Review: Abbott Lingo Continuous Blood Glucose Monitor

To put on the Lingo, you unwrap it and place the carton in the dispenser. Clicking the dispenser on your arm, which sends the filament under your skin, stings only faintly. It feels like getting flicked with a finger. It is way less painful than pricking your finger with a needle until you bleed, many times a day, and I was an idiot and should have done this before.

The sensor itself is fine. I don’t feel it most of the time, unless I change my clothes with much vigor and abandon, in which case I do have to be careful. You can pick where you put the sensor; most people pick their non-dominant arm. It’s water-resistant, so you can swim and shower with it, and you don’t have to charge it.

Once I had the sensor on, I opened the Lingo app, registered, and waved my phone next to it. Done! I was ready to start monitoring.

Sugar Rush

If you’ve never monitored your blood glucose continuously, you’re probably in for a few surprises. Eating in a way that makes sense to a glucose monitor does not always mean eating healthier, objectively. For example, consider a typical lunch for me, which is a bowl of homemade pureed carrot soup and whole wheat bread. Because carrots and bread are carbs, this spikes my blood sugar to an alarming extent. An ultra-processed protein peanut butter bar, however, barely moves my blood sugar at all, even though if you’re healthy, one is not necessarily better than the other.

If you reduce the number of carbs you consume, you will reach ketosis, which is when your body starts burning your body fat instead of your readily available blood glucose for energy, because you have none. This is different, and less dangerous, than getting ketosis as a diabetes complication, but I still hate it.

I put the Lingo on during CES, where I did make one alarming discovery—I was walking around way too much for the amount of food that I was eating, and I was going hypoglycemic during the night. I thought my sleep disturbances were just due to work, stress, and being away from my family, but no, I was totally bottoming out.