Levels Health CGM
“Hey, what’s that thing on your arm?”
Blood sugar has always been something that interests me. As a fitness junkie and a former athlete with a poor diet, I can personally speak to the changes in my health after learning more about how to regulate my blood sugar with better nutrition and exercise habits. Recently, I had the opportunity to get connected with a CGM and use the Levels Health app to monitor my glucose. I have spent years learning how to optimize metabolism and worked with hundreds of clients on bringing it to life. Even with all of that experience, it is amazing how much I learned in 28-days using Levels. The Levels program is a game changer for optimizing metabolic health.
What is a cgm?
Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) provide real-time feedback on your blood sugar, aka your glucose. If you want to learn more about continuous glucose monitoring, check out this Levels Blog for all of the info you need.
Why monitor your glucose?
Glucose monitoring is the best way to see how efficient your metabolism is running. Metabolism is life; it regulates our sleep, our appetite, our weight, and our energy levels. With the help of the Levels Health App + CGM, you are able to get real-time updates on how nutrition and activity habits affect your metabolism. By using this data, you can make more informed decisions by learning how certain food and activities affect your metabolic health.
The program
My Levels Health package arrived with 2 two-week Freestyle Libre CGMs, four patches, and instructions for getting the program started. Each CGM is worn for 14 days, then replaced with the next. This program can be done on an on-going basis, but each shipment sets you up for 28 days of tracking.
Once applied, you simply download the Levels Health app on your phone and scan the monitor when you want to see your blood sugar. The app also takes real-time data, so every time you scan you will also load up the data that was stored since the last time you scanned.
Any time you eat, drink something other than water, exercise, or do something active you would take note of when you did it in the app. Over time, you can see the impact those foods and activities have on your blood sugar. With more visibility to how your behaviors affect your metabolic health, you can identify areas to improve and watch your body adapt in real-time. To learn more about the Levels theory of behavior change, check out this Levels blog.
my top 6 takeaways
Managing Carbohydrate + Sugar Intake
The first thing I noticed after starting this program was that even though I was pretty carb conscious, I still had more room to improve than I was expecting. I’ve played around with a self monitoring glucose meter (test strips and lancets) before, and unfortunately I wasn’t blessed with the genetics to get away with crushing carbs.
Since carbs and sugars break down directly into glucose, they can have a massive impact on your metabolic health. I learned that some of my normal habits like big oatmeal bowls and extra servings of sweet potatoes caused a much larger spike in blood sugar than I was expecting. Duh, it makes sense, but I wasn’t thinking about strategically eating these foods and others like it. Now I’m thinking much more about when I’m eating my carbs and how large my servings are.
Make Protein, Fat, and Fiber your Go-Tos
Including sufficient amounts of protein, fat, and fiber in your meals/snacks is a great general rule of thumb for eating to support healthy glucose levels.This is something I learned a long time ago and coach on a regular basis. But, like many of the things I learned in this program, it was not something I was as conscious of as I could have been before starting to use a CGM.
This is a classic example of mindful eating. Rather than grabbing the first highly palatable food you can get your hands on, taking the time to prepare meals and snacks that are balanced and nutrient dense is a major key for managing your blood sugar.
Alcohol and Blood Sugar
I’m not a big drinker, but I do enjoy an alcoholic beverage or two every now and then. I was initially surprised with what I saw when I had a couple of drinks. “It lowered my blood sugar?” Alcohol’s effect on blood sugar is very interesting, learn more in this Levels blog.
Sleep, Stress, and Bood Sugar
We don’t play around about getting good sleep in our household, so I rarely have issues with sleep quantity & quality. I wasn’t actively tracking my sleep during my time following the Levels program, so I can’t make any objective comparisons to how they were connected.
However, I did have a few nights where I ate higher carb/sugar snacks before bed. It was eye-opening to see that while I was sleeping, my body was working hard to regulate my blood sugar after those snacks. After paying more attention to how I felt on those next mornings vs. the morning after a night I wasn’t snacking, I definitely recognized that I felt more well-rested when my body wasn’t having to work to regulate my blood sugar during the time where it is supposed to be ultimately relaxed and recharge.
Regarding stress, there is a direct correlation to how stress affects blood sugar and vice versa. I try to be very mindful and understanding of my stressors. Between faith, focus on what I can control, eating right, exercising, meditating, sleeping well, and staying hydrated I feel like I’ve found a solid balance with managing my stress relatively well. I didn’t have anything unexpected happen with stress induced spikes, but there’s a ton of information about how stress can impact blood sugar at this Levels blog.
Fasting + Meal Timing
After the first few days of monitoring my blood sugar, I was ready to start playing around with what I was learning and make some changes to fill in the gaps where I had room to get better. This Levels blog has a section that discusses fasting and meal timing.
Since I had never done a 24-hour fast, or anything outside of 16 hours, I gave it a shot to see what would happen. I finished eating breakfast at 9am on a Thursday, then didn’t eat again until 9am the following morning. Outside of missing Thursday night dinner, it wasn’t all that bad and it provided me with the baseline glucose reset that I was looking for.
I also became much more aware of my eating window and was reminded of the importance of meal spacing and timing for regulating blood sugar. Managing this is something that varied by the day and situation, but it was a great reminder to be mindful of when I’m eating and what my eating window looked like.
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
Increased metabolic flexibility is the body’s ability to shift between different fuel sources efficiently. The timing and type of exercise can have an effect on how the body taps into different types of energy, ideally shifting towards fat usage vs. carbohydrate usage for the majority of our physical efforts. It was very cool to see the difference between how my body reacted to different intensities and volumes of exercise while wearing the CGM.
During higher intensity workouts, you would see a larger rise in glucose because you’re signaling your body to provide rapid fuel sources. Where with lower intensity workouts, there was a much smaller increase in glucose, if any at all. I didn’t do any workouts longer than 90-minutes and the majority of my workouts are strength biased, so I can’t speak to any experience with long endurance workouts.
Don’t overlook the power of walking and doing short workouts. I saw the best glucose responses from 30-45 minute workouts. I also used walking and stretching/meditation as a way to lower my blood sugar when it was trending higher than ideal. This fits right in line with the idea that properly managing exercise frequency and intensity is hands down the best way to improve physical and metabolic fitness.
Bonus article - How metabolic health affects your joints
All together, my experience with using Levels was extremely beneficial. I’ve been working as a health and fitness professional since 2013 and this tool taught me so many things about how to apply the things I’ve learned about over the years. Knowing what to do is one thing, but actually applying the information around improving your metabolic health is much more challenging. While you can be really good at part of the equation, it is all about maintaining a balance of being pretty good in multiple areas to truly optimize your metabolic health.
Want to learn more? Check out https://www.levelshealth.com/
~Coach Nick
