What is Levels?
The Levels program combines access to the Levels app with continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) shipped directly to your home. The CGM measures your blood glucose levels in real-time, while the app helps you make sense of the data and get a more holistic picture of your metabolic health to make sustainable diet and lifestyle changes.
Read more about the benefits of Levels here.
How does Levels improve metabolic health?
Optimal metabolic health is at the core of a long, healthy life. Metabolism describes the processes by which our body makes and uses energy. The more efficiently our cells can do that, the healthier we are.
CGM and Levels help you ensure that your body’s metabolic systems are functioning at their best by helping you keep your blood sugar levels stable and healthy. The more spikes (hyperglycemia) and crashes (hypoglycemia) we have, the more damage we do to our cells. Stable glucose pays off in the short term through sustained energy and clearer focus, and in the long term, by helping to prevent chronic diseases, from Alzheimer’s to Type 2 diabetes.
While CGMs provide the data, Levels helps you tie that data to your daily behaviors and track your long-term progress toward building a better you. Meal logging, meal comparisons, exercise and sleep tracking, insights, and recommendations—all these features help you translate that continuous glucose information into learnings you can use.
Who should use Levels?
Levels can be a helpful tool for several health goals:
People Optimizing Health
Many people are surprised when they first use Levels and find that despite eating “healthy” foods such as oatmeal, they are frequently spiking and crashing their blood sugar. Only when they aim for stable glucose do they find that improving metabolic health can give them even more energy and improve their other healthy habits like exercise and sleep.
People Managing Weight
Stable blood sugar is foundational for weight management. That’s because high blood sugar leads to increased insulin, the hormone that helps shuttle glucose into our cells. Insulin prevents fat burning, so one consequence of elevated insulin levels is that weight loss becomes very challenging, even if you’re doing all other things right. More than 70% of people who use Levels to lose weight were successful in their first year.
People Managing a Metabolic Condition
PCOS and prediabetes are two common conditions that have a direct relationship with metabolic health. Many of our members find that by using Levels to improve their habits, they can reduce PCOS symptoms or reverse prediabetes.
People Improving Athletic Performance
Whether you practice CrossFit, run marathons, do HIIT, or any other form of intense exercise, Levels can help you dial in your nutritional intake for optimal performance. Tracking blood sugar can help you find the right mix of carbs and other macronutrients before and after training, so you have enough to fuel and recover, but not a glucose spike that could leave you crashing in the middle of a workout.
See how what you do affects your metabolic health
The best way to understand whether meditation can improve your blood sugar is with a continuous glucose monitor and an app like Levels to help you understand your data. Levels members get access to the most advanced CGMs and personalized guidance to build healthy, sustainable habits. Click here to learn more about Levels.
What does Levels cost?
Improving metabolic health is a long-term journey that’s different for everyone, so we’ve designed the Levels program to be the most flexible on the market so you can find what works best for your lifestyle and goals.
We also want to ensure our incentives align with yours, so we make the bulk of our revenue on our app rather than by marking up hardware. That means we’ll never push you to order any more than is right for you.
The Levels app
$199 per year or $40 per month
The app is the core of the Levels experience, your home for all your health data and insights. It combines your real-time glucose with information you log, like meals, along with data imported from Apple Health (including other wearables), so you can connect your blood sugar changes with real-world events.
What you get:
Immediate feedback on your blood sugar
- See how many hours a day you stay in our research-backed target glucose range
- Get real-time alerts when your blood sugar is spiking so you can take action, like going for a walk to help blunt the spike.
- Learn the foods and lifestyle choices that drive potentially damaging blood sugar swings.
Personalized diet feedback
- Log meals to get analysis and scoring to help you track the foods that work for you—and those that don’t
- Compare meals to find the ingredients and strategies that keep your glucose stable.
- Get real-time insights on food swaps and recipes so you can experiment and learn.
Long-term guidance beyond blood sugar
- One home for all your health data, including exercise, sleep, biomarkers, and blood sugar, to give you a complete picture of your metabolic health
- Sync with Apple Health and Google Fit to bring exercise data into Levels and view it alongside your glucose data.
- Long-term data tracking helps you uncover patterns and see progress over time.
The CGMs
$199 for a month’s supply
A continuous glucose monitor is a small device about the size of three-quarters that you apply to your arm or abdomen to measure blood sugar from the interstitial fluid just under your skin 24/7 for up to 14 days. The CGM sensor transmits your glucose readings to the Levels app on your phone via Bluetooth.
CGM devices are the best tool for understanding how your diet, exercise, and lifestyle impact your glycemic variability. Glucose responses are highly individual, so seeing your reaction to the food you eat gives you data you can use to make meaningful changes instead of simply looking at carb counts and guessing. Plus, real-time continuous blood glucose monitoring ensures that you see your entire glucose curve in a way that finger-stick or blood tests might miss by only giving you only a snapshot in time.
Levels is the only company that offers a choice of two leading CGM models, including the latest and most advanced. You can switch or cancel at any time. You can also choose how often you want new CGMs delivered.
- Some people prefer to wear them continuously as an accountability partner to help them stick to their new habits.
- Others prefer to check in quarterly, do some additional experimentation, and see how their glucose is tracking.
CGMs are prescription only in the U.S., but Levels makes it easy to navigate. Just complete a form online, and an independent telehealth physician will review it. If approved, we automatically send your order to our pharmacy partner, who ships the CGM directly to your door.
Bring Your Own CGM
Levels doesn’t require that you purchase CGMs through us. If members already have a prescription through their doctor or can buy CGMs for less money at a discount club store or a pharmacy, they can do so and simply pay for the Levels app.
Levels is compatible with Dexcom G6 and G7 or Abbott Freestyle Libre 14-day, 2, and 3.
[Optional] Levels Labs Metabolic Blood Testing
$99
Optimal metabolic health is about more than glucose. While that’s the only marker we can measure in real-time, staying on top of other vital markers is critical to seeing your progress. That’s why we introduced Levels Labs, our walk-in blood testing service that measures five key markers you’re unlikely to get at your regular physical:
- Fasting Insulin: Maintaining low insulin levels is crucial to warding off insulin resistance, the condition at the root of metabolic dysfunction.
- ApoB: This test is a more comprehensive view of whether your cholesterol levels pose a threat to your health than the traditional HDL and LDL tests.
- Triglycerides: This cholesterol marker is vital to overall metabolic health and can be an early indicator of insulin resistance.
- Uric Acid: Although commonly measured only for gout, uric acid is now thought to be associated with several conditions, including heart disease, metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure (hypertension), diabetes, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
- HbA1c: This test indicates your average glucose levels over the past three months, so it’s a more accurate measure of your metabolic health than the more common fasting glucose test.
You can schedule the testing as often as you like straight from the Levels app, and results appear in the app, along with personalized guidance for understanding and acting on your results.
Is Levels worth it?
Whether or not any wellness tool is worth it is an individual choice that depends on your own financial and health situation. And we’d never suggest that you need Levels to be healthy. That’s why we have a blog with more than 500 free articles on achieving metabolic health, whether or not you ever put on a CGM.
However, we believe that Levels and CGM represent a strong value proposition and, if you’re able, are worth a try. Here are a few reasons why.
- It’s the only molecule you can measure in real-time. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it. Of the thousands of molecules in our body, only with glucose can you get real-time data and view it as it’s changing, allowing you to react to what’s happening right now. And the fact that you can do it for only a couple hundred dollars with a simple device is a real feat of innovation.
- It’s the most honest input you can get about what you eat. Any prescriptive diet relies on you to trust that it’s working for you. At best, you can check your scale or get occasional blood tests to see if you’re getting healthier. But when you eat for optimal metabolic health, you get accurate data about how a food affects your glucose. No guessing, no assuming.
- Metabolic health underlies all other health. Although metabolic health is a new topic for many, achieving any health goal, from longevity to weight loss, is nearly impossible without it. In fact, eight of the top 10 leading causes of death are related to glucose or insulin. In short, it’s an area of health that many of us have not focused on, but it pays high dividends when we do.
- You don’t have to use it all the time. Many people find that after an initial month or two of getting CGM data, they can implement what they’ve learned and only use a CGM again every few months as a check-in.
How does Levels compare to competitors?
There are other ways to get a CGM and pay attention to your metabolic health, and because our mission is to reverse the metabolic health crisis, we’re happy anytime people are working on improving their own. However, we think Levels offers a few unique benefits:
Levels is research-based and backed by the world’s leading experts. Levels advisors include some of the leading researchers and doctors in the metabolic health space, including:
- Dr. Mark Hyman, founder of the Functional Medicine Center at Cleveland Clinic and multiple best-selling author
- Dr. Rob Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist whose research and advocacy influence governments and institutions on food and health policy
- Dr. Gerald Shulman, who’s done ground-breaking research on insulin resistance for decades
- Dr. David Sinclair, who leads longevity research at Harvard Medical School
- As well as several others.
Levels takes the long view. Achieving stable blood sugar is not a one-time hack or quick fix. So, we help you build sustainable habits that will pay off over time by giving you personalized insights and feedback. We also complement glucose with Levels Labs, on-demand blood testing of five key markers so that you can track overall metabolic health. And we give you long-term metrics around glucose, exercise, and sleep in the app so you can see big-picture trends.
Levels offers flexbility. Levels offers the most choice in managing your metabolic health. You can choose between two of the latest model CGMs and switch anytime. You also decide how often you wear a CGM, with a regular subscription or ad hoc ordering. We even allow you to bring your own CGM if you can get one for less money elsewhere.
