A Weekly Pause to Move You Forward
Last week, we looked at sleep as the foundation, the thing that services everything else. One thing I didn't mention: poor sleep directly degrades glucose regulation. Which is where we are this week.
Before I get into it, a quick check. Do any of these sound familiar?
Energy that holds through lunch, then drops like a trapdoor around 3 pm. A craving that hits hard and specific - not hunger exactly, more like a demand. Brain fog after a bigger meal. Irritability when a meal runs late, which feels disproportionate. Waking somewhere between 2 and 4 am, mind already running. Afternoons where the focus just isn't there, even when the morning was sharp.
These aren't personality quirks or signs you need more sleep. They're often glucose effects, a signal that blood sugar is less stable than it could be.
For most people, they've become so normalized that they've stopped registering as anything worth addressing aside from adding more caffeine to the day.
The reframe: the scale doesn't tell you
There's a concept researchers have called TOFI — thin on the outside, fat on the inside. The idea, building on the literature since the 1980s, is that normal BMI doesn't protect you from the metabolic conditions typically associated with obesity. Body fat percentage matters more than total weight. Where that fat sits matters more than either: visceral fat around the organs versus subcutaneous fat under the skin.
You may have heard this called ‘skinny fat’, an imperfect term that points at something real. Someone can be at a healthy weight and metabolically compromised. Someone can be heavier and metabolically clean.
For people reading this who might feel lean and high-functioning, this isn't abstract. It means you might have less reason to look than you think, and more reason to look than you realize.
What my panels actually showed
I had blood panels done last year. Fasting glucose: 103 mg/dL. HbA1c: 5.7%. Both at the low end of the prediabetes range.
I didn't feel it. Looked fine by any visible measure, maybe not my best, but the panel caught something my body wasn't advertising.
Knowing the number changed what I reached for. I didn't overhaul anything. The awareness created a nudge for urgency I wouldn't have had otherwise. When you don't know the number is elevated, the shortcut is easy to rationalize. The french fries are easier to justify now and then. Once you've seen the numbers, the rationalizations stop working.
Most recent panel: fasting glucose 79, HbA1c 5.6%. Still work to do, but improving towards a clean range.
It’s not specific to dads, but to give myself some grace, this pattern isn't unusual for men in this season of life. A Northwestern University study that followed more than 10,000 men for 20 years found that new resident fathers gained an average of 4.4 pounds after their first child, on top of the weight gain already associated with marriage, while men without children lost an average of 1.4 pounds over the same period.
The sleep disruption, the cortisol load, the dietary drift, it shows up in the numbers. Most men just don't know how to look.
Why this matters before it becomes a diagnosis
The clinical thresholds for prediabetes exist because they predict disease downstream. But the performance cost starts well before those lines.
Blood sugar instability, even within the normal range, affects energy across the day, cognitive clarity, mood regulation, and sleep quality. Those symptoms in the opening aren't minor inconveniences. They're your system telling you something.
And if you address them, the flip side is real: more consistent energy through the afternoon, fewer cravings that feel like emergencies, sharper focus in the second half of the day, nights that don't break open at 3 am.
The more serious downstream risks are worth knowing about: cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and Type 2 diabetes. But for most people here, ideally, the immediate return on getting this right is performance, with a long-term benefit of prevention.