Episode 7 – Josh Clemente, Levels on The Delly Podcast
Episode introduction
Would you characterize your health as “average?” If you live in America, being average would actually mean that you’re *unhealthy*. With chronic diseases on the rise in the west, much of our poor health can be attributed to metabolic dysfunction. Josh Clemente is a rocket engineer turned entrepreneur who is trying to change that. He believes that every person should have access to medical devices and information that help them control their health. For Josh, that meant founding Levels, a company that wants to provide easy access to continuous glucose monitors. It turns out that monitoring glucose may be the key to lasting health – and turning around the American medical crisis. On this episode of The Delly Podcast, host Matthew “Delly” Dellavedova talked with Josh about diet, sleep, fitness, and the Levels solution to understanding it all.
Show Notes
Key Takeaways
3:12 – Glucose management is for everyone
Glucose management is not just for diabetes management, it is also for anyone who wants to manage their energy.
“The majority of the use cases for glucose control is actually more oriented around the qualitative experience that we have day-to-day. It’s certainly a powerful tool for the management of diabetes, but it’s also equally useful for someone who is trying to optimize fuel for performance or who wants to lose a little bit of weight or who wants to clear out the sort of a mental cloudiness and post-lunch fog that we all experienced at work.”
7:28 – The current measurement system is broken
The way we test glucose now, once or twice a year is not a good way to measure a dynamic process like metabolism. The current system also does not measure quality. That’s why we need a continuous monitoring system.
“The way that your metabolism works is a dynamic system. It responds to the inputs, right? You put in a bunch of food and it has to break down into energy and none of the quality of your metabolic function is captured by that single point measurement. And you’re taking one measurement per year on average and extrapolating that to cover all of your metabolic health in combination. This point measurement represents how healthy you are. So what you see with continuous glucose monitoring is a super high resolution, full-time data stream. It’s like you’re wearing it streaming to your phone essentially. And you can look at it while you’re sleeping, while you’re exercising, exactly how you’re responding to the meal you ate 10 minutes ago. You can see in real-time the dynamic system that is your metabolism. And you realize a point measurement is essentially meaningless.”
8:53 – Medical devices are not just for sick people
With the growth in technology, medical devices have become smaller, smarter, and make sense for anyone who wants to make informed decisions about their body and what they put in it.
“We are on the cusp of this next generation of turning this technology from a medical device into a wearable device. And, you know, looking at the trends in metabolic dysfunction across the world, it’s very promising. Because by changing the stigma and by sort of flipping the script from this is a medical device for sick people to this is for anyone who cares about knowing more about themselves, right? Anyone who seeks health, who wants to optimize their choices. So it’s going from the current wearable technology that we have, like heart rate and step counters, to measuring molecules in the body is a fascinating and exciting thing. And we’re going to see like a whole host of new analytes, not just glucose, but many others to follow.”
12:35 – Metabolic fitness at your fingertips
The goal of metabolic fitness is to give the user access to dynamic information about their food and lifestyle, so they can make informed decisions without too much overhead.
“The goal of metabolic fitness is to metabolize the energy sources that you’re bringing in, whichever those may be. You might choose to be vegan, you might choose to eat animal products, whatever your choices are, dietarily, be able to bring in those food sources and metabolize that into energy with minimal byproducts, minimal access to aging, minimal inflammation all of the downstream effects of metabolic breakdown. So metabolic fitness would be a person who can do all of that with minimal side effects essentially, and living a healthy, wholesome life where they feel good and look good. That’s the system we’re building, trying to bring in as much information as possible in real-time and keep minimal overhead on the individual and just allow them to be able to understand specifically how good or bad that choice was for them.”
16:08 – Being average is being unhealthy
With the average American being overweight, it’s better to start measuring with aspirational goals rather than the current system of national average. This is what Levels is doing.
“70% of people are overweight. So you have a situation where the average is actually unhealthy and we need to start to think of aspirationally. It’s not that we want to be like everyone else. We want to know which direction should I be heading? What is the optimal look like? And so that’s what Levels is answering. We’re saying staying below 110 after meals will require focus, effort, and repetition. You’ll have to learn from how your body responds. And there’s a lot of personalization there, which we can dig into, but by doing so, you’re going to be limiting this hormonal cascade. You’ll be limiting glycation and cellular inflammation, which is caused by hyperglycemia and high levels of glucose. And you’ll also learn quite a bit about how your body functions.”
24:10 – Become metabolically flexible
When you become metabolically flexible, it opens up a world of possibilities, because your body can use energy from multiple sources when required. This is a great way to lose weight.
“My goal is to become as metabolically flexible as possible to eat meals that maintain low controlled glucose, which means low controlled insulin, which means a very flexible environment to switch between fat and sugar. And so I will do fasted training where I practice cardio after 12 to 18 hours of fasting, I’ll go out and just force my body to metabolize the energy that I have onboard, which is fat. Or I will eat a higher fat diet, switch between a ketogenic or paleo eating approach, and then back to a bit more carbohydrates with high fiber. And so just training myself to be very flexible and adaptable and sort of learning from those experiences. It really opens up a ton of personal flexibility so you’re not reliant on six meals a day, or getting in that snack because you know you’re going to crash mid-afternoon. It opens up a world of opportunity for experimenting with lifestyle.”
31:32 – Stop falling for dietary fads
With actual real-time data on hand, you can now see the truth about how some common dietary fads might actually be harming you rather than helping.
“People are discovering that a lot of the decisions they’re making that are, again, based on may be common knowledge or the internet searches they’re doing or fads, frankly, are not benefiting them in terms of what their actual goals are. Their goals are to maintain mental clarity and energy levels consistently throughout the day. But you do not want to have a diabetic blood sugar response in the middle of the day. And in fact, that pressed juice might be treating you exactly the same as a Coca-Cola or a donut. It’s not necessarily that you should avoid fruit, vegetable juice. It’s just we should consume it in the form that it is intended to be consumed. That is a whole fruit, right. Or a whole vegetable. We should be eating it as close to the ground as possible, is my opinion. And so people are learning this.”
34:44 – Your quality of sleep decides what you should eat
When you do know how much sleep you will be able to get, you can decide what type of food to eat so you are not constantly in a state of insulin resistance.
“That’s another one where seeing in real-time, how five hours of sleep affects you versus nine hours of sleep and how your body responds to the same meals differently, depending on how much sleep you got is super powerful. And it allows you to make better choices. Like if you know, tonight I’m not going to be able to sleep a full nine hours or a full eight hours. Now the system can tell you, like you should avoid these foods. These are your high responding foods. And like today, because you didn’t sleep well, you should try and avoid these. So that’s the type of result that people are loving is just understanding how all of this stuff meshes together.”
41:51 – Walk after you eat. You’re welcome.
10 two-minute walks is better for metabolic health than two 10-minute walks in a day. So walk after meals and you’ll immediately start to see metabolic fitness benefits.
“If you have someone take either two long walks in a day or several two-minute walks in a day, I think like something like 10, two-minute walks in a day, the person who takes those 10 two-minute walks has a much better metabolic response and glucose control than the person who takes the two long walks. And so we can see the benefits for glucose disposal when you eat a meal, it doesn’t even have to be a very rich meal. If I would just give one recommendation to anyone, listening is just going for walks after meals, just start incorporating that. And you will immediately start to see metabolic fitness benefits.”
52:09 – Level’s 28 day program
Once you set a baseline, you can explore different strategies and get feedback with the help of a comprehensive report in the quest to optimize your health.
“Right now we structure it, like you said, as a 28 day program. Where you learn quite a bit in just those 28 days. The first week kind of sets the baseline, see how your body’s responding to your existing choices. And then in weeks two and three, we recommend people really start to explore. So start to change up your behaviors, maybe try some things you don’t typically do, and experiment again with those sleep stress, diet, and exercise levers. And then in week four, we recommend people try and really just push for optimization, bring it all together and try and maintain that low and controlled a hundred percent time and range maximize your scores, really nail the story to the scorecard. And then we give you reports throughout. The value of that sort of learning experience is amazing.”
Episode Transcript
Matthew Delly: [00:00:00] All right welcome to The Delly Podcast, very special guest today Josh Clemente from Levels, thanks for coming on.
Josh Clemente: [00:00:13] Absolutely, I’m excited.
Matthew Delly: [00:00:15] Yeah. Now Josh works at Levels, a company I’m a user of. I’ve got my patch on right here and I love it so much, I’ve decide to invest. Can you tell us a little bit about Levels?
Josh Clemente: [00:00:30] Yeah, Levels was initially, basically developed to answer the question – of what should I eat for lunch? And it came to the point where I sort of, in my personal life, realized that you kind of need a PhD to answer that question effectively today. And I basically went down the path of trying to get one on my own after I discovered I had, essentially prediabetes, without knowing it. And I figured that out by putting on a CGM for the first time. And so, what came of that is now the concept that you should have real time information from your body that guides your decisions in the moment,. Right? It should be easier to make choices that are influenced by data from your body and a history of information rather than averages or information from the internet or something that worked for someone else. And so, that thing, the patch you’ve got on your arm there, that’s the continuous glucose monitoring system we use along with the analytics platform we’re building to help people make better choices in the moment.
Matthew Delly: [00:01:24] Yeah, that’s really interesting. And can you just explain some of the basics so people understand what you’re monitoring? Like what is glucose? Why is it important?
Josh Clemente: [00:01:36] Totally.Yeah, so, over the past two-ish years I’ve kind of learned all of this stuff myself. And it’s not, metabolic health is not something that we think about in modern society right now. The way that we think of physical fitness or mental fitness, we don’t have this concept of metabolic fitness yet. And so Levels is establishing that concept. And ultimately what metabolism is, it’s the processes that your cells perform to take food and environmental factors and turn them into energy. So every cell in your body needs energy and the two primary fuel sources there are glucose and fat. Glucose is just another word for sugar, it’s a type of sugar that our bodies, our cells can metabolize, they can directly translate into ATP for energy. And so what you’re measuring is actually the molecule glucose, the primary energy molecule in the human body. And the technology has been developed over the course of decades. Essentially, it was developed to help people with diabetes manage their condition. So people with diabetes, they experience a breakdown of the feedback loop between glucose and insulin, which helps you use that glucose effectively. And when that starts to break down, glucose levels start to rise. And there are a lot of negative complications that come with that. So the technology was developed for that use case. But since all of us, no matter where we are in the metabolic fitness spectrum, have glucose as our primary energy molecule, it’s super valuable for all of us to pay attention to how our decisions are affecting those glucose levels in our bodies.
Because again, dysfunction sets in over long periods of time. And in fact, the majority of the use case for glucose control is actually more oriented around the qualitative experience that we have day to day. It’s certainly a powerful tool for the management of diabetes, but it’s also equally useful for someone who is trying to optimize fuel for performance. Or who wants to lose a little bit of weight or who wants to clear up a mental cloudiness, and post-lunch fog that we all experience at work. And that, in my past life, triggered this entire adventure for me. And so, the qualitative experience of glucose or lack of glucose control and the cascade of hormones that it produces is really why Levels exist. It’s helping people take control of their day-to-day experience and also optimize the quantitative risk of long-term illness.
Matthew Delly: [00:03:58] Yeah, no, that’s really interesting because when you think of, or I know when I first thought of glucose or a monitor, it’s probably associated with diabetes or health problems rather than optimizing for performance. And I think that’s something that really stood out for me as an athlete trying to always learn more about my body. And I think something that’s really interesting, is just that real time feedback, to get pretty much immediately what a food is doing to you after you eat it. How important is it to users to to get that real-time feedback? And in comparison to when you go to the doctor to get some blood work done, and I’m amazed that that screenshot or that snapshot in time of your glucose at a doctor’s appointment, that really doesn’t mean anything after using the app?
Josh Clemente: [00:05:00] Well, I love kind of mapping out this space because it really excites me actually for the future, because historically technology has evolved sort of from academic uses, right? The way that most technologies develop is they’re used in a laboratory somewhere and then eventually someone thinks of a way to get it to a market and then it slowly evolves from there. In medicine, so we’ve had a few things going on lately, since the 80s we’ve seen a massive increase in the rate of diabetes, in every developed nation around the world. And so in the United States, right now we have 90 million people that are pre-diabetic and of them 90% don’t know they have it. 35 million people have type 2 diabetes, which is the preventable type of diabetes. And, you know, diabetes is the leading cause of blindness, it’s the leading cause of foot amputation, it’s the leading cause of mortality, well, it’s connected to the leading causes of mortality. So we have all this breakdown that is kind of hard to explain because we have a medical system that is improving and technology is getting better.
And so there’s a strange juxtaposition where you’re thinking of like, how can these metabolic outcomes or these mortality outcomes be getting worse when our medical technology is getting better? And I think a lot of it is, essentially, just precedent. So we’ve had these tests, like fasting, plasma, glucose, or A1C, which maybe, anyone who’s listening to this might have had those tests are seeing them on their blood panels. And it’s a single measurement, which attempts to just show you okay, this is where your glucose level was today, when you came into the doctor’s office. And usually you’re told before getting blood work to fast. So don’t eat anything before you go into the doctor’s office and come in first thing in the morning. And so what’s that’s doing is it’s putting you in an abnormal circumstance, most people don’t fast. They don’t go to their first meeting of the day without eating anything, they typically will grab breakfast, right? And so it’s automatically not your normal condition. And then you’re getting a single point measurement. So you’re getting a little blood sample and that goes away and then the blood sample results come back. And the doctor looks at them two weeks later and then they call you up or they give you your piece of paper that has them on there. And as long as you’re inside a bucket, like you’re inside this range, they don’t say anything about it. It’s just like, yep, totally, totally in the range so nothing to see here. Now you go home and you sit down for lunch and you’re starving because you haven’t eaten all day. And you consume a gigantic lunch that is just, or maybe you grab fast food on the way home and you eat it because I skipped a meal, so I’m gonna treat myself. Well, the way that your metabolism works is it’s a dynamic system. It responds to what, the inputs, right? You put in a bunch of food and it has to, that’s what you break down into energy, and none of the quality of your metabolic function is captured by that single point measurement. And you’re taking one measurement per year on average and extrapolating that to cover all of your metabolic health in combination,. It’s like, this point measurement represents how healthy you are. So what you see with continuous glucose monitoring is a super high resolution full time data stream. It’s like you’re wearing it, it’s streaming to your phone essentially, and you can look at it while you’re sleeping, while you’re exercising, exactly how you’re responding to the meal you ate 10 minutes ago.
You can see in real time the dynamic system that is your metabolism and you realize a point measurement is essentially meaningless. It’s one dot on this continuous stream. And I totally understand why the medical system built around this technology, it’s what was available. And it’s easy to run along with all the other tests that are interesting. But now we’ve seen this amazing micro electronics revolution, which has allowed for the miniaturization and the technology to become much more cost-effective. Such that people with diabetes can get a full time awareness of their glucose, which is fascinating. And now we’re reaching the point where that technology can now be expanded, even from the diabetes use case, to general wellness and performance. And so that’s where we are right now. We are on the cusp of this next generation of turning this technology from a medical device into a wearable device. And looking at the trends in metabolic dysfunction across the world, it’s very promising because by changing the stigma, by sort of flipping the script from this is a medical device for sick people, it’s not. This is for anyone who cares about knowing more about themselves, right? Anyone who seeks health, who wants to optimize their choices.
And so, it’s going from the current wearable technology that we have, like heart rate and step counters, to measuring molecules in the body, is a fascinating and exciting thing. And we’re going to see like a whole host of new analytes, not just glucose, but many others to follow. So, I’m really excited for it. That’s why we’re where we are but to your point, yeah, the point measurements, no system can be characterized by a single point, especially one that is as dynamic as human body.
Matthew Delly: [00:09:51] Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. And can you explain how easy it is to use? And one of the things I’ve really liked is, you take a photo of your food, you put in avocado toast, that’s what I have for breakfast every morning. And then timestamps when you eat it, so then you can go back later, click on “avocado toast” and see on a graph what it’s done to your body. And you can compare that to other meals, you get a score for what foods are doing to your glucose. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. So there’s, the goal again, of Levels is to help people understand the quality of their choices, their daily lifestyle choices. So we’re all making decisions all day long. If we really stop and think – what is driving this choice? I’m sitting down for this meal, why did I pick what I picked? Usually it’s like, “Well, it’s going to taste good.”, I know that I like the flavors, and I heard at some point that it’s good for you, or something like that. This is allowing you to, not only take in dietary information, but also the other 3 factors, which are sleep, stress, and exercise. And so Levels is building the program where, like you said, with minimal, sort of overhead. It should be very straightforward, driving for a seamless user experience. You can log the choices you’re making and then the system analyzes how your blood sugar responds to that choice. And so it produces, like a score or, we call them various things, but some of them are on a scale of 1 to 10 and some of them are out of a 100%.
And the goal here, like with the zone score, is so that you can see on a scale of 1 to 10, how good that meal was for you. And it’s typically post-process meaning you log that, you take a picture and then you come back a few hours later, after your body has fully responded to it, and you can see how that meal affect you. But the interesting thing about what we’re building with Zones is that it adapts to additional activities. So let’s say you eat a meal and then you go for a jog 30 minutes later or something, or you just go for a walk around the block. By integrating with Apple Health Kit and other wearables that you have, we can sense that there was some activity there and pull that into the Zone as well.
And so now you can start to see how making small tweaks, so adding a walk after that specific meal, that might be a Chipotle burrito, adding a walk after it modifies your score, actually quite effectively. And it makes that a much better meal for you. And so you start to string together, through comparison features in these Zone scores, how to effectively do the things you want to do while also maintaining metabolic control and influencing the habits you have in your life. Such that you’re driving towards metabolic fitness, ultimately. Which is, the goal of metabolic fitness by the way, is to metabolize the energy sources that you’re bringing in, whichever those may be. You might choose to be vegan, you might choose to eat animal products, whatever your choices are dietarily, be able to bring in those food sources, and metabolize that into energy with minimal byproducts. Minimal excess of aging, minimal inflammation, all of the downstream effects of metabolic breakdown. So metabolic fitness would be a person who can do all of that with minimal side effects, essentially, and living a healthy, wholesome life where they feel good and look good. So yeah, that’s the system we’re building is trying to bring in as much information as possible in real time and keep minimal overhead on the individual and just allow them to be able to understand specifically how good or bad that choice was for them.
Yeah. And then can you talk a little bit about the optimal range of glucose, what you guys want people to aim at? Versus maybe what is recommended by the US.
Josh Clemente: [00:13:45] Man, so this one’s a really exciting topic as well, because this is an area that Levels is contributing to in real time. Because, again, there’s very little data on the healthy metabolism, right? We have, since the CGM devices are typically used for the management of diabetes, we don’t have a huge data set on non-diabetic people. So what we have is a lot of finger prick measurements, we have a lot of those point measures we talked about earlier. But we have not studied in great detail the pre-diabetic state or the non-diabetic state with continuous glucose monitoring. Now, at Levels we’ve reviewed, essentially every blood sugar study on record. We’ve looked at thousands and thousands of pages of documentation of all of the existing information on non-diabetic glucose levels. And from that we developed our optimal ranges, which are 70 to 110 milligrams per deciliter. That compares to the American Diabetes Association, which says that, basically, a non-diabetic person should have a fasting glucose below 100 and they should not exceed 140 milligrams per deciliter, except rarely. And so, by bringing the range down to 110, and we did that very deliberately, because that is the lowest risk core tile. So if you look at all the data, basically it boils down to there are different buckets of risk,. And depending on how your body responds to your meals, you kind of fall into these different categories. And people who have higher fasting glucose and higher responses to the meals they choose, essentially across the board, have a much higher risk of developing heart disease or diabetes longterm. And the way the American Diabetes Association developed their range is more so in average of normal people. Now, that sounds like a good concept, it’s like, averaging the normal people, that’s probably a pretty safe range. But then you look at the statistics in the United States, a study came out, last year I believe, or 2018, from the University of North Carolina. Which showed that 88% of US adults are metabolically unhealthy, so only 12% of us adults were metabolically healthy. If you look at the diabetes and pre-diabetes statistics, 1 in 3 people has pre-diabetes or diabetes in the United States, 70% of people are overweight. And so you have a situation where the average is actually unhealthy and we need to start to think of aspirationally. It’s not that we want to be like everyone else, we want to know which direction should I be heading? What does the optimal look like? And so that’s what Levels is answering.
We’re saying – staying below 110 after meals, it will require focus, effort, and repetition. You’ll have to learn how your body responds, and there’s a lot of personalization there which we can dig into. But by doing so, you’re going to be limiting this hormonal cascade, you’ll be limiting glycation and cellular inflammation which is caused by hyperglycemia, high levels of glucose. And you’ll also learn quite a bit about how your body functions. And so it’s a really, it’s kind of a challenge, but it’s ultimately something that, like anything else, any physical fitness training or mental fitness training, it’s something that we should strive for. It’s a goal that we should all want to achieve because this is what’s most closely connected with longevity.
Matthew Delly: [00:17:04] Yeah. And obviously it’s going to help you live longer if you have a healthy glucose and metabolic fitness. What are some other specific benefits that people can get by staying within that healthy range?
Josh Clemente: [00:17:22] So it’s connected with a huge host of the day to day, sort of struggles that we all have. Part of the reason that I initially got into this, I was working at SpaceX on life support systems, and you know, it’s a pretty strenuous job. And I was running a team there and I just found that my day to day, I was getting less and less, I guess I was feeling less and less prepared for the day, each day. And so my fatigue levels were kind of out of control and they were very, very spiky, I would have energy and then suddenly I’d be crashing. And my mood was kind of going along for the ride. So I was really just not feeling great. And I’m also a CrossFit level 2 trainer, so I’m working out a lot and kind of at that time in my life considered exercise to be really the only thing that mattered. As long as you’re working out, you’re not gaining a bunch of weight, then you’re probably doing the healthy thing. So the realization actually, of digging into the research, is that glucose dysfunction, metabolic breakdown is connected to about 7 of the top 10 reasons for death in the United States.
And it’s also connected with a bunch of qualitative experiences, for example, skin wrinkles, acne, cognitive fatigue. So people describe sort of mental clarity issues and memory is very strongly affected by glucose dysfunction.We know it’s connected to Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, so there are all of these very, very strong correlations between metabolic dysfunction, glucose regulation, and the things that people struggle with daily. Not to mention, I don’t know that I mentioned weight, but weight gain is a big one, so there’s a hormonal process involved in weight gain of course. And so, the effects of managing glucose are sort of manifold. Firstly, you are controlling, again, the primary energy molecule, and the human body responds to its energy supply.
If you go on a long fast you might notice, like, significant changes for the first, say 24 hours, as your body starts to adapt, realizes that it’s not getting additional energy in and it starts to control, basically the way to think about it is like, the body starts to ration out energy essentially. So instead of maybe, initially you might feel some mental fogginess, you might feel a little bit groggy, a little fatigue or low energy levels, etc… as your body starts to adapt. And then you might have a breakthrough where your body realizes, well, not only do you not have energy coming in, but you also don’t have to go through the process of digestion, right? So it starts to marshal more energy to your brain, frees up more of the glucose in your bloodstream for your brain. All of these things are happening daily and they’re happening in response to the energy influx, so what you’re consuming and how available it is. And it’s the way this is working is through hormones.
So essentially, by modulating your glucose levels, consuming foods that allow for a slow and controlled release of glucose into the bloodstream, you are helping to also modulate all of these downstream hormones. Like, for example, insulin, which is a huge one connected with not only weight gain, but insulin resistance, which is caused by too much insulin. It’s connected to, again, the same issues like heart disease and cognitive decline. And so you’re controlling this entire chemistry set, essentially by just managing the input. And so that’s kind of, for the qualitative and wellness space, you know, helping to optimize mental and physical clarity and long-term health trajectory. But then you’ve got this really fascinating space of performance, and I’m sure this is one that you’re very interested in – being able to integrate real time data into a nutrition protocol or a training regimen is something that we’ve never really had before. We’ve had a lot of kinetic stuff, so like measuring speed and quickness and reaction time and all those types of things, we’ve got a ton of data on. But there has never been real time, to my knowledge, real-time data being used as it relates to nutrition science and nailing down dietary protocols that are helping someone get better in terms of their metabolic fitness. And so this is an area that we’re profoundly interested in and I’d love to dig in here if it’s something you want to go deeper on.
Matthew Delly: [00:21:23] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what things personally have you found from using Levels that have made the most impact?
Josh Clemente: [00:21:33] Yeah, the biggest thing for me is focusing on metabolic flexibility. I was, essentially a candy addict my whole life and until I got to the point where I dunno, I was probably like, 25 when I started to grow out of it. And it was like, “Oh, I probably should not have M& M’s for dinner.”. But before that it would just be a free for all. And so what that sort of ultimately leads to is you’re influencing the cellular environment. So the chemical, again, we’re a chemistry set, like the human body is not like this fine running mechanism. It’s literally a system of chemicals, which is metabolizing other chemicals, turning them into energy. And so the balance of that chemistry dictates all the processes. And so, if I’m just giving myself sugar full time, my body can use that, but that’s what it’s going to adapt to. And the concept of metabolic flexibility discussed is basically focused on the difference between a person who is really good at metabolizing one thing and a person who’s a generalist and can metabolize what is available at that moment. And so we have sugar in our blood, we have sugar coming in from our food, we can store sugar as glycogen, about 400 grams of it. And we also have fat in our food, fat that is in our bloodstream as triglycerides and free fatty acids, and then fat stored on our bodies.
Now the key or the ideal is to be very metabolically flexible and be able to select from whichever fuel source is most readily available and in highest supply. But actually, many, many people, and myself, I’m one of these, become adapted due to the way that we are like training ourselves over time. We’re building a metabolism that can only run, essentially on glucose. And the way to figure it out if you’re one of these people is to just don’t eat anything for a while, or try to shift into ketosis by eating a very high fat diet. And you may experience the symptoms like keto flu, which are essentially, a withdrawal from sugar. Your body does not know how to metabolize the food that’s available, the fat that is available in your diet. And there’s some really interesting anecdotes about people who are, for example, very overweight and they have, essentially 100s of pounds of available energy in the form of stored body fat. But there’ll be laying on the couch and they’ll have a respiratory quotient of 1, meaning that all of the energy is coming from sugar. So everything that they are, all the energy that’s available is coming from sugar in their body and their bodies are working furiously to produce and make glucose available to them, but they can’t access all the fat that’s available because they’re just essentially metabolically inflexible. So to your question, my goal is to become as metabolically flexible as possible. To eat meals that maintain low controlled glucose, which means low controlled insulin, which means a very flexible environment to switch between fat and sugar.
And so I will do fasted training where I practice cardio after 12 to 18 hours of fasting, I’ll go out and just force my body to metabolize the energy that I have on board, which is fat. Or I will eat a higher fat diet, switch between like sort of a ketogenic or paleo eating approach, and then back to a bit more carbohydrates with high fiber. And so just training myself to be very flexible and adaptable and learning from those experiences. It really opens up a ton of personal flexibility too. If you are not reliant on 6 meals a day, or like getting in that snack because you know you’re going to crash mid afternoon, it opens up a world of opportunity for experimenting with lifestyle. And maybe you go to a 1 meal a day, or maybe you go to a more ketogenic lifestyle where you eat large, but very controlled release meals in the mornings and eat less in the evening and get better sleep. So that’s been the area of most interest for me, is by managing my glucose I can tap into the energy sources that are available and it’s made a huge difference in my daily sort of energy availability. And all that fatigue I was talking about is for the most part, I still have the regular ups and downs, but it is so much better for me day to day.
Matthew Delly: [00:25:36] Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. And I haven’t, I guess dived that deep into the experimenting. But some of the things that I’ve found, I found that I was in a pretty good spot. I think I was getting probably low 90s, high 80s on my scores. But with my avocado toast with eggs for breakfast, I’m happy that got a good score because I’ve had that breakfast for about probably 3, 4 years now. But something I did find was I was dipping in the afternoon, after lunch, and that’s the time, during the NBA season, it’s usually time for a nap. You’re travelling on the road, it’s a game day, that’s just part of the routine. But with no games going on right now I’ve found that having almonds, like a handful of almonds, handful of walnuts, is a fast way to kinda get some energy, but keep that glucose nice and level.
Josh Clemente: [00:26:44] Yeah. So those sorts of, being able to get results, like close the loop between an action and a reaction is just really the paradigm shift here. Something that most people who are using Levels absolutely love is being able to test foods they’ve already got an opinion about, you know, for example, a lot of people are choosing to eat oatmeal for breakfast, because if you Google it it’s like the most, it is the healthiest food you can eat, according to Google. Now, I would say that it is not anecdotal. We now have dozens of people who have had this exact response, where they will eat oatmeal for breakfast because that’s the thing they’re trying to do to be healthier, and have a nearly diabetic blood sugar response, which causes this huge blood sugar elevation. All of the troublesome downstream consequences that we just talked about. But also it comes with, for someone who does not have diabetes, you will have an insulin response, meaning your body will respond and bring that glucose back down, but it will do it as rapidly as it can. So if you have a huge blood sugar spike, your body wants to get rid of that as quickly as possible so it over responds with insulin and then you have this crash.
And this is typically happening for people who race out the door, eating oatmeal on the way out, this is happening right as you’re walking into your first meeting, or perhaps 2 meetings in when you’re trying to basically focus on the first serious work of the day. It’s this first fluctuation, this first crash, and then now you’re starving because that crash actually signals to the body “We’re running out of energy.”. And so now you need to go fuel up again and you’ll eat a big lunch and by 2:00 PM, the process repeats, right? You’re crashing once more. And that’s where, for me, I was crawling out of my meeting, looking for the coffee pot and trying to get another round. And you become very, really you’re dependent on meal timing and you’re dependent on external, like exogenous energy sources like caffeine. And so being able to test the foods that influence control, finding out that, for example, for you almonds might work. For me, I love cashiers, but cashews actually induce like quite a bit of a blood sugar response for me, so I try and eat those with, sort of, other foods that are like almonds, I’ll mix them.
But that’s one example and then also just like protein bars. Being able to grab a snack on the run that helps keep you fueled up and have great energy levels for awhile. I’ve tested dozens and dozens of, sort of, energy bars and there are profound variations in how my blood sugar responds and how I’ll feel afterward. And like, some of my favorites are Perfect Keto bars because it’s literally a rock solid, flat response and they taste delicious. Other ones are Quest bars, those work really well for me. But there are a few varieties that have the exact same, like, if you look at the nutritional ingredients, they look exactly the same. But because I have a personal sensitivity to whatever carbohydrate they have in there, like tapioca fiber versus corn fiber, I’ll have a huge blood sugar spike and crash, for no benefit, right? It’s like, I’d rather just pick the one that treats me well. And so that’s so freeing to be able to find those products that you can rely on and just grab on the go and not have to think really deeply about.
Matthew Delly: [00:29:45] Yeah, no, it’s interesting. I’ve ordered some of those Perfect Keto bars, I’m looking forward to trying them. I usually go with like an RX bar, it doesn’t spike my glucose, but I have it and then basically nothing happens and then I just start to dip down again. But what are some of the, I mean, I’ve heard some of the amazing stories of other users, how much it’s changed their life. Can you share maybe a few of those that really stick in your mind?
Josh Clemente: [00:30:18] Yeah. The oatmeal one is always interesting to people, but I think, in a similar vein is the effect of pressed juice or, basically the higher the processing of a food, the more likely it is to induce a major blood sugar response. And a really good example here is, fruits and vegetables are very good for us and so there’s this thought that if something’s good, a lot more of it is probably much better. And so we’ll take, you know, 25 apples and some celery, and press all of the fiber out of it and turn it into a green juice drink and drink that. And it’s like, this must be all of the good stuff condensed into a single cup. And so that’s like kind of the juice thing that many people do as a healthy approach. The highest blood sugar response I’ve recorded so far was a juice that was apple, green apple, celery, and carrot. That was it. There was no additives. My blood sugar was over 200 milligrams per deciliter for over an hour. And that is a diabetic blood sugar response.
So, this is, again, not anecdotal. There are several people actually just this week on Twitter, there are some examples of people sharing exactly the same, well, they had a lower response than I did, but I think I was probably a little bit worse off in terms of metabolism at the time. But yeah, people are discovering that a lot of the decisions they’re making that are, again, based on, maybe common knowledge or the internet searches they’re doing, or fads frankly, are not benefiting them in terms of what their actual goals are. Their goals are to maintain mental clarity and energy levels consistently throughout the day. But you do not want to have a diabetic blood sugar response in the middle of the day. And in fact, that pressed juice might be treating you exactly the same as a Coca-Cola or a donut. And it’s not necessarily that you should avoid fruit and vegetable juice, it’s just, we should consume it in the, sort of the form that it is intended to be consumed. And I think that is a whole fruit, right.? Or a whole vegetable. Like we should be eating it as close to the ground as possible, is my opinion. And so people are learning this and I’m one of them, I get these results constantly and just think, “Okay, what is the processing?” What was this? How did this food originally form and how am I eating it now? Has it been dehulled and all the fibers stripped away and ground up? Basically all the work of digestion has been done and if that’s the case then it’s going to very quickly absorb into the bloodstream and produce a spike. It’s not going to be a very smooth response. Another really interesting thing is just like, I touched on the statistics for pre-diabetes and diabetes, we’ve had several examples of people, essentially finding out this was kind of an early warning for them. They tested this product because they’re very interested, they’re fascinated in optimization, but what they realize is that, had they not tried this, they may have ultimately ended up becoming type 2 diabetic, because they had absolutely no insight there. Their blood sugar levels were very far out of normal. And the things that they were doing each day were actually making it worse. And in many cases, again, these are choices that they’re making because they think it’s healthy. Someone else told them this is how they should eat, or again, as a sort of a fad they’re following.
So that to me is like really gratifying that people, you know, that was myself. I was, again, a prediabetic or very close to it when I first started this and so, being able to give people better information, put them in the driver’s seat of their own health, I think is just profoundly powerful. It’s the way that we will reverse metabolic outcomes in this country and start getting, I think globally, our metabolic health back on track. And yeah, so those are the big ones. And then I think, for me again, and for many people, the realization that stress is like a huge lever that you have to pull on is really powerful. Stress is kind of nebulous, like it’s really hard to understand what that means. Like for different people, I think it affects us all differently. But there are some really good markers and we know that sleeping too little induces whole body insulin resistance. So it’s a stressed state where your body knows that it wasn’t able to recover. And it seems like that insulin resistance, which by the way prevents you from being able to use glucose effectively, is really affecting in particular people who are, maybe like second shift workers. People who are working strange schedules and so they are perennially living in this state of odd sleep hours and they’re constantly in a state of insulin resistance. And so, that’s another one where seeing in real time, how 5 hours of sleep affects you versus 9 hours of sleep. And how your body responds to the same meals differently, depending on how much sleep you got, is super powerful. And it allows you to make better choices.
Like if you know, tonight I’m not going to be able to sleep a full 9 hours or a full 8 hours, now the system can tell you, like, you should avoid these foods. These are your high responding foods. And like today, because you didn’t sleep well, you should try and avoid these. So that’s the type of, I think, result that people are loving, is just understanding how all of this stuff meshes together. And a little activity goes a long way, and just sleep and stress are much more powerful than you may have considered.
Matthew Delly: [00:35:19] Yeah. Is it the same effect with stress, where there’s an increased insulin response?
Josh Clemente: [00:35:27] Yes. Well, that’s another really, so that mechanism, like with sleep, and by the way, we’re doing some great work with Eight Sleep and our friends over there, on trying to quantify this by directly connecting the 2 data streams together to help people really correlate straight through the ecosystem, the quality of their sleep with their metabolic outcomes. So that’s exciting. But then with stress, yes, poor sleep induces a stressful state. But there are many other things, like just a state of mental stress, going into a scary meeting or something like that can acutely increase cortisol. And cortisol actually causes your body to enter a sort of a fight or flight mode. And what your body does in that situation, when it knows it has to respond to a threat, is it cranks up energy. So it basically shuts down, it doesn’t actually release insulin per se, but it shuts down the glucose control mechanisms. So it allows you to flood the bloodstream with extra energy, to fuel whatever you’re about to face.
And so you might see this, like if you’ve done an intense workout while wearing Levels, your body, if it’s super, if you’re going really hard, you’re going to see cortisol and adrenaline respond. And then you’ll see a blood sugar response. My blood sugar, without any food, to a really aggressive CrossFit workout, has exceeded 200 milligrams per deciliter. And that is a stress response. Like that’s my body saying, “All right, you’re going through something, let’s get you out of this.” And that is happening though, on a smaller scale, all day, for people who are constantly stressed out. And just like you can bring down heart rate, through like mindfulness and just maybe doing some breathing exercises, that’s a whole body stress control mechanism. Which will also affect your cortisol release and help you to bring control to glucose levels. And yeah, so I’ve actually started to experiment with mindfulness myself, and meditation, so that I can optimize sleep, get better recovery, and also bring my whole body’s stress levels down as well. Because that is having a real effect for many people for glucose controls. It’s really quite powerful and pretty impressive.
Matthew Delly: [00:37:26] Yeah. No, that’s really interesting. And then, can you talk a little bit about some of the, I guess weight loss reported by some of the users? I know Sam shared with me that people wearing it have had some pretty amazing results. And why do you think that is? Is that the change in metabolism?
Josh Clemente: [00:37:50] Yeah. So we’ve partnered with Justin Mares and his team. He, so he started Perfect Keto and Kettle and Fire and he’s very interested in optimizing nutrition sources and just general wellness. So, we’ve now got a challenge going on called the Wearable Challenge and we do cohorts of this. So if anyone’s interested, go to the wearablechallenge.com and check this out. But the way it works is it’s a weight loss challenge where you wear a continuous glucose monitor from Levels. And the goal is you stay within range. So as we described, we have that optimal range, eat however, your dietary philosophy is right. We don’t tell you specifically what to eat, we provide some keto information for people that want to go that route, but the point is just to keep your blood sugar controlled. Go from this like complete unawareness and sort of spiky blood sugar oscillations thing, down to just low and controlled and staying in range. And what that’s doing is, by bringing your glucose load down, it’s bringing your insulin load down. And insulin is the hormone that stores, right? So when you have high blood sugar, insulin tells your body to store as much of it as glycogen as possible. And then once your glycogen stores are full, which it can only hold about 400 grams of glycogen, in the average person, once those are full, start storing that as fat. And so for many people who are constantly eating in a way that has high glucose release and then high insulin release, they’re constantly storing that glucose as fat. So that’s the concept of the challenge, it’s just keep your blood sugar levels controlled. And in the first cohort we ever ran, which is 28 days long, again, we gave no dietary requirements, just stay in range, people lost on average 9.8 pounds. And this is a data-driven approach to personal weight loss. It is just strictly using your own body’s information to tell you, and for certain people they had to be stricter than certain others, right.?
And this is the personalization that CGM has unlocked, which I’ll get to in just a second, but yeah, the weight loss benefits of just simply managing your glucose levels, which is by default, an insulin control measure, is producing some amazing weight loss results. And this is going to be an area of intense focus for us. You know, we really want to provide people with maximum freedom, right? You don’t want, this is the calories model of weight loss versus what we’re working on, which is the hormonal theory of weight loss. Which says that, again, we are a chemistry set, and so if chemicals are out of whack, you’re going to use energy in different ways. Whereas calories is just like, reduce your calories and you’ll burn X amount of fat. That doesn’t always work for people. And we’re starting to show why that is the case, because you have more insulin in your body than someone else, because you’re more sensitive to certain carbohydrates, so tons of promising stuff and we’ll be doing quite a bit more in the weight loss space.
Matthew Delly: [00:40:35] Yeah. And I think it’s interesting that that’s the only instruction you gave was try to keep it within that range. Because when you’re using it, it almost feels like a bit of a game but you’re just playing individually with yourself, so try to stay within that range. And one of the things that I know you guys have talked about in blog posts on your website, where there’s a lot of great information, is going for a walk after meals or doing some form of exercise. And how you can have the same meal but if you exercise one time and not after the other, you have two different responses. And can you talk a little bit about that? Because that was really interesting to me.
Josh Clemente: [00:41:22] Yeah, that’s one of the best lessons, I should’ve brought this up a little earlier, as one of the biggest lessons learned for me. The power of a little bit of exercise, just a little bit of mobility, after a meal to control your metabolic response is incredible. So one of the things that we are integrating into the next iterations of the app, are these little nudges to just be a little bit more active. And there are some studies that have shown that actually, if you have someone take, I think, either 2 long walks in a day, or several 2 minute walks in a day, I think something like 10 2 minute walks in a day, the person who takes those 10 2 minute walks has a much better metabolic response and glucose control than the person who takes the 2 long walks.
Matthew Delly: [00:42:03] Really?
Josh Clemente: [00:42:03] And so, yeah, and we can see the benefits for glucose disposal. So when you eat a meal, it doesn’t even have to be a very rich meal. If I would just give one recommendation to anyone listening, is just go for walks after meals. Just start incorporating that and you will immediately start to see metabolic fitness benefits. And we see this where, if you take, with the Levels program, let’s say you eat a personal pizza and sit on the couch, and you’ll get a score for that right? And it’ll tell you, this is how your body responded to that meal and here’s your score. Let’s say it’s a 3 out of 10.And I’m using numbers that don’t, this is not actually pizza, I’m comparing to more of a Mexican style food that I eat. But I’ve had, essentially this exact experience. So get a3 out of 10 and then eat the exact same meal and go for a 20 minute walk afterwards. Casual, you don’t have to break a sweat, just cruise around the neighborhood. I have been able to score, go from a 3 to an 8 on a scale of 10 in my blood sugar response, from just simply going for a stroll. Which I would like to do anyway, it’s just that we typically think, “Well, that’s not going to do anything. I just ate a 1000 calories.” What’s that going to do? What it’s doing is it’s allowing your body to modulate the blood sugar response. So as that food is breaking down in your body and releasing into the bloodstream, you either have to manage that with hormones, release a wave of insulin to get rid of it quickly so it stays within range, or your muscles are in real-time using energy from that same supply. And so that’s helping you have to use less a hormonal response to control that blood sugar. If that makes sense. And so, yeah, that’s the mechanism, you’re just using the energy source and supporting your body as you’re metabolizing and digesting.
And the benefits are incredible. We have Dom D’Agostino, he’s a university of South Florida ketogenic researcher and neuroscientists, he’s currently using the program and sharing a lot of the same stuff. I think even he was kind of shocked at how powerful the walk response was in controlling blood sugar after a meal.
Matthew Delly: [00:44:01] Yeah. I think that’s probably the, one of the most easy to implement practical steps that everyone can use. Even if they don’t end up wearing a glucose monitor to help them overall. But another interesting thing I’ve found on the website, and I think it was in the onboarding process, was the study of the banana and the cookie. And how the same food affects two people completely differently.
Josh Clemente: [00:44:33] Yeah, absolutely. So this is the area of personal glycaemic response or gluco types. So there was a landmark study in 2015, which was done by the Weitzman Institute in Israel, which is the one you’re discussing. So what this study showed, well, they put 800 people through the program and they all wore continuous glucose monitors, and these were all non-diabetic people. And so this was one of the first studies that looked at non-diabetic blood sugar responses with a continuous glucose monitor. And they discovered that, like you said, 2 people who eat the exact same 2 foods can have equal and opposite blood sugar responses. So it’s not so much that they just have a different scale of response, it’s that one person spikes, in this example spiked on a banana and remained flat on a cookie made with wheat. And then the other person spiked on the cookie and remained flat on the banana. And so this implies not that someone should just eat cookies all day, it’s that that person, you know, unfortunately, but it’s that that person is likely more sensitive to fruit sugar versus grain sugar. And what we’re realizing is that this personal variability is really, really powerful and it’s quite widespread.
Additional studies have shown, out of the UK, Kings College, and then also in Stanford have shown that different people who have normal blood sugar responses to certain things can have diabetic blood sugar responses to other foods.
People who have, in the Kings College trial, they showed that even identical twins who share a 100% of their DNA can have equal and opposite responses to foods. And so it’s partially genetic, it probably has something to do with body composition, stress environment, potentially even microbiome. And so there’s all of this complexity, and again, this is why we’re calling the human body a chemistry set, because it truly is so complex. And if you’re going to make decisions, they need to be guided by your data in real time. Otherwise you have no idea, are you the banana person or the cookie person, is that thing that you’re doing each day, which you assume to be healthy, actually working against you and causing you to gain weight and feel terrible and exposing you to higher risk. And so that personalization element is ultimately why Levels is, I think, the best solution to the problem of metabolic dysfunction, is that you can find out in real time and then tailor your decision-making process to these personalizations, right?
Matthew Delly: [00:46:54] Yeah, no,that’s unbelievable stuff really. And Levels is a really fast growing company. I love how quick, quickly you guys implement new things into the app and the weekly and monthly reports. What does the future for Levels look like?
Josh Clemente: [00:47:15] Well, we’re the metabolic fitness company, so we won’t stop until we have reversed the metabolic health trends in this country and globally. And the way that we’re going to do that is by increasing the accessibility and the actionability of real-time metabolic information. Glucose is the first molecule we’re working with and so we’re really cracking the nut on what, again, this is an unstudied area. It’s not understudied, it’s unstudied. We do not know what optimal looks like in real time or in real terms and we are developing the data set that is going to define the future of metabolic optimization and what it means to be truly metabolically fit. So, we’ll incorporate more analytes, we’ll go from glucose, likely incorporate things like ketones and free fatty acids. And then ultimately, I’m very optimistic about adding hormones. Hopefully insulin is going to be, there’ll be some breakthroughs in the technology there. But yeah, what we’re doing is bringing together all of this information that defines how metabolically healthy you are as an individual and putting it in the context of your decisions each day.
So that again, when you sit down for lunch, without needing that PhD, what you’re going to eat and why. And the long-term vision is not that this be something that is, I think very onerous. Maybe some people kind of look at this and think, oh, that’s a big undertaking, I don’t want to track my calories or my nutrients or any of that stuff. And I think you’ll know as a user of Levels that that’s not how it feels to you to use the program. It’s very lightweight, low overhead. And you know, the vision I see for it is we start to treat metabolic health information or personal health data, more like financial data. Right, so I can pull my phone out and I can look at my account balances and I can look at my deposits and withdrawals, and I can talk to a financial expert and they can help me sort of project out into my retirement. But I don’t know, I don’t have the same data telling me, am I going to be around to enjoy that retirement? And so in the future, your phone should be, maybe not the phone, but the point is that you should have all the data that defines how healthy and how metabolically fit you are and how that projects into long-term risk outcomes and how you can make better choices.
Right now we’re kind of living in this world where, because of the accessibility issue for your own personal data, you kind of have a bank account balance, but you’re not allowed to check it. And you’re being told don’t withdraw or don’t overdraw, right? Like you don’t overdraw the balance but you’re not allowed to look at it. And so what we’re doing is closing that loop, making sure that a behavior change is easy, obvious, and actionable, and we’ll continue to do so until someone tells us stop, everybody’s too healthy.
Matthew Delly: [00:49:43] No, I don’t thinkpeople will tell you to stop. There are always ways you can keep improving right? Quickly, what are some of the things you’ve learned from your previous experiences at SpaceX and Hyperloop that you’ve leaned on this time around with Levels?
Josh Clemente: [00:50:03] Well, the biggest thing is team, quality of the team. So that’s the best part about my experience at SpaceX, was just the quality of the people I worked with. And the mission and vision is exceptional and it’s great to be a part of, but ultimately it came down to who was executing on it. And that is the strength of Levels, is that we have just a totally world-class team. And I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to work with these folks. And the pace of progress is representative of how good the team is. And so that was my, I think the lessons learned at my prior endeavors was just bring together people who share values and principles and just set them free on the problem and great things are gonna happen. And that’s what we’re seeing here. And then, also SpaceX was formative for me in the sense that it’s where I was first exposed to the science that human performance is influenced, well, human wellness is influenced by not just this, sort of fitness first approach, but also diet is 90% of the problem. And I learned that through my exposure on life support program, to the work of Don D’Agostino and his work on ketogenic studies. And so, I think that bringing metabolic health into the mainstream, it started way back at SpaceX and working on that astronaut life support program and it’s been an amazing passion project that personally affects me. You know, I discovered that I had this problem myself through this whole crazy sort of web of discovery that took multiple years. And I’m very grateful for having had that experience at SpaceX to kind of kick this whole next phase of my life off. And just can’t be more excited about the future for Levels.
Matthew Delly: [00:51:46] Yeah, that’s awesome. And then, it’s a 28 day program, right? And each level lasts 14 days. Are you seeing people wanting to continue on after that 28 days?
Josh Clemente: [00:52:01] So how it, yeah, so absolutely. Right now we structure it, like you said, it’s a 28 day program where you learn quite a bit in just those 28 days. The first week you kind of set the baseline, see how your body’s responding to your existing choices. And then in weeks, 2 and 3, we recommend people really start to explore. So start to change up your behaviors, maybe try some things you don’t typically do and experiment, again, with those sleep stress, diet and exercise levers. And then in week 4 we recommend people try and really just push for optimization, bring it all together and try and maintain that low and controlled 100% time and range, maximize your scores, really nail the story to the scorecard, and then we give you reports throughout. Now the value of that sort of learning experience is amazing. But for me, as someone who’s been wearing a CGM now for about 2 years, about 80% of the value for me day to day now, is accountability. So, I have goals, I am a person who really enjoys eating. I can definitely go off the rails sometimes in terms of what I’m trying to accomplish for myself. And so the accountability of having that data in real time just keeps me honest. It’s you cannot cheat this data stream. You can’t, with a macro tracking app, you just don’t enter the meal right? And then you cheat the score and you did great today. But with your glucose data, that score is not going anywhere, it’s going to sense the glucose load, and it’s going to tell you about it. So I think that’s the beauty of it, the lessons continue to be learned. I’m learning something honestly, daily still, with this. I don’t know if I’ll ever get tired of it as a data source, but then also again, that accountability, it’s like the angel on your shoulder helping you to stay accountable to your goals.
So, certainly in the longterm, we will be, and we already are introducing subscription options for people to continue using the program long-term. And the long term vision of the company is that, people are using this information daily, throughout their lives. It’s not necessarily that this is just something that you opt into for a short period of time. So that’s the direction we’re heading for sure.
Matthew Delly: [00:54:02] No, that’s really exciting. And where can people learn more?
Josh Clemente: [00:54:06] So, given that we don’t talk about metabolic fitness much, and again, it’s the foundation because metabolism is the set of processes that give you energy. You need energy for your brain to work, you need energy for your body to work. So physical fitness and mental fitness are built on metabolic fitness. And the way that we’re bringing this to the mainstream is by publishing a ton of content around this to help people understand exactly what we mean by these terms. So definitely start at levelshealth.com/blog and just dig in there. If there’s something you’re missing, if we’re not connecting the dots well, please drop us a line at [email protected]. And yeah, you can sign up for the waitlist at Levelshealth.com on the homepage. We currently are in beta, which means that we’re kind of limited in the amount of space that we have at the moment. But we’ll be rolling out pre-orders in the next few weeks and then the full launch will follow shortly thereafter.
So please sign up for the wait list and we’ll be distributing more information about how you can get signed up through that mechanism. And then, shout us out on social media. Where at UnlockLevels on Instagram and Twitter. And yeah, you’ll see the founders floating around out there too. We’d love to engage and talk about metabolic health, so hit us up.
Matthew Delly: [00:55:16] Yeah, that’s how I found out about Level’s , is on Twitter by a tweet.
Josh Clemente: [00:55:21] Love it. I didn’t know that actually.
Matthew Delly: [00:55:23] Matteo from Eightsleep.
Josh Clemente: [00:55:26] There you go.
Matthew Delly: [00:55:28] That’s awesome. Thanks very much for coming on the Delly podcast Josh, I really enjoyed it.
Josh Clemente: [00:55:33] 100% thanks for having me on, I look forward to coming on again sometime.
Matthew Delly: [00:55:36] Sounds good.
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