I Tried Levels, The Waitlist-Only Glucose Monitor

blood sugar & metabolism 101

Levels Health Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM).

What is a CGM?

CGM is short for Continuous Glucose Monitor. It’s a small, discrete patch you put on your stomach or the back of your arm that, you guessed it, continuously monitors the amount of glucose in your bloodstream and delivers it to an app on your phone.

CGM technology is exciting because it gives users a personal snapshot into exactly their our body is responding to different foods and choices we make every day. These choices include the foods we eat, when we eat them, what we pair them with, in what order, and the influence of factors like exercise, sleep, and stress. With a clear picture of our metabolic health in a nutshell, we can make informed decisions about how best to optimize our diet and lifestyle for our unique makeup.

A technology once only used by diabetics has received an exciting facelift by the company Levels. They’ve taken hardware manufactured by companies like Dexcom and Freestyle and adapted it to their sleeker tech, including a great blog of resources and an app with top-notch insights designed to elevate and translate the data. Levels was the first company to make blood sugar monitoring possible for people without diabetes, effectively taking the first data-driven step towards addressing the health crisis surrounding metabolic health.

While Levels’ technology can reduce the number of people who end up relying on costly interventions later in life, the implications of this data go far beyond preventing diabetes. Emerging data tells us that metabolic health is the key to halting or reversing aging and chronic disease. Dr. Mark Hyman called Levels’ continue glucose monitor “the gadget that revolutionized my health”.

If you struggle with issues like blood pressure, cholesterol, energy fluctuations, brain fog, stubborn weight gain, cravings, emotional eating, and many more described below, the path to healing likely lies in addressing metabolic health. Metabolic syndrome is the root cause of so many chronic diseases, yet most people don’t know they have it, or that it can be remedied with simple diet and lifestyle changes made early.

Until recently, Levels membership came with a long waitlist. I was lucky enough to sign up early and test it out.

What is metabolic health?

Metabolic health and metabolism are frequently misunderstood, understood only in terms of their role in controlling weight (to describe when people eat whatever they want and never gain weight as having a “fast metabolism”). While they play a central role in how we gain and lose weight, at its core, metabolic health is about how effectively our body makes and uses energy.

Good metabolic health depends on “optimal levels of five markers: blood sugar, triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, blood pressure, and waist circumference—without using medication.”(i). None of these markers live in isolation, and all of them can be improved by the right dietary and lifestyle choices. Levels’ technology continually measures our blood sugar in real time, monitoring how we respond to dietary choices

Every cell in our body needs energy to function. One of our main sources of energy is glucose, which enters the bloodstream from food. Everyone is different, and Levels’ offers the opportunity to get a pulse check on how our unique body responds to foods so we can make better choices.

To understand poor metabolic health in relation to blood sugar, let’s talk about diabetes. Diabetes is a disease of insulin resistance. When we eat sugar and refined carbs, they are quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, causing a rise in glucose levels. In response, our body pumps the hormone insulin to combat the glucose and bring levels back to baseline. When we consume the Standard American Diet of refined sugar, carbohydrates, and processed food, over time our body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin and we need more and more to return to baseline after repeated glucose spikes. Hence the need for diabetics to manually pump insulin as soon as their blood sugar reaches unhealthy levels. The first stage of insulin resistance is “insulin sensitivity”, and warning signs include glucose spikes that stay elevated for too long, go too high, exhibit lots of instability (spikes and crashes), and an increased sensitivity to healthy “complex” carbs from whole food sources likes sweet potatoes, squash, amaranth, and fruit.

Why does this matter?

1. Type II diabetes is entirely preventable and/or reversible by eating a metabolically healthy diet and understanding how our bodies respond to food.

2. Unlocking your metabolic health will make you feel and perform better than ever before. Benefits include:

   • Weight loss and increased fat-burning ability

   • Stable and sustained energy throughout the day

   • Sharp memory

   • Increased exercise endurance and athletic performance

   • Stable mood

   • Clear skin and decreased wrinkles

   • Improved fertility and sexual health

   • Stronger immunity

   • Beyond diabetes, lower risk of other chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s, obesity, fatty liver disease, heart disease, stroke, and many more.

Coaching with Levels:

Levels technology enables me to offer my Health Coaching clients the opportunity to explore their own metabolic health. For those who choose to work on it together, I partner with them in translating, understanding and extracting solutions from their real-time data to build custom recommendations that address their unique needs.

After positively ranting about Levels over Thanksgiving, my Dad decided to order a kit. I coached him through the process, and it was ultimately a very eye-opening experience. He went into it curious about the effects of food on his body after noticing symptoms like adverse physical reactions and decreased energy after meals. He discovered that a lot of foods he was eating that he thought were healthy like amaranth, rice, sourdough bread, white potatoes, and gluten-free pizza did not work for his body and caused overly-elevated glucose spikes, especially when paired with stress. He had to make modifications to his diet to regain energy, optimize performance, and avoid worsening metabolic health. I’m very glad he did! He would never have known that specific combinations of food (ones that might be perfectly healthy for someone else) did not agree with him and were contributing to his symptoms.

Levels x Dexcom G6.