Greg Matthews

Behind My Blood Sugar Log

About

I'm 51, small business owner, Cobb County side of Atlanta. A routine physical came back with an A1C of 6.3. My doctor said "watch your sugar" and told me to schedule a follow-up in three months. I drove home, sat at the kitchen counter, and started Googling. By that evening I understood what A1C was, what 6.3 meant relative to the prediabetes cutoff, and roughly how many supplements on Amazon claimed to address it. By the following week, I had a Contour Next One glucometer, a lancet device, and three bottles lined up in a row on the counter.

That was about two years ago. The setup is the same every morning: fasting glucose before coffee, kitchen still dark, the glow of the meter's backlit screen before I have turned on anything else. Sharp click of the lancing device, a count of three, then the countdown beep and the pause before the number appears. I log date, time, reading, supplement name, day of the current test cycle. One supplement at a time, thirty days minimum, full label dose. Post-meal readings two hours after dinner when I am running a cycle I want to stress properly. The spreadsheet runs longer than my actual business financials.

Month two, I noticed my fasting numbers were higher than I expected first thing in the morning and could not figure out why. Turned out my liver was doing something counterproductive in the early morning hours: a cortisol-driven glucose release that people with impaired insulin function cannot suppress automatically. Once I understood what was happening at 5 a.m., I restructured how I read baseline data and tightened my test windows accordingly.

Randall Kovic, a business acquaintance I crossed paths with at a commercial property deal in 2019, pushed me to treat the whole thing like a business problem. When I mentioned the A1C number, he said he had been running his own fasting numbers for six months and wanted to see the data. His framing stuck: change one variable, track the outcome, do not read causality from noise. Obvious once someone says it. Not obvious at midnight in a health forum.

What I do not cover: meal plans, low-glycemic diets, cooking, or general nutrition. The lane is supplement testing only. Three of those test cycles showed nothing moved. Those reviews are on the site because that is what a log is. The supplement shelf in my kitchen runs left to right by current test cycle. My wife calls it the second business. I have been bringing my own food to barbecues for two years now. It is a whole thing.

Two years of personal tracking data has a ceiling when it comes to medical guidance. Your doctor has your full clinical picture; the spreadsheet here has mine. Loop in your doctor before making any changes based on what you read on this site, especially for blood sugar, where the stakes of getting it wrong are real.

Written by Greg Matthews

Disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links. I earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend supplements I have personally tested and tracked with my own glucometer.