Amazon book search is quite handy; it confirmed for me that the GI diet does not promote or even mention measuring blood sugar yourself. The premise seems to be that foods with high glycemic index (that is, foods which cause a large blood sugar response in a representative test subject) are bad, but that you should use the book and web site to determine which foods those are, rather than measuring anything yourself. It definitely doesn’t make the hunger vs. hypoglycemia distinction anywhere.
(Aside: Blood sugar levels aren’t something that you can usefully “go get measured”; you have to get a test kit and administer the test yourself, because the point is not to measure one number but to see how it changes in response to the various foods in your diet and learn what those changes feel like. Monitors are often given away for free or almost-free as a loss leader for the test strips, which cost about $1 each and can only be used once.)
My understanding is that getting your insulin response measured involves several hours at a medical facility after a period of fasting. You consume a glucose solution and then your insulin levels (and blood sugar?) are measured at intervals over a period of several hours. The data obtained is used as a diagnostic in identifying insulin resistance which can be a precursor to type 2 diabetes I believe. The idea of getting the test done is to establish whether you are already on a possible path to something like metabolic syndrome. Measuring blood sugar levels yourself as part of monitoring the diet progress sounds like a good idea, but I’m not a nutritionist.
The test you describe is called a glucose tolerance test. You’ll spend a few hours in the hospital, and get back a result that says “you don’t have diabetes”. Whoopty doo. What you want is to find out whether your blood sugar ever goes low, if so when, and what it feels like. That test can’t be done in a hospital, because being in a hospital means not following your usual routine.
Amazon book search is quite handy; it confirmed for me that the GI diet does not promote or even mention measuring blood sugar yourself. The premise seems to be that foods with high glycemic index (that is, foods which cause a large blood sugar response in a representative test subject) are bad, but that you should use the book and web site to determine which foods those are, rather than measuring anything yourself. It definitely doesn’t make the hunger vs. hypoglycemia distinction anywhere.
(Aside: Blood sugar levels aren’t something that you can usefully “go get measured”; you have to get a test kit and administer the test yourself, because the point is not to measure one number but to see how it changes in response to the various foods in your diet and learn what those changes feel like. Monitors are often given away for free or almost-free as a loss leader for the test strips, which cost about $1 each and can only be used once.)
My understanding is that getting your insulin response measured involves several hours at a medical facility after a period of fasting. You consume a glucose solution and then your insulin levels (and blood sugar?) are measured at intervals over a period of several hours. The data obtained is used as a diagnostic in identifying insulin resistance which can be a precursor to type 2 diabetes I believe. The idea of getting the test done is to establish whether you are already on a possible path to something like metabolic syndrome. Measuring blood sugar levels yourself as part of monitoring the diet progress sounds like a good idea, but I’m not a nutritionist.
The test you describe is called a glucose tolerance test. You’ll spend a few hours in the hospital, and get back a result that says “you don’t have diabetes”. Whoopty doo. What you want is to find out whether your blood sugar ever goes low, if so when, and what it feels like. That test can’t be done in a hospital, because being in a hospital means not following your usual routine.