Erin Callahan

Writing at Low GI Lifestyle

About

Part of my job in corporate HR, for the past several years, has been managing employee wellness programs, including the annual health screenings. The screening that flagged my prediabetes was one I had personally added to our benefits package. When the A1C result came back at 6.1, I read it at my desk, closed the email, and decided the number wasn't quite urgent enough to act on. That phase lasted a month. The follow-up result ended it.

I sat in a parking lot after that follow-up appointment, three years ago, and downloaded a glycemic index app before I drove home because I had to buy groceries and had no idea what to put in the cart. That was the actual start.

What followed was a lot of logging against my continuous glucose monitor and finding out which assumptions about food were accurate and which weren't. "Healthy whole grain" turned out to be doing more marketing work than metabolic work on a lot of packaging. Cauliflower rice was a genuine surprise on the other side: the glucose response gap between that and regular rice was larger than the GI charts predicted. The almond-flour muffin phase lasted about two months before I accepted that none of them were going to work, regardless of what I added. The Explore Cuisine lentil pasta from Costco does work. My husband ate it without knowing what it was, called it fine, and that remains my real-world benchmark for anything I write up as worth using.

My college friend Noel, who lives in Bellevue, is the reason I started tracking glycemic load instead of just glycemic index. He wanted to see the spreadsheets. He still asks. My neighbor Greta, who grows an enormous vegetable garden across the cul-de-sac, has been skeptical of the entire project from the beginning and has been more useful for exactly that reason than I initially expected.

There is no clinical training behind this writing. What's here is three years of meal-tracking data, a CGM log my husband finds mildly alarming, and the kind of attention that comes from caring a great deal about the outcome. Glucose response varies considerably from person to person, which means my experience with a specific food is a data point, not a prediction for anyone else. Talking to a doctor before making significant diet changes is genuinely worth doing, particularly with a prediabetes or diabetes diagnosis in the picture.

Posts by Erin Callahan

Disclosure

This site includes affiliate links. Clicking one and buying earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. Products get mentioned because they fit into my actual low-GI routine, not because of commission rates. If something didn't work, or tasted like cardboard, the article says so. No financial relationship with any healthcare provider, medical clinic, or supplement manufacturer beyond standard retail affiliate commissions.