Levels Experiment Week 1

What I’ve Learned

Measuring glucose once every year or two as part of an annual physical, simply isn’t enough. That’s like driving a car without knowing how much gas is in the tank.

The continuous glucose monitor (CGM) gives me the information I need to learn how to eat and exercise in a way that keeps my glucose in a healthy zone as much as possible.

Improving my metabolic health will help prevent diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

My Personal Food and Exercise Learnings

• 10 minutes of gentle exercise immediately after eating helps keep my glucose levels from spiking. I go for walk or easy peddle on my bike. I highly recommend that you make this a habit if you want to improve your metabolic health. It’s free and easy. Don’t be an overachiever here. Getting your heartrate high will actually raise your glucose levels.

• The transition from having an abundance of freely availble glucose to a lower amount can be physically uncomfortable. This is temporary. And with the CGM, I know what my levels are and I can make decisions based on that information.

• Eating protien and fat before eating easily digestable carbohydrates prevents glucose spikes and helps keep levels down. I eat cheese and almods with half an apple as a snack. An apple spikes my levels.

• I can eat regular portions of food especially when there is a good mix of fat, protien, and fiber

• Beans seem to be very good at helping blunt glucose spikes. So do avocados.

• I can eat pizza

• I can eat popcorn

• I can eat chocolate

• I can eat cheeseburgers

• Cheerios shoot my glucose levels up high and fast

• Rowing crashes my glucose levels right now. That’s an idication to me that my body isn’t converting stored energy - fat - into energy. This would not be a problem if I were more metabolically healthy. I’ve already seen an improvement with yesterday’s rowing session, where my levels didn’t crash. I take that as a good sign.

Support from Levels

Levels provides a lot of information to help learn what works and what doesn’t. For example, you recieve a daily report with ideas on how to improve. I’ve included part of one of my daily reports in the screenshot above.

The meal shown in the report was scored 7/10. It stayed in the healthy range, but it did go up a little fast. That response to a meal like this should improve as I stay within range in the coming weeks.

The mobile app also presents you with articles that can help. One night my levels dropped below the healthy range, and the next morning the app had a link to an article explaining why levels can drop overnight. One reason is sleeping on the CGM, which I was doing at the time the low levels were recorded.

Looking Forward to Week 2 and Beyond

I feel I’ve learned a lot this first week. Information I would not have without doing this experiment. This week I will try to keep experimenting with what I eat and how I exercise. My daily scores are in the high 70’s and I had one day that was 100% in range.

Week 3 will have Christmas, so there will be a day or two that won’t be perfect, and that’s OK. It’s a holiday and I’m going to enjoy it. I hope you will too.

• Levels
• Metabolic Health
• Health Experiment
• Healthy Diet
• Inflammation
• Chronic Inflamation
• Cancer
• Diabetes
• Heart Disease
• Stress
• Mediation
• Yoga
• Exercise