Health & Wellness : The Rain Gauge Doesn't Care What I Think It Should Say

Oct 28/26

For twenty-seven years I kept a rain gauge just outside our shops door I didn't need it, not really — I could feel a wet winter coming the way anybody who's spent enough seasons outside can feel it, in the color of the sky and how the ground gave under my boots. But I checked the gauge every morning anyway, because feeling and knowing turned out to be two different things, and only one of them holds up when you're deciding whether to hold off on planting.

I've been thinking about that gauge since I started wearing a continuous glucose monitor. The Libre 3 sits on the back of my arm and reports a number every few minutes, whether I ask it to or not, and I've noticed it does to my assumptions about food roughly what that rain gauge used to do to my assumptions about weather. I thought I knew which foods were good choices for me and which weren't. Turns out I knew the way I used to know it was going to rain — a general sense, built out of habit and what I'd read, not out of anything I'd actually checked.

The oatmeal I've eaten most mornings for years, out of a settled conviction that it was a smart, steady choice — the monitor tells a more complicated story some days than others. Nothing dramatic. Just a quiet correction to a belief I'd never once tested, because why would I test something I already knew? Except I didn't know it. I assumed it, the same way I used to assume a field was dry enough to work before I'd pushed a probe into the soil and found out I was wrong by two inches. You can farm a long time on assumptions like that and never notice, because most days nothing goes wrong enough to make you check.

That's the distinction the monitor keeps handing me, unasked: knowing and measuring aren't the same activity, even when they feel identical from the inside. A person who's been at anything a long time develops good instincts, and mine have mostly served me fine — but instinct is a summary of the past, and the gauge is a report on right now, and the two only agree by coincidence some of the time. Mounjaro has changed my numbers, flattened some of the spikes I used to see — and even that took the monitor to notice properly. I felt generally better. I couldn't have told you by how much, or on which foods, without the data in front of me.

None of this is an argument for measuring everything, all the time, forever. A field checked too often gets no rest, and neither does a person, and there's a version of this that turns into its own kind of anxious guessing game if you let it. But once in a while, checking replaces a belief you'd stopped examining with something closer to the truth, and that's worth the trouble even when the truth turns out less tidy than the story you'd been telling yourself. This week I'm picking one meal I've never bothered to question — something I eat on autopilot, confident I already have it figured out — and finding out what it actually does, instead of what I've always assumed it does. I already have a guess. I'm curious how wrong I'll turn out to be.

This is a record of what I've read and observed, not medical advice. I'm not a doctor, and nothing here should replace a conversation with one. Any drug, dose, or treatment decision -- Mounjaro included -- is between you and your own physician. What works in my reading or in the field doesn't automatically apply to your situation.

From the Field:

Food Safety Recalls & Outbreaks -- https://www.foodsafety.gov/recalls-and-outbreaks

Mayo Clinic -- mayoclinic.org

fitandwell.com

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