Johnson was already highly mindful of his nutrition, eating a low sugar and carb diet, when he started using Levels last summer at the suggestion of trainer to the pros, Mike Barwis. Johnson quickly found out how valuable personal feedback can be. He cut out berries that spiked him and realized pasta—a previously forbidden food—worked as long as he had protein with it.

“I just learned so much for two weeks, every day. I started getting lean. My energy was consistent,” he says. “I always thought I was honing in nutritionally, but this is the first time I’ve seen a significant change, because I’m finding out what works for Jack.”

Here’s what Johnson had to say about getting addicted to the Levels experience, preparing for life after the NHL, and finding his go-to order at the ice cream shop.

On his early attempts to eat well as a professional athlete:

When I was young I was fairly small, so I just ate whatever I could, trying to get bigger and stronger. I didn’t start paying attention to nutrition until I turned pro, when I was 20 years old. I was around guys that were more health conscious, and I started to learn from them. But really I was just mimicking what they were doing.

When the whole gluten fad hit, I thought, “Hey, maybe something miraculous will happen to me if I go gluten free.” Nothing did. Then I tried going no carbs and no sugar. And that didn’t change anything for me. I didn’t feel like my performance really changed. I was just hungry all the time. I’d get to lunch and think, “There’s only so many salads I can eat every day,” and I’m just bored with it.

With something as extreme as no carbs and no sugar, I at least expected my body fat to drop to, like, three percent, and it never did. My wife would laugh and tell me, “You literally look no different.” And I’d think, “Well, that was a waste.” All I did was make life more difficult.

I realize now I was just playing a guessing game.

On discovering Levels in the off season through his trainer, Mike Barwis:

I approached Mike about the nutrition aspect of my summer training and he said, “Hey, you’ve got to try this. It’s awesome. Just eat what you normally eat, and you’re going to learn from there where to go.”

After a few weeks, Mike said to me, “You look a lot leaner than you normally do. How’s it going [with Levels]?” And I said, “It’s great. I mean, I’m addicted to it.” I’m scanning my arm every half hour. My wife would joke, “Are you taking another picture of your food?”

I think the best I ever felt was this summer, when I started monitoring my glucose level, because I could eat in a normal way, monitor my glucose level, and I see that I was in the green. I just found things that worked for me.

No two human beings are genetically built the same. We’re just not. And so what works for somebody, doesn’t work for someone else. This is the first tool I’ve seen that you can really find out what works for you.

On Levels opening up his food choices rather than restricting them:

I was told years ago that a lot of players switch to rice instead of pasta for their pregame meals because it was lighter, it didn’t have as many carbs. It’s supposed to be better for you. So that’s what I did.

After I started using Levels, I was at an Italian restaurant and it was my splurge meal, so I ordered chicken Francese over pasta. It was unbelievable. I must have had four or five pieces of it. I was checking my Levels app, and I just kept waiting for the spike, waiting for the spike. A couple hours went by and no spike. What I learned was that there was so much protein in that meal, my body leveled out the pasta.

So last night we had a big family dinner, and there was a choice of chicken parm or salmon. Normally I’d be thinking, “Man, I can’t enjoy this dinner at all.” I’d grab my piece of salmon and sit at the end of the table, and everyone would look at me like, “What a weirdo.” But knowing what I know now about my body, I had a bowl of Alfredo, and a bunch of salmon to get my protein, and I never spiked.

Peanut butter was another big one. Apples and peanut butter are a main snack for me. I expected there to be enough sugar between the apples and the peanut butter for it to spike me, but the app would rate it as a zone score of nine [out of 10]. Now, there’s an ice cream place down the street we take the kids to on the weekends. So with this lesson in mind, I asked them, “Hey, do you guys put actual peanut butter in the milk shakes, or is it peanut butter flavored ice cream?” They said, “No, we put regular peanut butter in.” So I had them throw me a peanut butter milkshake, and my Levels reaction wasn’t terrible.

I feel like I’ve got so much more freedom to eat. By learning what doesn’t work for me, I’ve opened up so many more doors. I don’t have to worry as much, and feel like I’m limited to like five things on the menu.

On staying healthy after he retires:

This is something that’ll carry on way beyond playing pro. I mean, I’ve got a whole second half of my life to live after hockey, hopefully. And this is going to be a tool that I use for a healthy life. It’ll allow me not to stress out when I’m done playing, and think “Oh, man, I’m not burning as many calories. I can’t eat anything now.” No, I can still live a normal life.

On why anyone can benefit from Levels:

Dieting is hard for people because A, they don’t know any better—sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. Or B, they just don’t want to. And having Levels would allow them to maybe open some doors that they didn’t think were possible. So you can still have a sandwich, because maybe wheat bread doesn’t affect you like you thought bread would. Still having those things in your life might be an easier segue into getting healthy than just eating broccoli and going to the gym every day.

As a professional athlete, a lot of my job is performance, so this is tied to it. But anybody who wants to feel better or look better could use it. That could be a school teacher, or someone who works a corporate job—anyone that feels sluggish during the day. The reward for feeling better and eating what’s good for you? There’s no measure on that for whether you’re an athlete or somebody else. I mean, that’s a quality of life that’s priceless.

The post How NHL player Jack Johnson stopped stressing about his diet appeared first on Levels.

We’ve both been in the sports/volleyball industry for over 10 years and are currently professional beach volleyball players competing on the AVP and FIVB tours. If there is one thing we know to be true, it is that health is freedom. It’s the confidence that your body will allow you the energy, strength, and mood to do the things you want to do every day.  The more you learn about your own health, the more you can control. This past year, we’ve been using Levels to track and optimize our blood sugar levels with wearable continuous glucose monitors paired with their software. This experience has  deepened our understanding of our bodies and taught us how we can use our diet to have more energy and a better mood on a daily basis.

Before working with Levels, we had no idea where our blood-glucose levels stood, or even why they mattered. It seemed like that was only something that people with diabetes or who were pre-diabetic measured. We didn’t realize the importance of maintaining consistent glucose levels for individuals who were seeking optimal health and performance. 

More specifically, we didn’t realize the positive health impacts that limiting glucose spikes can have on our bodies. Stable glucose levels can contribute tohigh functioning immune systems, increased energy levels, stable moods, fat-burning ability, and lower risk of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and stroke, to name a few. That’s just a little bit of the WHY behind the relevance and importance of glucose monitoring.

Though we didn’t meet until we were in our 20s, we both grew up in active families playing multiple sports and had hard-working role models and athletes in our lives that we sought to emulate. Neither of us was heavily interested in “health” in our younger years because we generally felt healthy. Both of us led extremely active lifestyles, avoided getting sick except for the common cold, had a good relationship with sleep, and ate well-balanced meals always including veggies. 

Even though she was an athlete, Kim never really took an interest in her health until college when she started noticing that compared to other collegiate athletes she wasn’t as strong, fast, focused, or energetic.  This led her to study nutrition in college, explore meditation and yoga, learn all kinds of rehab/fitness/movement styles, and experiment a LOT with her diet. 

Sarah developed more of an interest in nutrition and food specifically, after college, when she spent three years living in Europe while playing volleyball. There was an obvious lack of prepared foods and fast foods compared to the US. She started to explore more with whole foods, meal prepping, and became a little obsessed with anything “FRESH”. Fast forward through all of this exploration throughout our college and professional careers to the moment we discovered continuous glucose monitoring and Levels – the moment we found that missing link that could better connect our food choices with performance.

Our experience with CGM

Sarah

I assumed my glucose levels would be within a normal and healthy range (70-110 mg/dl) the majority of the time. Big surprise to me, that wasn’t the case!

I will say that my fasting levels remained very consistent and within range throughout the night. Okay, check. I also learned that I spike pretty high during intense training sessions and especially during matches. (Which makes sense, because exercise triggers the body to release stress hormones like adrenaline and blocks insulin production). But my body quickly returns to normal levels shortly after. However, this is where I find my glucose levels get a little wacky. It starts with how I refuel my body after morning workouts – I am usually on the go and don’t have a lot of time to cook a meal from scratch, so I just reach for whatever is quick or readily available (pasta, rice, bread, potatoes), especially at lunchtime. Post-exercise carbs spiked my glucose, and so I ended up being on a roller-coaster of spikes and dips all day.  What I learned through the Levels program was how to pair those carbs with fats and protein to level-out those spikes, so that the rest of the day it was smooth sailing. 

Kim

I started noticing that oatmeal for breakfast spikes my glucose levels and subsequently crashes those levels (due to the insulin response) into the hypoglycemic (too low) range, sometimes for hours!  If I train immediately after breakfast, no big deal because the energy I need to sprint and jump around in the sand soaks up all of that immediately-available glucose from my oats.  However, if I DO NOT train right away, like when I have a later practice or when practice gets canceled due to rain, etc, all of a sudden first thing in the morning I am SO tired and usually hungry again two or so hours after breakfast. Before I knew about myglucose level response to oatmeal, I would just attribute it to a bad night of sleep or too much training and make sure to make time for a late-morning nap.  More importantly, I started noticing on tournament days that if I have a late morning or afternoon first match, that by game time I would feel shaky and feel my heart racing – which I had always attributed to game-day nerves.  

For reference, here are some of the symptoms of LOW blood sugar:

–       Feeling hungry

–       Sweating

–       Feeling shaky or trembling

–       Dizziness

–       Feeling tired

–       A fast or pounding heartbeat (palpitations)

–       Irritability/moodiness 

Ever noticed these throughout your day?  This was a huge breakthrough for me as an athlete. My mornings needed to be the most productive part of my day – and with Levels, I realized I was killing them due to my body’s response to my favorite ‘healthy’ go-to breakfast staple.  I was also hindering my game-day performance by putting my body into hypoglycemic glucose levels – worst case scenario!! 

Increased performance and mindfulness 

Levels’ technology has been crucial for our training as elite athletes and has also helped us understand how to have a better and more productive day-to-day life.  It has also contributed to our mindfulness, by allowing us to see in real-time the effect of our workouts and nutrition on our bodies.  It allowed us to notice how our mood and energy levels coincide with our glucose levels and begin to develop mindfulness about the actual effect that has on our lives.

Even if you don’t have the ability to accessLevels, we would encourage you to start taking note of how what you eat affects your energy levels and mood.  Eat the same thing for breakfast every day for a week, and try to get the same amount of sleep – notice any mid-morning crashes, hunger, or mood swings?  You might be at the mercy of your body’s glucose response.  The coolest thing about it is – you can control it!  You’re more in control of your health and day than you think, and the best thing you can do for your life is experiment with your health.  The more you learn, the more freedom you will find in a deeper understanding of the body.  Our experience with Levels gave us more freedom on our journey to finding optimal health, live happy lives, and excel in our careers as athletes.

The post Glucose monitoring: game changing for pro volleyball appeared first on Levels.

David Lee studied biology in college and wrote a paper about how a ketogenic diet can affect epilepsy and seizures. If keeping insulin sensitivity high and blood glucose levels low could potentially prevent these processes from happening in the brain, David wondered what other longevity benefits one could receive. He tried a strict keto diet, but as a collegiate soccer athlete always chasing better performance, he realized his athletic output requirements needed more juice. 

David learned that a typical keto blueprint didn’t work with his sprint-heavy workout routines. He soon embarked on a mission to find a way to leverage the potential long-term benefits of keto while also getting explosive sprint energy.  He started following people like Tim Ferris, Peter Attia, Dom D’Agostino, and others who were experimenting with CGMs. 

“In January 2020, I did a DEXA scan that put me at 18.5% body fat,” notes David. “I was spending a lot of time at work and eating liberally, and decided to make a big health push. I started using Levels around June 2020 to refine my understanding of nutrition. I dropped about 13 pounds in about two months, and being able to visualize the metabolic journey with Levels was insightful.” 

David credits the new perspective of his metabolic health as an impetus for envisioning a stronger connection between food and energy. 

“I am big on using data to make informed decisions about my general wellbeing,” remarks David. “I want to have a lot of metrics to develop feedback loops that lead to actionable improvements. Levels helped me summarize a very important component of my biochemical profile. The objective data is great to connect perspective and personal performance to drive actionable insights.

Metabolic Health as a Keystone Habit

For David, the best metabolic health approach is to build a flexible set of habits built on short feedback loops based on data, rather than a rigid pass-or-fail goal tracking system. 

“As a data scientist, I try to view all data as being part of a system. I think a lot about systems and habits,” says David. “If you have good habits and a finely-tuned autopilot system, you’ll directionally be pretty good. Levels helped me get that instant feedback loop and hone in on my habits and make sure I was going in the right direction.”

Being directionally correct has allowed David to eliminate the extra worry that may come with optimizing his personal nutrition so he can focus on stringing together positive days. 

“James Clear’s book Atomic Habits helped me bring a lot more awareness to the actions I was taking on a daily basis, particularly how I could rewire my days around a certain keystone habit,” believes David. “If you set metabolic health as your keystone habit, you’ll end up driving much more awareness and accountability to every other aspect of your life: sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress, and so on. Before you know it, you’re stacking other healthy and beneficial activities together while attempting to optimize your metabolic health score in the app.” 

However, building habits can be difficult if they come with the responsibilities of tedious rote work such as manually logging food and exercise, and then trying to correlate it with an additional response data set, such as blood glucose. 

“What I liked the most about Levels is that it helped make eating healthy and making good choices less neurotic,” comments David. “Snapping a picture of your meal is so easy– otherwise I would hate logging anything because it’s just tedious. Even logging workouts is tedious. I set up templates for these things because individual logging is so annoying.” 

The nuances of nutrition can be tricky to nail down without a real-time cause and effect. David had a functional understanding of how what types of foods were good for him in theory, and seeing his metabolic data helped him develop a more granular understanding. 

“Prior to tracking my metabolic health, I basically just relied on intuition,” says David. “One of the most significant eye-openers was the impact white rice and white flour could have on me. Whether it was enchiladas or sushi, or anything that was white rice based, I would spike up. So now, I plan to have that at the end of the week or before or after a really hard workout.” 

As long as he was eating directionally good, David found a delayed gratification piggy-bank effect on his metabolic health. 

“I could have a cheat meal with minimal metabolic impact because I had basically built some sort of credit with my body, explains David. “Recently, I had a Blizzard from DQ and it didn’t do much, whereas maybe if I had like two bad days in a row, my glucose levels would have probably exploded.”

Optimizing Workout Strategy

David is very principled and strategic about his workout routines and nutrition. He found that by reducing the cognitive load of deciding his workouts and nutrition, he was able to focus more on how he can better optimize his athletic endeavors by prioritizing his metabolic health.

“I liked seeing which things are working well, which ones aren’t,” says David. “With Levels, right away, I was able to see validation that I ate well. Seeing those green metabolic health scores drove my other behavior. It became easier to connect data sets. I noticed that if I had a great workout one day, I also tended to have a green metabolic score– I also felt overall better and more accomplished on that front. I focused on making life decisions that gave me better metabolic health scores because they were linked to overall positive results in many other aspects of my life.”

Being able to see a single objective data makes it easier to quantify subjectivity. If we can ascertain a positive impact from our actions on our overall well being, we’re able to focus on the things that give us more long-term enjoyment in life. 

“I found that having accessible metabolic data just makes you a more conscious and thoughtful eater,” concludes David. “It also gives you a ton of flexibility. For example, if I’m about to eat something I’d consider bad for me, I better enjoy it because it’s going to bomb the score. Better yet, I can plan to take actions after something that spikes me to minimize the negative impact while also getting a stronger burst of energy.”  

Planning his daily workouts in one sitting a month in advance, David found that he was able to reduce the daily requirements of deciding what to eat and how to work out. 

“The first thing I did when I woke up was check my workout and be locked into it,” comments David, “That would roll into the rest of my day’s nutrition. I would pair my meal types with my workouts. I found this reduces the necessity to think of it on a daily basis, and I think it created a really good synergy of accountability to yourself.”

In action, David found that he could coordinate his meals with his type of workout to maximize his athletic output and set reasonable expectations.

“I tried to monitor how HIIT versus low-intensity longer duration exercise impacted my glucose levels,” explains David. “If I was doing HIIT exercises like sprints, I wanted to see that big spike. If I was doing long runs, I’d look for my levels to be fairly flat. If I saw myself crashing, I would eat foods to replenish my glycogen. This all connects to my daily nutrition and planned workout as well.”

“The objective data makes it easier to make directionally good nutritional decisions, and that makes it so much easier to be consistent without the added mental stress of calculating calories and living a rigid lifestyle because of your diet.”

By using the Zone Comparison feature in Levels, he could see how his HIIT versus longer-duration impacted his energy levels, and that information influenced how he would eat before, during, and after a meal.

“If I didn’t see a big spike in my HIIT exercises, I felt that I probably could have ran a little bit harder, or that I should have done the exercise with more effort or giving myself a shorter break. I wanted to see that large spike, I wanted to be huffing and puffing. I wanted to visualize the glucose being broken down. If it was a longer-duration exercise, like a 90-minute run, I expected to see a long and slow breakdown.” 

Final Thoughts: Directionally Good Metabolic Health 

David Lee is on a mission to feel better and live longer, and he’s found that by focusing on his metabolic health and setting the goal of being directionally good, achieving his other goals becomes much easier. 

“My nutrition plan is simple now and picking food is so much easier now: these are the foods that make me feel good, hopefully I can cook them well so they taste good too, and these are the meals that make me feel bad,” laughs David. “Instead of having to do a lot of the manual labor these insights would usually require, I can build a real-time awareness of where my metabolic health is at any given moment.” 

Without the immediate response, David posits, he would end up trying to retroactively piece together meaning over weeks and months. The shorter the feedback loop, the easier it is to focus on making improvements rather than just monitoring and logging.

“Metabolic health and overall wellness go hand in hand,” comments David. “At the end of the day, it becomes much easier to stack good days together in a row versus trying to set a vague long-term goal over a period of weeks or months. Having that feedback loop makes it so much to stack good habits together, which leads to more good days.”

The post David Lee: Using CGM to build keystone habits for athletic performance and metabolic health appeared first on Levels.

As an RN care coordinator that works with extremely high-risk patients such as individuals with severe cases of diabetes and chronic health issues, Amanda has a unique perspective on the extremes of metabolic dysfunction.

“I’m working with the top 1% of the sickest people, and I focus on health coaching, making sure they have their medications, triage, and so on,” says Amanda. “This category of patients can be incredibly complex. In many cases, it can be difficult to make any lasting positive changes because those conditions have become so severe.”

Amanda aims to help her patients develop an intimate understanding of how they can influence their condition with metabolic awareness and optimization. 

“Since many of my patients have continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), I can connect with them on a more personal front, since I went through the process of using a CGM myself,” says Amanda. “They think it’s just a basic tool to check their blood sugar, but when I talk to them from personal experience about how they can change their behaviors by acting on the cause-and-effect relationship right before their eyes, they seem more open to it.” Amanda posits that her patients will get more engaged in the healthcare process by being able to better visualize the connection between the actions they take (like dietary choices or exercise), and immediate reactions (like changes in glucose levels). 

“If anyone can make the mindful connections between the supply chain of food, energy, and their overall wellbeing, they’re taking a strong step in changing their lives for the better,” says Amanda. “Being able to connect your subjective feelings to your glucose level readings is a very simple way to accomplish that.” 

Since much of Amanda’s responsibilities focus on reducing the complications from chronic illnesses and increasing the quality of life, she spends a lot of time working with patients to help them set goals and make positive lifestyle changes. 

“I’m basically in sales, and my product is trying to sell my patients on good lifestyles and good habits,” says Amanda. “I’m trying to show them how if they make some changes, they will feel better. Aging will be better. Everything will be better and easier if you’re doing A-B-C.”

While using Levels, Amanda also gained insights into the power of immediate and personalized data, and has helped her reinforce her healthy habits and prune her negative ones. 

Amanda’s Journey to Metabolic Health

“I was really excited about using CGM and, of course, the moment I put it on, I think I checked my blood sugar a hundred times the first day, because I was just so enthralled with the real-time feedback aspect,” says Amanda. “It really made an impact on how I looked at my day-to-day eating and my habits.”

Amanda had always been healthful with eating, but being able to see that instant feedback was a very enlightening moment for her. 

“To know how one food makes your blood sugar shoot up versus how that food combined with more fat or protein is really neat,” says Amanda. “I noticed how my thought process changed around food. Every day, I started to think about cause and effect. If I eat this, then this will happen. It starts to stick in the back of your head and you start to think about the consequences of everything you consume.”

For example, Amanda points to a piece of chocolate-covered honeycomb, and how her experience eating it differed before and after tracking her metabolic response.

“It was basically pure sugar,” laughs Amanda. “It shot my blood sugar up to 180 and it had never gotten that high before. I had another piece of it recently, remembering how it spiked my blood sugar before, and I talked my family into going for a walk after dinner. I didn’t feel that severe of an effect– knowing that I can reduce my spike with small actions like that is very useful.” 

Simply being able to confirm her nutritional intuitions with objective data has helped Amanda make more calculated decisions with her meal choices. 

“I remember eating a big piece of cheesecake one night, and my blood sugar didn’t really move, which is a stark difference compared to that honeycomb,” says Amanda. Seeing the difference the fat and protein balance made in an otherwise sugary dessert was great to visualize.”

Building Functional Metabolic Awareness

Amanda found herself at a crossroads familiar to many active individuals with a keen interest in nutrition: maintaining a lean figure while consuming the optimal quantity and quality of food to fulfill the energy demons of a highly athletic lifestyle.

“I’m always trying to stay really lean,” says Amanda. “I do functional fitness too, so I try to balance my aerobic exercise with the weightlifting stuff, but if you do too much of either, you have to really focus on the quality and quantity of the food you eat.” 

By being able to see her post-workout blood sugar and how it fluctuated throughout the day helped Amanda change the way she ate to maximize her workouts on her most active days. 

“My husband, daughter, and I are a very active family,” notes Amanda. “I’m a volunteer for the Colorado Fourteeners initiative, so I climb fourteeners (mountains with an elevation of at least 14,000 feet) on the weekends, and I think Levels has helped me build that awareness to better balance my diet for my most active days and my days that aren’t as active.”

With an average elevation gain of around 5,500 feet, Amanda is likely to burn around 3,000 calories over the span of a few hours. To do so successfully, she must plan her nutrition accordingly. 

“Levels has impacted how I cook and the way I plan our meals when we’re out and about,” says Amanda. “I’ve made sure to add more healthy fat to our diet, because I think that was lacking, so it’s not only just  benefited me, but also my whole family.”

Her metabolically streamlined approach to nutrition has also cascaded into better sleep. 

“I feel like I’m an overall more pleasant person to be around when I’m well-rested– if I’m happier, then everyone else is as well,” laughs Amanda. “I started adding in a high fat snack like peanut butter or almond butter and celery before going to bed and I think I started getting better quality sleep.”

Further, Amanda was able to develop a more granular understanding of what goes on in her body that would otherwise be left to guesswork. 

“I have terrible Premenstrual syndrome (PMS),” says Amanda. “Closer to when I’m going to have my period, I had a feeling my blood glucose would be fluctuating a lot– I felt like when it went too high or too low, I would be super irritable. CGM use helped me confirm in real-time that I had more spikes during the week prior. Bad PMS can be related to glucose stores and how your brain uses them, so it was really neat to see that in action.” 

Final Thoughts

Today, Amanda has internalized her learnings from her Levels experience and become more mindful of her daily nutrition. 

“I found that if I ate a really good protein-packed and fatty snack before bed, I would get better sleep,” says Amanda. “Or, if I exercised and crashed right after, I could tell why. All of these little benefits helped reinforce that body-brain connection that you have when you see what certain foods do to you and how you feel about them.”

By building metabolic awareness early on in life, Amanda posits, people will be able to get a grasp on their metabolic condition and make positive changes before things get too complicated. 

“If only more people in the high-risk pre-diabetic range could have access to glucose monitoring and Levels to prevent them from crossing the threshold into the diabetic ranges,” says Amanda. “I bet the majority of the population in the United States is either in the pre-diabetic range or too close for comfort to that range. It’s just a shame to see people suddenly try to build that awareness only when the problem is staring them right in the face.”

“You have to know what you want in life,” implores Amanda. Where do you derive joy from? What matters to you? What does your day-to-day life look like? What do you want it to look like? For example, if you’re 60-years-old and you just got a diabetes diagnosis, the rest of your life is going to be pretty rough if you don’t make some changes. I talk a lot about aging and how much easier the process is with small changes now.”

“Do you want to see your grandkids grow up,” asks Amanda. “If so, do you want to be able to get down on the ground and play with them? You need to have a very personalized vision of what future you want to have because those small changes might be uncomfortable in the short-term, but in the long-term, they’re more than worth it if you set your sights on something that matters to you.”

“You definitely can’t have the same approach for everybody,” says Amanda. “If someone values watching Judge Judy all day, smoking cigarettes, and drinking above all else, we’re likely just going to have a few more conversations, and if not much changes, that’s like to be the end. You need to be ready to change to build a care plan that will work.” Paired with the right tools that offer visibility such as a continuous glucose monitor, large lifestyle changes can become less daunting, especially if they’re staggered in series of small tweaks.

The post How Amanda Bloom, RN, BSN, used glucose monitoring (CGM) to improve sleep, refine athletic fueling, personalize her diet, and minimize risk of future chronic disease appeared first on Levels.

I applied this approach throughout most of my life until I got to college, sticking with foods like protein shakes, protein bars, and cauliflower rice. Little did I know that those low-carb diets weren’t fueling my body in the optimal way. I actually ended up breaking my foot from lack of carbs, lack of sleep, and overuse of supplements. I would estimate that I was getting about 50-80g of carbohydrates per day at my lowest. I didn’t understand how that was all affecting my body.

Eventually, I learned that carbs are my body’s preferred source of energy. I spent years eliminating them from my diet when they should’ve been there all along. While everybody processes energy differently, for my body, I know that carbohydrates are an efficient and effective source of fuel.

Between my education and professional experience, I’ve learned a lot about nutrition. Using Levels allowed me to actually apply what  I’d learned in school about food and what it does to your body, and see instant feedback on it.

Working with elite athletes at the University of Florida, I learned about the fuel gauge analogy: the idea of having a button on your body that will reveal a gas gauge when pressed to measure how fueled you are. Levels can be that gauge.

Using Levels to understand my blood sugar

My experience using Levels revealed three major surprises:

• How blood sugar affects my energy
• How certain foods affected my blood sugar
• How sleep affected my blood sugar

How Blood Sugar Affects My Energy

One of my favorite and most eye-opening moments I had while using Levels was with my energy levels.

I teach the athletes I work with about premium carbs and regular carbs because they play different roles when it comes to energy. Premium carbs are high in fiber, lower in sugar. They’re slower to be digested and less likely to cause large spikes in your glucose levels. Regular fuel, which is low in fiber and high in sugar, is best had when doing high-intensity exercises so your body can use those fast-acting carbs to fuel your muscles.

There was one afternoon during my second week using Levels when I noticed a change in my energy. It felt as though I’d hit a wall. Instead of working, I just wanted to lay in bed and nap.

When I swiped my CGM, my blood sugar was low. I realized I had hit a post-meal spike from my lunch (homemade pad thai and a Fiber One brownie), and then plummeted. Since the brownie was loaded with fiber (which is generally thought to help with glucose control), it was surprising to see my body react the way it did.

Tony discovered that pad thai and a Fiber One brownie caused a large glucose elevation and subsequent glucose dip that led him to have low energy.

Once I made this discovery, I ate a piece of dried mango and my energy went up. While this helped in the short term, I came to realize that if I had avoided the big spike and subsequent dip (often called reactive hypoglycemia — the body’s exaggerated response to a big glucose load), I could have avoided the energy low. It was totally clear to me that big glucose swings affect my energy, and that pad thai and a brownie might be too many simple carbs for me in one sitting.

Tony found that rice and beans had much less of a glycemic response than dried mangos for him.

How Food Affected My Blood Sugar

One day after having rice and beans, my Levels report revealed this meal did very little  to my blood sugar. My levels  actually maintained a fairly steady level, most likely  because the beans were full of fiber and counteracted the fast-acting carbs in the rice. In contrast, eating a banana on its own made my blood sugar spike then crash down.

Levels provided me with real-time data on what different foods did to my blood sugar. Knowing this information is beneficial so you can prepare yourself for the day. Since the banana caused a crash, I know not to have one before going into a consultation with a client. For athletes, they’ll be able to know what they should and shouldn’t eat before doing any sort of physical activity.

A feature of Levels that I liked in particular was their Zone Scores, which help identify how different factors such as food, sleep, and exercise, affect your metabolism and glucose response. Learning and understanding these effects can help you determine how to combine different foods, as well as foods and different activities, to minimize glucose swings.

While using Levels, I found that homemade protein pancakes with almond flour generated a perfect zone score, meaning very little glycemic response A meal that generated my worst Zone Score  a combination of corn, asparagus, and salmon burgers.

Tony found that homemade protein pancakes with almond flour generated a perfect zone score, meaning minimal glycemic response.

How Sleep Affected My Blood Sugar

Sleep can affect insulin sensitivity, carb metabolism, and even protein synthesis. After using Levels, I can confirm that this is true.

Levels released colored lines to indicate whether your blood sugar is in an optimal range or not. A blue line means low and a red line means high, so you want to stay green. When I changed my sleep schedule for a couple of days, these lines went from steady all day to peaks and valleys. Through this experiment, I learned that lack of sleep hindered my performance. Hindered performance led to higher post-meal spikes and carb intake, which causes more oxidative stress and inflammation.

Tony learned that changing his sleep schedule fro a couple of days led to increased glucose variability, represented by up and down spikes.

Conclusion

Through my own experience, I was able to monitor how different foods affect my energy and how sleep impacts the ways in which my body uses food as fuel. It helped me optimize and personalize my performance through nutrition, and I can take these new learnings and apply them to the work I do with clients to make a bigger impact on their lives.

Author Bio

Tony Castillo is a Registered Dietitian and Nutrition coach who helps recreational athletes lean out and enhance performance without diets, endless supplements or overhauling their whole life.

Tony graduated from Florida International University in Miami with a Bachelor’s in Biology, Bachelor’s in Chemistry, and a Master’s degree in Nutrition and Dietetics.

Tony worked at University of Florida at the collegiate level and then the Toronto Blue Jays with elite professional baseball athletes, Tony’s does virtual private practice on helping recreational athletes become elite performers. Tony’s teaches his virtual clients how to manage their weight and increase performance through behavior changes without counting calories or macros.

Having both parents from the Dominican Republic, Antonio is fluent in both English and Spanish. His journey began in middle school when he was overweight. This continued throughout high school until he decided to jump on a “diet”, which resulted in unsustained weight loss.

Throughout college, his weight fluctuated due to lack of nutrition knowledge. This led him to see that his true passion was to understand how nutrition played a role in the human body. Today, his passion is to teach others how healthy lifestyle modifications optimize performance in ALL areas of life through nutrition.

For more information on Tony:

Email: tony@nutritonfp.com

WEBSITE

INSTAGRAM

FACEBOOK

The post A Performance Dietitian’s perspective on CGM: a critical tool for dialing in sleep, exercise, nutrition, and energy appeared first on Levels.

Josh spent the first half of his professional career working at SpaceX and Hyperloop– two companies, one founded by and the other supported by Elon Musk, with reputations for attracting the nation’s most promising and ambitious talent and pushing them to new productivity heights to accomplish demanding goals.

For Josh, performing at peak levels of focus for extended periods of time was a daily requirement, and slumping energy levels weren’t an option.

At SpaceX, Josh spent six years working on rocket and spacecraft systems, including the pressurized life support systems that flew astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station in May 2020. At Hyperloop One, a high-speed, evacuated transportation company, Josh worked on infrastructure level engineering and life support systems development.

“I decided to get some quantitative data to understand what’s going on with my metabolism, the energy producing system of the body– and see how I might take objective action to improve my current state. Going down this road, I started experimenting with measuring my glucose.”

In an effort to combat fatigue, Josh applied his characteristic engineering approach to his health by using glucose monitoring to analyze how his body was performing in converting food to usable energy. In time, through years of this self-experimentation and further exposure to metabolic research while at SpaceX, Josh would be compelled to go on to start Levels to help others improve their metabolic fitness.

Today, Josh feels confident he exerts a high level of control over his energy levels by having developed a dialed-in intuition about how his body responds to specific food and what affects his glucose levels.

“It’s not like I have some superhuman energy and I’m always running on afterburners at 110%,” jokes Josh. “I just have much more control. I don’t have the post-meal lows, and that’s the biggest improvement that I’ve experienced. I don’t have this overwhelming need for a nap in the afternoon. Every once in a while I’ll have an afternoon cup of coffee just because I love it, but now it’s more of a ritual than a requirement.”

How Josh Clemente Optimized His Energy with Levels

Prior to being hit with fatigue, irritability, and lower mood in his late 20s, Josh — who is also a Level 2 CrossFit trainer– was seemingly doing everything right. Already athletically inclined, Josh grew frustrated that his energy levels were slumping despite his hours in the gym.

“I expected that if you work out regularly and aren’t overweight, the aesthetic physical fitness element will equate to overall health,” says Josh. “I thought that I was fairly healthy because I was in decent shape, but didn’t really pay attention to the nutrition side or the holistic side of metabolic function and metabolic health.”

Josh first encountered scientific research about the potential of different dietary strategies while at SpaceX. The study, originally done on rats, extrapolated that a ketogenic diet could potentially have neurological and protective benefits for people in strenuous circumstances, including jobs such as astronauts and divers.

“That study showed me for the first time that diet could have a profound positive impact on human physiology,” notes Josh. “I followed a rabbit hole that led me to the two basic primary energy molecules in the human body, fat and carbohydrates, and I knew I wanted to track them in my own body.”

Josh started with fingerprick blood glucose tests and an Excel sheet to try to discern a correlation between his food consumption and energy levels.

‍After a few weeks of taking upwards of sixty finger pricks a day, Josh ultimately noticed that the unfavorable energy fluctuations he was experiencing were correlated with wild variability in a primary energy substrate in the body: glucose.

Although Josh started to see some patterns, he wanted to get more immediate real-time data.

“I wanted to get a more granular view of my glucose responses, so I started exploring continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices, which were originally developed for diabetes management.”

A CGM is a wearable sensor with a small filament that inserts under the skin that automatically check glucose at regular, frequent intervals, without the need for fingerpricks.

Josh found his energy fluctuations appeared to be correlated with large spikes in glucose that resulted from the dietary decisions he was making. Post-meal glucose elevations are generally followed by surges in insulin, which allow glucose to be taken into the cells, and when the glucose load is excessive, it can cause an exaggerated insulin response that leads to a subsequent big drop in blood sugar, a response known as reactive hypoglycemia.

“These lows following my glucose highs corresponded almost perfectly with my mid-afternoon crash: that 2:00 PM need to have another cup of coffee, and just a general feeling of irritability and fatigue,” says Josh.

“At the time, I was loading up on calories for muscle-building purposes. Several hundred grams of carbs per meal. My tests showed I was actually pushing myself way beyond the muscle-building threshold of carb loading into the pre-diabetic blood sugar zone. Because of this, my blood sugar would occasionally stay in an elevated range after meals for quite a long time.”

“In my personal research on myself, I realized that I’m extremely sensitive to carbohydrates– I’ll have a major blood sugar increase for something that will cause a fraction of the response in someone else. It doesn’t matter what the carbohydrate is; I am just generally sensitive to carbs. Since I’ve adjusted to a more low-carb diet, I don’t get those energy slumps anymore and feel overall healthier.”

Josh had opened the pandora’s box of human metabolism, and learned how to optimize it for himself through regular glucose monitoring: a process that culminated in the founding of Levels.

“I started looking into ways to get more value from the data by using software that helps people take action themselves to improve their metabolic health. Realizing there was some underlying metabolic dysfunction I hadn’t expected was a transformative moment for me,” recalls Josh.

It became clear to Josh that improvement in health requires a personalized, data driven approach with actionable insights; there’s no “one size fits all” strategy to get to better health, as every body is different.

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Final Thoughts: Metabolic Empowerment at Scale

Josh started by thinking about how many variables are inextricably linked to glucose levels, beyond just nutrition, including sleep, stress, exercise, food selection, meal timing, food combinations, and more.

“Using Levels helped me focus on a single number, my glucose levels, and monitor how it reacts to so many of my decisions in real-time,” says Josh. “Whether it’s a workout, sleep quality, stress levels, or the food on my plate– glucose just responds so quickly and so objectively that it instantly became the most interesting data I’d ever had about my own health. All the things you can get from a normal wearable, like heart rate, step counters, heart rate variability, pulse ox, this one beats them all.”

The power of data, however, can only be unlocked with the proper analysis. Josh started Levels to make that analysis and actionability of the data seamless. Josh and the Levels team now push themselves to refine the CGM user experience to lessen the cognitive load and minimize the biological detective work to ascertain a relationship between glucose and daily choices. In doing so, they enable useful access to potentially life-changing data that is otherwise out of reach for most people.

“We want Levels to be an optimized user interface that uses composite metrics to quickly make sense of which lifestyle and dietary choices are good or bad for metabolic health,” says Josh. “We want to give people visibility into trends over time.”

Every human body is unique and can have different glucose responses to various foods, making a perfect-tailored fit of a universal blueprint diet, such as low-fat vs keto, impossible. By gaining access to your personal unique data points with Levels, Josh argues, you can engineer an optimized diet for you.

“The personalization aspect of Levels is really amazing,” adds Josh. “There’s a huge amount of variability, and it’s difficult to gauge your body’s response just based on how you feel– you need objective data to make sense of it all in the long-term and build the healthiest habits.”

At a population level, Josh sees Levels as an opportunity to make an enormous and scalable impact on the world.

“We have the capability to compare personal data across other populations,” says Josh. “Users can learn from the Levels community through social engagement, and can use the Levels software to help make sense of the multivariate drivers that all impact glucose levels. I love the feedback and having that closed-loop between actions and reactions.”

Metabolic fitness, according to Josh, starts with building awareness around our daily decisions and making minor adjustments in the pursuit of a truly healthy lifestyle.

Levels has come a long way from sixty blood glucose finger pricks per day, boasting features such as metabolic fitness scores, activity catalogs, and zone scores designed to help anyone craft their personalized optimal diet.

By using Levels to refine his understanding of how his body responds to his lifestyle choices, Josh was able to unlock a treasure trove of useful and actionable information.

Today, Josh enjoys control and flexibility over his energy levels countless entrepreneurs and engineers in demanding work environments can only dream of. All it took was getting educated on the basics of molecular energy– and building a powerful platform to apply it to his life.

The post How Levels Founder Josh Clemente mastered his energy levels with glucose tracking and CGM appeared first on Levels.

After using Levels, Alex became inspired to start looking into creating glycemic profiles for all of his athletes to better understand how their unique metabolic responses to foods can be leveraged for better performance.

“I wanted to be a guinea pig for Levels so that I could then know how to approach higher-level tests with our athletes,” laughs Alex. “Everyone who competes knows how big nutrition is. But even now, if I refer someone to a dietician or nutritionist, they’re going to start with keeping a personal food log, followed by reports of how they feel during their workouts.”

The sensation of feeling, Alex posits, simply isn’t good enough to truly understand how nutrition impacts someone on a personal level. To get the extra edge, you need objective data.

What happens when a golfer reports having shaky hands halfway through a big tournament? Alex runs through a quick mental list: dehydration? Lack of sleep? Nerves? Food? Something else?

“Most of the time, we’re just not getting objective enough,” says Alex. “Levels is a huge help in isolating a critical variable. The objectivity is golden.”

“I was also surprised how exercise right after eating can impact glucose levels, says Alex. “I never really even considered how a fairly low level of exercise could affect glucose levels so much.”

Maximizing Golf Performance with Nutrition

In golf, a sport where a standard 18-hole round of golf can take anywhere between 4 to 6 hours, what you eat and when you eat before and during the match can be very impactful on performance.

“When we’re talking about professional golf, what you eat can make a huge difference,” insists Alex. “For example, if you have a banana as a snack at the turn (halfway in golf), and you get a sharp spike in your glucose levels, your performance in the next portion can be severely impacted. If you can keep your mental clarity and avoid shaky hands, especially in such a mentally demanding sport like golf, why not do it?”

Golf requires a stillness of mind, and many variables such as hydration sleep, sleep, nerves, and glucose levels can all have an impact.

“There are so many variables and there is simply no replacement for Levels to eliminate the subjectivity,” says Alex. “If my athletes are saying their hands feel unsteady, I want to better understand whether it’s from their meals, dehydration, or just nerves, and the work proactively to ensure those negative effects are minimized or eliminated in the future.”

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Experimenting with Custom Glycemic Profiles for Athletes

“A big attraction of studying glucose levels for my athletes isn’t just about what foods they need to replace,” says Alex. “I believe it will also help us understand which athletes should be more concerned about their glucose levels in general. To know if someone is susceptible to having low blood sugar would be a huge benefit.”

“For example, I never get blood sugar crashes,” explains Alex. “I can easily go 24-hours without eating and get two workouts in and be fine for the most part. But, when you’re on tour, sometimes you have the issue of someone playing super early. They might be already warming up at 6:15 AM to go play. Do they need a big meal that early” For players that are particularly prone to low glucose levels, Alex notes, they put their performance at risk if they skimp on eating the right food– particularly in those early tee times.

“If you know your athlete’s individual glycemic profiles, you could possibly provide immediate support if they report feeling off between rounds,” comments Alex. “For example, if their energy levels and focus are slumping as a result of low or high glucose levels, they can make minor tweaks in their nutrition to better support their performance.”

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Using Food Combinations to Control Glucose Spikes

A valuable asset to his athletes, Alex often finds himself on the road to provide as much support and guidance as possible.

“In a normal year, I’m on the road with my athletes for around 24 weeks of the year,” describes Alex. “When traveling, it’s not weird for me to have multiple back-to-back 14-hour days. On tournament weeks, I’m working six days a week. I can’t just be crashing after lunch.”

By developing a deeper awareness and appreciation of how the food he eats impacts him on a chemical level, Alex is able to gain more control over his unique diet, a valuable skill set during times that require extended focus.

“I have a huge sweet tooth,” Alex admits. “When you’re on a tournament week, they’ll just put out these huge platters of food and say eat whatever you want, which is a challenge for me. The Honey Nut Cheerios are always calling my name. At home, I’m great because I don’t buy things I would indulge in– that box of Cheerios would be gone in a day. But when you’re on the road with catered food, and you’re hungry? That’s a different story.”

Alex has found that experimenting with fats have allowed him to minimize any spikes, and therefore eliminate the post-spike energy and focus crashes.

“Food combinations are super interesting to me,” notes Alex. “For example, I can have that bowl of cheerios without a significant spike as long as I have a few pieces of bacon beforehand. For me, fat was the ultimate equalizer of carbs, and I had never really focused on adding fat to curb my glycemic response.”

Alex also gained some unique insights into his regular nutritional habits.

“I thought oatmeal was a pretty good food for me, but after using Levels to track it, I saw having oatmeal as my first meal of the day would shoot my glucose levels through the roof,” remarks Alex. “I may as well have had a candy bar.”

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Final Thoughts

Like many physical therapists working with top-tier athletes, Alex Herzlin needs to be at the top of his game to make sure his athletes are at the top of theirs.

“Levels just takes the stress out of the whole thing. I think anyone that cares about their health or their performance has moments where they eat certain things and say, ‘Oh, I probably shouldn’t have eaten that’ but that’s mostly subjective. Levels helped me break that down to a number.”

Alex looks forward to the day where he can troubleshoot any gaps in performance and recovery with objective data. Along the way, Alex also gained some insight into his own metabolic health.

“The coolest thing is that Levels just really is an application for anybody,” says Alex. I really can’t imagine a person that wouldn’t benefit doing this for a month.”

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More About Dr. Herzlin:

Instagram

The post How glucose monitoring (CGM) is changing the game in professional golf: an interview with Dr. Alex Herzlin appeared first on Levels.

However, if you’re curious about how your glucose levels naturally impact your energy levels, you’re a step ahead of the game.

Sleep and rest aside, the sensation of having low energy is often linked to how, what, and when we eat.

Your brain primarily runs on glucose for energy under normal conditions. Given that, it’s no surprise that conditions of glucose dysregulation (like type 1 and 2 diabetes) are known to be linked with decreased energy levels, feelings of fatigue, and reduced alertness.

While there isn’t conclusive evidence or studies that show a direct link between glucose levels and overall energy in non-diabetic, otherwise healthy individuals, we can gain some insights from extrapolating on studies of energy levels in states of metabolic impairment.

For example, individuals with type 1 or type 2 diabetes tend to experience significant rates of fatigue and low energy, two symptoms that tend to be correlated to acute dips and spikes in glucose levels.

However, it’s worth asking– can all individuals maximize their energy levels by controlling their glucose levels?

Minimize spikes and dips for optimal energy

As we’ll learn, there’s a slight irony to energy levels: the more “energy” we have in our body in the form of glucose, the less subjective energy we might feel.

In one study where glucose levels were sharply elevated to around 300 mg/dL over 20 minutes, the participants noted a significant decrease in “energetic arousal” as well as worse working memory and attention, slower speeds of information processing, and increased feelings of sadness or anxiety.

The quick spike in blood sugar seemed to directly lead to reduced energy levels and poorer performance on measures of cognition.

Think back to when you had your last “big meal” in one sitting. Soon after eating, you may have experienced the infamous “post-meal slump,” or the distracted period in which you had to actively fight the urge to take a nap.

Not only do sharp glucose spikes seem to cause fatigue and decreasing energy levels, but so do dips. One study in individuals with diabetes found that low glucose levels overnight (between 42 to 59 mg/dL) were correlated with lower energy, decreased well-being, and a faster time to fatigue during exercise the next day (compared to individuals with overnight glucose levels between 90 to 216 mg/dL.

Glucose dips that occur after a post-meal glucose spike, termed reactive hypoglycemia episodes, are notorious for leading to feelings of tiredness, fatigue, and a lack of energy– but some studies suggest that minor modifications of eating patterns can minimize reactive hypoglycemia or eliminate it altogether.

One 2018 study followed three healthy individuals experiencing post-meal reactive hypoglycemia. By changing up the participants’ eating patterns to a lower carbohydrate diet and more frequent, smaller meals, the study found that the reactive hypoglycemia in all three participants improved.

Another study found that the fatigue that is commonly reported by individuals with a new diagnosis of diabetes is worse as fasting glucose levels increase.

High glycemic index foods tend to produce both high blood glucose and insulin levels, which for many people is followed by reactive hypoglycemia and that pesky feeling of fatigue. It has been suggested that low glycemic index meals can prevent hypoglycemia in the post-meal period because they may have less accessible carbohydrates, and may generate slower absorption of nutrients, triggering less of an insulin surge (and therefore less of a reactive, exaggerated drop in glucose).

Glucose swings, termed glycemic variability, are also a known trigger of oxidative stress, a process in which “free radicals” are formed that can cause cellular dysfunction. Oxidative stress is often linked to chronic fatigue, further giving strength to the theory that metabolic dysfunction can reduce one’s energy levels.

How to get more energy by controlling your glucose levels

Sometimes, the quest for more energy may require a fundamental psychological shift in how you view food. Another energy drink or coffee may just be a quick fix that is blinding us to the metabolic chaos underneath.

Getting more energy likely means modifying a few life habits in the pursuit of metabolic fitness. This is going to require learning your personal unique response to food and lifestyle choices and distilling your learnings into actionable steps.

The Levels program, for example, helps people unlock, aggregate, and analyze critical metabolic data in real-time, so they can make the best dietary decisions for them.

Given the research highlighting the links between glucose spikes, glucose dips, glycemic variability, and elevated fasting glucose with reduced energy levels and fatigue, there can be a significant benefit in regularly tracking glucose levels to better understand your personal glucose levels in response to different foods.

You have a few options at your disposal:

• Reduce your carbohydrate intake per meal. Every human body is unique, and we all respond to carbohydrates differently. Some people may be more sensitive to carbs, whereas others aren’t.Testing your response to carbohydrates can help you zero in on how much they raise your glucose.
• Change your carbohydrates per meal. Within the same vein of our metabolic uniqueness, we also respond to different types of carbohydrates differently. For example, the same amount of banana can spike one person’s glucose levels significantly while having a minimal effect on another.

• Try out other metabolic health strategies, like optimizing sleep and engaging in consistent exercise, to control glucose levels.

Ultimately, you may just need a metabolic tune-up: consistent, smarter dietary and lifestyle habits based on your own personal glucose data. The only way to know with a high degree of certainty is to test it for yourself and witness the results yourself.

Seeing the data first-hand is an important and empowering opportunity to make personalized lifestyle and dietary adjustments, many of which can contribute to more consistent and stable glucose levels, which may, in turn, lead to better energy levels and reduced fatigue.

The post Can controlling my glucose levels give me more energy? appeared first on Levels.

After three years of low carb dieting and exercise, Allison dropped 95 pounds, shredding from a high of 219 pounds down to about 125. “The first 2 years I stayed below 20 net carbs, and stayed below 10 TOTAL carbs for about eight months of that,” reminisces Allison.

These days, after using continuous glucose monitoring and Levels, Allison is now including many of the “forbidden foods” that rigid keto diet practitioners tend to avoid: things like carrots, apples, pears, and more. She has been able to liberalize her keto diet by seeing in real-time that certain “keto-unfriendly” items actually do very little to raise her glucose, making them fair game for her and little risk of kicking her out of ketosis.

While the results of most hardcore diets are hard to dispute, the underlying psychological attachment or rejection of certain types of food that develop can be very rigid and limiting.

So, how would an individual that pushed through eight grueling months of a total of 10 carbs view something like an apple (~30g carbs) or even a carrot (~10g carbs)?

The answer is: with terror.

“I had full-blown carb-phobia because I felt that any carb I ate would have super negative effects on my health. Seriously, I would toss out every carrot from my salads,” Allison laughs.

Although Allison managed to hit her weight loss goals, she felt at a lack of energy when it came to her muscle-building gym routines.

“I had gotten to this point where I lost all the weight I’d wanted to, and now I’m trying to build muscle,” says Allison. “Instead of carbs, I was taking in more pre-workout caffeine, and my energy levels were pretty erratic. I wanted a more natural way to fuel muscles.”

In her research to find dietary flexibility and more energy for her workouts, Allison found out about Levels.

“My goal with Levels was to see whether I’m metabolically flexible or not. Can I have these carbs? What do they actually do to my body? I found that carbs in moderation really don’t do a whole lot!”

After using Levels for just two months, Allison was able to make some adjustments to her rigid keto diet, and in doing so fight off the carb phobia, one carrot at a time. By using continuous glucose monitoring to identify whether foods were having an impact on her glucose levels, she was able to identify a number of foods she could consume without a big impact on ketosis.

“The metabolic data is super interesting to me because it shows me how my body is responding to the carbs I eat,” says Allison. “I love the concept of metabolic flexibility. Since I started using Levels, I’ve remained at around 30 total carbs daily and I use them to get more energy in my workouts.”

Allison’s Journey to Metabolic Flexibility

Using Levels, Allison also found that it’s not just about individual foods; a lot of the glucose response has to do with how you pair foods together.

“It was so fun and interesting to see how my body reacted and how I could mitigate certain responses from foods I was afraid of,” comments Allison, explaining her enthusiasm about finally being able to eat an apple without stressing.

I loved the meal comparison feature.

“One of the things I loved that came out in the app during my use was the ability to compare individual meals and responses,” says Allison. “ I could tap on my score and a quick explanation would pop up to give me insight. I also loved being able to call in and ask questions if I needed anything.”

The meal comparison feature is often a gem for any individual seeking to understand how individual foods impact their unique metabolic reaction. For Allison, she notes how she used the feature to differentiate between glucose responses when she added in exercise close to a meal.

“I would use it to see how my body responded to the individual food, then later how exercise impacted the reaction, and how some simple food combinations can minimize my glycemic spikes,” says Allison. “For example, I’d eat an apple immediately before leg day and notice how my blood sugar only hit a peak of 110 mg/dL.”

Food Combination Reactions

“I tried mixing certain combinations to see my response,” says Allison. “I had a pear with cottage cheese. Pears are super sweet and I’d assume they would spike me, but with the cottage cheese, my glucose levels only raised a little, compared to eating the pear alone.”

Pairing fruit with cottage cheese appears to blunt a glucose response for Allison

Carbohydrate Sensitivity

Allison found that she was sensitive to certain carbs, such as bananas.

“Once I found out I could have some carbs period, I wanted to make my experiments more specific,” says Allison. “Most carbs didn’t skyrocket me, but bananas did. I went from 96 mg/dL to 154 mg/dL from a single banana.”

Given this, she’s going to keep those off her keto diet, instead favoring fruit that has less of a glucose response for her.

In an Instagram post, Allison describes the banana sensation: “One thing I noticed VERY QUICKLY was the SURGE of energy that I got from the sugars in the banana! BUT it was not an energy that is good for lifting, as it made me feel shaky! By the end of the lift the feeling had gone away (so definitely a quick hit) but that shows how ineffective fast sugars are for sustained performance [for me].”

More Mental Control Over Nutrition

According to Allison, the data and analysis from Levels also helped her make a distinction between mental cravings and physical needs for food. When people feel hunger, they may sometimes think it’s because of low blood sugar. However, when they see the data indicate that their glucose levels are fine, it can be reassuring evidence that the hunger may be more mental.

“Fasting often becomes a mental versus natural physical hunger,” says Allison. “By looking at where my blood sugar is at, it helps me understand whether I’m most likely craving something, or if I’m genuinely hungry.”

Final Thoughts: Empowerment Through Data

Keto and carbs is often a forbidden pairing, and to maintain ketogenesis, many individuals followed strict regimens of foods that are specifically “keto-friendly.”

Sticking to this list can help ensure that glucose stays low and healthy, but can also be restrictive and limiting. With emerging continuous glucose monitoring technology paired with software insights like Levels offers, individuals can now personalize their diets to really maximize results, by choosing foods that specifically have minimal impact on glucose.

Since two people can respond very differently to the same carbohydrate (based on factors like genetics, body type, microbiome composition, insulin sensitivity, sleep quality, and more), glucose monitoring can clarify how a particular carb impacts you.

‍Carbohydrate quantity is not a foolproof metric of glucose rise in the bloodstream, so biofeedback can be extremely empowering.

For Allison, the glucose biofeedback generated by Levels allowed for inclusions of more foods, helped her understand how exercise can impact a food-related glucose elevation, and showed her how to combine foods in such a way to minimize glucose spikes.

Using CGM during exercise has helped Allison understand how different forms of exercise affect glucose levels

“I really liked how easy Levels was to use, there was lots of functionality, tools, and explainers for the newbies or non-science people like me.”

Allison looks forward to using Levels to continue launching several new experiments to better explore her metabolic flexible ranges. She’s excited to learn how to continue receiving the mental and health benefits of a primarily keto diet while also making the most out of the valuable energy locked in carbs.

“I love having some control over my nutrition,” says Allison. “After being keto for three years, I can finally start coming up with some unique and energy-packed recipes that are personally designed for me.”

Today, Allison feels empowered over her health. Carbs no longer look like a scary step backwards– they’re viewed as more of a valuable energy capsule that must be used responsibly. In two short months with levels, Allison helped to completely restructure the foundation of her nutritional approach in favor of metabolic health.

The post Finding freedom and flexibility in a keto diet by glucose monitoring with CGM: an interview with Allison Krook appeared first on Levels.

• Food is the fuel our bodies run on. Knowing the difference between “regular fuel” vs. “premium fuel” helps understand which one is better for performance

• My experience using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) for 2 months brought me to the conclusion that CGM can offer insights for both athletes and Dietitians to help understand how food affects performance and energy

• CGM shows real-time results to athletes so they can make the necessary adjustments to optimize their performance

CGM through the eyes of a Dietitian

Before using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), I wondered how someone like myself who is not diabetic would get any value from it. I have a healthy pancreas and my diet mainly consists of high-fiber carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, and healthy fats. So how would it benefit me?

Using CGM helped me figure out:

• How to optimize my performance
• How to optimize my energy
• How to optimize my recovery

As a sports Dietitian who’s worked for the University of Florida and then a major league baseball team, I often speak about carbohydrates and performance. It’s one of the first lessons I cover when doing 1:1 virtual coaching sessions with my clients.

When I talk to my athletes about carbs, I ask, “Is there a button I can press on your body to reveal a gas gauge that measures how fueled you are?”

My virtual clients say, “No.”

Using a CGM, however, is almost like having a gas gauge on your body to see how you’re utilizing fuel for your performance.

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Different types of fuel for performance

Imagine two types of cars: a high-end sports car like a Lamborghini or a Ferrari and a lower-end car like a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic. The Lamborghini and Ferrari take premium gas while the Corolla and Civic take regular gas.

If you were to put regular gas in one of the high-end cars, it wouldn’t run as well. But if you were to put premium gas in one of the low-end cars, it would run better.

How does this compare to athletes?

Most of the athletes I work with are Ferraris who want to gain that competitive edge. Even if you’re an everyday athlete trying to optimize your performance, knowing what fuel to have will get you to the next level in your training.

That’s where nutrition comes in, specifically carbs.

I think of carbs as premium and regular. When recognizing the difference between the two, remember that premium carbs are high in fiber, low in sugar while regular carbs are high in sugar, low in fiber. Premium carbs are slower to be digested, less likely to cause a big elevation in blood glucose levels, and have health-supporting fiber. For the majority of the time, this is the better type of fuel to consume because large repeated large glucose spikes are not generally healthy for the body and can zap energy and can lead to inflammation, oxidative stress, and metabolic disease over the long run.

Upon reading a nutrition label, my clients learn to take the total amount of carbohydrates and divide it by the total amount of fiber. Anything with a 5:1 or less ratio is premium fuel, anything between 5:1 and 10:1 is like the middle-grade gas, and anything 10:1 and above is regular fuel.

Athletes doing marathons or even interval training are often advised to have regular fuel. This is thought to give them a competitive edge and a boost in their performance due to the fast-acting fuel. You typically want regular fuel when doing high intensity exercise because that’s when your body needs the most fast-acting carbohydrates to refuel your muscles and give them energy for optimal performance. All other times you want premium fuel. (Note: there are some athletes who follow low-carb training regimens in order to become better adapted to using fat for fuel during workouts, a strategy sometimes called “carb cycling” in order to generate metabolic flexibility).

Why athletes need to be conscious of what they eat

Athletes train multiple times a day. They’re getting very little recovery time and typically eat a lot of processed and individually packaged foods. It’s important for them to recognize whether or not those foods are hurting them or helping them optimize their individual performance.

Imagine finishing a race and noticing your energy go down. If you could monitor your glucose with a CGM device coupled with the Levels app, you’d know when to fuel up before your blood sugar drops so you can continue optimizing your performance.

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Real-time results using Levels to optimize performance

By using Levels, I was able to test my theory on carbohydrates to see if high-fiber foods/premium fuel actually helped me perform better. Not only was I able to confirm what I teach, but I also came to understand that most of the foods I eat help me stay fueled.

For example, I found that rice and beans work great for me because I didn’t hit a post-meal spike, which means having my favorite foods actually optimized my performance. The reason we do not want a post-meal spike is because high post-meal spikes are linked to worsened glucose control over time, development of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, and impaired exercise and cognitive performance. When I ate these foods that did not cause spikes, I found that I felt more focus throughout the day and no slumps in the afternoon.

Unsweetened dried mango, however, sent my blood sugar through the roof. Knowing that, I’d have the dried mango and a protein shake post-workout in order to maximize my recovery. Maximizing my recovery to me meant ingesting rapidly absorbed carbohydrates to refuel my muscle stores and protein to repair the muscles. If I was looking for a quick boost, I’d grab some fruit. If I was trying to maintain my energy throughout the day, I made sure to have a high-fiber snack like granola with Greek yogurt with berries.

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Once during my first month of the Levels experience did I feel my energy crash. After having a dried mango (regular fuel), I saw my glucose go up in real-time, only to come crashing down and resulting in a post-snack energy slump. This helped me be more aware of how “regular fuel” can sometimes lead to poor performance.

I also noticed how the CGM picked up on the 4 Rs of recovery (the recovery strategy I teach clients):

• Refuel your body with fast-acting carbs. I typically suggest granola, fruit, and toast.
• Repair with protein since you were just ripping and tearing your muscles.
• Rehydrate with some sort of liquid from the sweat you lost.
• Rest to ensure your muscles recover properly for your next workout.

Levels showed me that the amount of carbs and protein I had post-workout was what I needed for my recovery. Knowing your own individualized recovery strategy ensures you’re getting what your body needs, and Levels can help accomplish that.

Not only did I have a better workout the next day, but in the moment my body reacted best because those carbs and protein stabilized my blood sugar after it had spiked and then dropped from doing HIIT.

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Conclusion

I can tell you from first-hand experience that Levels is something I would love to use with more athletes. It’s the first product I’ve seen that can address if performance and energy really are affected by what you eat, or if there’s another underlying issue. As a Dietitian, this can enhance the specificity of the advice I can give to athletes, and allows athletes to have more control and clarity over their fueling and recovery strategies.

Whether you’re an athlete or a dietitian, Levels provides you with real-time readings to see if the food you eat impacts how you’re performing. Levels also has some additional features like Zone scores and Metabolic Fitness score, which make it simple to see which food and activity combinations are going to be potentially acting as premium or regular fuel for the individual athlete. These findings will help you understand how to optimize your daily choices and performance so you can remain at a steady energy state for most of the day, instead of hitting peaks and valleys.

Author Bio

Tony Castillo is a Registered Dietitian and Nutrition coach who helps recreational athletes lean out and enhance performance without diets, endless supplements or overhauling their whole life.

Tony graduated from Florida International University in Miami with a Bachelor’s in Biology, Bachelor’s in Chemistry, and a Master’s degree in Nutrition and Dietetics.

Tony worked at University of Florida at the collegiate level and then the Toronto Blue Jays with elite professional baseball athletes, Tony’s does virtual private practice on helping recreational athletes become elite performers. Tony’s teaches his virtual clients how to manage their weight and increase performance through behavior changes without counting calories or macros.

Having both parents from the Dominican Republic, Antonio is fluent in both English and Spanish. His journey began in middle school when he was overweight. This continued throughout high school until he decided to jump on a “diet”, which resulted in unsustained weight loss.

Throughout college, his weight fluctuated due to lack of nutrition knowledge. This led him to see that his true passion was to understand how nutrition played a role in the human body. Today, his passion is to teach others how healthy lifestyle modifications optimize performance in ALL areas of life through nutrition.

For more information on Tony:

Email: tony@nutritonfp.com

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