iron willed obsessive that she is, took it upon herself to record the values and try different things to see if she could keep the sugar under control.

98 meals in and I decided to load up the data in the DataLightProject app. I had a pretty good qualitative handle on how things were going but I hadn't really been following the numbers that closely.

The diagram represents data before all meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner). We already knew that before eating her blood sugar values were generally within the normal range. The thing to keep an eye on is after eating.

The average value doesn't look too bad, but the Max value of 202 mg/100ml points to the fact that all is not as it should be.

Some quick application of filtering by food type and we get some idea of what foods are to blame. Some things were no surprise:- Orange juice (average 202 mg/100ml) and All-Bran (average 163 mg/100ml) were leaders in causing higher blood sugar. But toast (average 152 mg/100ml) for breakfast was a surprisingly bad thing too!

The most surprising effect on post meal blood sugar came when considering exercise. Now given that my wife is pregnant, the kind of exercise that she can do is pretty light. Even so this has a dramatic effect:

A 20 minute walk after breakfast makes a real difference. The blood sugar measurements after breakfast are consistently higher, so being able to get that under control was a real bonus. I'm not sure why exercise has a greater effect following dinner, but it's definitely real.

With any luck the diabetes will stop once the baby is born. This run-in with diabetes has really made us think about what it must be like to live with this condition throughout your whole life. Of course there are treatments but diabetes has a lot of day to day overhead. Most of us don't have to think about what food types we can eat or how long we can or can't wait between meals. Diabetes isn't as solved a problem as most of us like to think.

Shameless plug:-

Simplicity is what the DataLight Project is all about. We want to empower people with the ability to look at their real data and gain some real value. It took me a total of 12 mouse clicks in DataLight to prepare all of the diagrams for this post (yes, I counted). This gives the user the ability to think about the underlying data and it's meaning, rather than the number crunching. So why not give it a go!

*I'm referring to my wife as my "Dream Girl" - not as someone I met from a dying world; we don't talk about that.