An optimal blood sugar level is a critical factor for healthy living—levels that are too low can affect normal cognition and bodily functions, while heightened levels can lead to health issues when prolonged. Whether you’re addressing diagnosed prediabetes, suspect elevated blood sugar levels, or have another glucose-related concern, anyone can now evaluate their personal blood sugar trends painlessly and promptly.
But as medical researchers uncover more factors impacting your blood sugar, adjusting your nutrition and lifestyle choices to achieve and maintain healthy levels can feel challenging or even stressful—and that stress only compounds the issue as it affects your glucose levels too. Further complicating your healthy lifestyle choices is that everyone is unique.
That’s why the Better Nutrition Program started The BNP Continuous Glucose Monitor Program™—a dietitian-led and coach-supported program that helps you discover how your personal choices impact your levels in real-time. With state-of-the-art data analysis and one-on-one coaching, our patient-tailored program will help anyone achieve better outcomes—better energy, better moods, better sleep, better immunity, and better blood sugar.
What Is a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM)?
Before we dive into the program, let’s explore its most important tool—the continuous glucose monitor, or CGM. The most essential things to know about a CGM are:
- The device doesn’t interfere with your everyday life; CGM-wearers continue to play sports and work out, and showering, swimming, and other water-based activities don’t affect it.
- It’s a discreet external device, easily and painlessly attached to your body (typically the upper arm).
- CGMs monitor your real-time glucose levels 24/7/365 for accurate, in-the-moment insights—unlike painful, once-per-day finger pricks or the 90-day averages shown by the HbA1c lab test.
- The collected data helps evaluate more than 40 different factors affecting your blood sugar levels.
CGMs are still relatively new, but they’ve become increasingly popular and accurate in recent years. But perhaps their most attractive (and important) feature is their ability to track time in range (TIR).
Time in Range Monitoring
TIR describes the total time spent in your target blood sugar range, often expressed as a percentage. For instance, if your levels are within your targeted range for 17 hours of a given day, your TIR would be just over 70%.
Since CGMs are relatively new, medical experts are still uncovering the long-term results of improved TIR. But one study of a group consisting of healthy adults, those with prediabetes, and those with non-insulin-treated type 2 diabetes mellitus saw universal TIR improvements due to CGM use.
What Is BNP’s CGM Program? What to Expect
Since TIR is becoming an increasingly important metric for health-conscious individuals, The Better Nutrition Program developed a personalized assessment to uncover how your dietary and lifestyle habits impact TIR—and, as a result, your unique health outcomes like metabolic health, energy, and stress.
Numerous factors can impact your blood sugar levels, including but not limited to:
- Sleep patterns
- Activity level
- Food choices, including:
- The quantity of food you eat
- Macro and micronutrients
- Meal timing
- Stress
- Hydration level
- Menstrual periods
- Hormonal changes
- Medication side effects
Each of these factors uniquely impacts each person’s sugar level. Sleuthing out how they affect you, in particular, is the primary purpose of our CGM program.
The BNP Continuous Glucose Monitor Program™ Benefits
When you enroll in the program, you’ll receive:
- A Meet ‘N Greet with a health and wellness coach who will personalize your program
- Three weeks of daily, digestible content
- Two one-on-one sessions and unlimited messaging with your coach
- Bi-weekly group sessions led by dietetics expert Ashley Koss RD and other board-certified professionals
However, it’s important to note that The Better Nutrition Program isn’t a medical device company—we’re not trying to sell you a CGM.
Your medical provider can either prescribe you a CGM (which may help you get one for free before the program starts), or you can purchase your own without a prescription.
Our Proven 3-Step Process
Our award-winning, board-certified practitioners have developed a proven 3-step process for unlocking individualized knowledge about your glucose levels:
- Education – During the program, you’ll learn all about glucose levels, what the current research says about the (over 40!) factors that impact your level, and how your future choices can positively impact both your glucose and your TIR.
- Experimentation – Your individual coach will provide an in-depth, personalized plan complete with guided experiments. The experiments help you evaluate various lifestyle choices, helping you nip massive sugar fluctuations in the bud and adopt new sugar management strategies.
- Evaluation – Your BNP coach will help you uncover new opportunities for better health through nutritional and behavioral adjustments to your daily life. These aren’t one-size-fits-all tips—they’re personalized changes for your one-of-a-kind lifestyle.
We don’t do cookie-cutter—we help you build a bespoke plan to help you live a better life.
A Typical Day in the CGM Program
So, what does the average day look like for someone using the CGM program? Continuous glucose monitoring allows you to:
- Access daily content using our mobile app or your desktop—personalized tips and tricks developed by dietitians and your one-on-one coach.
- Tailor your meal plan to your glucose levels and taste buds by tracking how your body—and sugar levels—respond to nutritional experiments.
- Consult your coach via one-on-one sessions—helping to provide real-time encouragement and advice whenever you need it while keeping you accountable with tracking tasks like sharing photos of your meals.
- Log into expert-led group Zoom sessions to share experiences, tips, and experiment outcomes with fellow participants. Group sessions are optional, but they’re perfect for people looking for extra support from our community.
Throughout the three-week program, you’ll explore what works for you. If you find that an experiment, meal, or tip isn’t helping or your circumstances have changed (long or short term), your coach is only a message away. They’ll help you choose better-for-you snacks, adapt with different glucose management strategies, relay questions to our clinical team, or debrief when the unexpected happens.
CGM Program Takeaways
By the end of the CGM program, you’ll have:
- An in-depth understanding of your glucose levels and the everyday choices that impact them, positively and negatively—such as how meal timing, quality, and quantity affect levels directly and indirectly (e.g., effects on your sleeping habits, stress)
- A list of doable, delicious recipes for meals and snacks and menu swaps to help you support healthy levels through optimized nutritional balance
- Personalized tools that will help you increase your TIR—on the clock, on vacation, and on your terms
- Year-long access to your personalized content library, because education, experimentation, and evaluation don’t stop when the program ends
The point of wearing a CGM is ultimately to see your personal data. But a bunch of numbers without reference doesn’t tell you much if you don’t know what actions to take when making adjustments or receive support in that effort. So if you’re only using your CGM for momentary glucose checks, you’re not maximizing its potential. That’s what we provide—data analysis and personalization via one-on-one sessions that help you take action with doable habits.
The program we’ve developed grows with you and emerging research about how your choices affect your glucose levels and how your glucose levels affect your health. Your life, your choices, and medical research will evolve. So, our program adapts as well, continually helping you overcome hurdles, celebrate wins, and make long-lasting changes.
Benefits of the CGM Program
At The Better Nutrition Program, we believe in the science-backed plans that help our community members live better, healthier lives. We’re confident that, during and after the three weeks, you’ll reap the benefits of our CGM program, including:
- A deeper understanding of the CGM device and how helpful it can be in your everyday life
- A personalized plan of attack for sugar fluctuations—our coaches’ experiments will help you establish what to do when your sugar is too high/low, your TIR is shorter than you’d like, or you’re not sure how to maintain a level that works for you
- A year of access to the content that makes our program unique
Our team is focused on the facts—peer-reviewed, up-to-date information that dietitians and health experts use to guide the insight and strategies provided to you.
However, we also recognize that:
- The world changes – When your grocery store quits carrying your favorite, sugar-friendly snack, we’re here to help you find a tasty, healthy alternative.
- People change – If you tire of your go-to meal, your health goals change, or you start taking a new medication or supplement, your coach can help you navigate uncharted waters and keep your sugar under control.
- Scientific information changes – Researchers are always discovering something new; that’s one of the most exciting things about science. Our program is designed to evolve with the dietetics field and help you adapt to changing nutritional knowledge.
After the CGM Program: Supporting Your Healthy Lifestyle for the Long Haul
During the three-week CGM program, you’ll discover foods, behaviors, and habits that work—you’ll learn how to increase your TIR, make healthy choices, and sustain positive change.
But what happens when the program ends or you stop wearing the CGM? You have two options (and you can try them both!):
- Keep accessing your content and resources:
- Revisit your personalized library of content and tools to progress your health journey further over the following 12 months.
- Consult your catalog of tasty recipes and menu swaps.
- Return to BNP for a more in-depth understanding of your personal health needs:
- If your CGM uncovered a need to address your sugar cravings, our Sweet Taste Bud Reset™ course can help you identify and address craving triggers.
- Once you understand how stress impacts your blood sugar, you can explore how two critical nutrients play a role in your stress with our Magnesium & Calcium Optimizer course.
- Your personal coach guided you throughout the CGM program, and you can sign up for Personal Coaching to continue working with them to further benefit from their expertise and stay on track throughout your wellness journey.
The BNP Difference
Maybe your primary care provider printed out a meal plan at your last appointment. Perhaps a friend suggested a book that worked for them. There are lots of health and wellness programs on the market, and maybe you’re considering partnering with one of our competitors.
What makes The Better Nutrition Program, well, better?
- We don’t sell CGM devices—we just want to teach you how to use this powerful tool to achieve better TIR, better health, and a better everyday life.
- We’re committed to bespoke solutions over cookie-cutter tidbits. You’re not like everyone else; you deserve a one-of-a-kind plan to manage diabetes while you live your one-of-a-kind lifestyle.
- We offer both individual and one-on-one support, and our community is simply spectacular.
- We’re not influencers. Our programs are created, adapted, and run by board-certified staff—scientists, dietitians, and health professionals.
If you’re looking for better, we know where you can find it: here.
The Better Nutrition Program: One-on-One Support and So Much More
If you’re ready to embrace cutting-edge technology, unlock personalized methods for increasing your TIR, and make major strides in your health journey, The Better Nutrition Program’s Continuous Glucose Monitor Program™ can help you live a better life.
Simply put, we’re not like other health and wellness coaches—we’re better.
We offer various programs for both medical practitioners and patients that can improve outcomes, adapt alongside changes in nutrition and medical science, and meet unique lifestyle needs. We believe in our programs and services, and so do our clients.
If you’re interested in learning more, schedule a free demo—we can’t wait to welcome you to the BNP family!
Sources:
American Diabetes Association. The Big Picture: Checking Your Blood Glucose. https://diabetes.org/healthy-living/medication-treatments/blood-glucose-testing-and-control/checking-your-blood-sugar
American Diabetes Association. CGM & Time in Range. https://diabetes.org/tools-support/devices-technology/cgm-time-in-range
American Diabetes Association. Good to Know: Factors Affecting Blood Glucose. https://diabetesjournals.org/clinical/article/36/2/202/32929/Good-to-Know-Factors-Affecting-Blood-Glucose
MDPI. Continuous Glucose Monitoring in Healthy Adults—Possible Applications in Health Care, Wellness, and Sports. https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/5/2030/htm
