How Your Metabolism Really Works (with Josh Clemente)
Episode introduction
The secret to being healthy is working out, right? According to Josh Clemente, founder of Levels, it’s actually not that simple. Speaking from experience, Josh knows that perfect health stems from a healthy metabolism. And a healthy metabolism has its roots in diet and self-care. When we say diet, we’re not talking Keto. It’s about scientifically figuring out which foods are right for you and when. This answer can lie in a continuous glucose monitor, an innovative piece of technology that’s been traditionally reserved for diabetics, but which Josh and his team are hoping to get in the hands of athletes, pre-diabetics, and more. In this episode of BarBend, host David Tao picks Josh’s brain about metabolic dysfunction, fasting, and nailing down healthy routines that go beyond physical fitness.
Show Notes
Key Takeaways
03:04 – What is the definition of true health?
Josh was a crossfit trainer, with low body fat and an intense workout regimen. Yet he was still burning out physically and mentally. That’s when he started exploring how he could be making better choices to improve his overall wellbeing.
“I actually reached a point where I had to come to grips with the fact that I was burning out mentally and physically. I had hit a wall. It felt like I could not continue to perform at the level that I expected of myself day-to-day. And it felt very strange because I thought I was doing everything right to set myself up to be a high performer. And this was throughout my career. Also being a fitness freak and a CrossFit level two trainer, somebody who pushes harder in the gym assumes that if I’m doing all the things, sticking to my workout regimen and having low body fat, can run fast, lift heavy weights, then I’m healthy. Having that juxtaposed with the reality of my day-to-day, which was no energy, low mood, just kind of dragging myself through the day and not performing to the degree that I wanted, led me to start deciding, okay. I’ve got to do something about this. I need better information about what choices I should be making because clearly the ones I am making are not enough.”
06:47 – Continuous glucose monitors are for everybody
CGMs were traditionally used for diabetes management and only issued to individuals manifesting acute symptoms. Josh believes putting this tech in the hands of people in the early stage of metabolic dysfunction could be a game-changer.
“There’s a specific reason that the continuous glucose monitor is what it is today. And that’s for the management of diabetes. It was originally a lab technology, but because people who have diabetes have an acute need to know their blood sugar, basically it made the business case for companies to develop convenient technology that can be worn full time and can stream wireless data to your phone to tell you what your glucose is. And the rationale there was for people with type one and type two diabetes to be on top of their medications as necessary. But the beauty of it is that everyone who is alive has a metabolism and the factors that lead to metabolic breakdown, specifically type two diabetes. But even prior to the metabolic dysfunction, I was experiencing energy issues, crashes, hypoglycemia, reactive hypoglycemia, weight gain, and mood dysfunction.”
07:45 – Taking glucose monitoring mainstream
A winning combination of factors means that CGM access could soon be easily accessible. These factors include the current microelectronics revolution, decreasing costs, abundant resources, and perseverance of companies like Levels.
“I think it’s like the factors had to come together and the microelectronics revolution had to happen. Affordability had to happen. Resources needed to be allocated to this to make the technology possible. And then when that happened, when those resources were applied, it was in the medical device field, which is heavily regulated. It takes a lot of money and a lot of time and determination to get a new device to market. It’s not the ideal space for a consumer product. The factors aren’t quite there. And so that’s what we’re dealing with right now is like reallocating this firmly therapeutic device into the world of wellness and fitness. And it’s going to be the bow wave. We’re going to break open this new space and it’s going to really transform over the next few years. We’ll see many more molecules being measured.”
10:04 – Metabolic health depends on daily choices
Just like daily workouts require dedication, we need to make the right daily choices for our metabolic fitness in all aspects of our environment – food, sleep, stress, and physical activity.
“We all live on the spectrum of metabolic function and that’s called metabolic fitness, right? That’s the same way we go into the gym and we train our strength through focus, effort, and repetition, that applies to you. All of the lifestyle choices we’re making throughout the day, which build into a hormonal environment, a chemical environment in our bodies that determine whether or not we’re functioning properly. And so for me throughout my life, I’ve just been focusing on the physical fitness piece, just been focusing on strength and conditioning, putting up big weight, and running fast. Those were like my metrics for health. And that’s important for sure, but there are several other levers and those are sleep, stress control, and nutrition. And so I had never paid enough attention there. I have always been the type of person who’s like, I can outwork any diet and I’m a machine, as long as I have the right mindset, I’ll be able to go without sleep and I’ll be able to manage my stress levels, that’s for other people to worry about. And the realization that I had with CGM extended well beyond the foods I was eating to the environment I was building for myself.”
14:44 – What causes insulin resistance?
When you eat a lot of carbohydrates throughout the day, the body releases a lot of insulin to process it. Over time, cells stop responding to the insulin hormone, leading to metabolic dysfunction.
“Essentially the way the body works is you put molecules of chemicals in, and then chemicals respond to it, depending on which ones you just consumed. So in this case, the difference between how your body metabolizes fat, protein, and glucose is pretty dramatic. So you eat a bunch of carbohydrates in order for your body to get those into the cells. To be used as energy, it has to release insulin, and insulin tells the cells to open up and let the glucose out of the bloodstream into the power plant, the mitochondria. And the issue there is that if you are creating a massive blood sugar elevation, you have to release a large amount of insulin to compensate for it. And over time, there’s this phenomenon called insulin resistance, which sets in which is essentially the cells stop responding to the insulin hormone. And this is important because it is essentially the underlying factor that determines how you specifically should be setting up your macronutrient balance. If you’re creating an environment where you’re constantly spiking glucose and constantly spiking insulin without depleting those stores or using them for immediate expenditure, you can create this insulin-resistant environment, which is the beginning of metabolic dysfunction and breakdown.”
17:59 – The concept of metabolic flexibility
Human body has access to two energy sources: glycogen and fat. While an average person has 2,000-2,500 calories of glycogen, they have 80,000 calories of fat in the body. Metabolic flexibility is the ability to switch from burning glycogen to burning fat.
“The concept of metabolic flexibility, I’m sure it’s been talked about a lot, but it’s essentially ensuring that your body is hormonally set up to switch between fuel sources effortlessly. And a lot of us are basically dependent on a life support drip of food in order to keep running. And you take that away for one meal time and you’re feeling shaky. You’re feeling like you need to go pass out. And so with setting up a training regimen where you are depleting your glycogen reserves and forcing your body to switch over onto your fat reserves, you can start to balance out that hormonal environment and predispose yourself to more easily tap into that energy. It’s really interesting there if you just look at the raw numbers, an average size person has the ability to store about 2,000-2,500 calories of glucose as glycogen. But that same person will typically have 10 to 15% body fat. They’ll have about 80,000 calories of fat stored on their bodies. There’s plenty of energy there. The concept that we’re going to run out of energy and pass out or die is just complete nonsense. It’s just training yourself to be able to tap into it.”
21:06 – Can you do high intensity workout in a fasted state?
Even in a fasted state, the body produces cortisol a few minutes into a high intensity workout. This signals the liver to start releasing glucose in the body, providing energy to continue the workout.
“One of the other guys on our team, he’s doing marathons. He’ll do an 18 hour fast, and then he’ll start a 26-mile run and has been able to do so with perfectly flat blood sugar and with no exotic calories. And that’s a demonstration of the fact that this can be trained. So now going back to the high-intensity stuff, I mentioned how cortisol affects the liver and it tells your liver to crank out glucose. That kind of cortisol impact happens for me at around 85 to 90% of my maximum heart rate. So if I’m sustaining high intensity for more than five, ten minutes, I’m going to see a huge blood sugar elevation. And that’s my liver kicking in and producing all of this extra energy, and that happens regardless of fast state. I’ve done 24 hour plus fast and done a high-intensity workout. And it certainly doesn’t feel great initially. But once that kicks in, I’ve got all the energy I need. I do not feel like I’m going to crash.”
26:21 – Should you ditch the pre-workout smoothie?
The answer is, it depends. Many metabolically flexible individuals will automatically produce the energy needed for the workout, without needing calories from pre-workout snacks.
“Given that historically these devices have been used to study diabetic populations exclusively, with the exception of those recent studies I just touched on, this is an unstudied area. And continuous molecular monitoring for fitness and strength training has just not been done yet. We have some athletes right now across all professional sports in CrossFit and UFC in all of the pro leagues using this as a very early sort of exposure to how their bodies are actually functioning and starting to ground their nutrition training in it. But we were a little too early for conclusions just now. One of the big things people are noticing is what I touched on myself, which is a lot of the time the pre-workout and the post-workout that they’re using are just not working well for them. And so they’re starting to see this whole shake smoothie thing I’m doing before hitting the gym, I actually feel way better, and based on my blood sugar availability, maybe do not need it at all and can instead deliver the nutrients for recovery in a much slower burn fashion. Contrary to that, some people have triple headers where they’re doing back to back to back performance, and they need to have tons of energy available. They’re depleting glycogen all day and they can see delivering fuel just in time is made possible by seeing the data happening in the moment.”
Episode Transcript
Josh Clemente: [00:00:00] I had always been the type person that’s like, “I can outwork any diet and I can – I’m a machine I can just – As long as I have the right mindset, I’ll be able to go without sleep and I’ll be able to just manage my stress levels. That’s for other people to worry about.”
David Thomas Tao: [00:00:16] Welcome to the BarBend Podcast, where we talk to the smartest athletes, coaches, and minds from around the world of strength. I’m your host, David Thomas Tao and this podcast is presented by barbend.com.
Today, I’m talking to Josh Clemente, Founder and President of Levels, a company producing wearable tech so users can track blood glucose in real-time to maximize diet and exercise results. It’s a relatively new company, but after a $12 million fundraising round, they’re already in use by top pro athletes and are even making waves in the strength sports community.
Josh is a veteran of both SpaceX and Hyperloop One and his background is in designing life support systems for the next generation of space exploration. In today’s episode, we discussed how that work inspired Josh to found Levels, why metabolic responses can vary so differently from one person to the next, even with the same food, and what this means for actionable insights into strength and performance.
I do want to take a second to say we’re incredibly thankful that you listened to this podcast. So if you haven’t already, be sure to leave a rating and review of the BarBend Podcast in your app of choice. Now let’s get to it.
Josh, thanks so much for joining us today. The question that I want to ask you, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been able to ask anyone in the world, this question. How do you go from rocket science to glucose monitoring? Maybe give us a little background as to how you got from point A to point B there.
Josh Clemente: [00:01:57] David, thanks for having me on the show, first of all, and to your question, It’s a very good one but really, it was just through personal experimentation and a lifelong interest in, or a curiosity about things I don’t already know. And that led me into how machines work throughout childhood and just tooling around in the garage trying to stay out of chores. And so I became fascinated with machines and mechanisms and that led to a mechanical engineering degree, a job at SpaceX, eventually leading the pressurized life support system team working on the astronaut program. SpaceX recently flew four astronauts to the International Space Station just earlier this year, the first launch of that Crew Dragon vehicle and what I was able to work on was the pressurized breathing apparatus and so the systems that feed oxygen and purified air into the cabin, into the space suits, clean contaminants out, extinguish fires. That program was the last big push in my six years there at SpaceX and during that time, I actually reached a point where I had to come to grips with the fact that I was burning out mentally and physically. I had hit a wall, it felt like, where I could not continue to perform at the level that I expected of myself day-to-day and it felt very strange because I thought I was doing everything right to set myself up to be a high performer.
And this was throughout my career also being on the side a fitness freak and a CrossFit L2 trainer, somebody who pushes harder in the gym, assumes that if I’m doing all the things, sticking to my workout regimen and have low body fat, can run fast, lift, heavy weights, then I’m healthy.
And having that juxtaposed with the reality of my day-to-day, which was no energy, low mood, just dragging myself through the day and not performing to the degree that I want. It led me to start deciding, “Okay. I’ve got to do something about this. I need better information about what choices I should be making because clearly the ones I am making are not enough.”
And that caused a little bit of side research to happen and this was just experimenting with, okay, fuel systems. Where does our energy come from? And that’s of course metabolism, which is how our bodies, every cell in our bodies produce energy from our food and environment. And the number one molecule for energy in the modern human is glucose. So I was like, “Okay. I’ll start pricking my finger and measuring glucose.” And that was how it started. Didn’t lead very far. Eventually I read about this new technology called continuous glucose monitoring and I tried to get one, was turned down by my doctor because I wasn’t diabetic. And when I did eventually get one, I found out that, after about two weeks of data, I was either borderline or full blown pre-diabetic and that was the last straw where I realized, okay, this is crazy. I had no idea, no indication, don’t have any outward appearance that would cause me to think that something was going wrong, but all of my underlying manifestation of this metabolic dysfunction was my quality of life, my day-to-day experience. And so I, yeah, I started from there on the Levels journey.
David Thomas Tao: [00:04:54] It’s fascinating to me that the fitness industry has been, and I’m preaching to the choir here, but this is a setup for a question I promise. It’s fascinating to me the fitness industry has been obsessed with cracking the wearables code for so long. Going back decades, we heard about, with the advent of smartwatches, with devices that measure things like HRV and blood pressure, we hear about wearables and it’s oftentimes focused on the physical signs of output or energy expenditure as measured by work output, work capacity, pedometers being the base level of that. They’ve since gotten much more advanced, but wearables in the fitness industry, haven’t really focused on the chemical interactions in our body or at least measuring that. So everything’s been measuring the output, but the fuel going in, we haven’t measured that.
Why do you think that the industry has been so slow to adopt or to introduce fitness wearables that do focus on chemical aspects of performance?
Josh Clemente: [00:05:55] Really great question. We’re referring to this new future era that we’re, I think, a part of right now as the biowearables. So this is stepping from the superficial factors that you can measure yourself, the pedometer, the pulse to actually measuring molecules in our biology and I think part of the reason, there’s two-fold reasons. One is that historically this has been very hard to do. So there’s a specific reason that the continuous glucose monitor is what it is today and that’s for the management of diabetes. It was originally a lab technology, but because people who have diabetes have an acute need to know their blood sugar. Basically it made the business case for companies to develop convenient technology that can be worn full time and can stream wireless data to your phone to tell you what your glucose is. And the rationale there was for people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes to be on top of their medications as necessary. But the beauty of it is that everyone who is alive has a metabolism and the factors that lead to metabolic breakdown, specifically Type 2 diabetes, but even prior to that, the metabolic dysfunction I was experiencing, energy issues, crashes, reactive hypoglycemia, weight gain, mood dysfunction, all of these things are actually energetic at the foundational level. And so that same technology can now be reapplied to the prediagnostic space. And so I think it’s like the factors had to come together. Micro electronics revolution had to happen. Affordability had to happen. There had to be resources needed to be allocated to this to make the technology possible. And then when that happened, when those resources were applied, it was in the medical device field, which is, heavily regulated. It takes a lot of money and a lot of time and determination to get a new device to market. And so it’s just – It’s not the ideal space for a consumer product. The factors aren’t quite there. And so that’s what we’re dealing with right now is reallocating this firmly therapeutic device into the world of wellness and fitness and I think it’s going to be the bow wave. We’re going to break open this new space and it’s going to really transform over the next few years. We’ll see many more molecules being measured.
David Thomas Tao: [00:07:51] One thing I can tell immediately talking to you for just a few minutes is that you like trying difficult things, whether it’s personally and being very quantified about your own health and wellness or trying to crack into a, or break into a very difficult space. It’s something we’ve talked about on the podcast before and I will say you’re actually not the first former rocket scientist we’ve talked about, we’ve talked to you on this podcast. We had Brandon Heavey who worked at the jet propulsion labs on the podcast well over a year ago. So there’s a trend there. People –
Josh Clemente: [00:08:19] Yeah.
David Thomas Tao: [00:08:19] Who like breaking these things down and asking big questions in the fitness space. Do want to talk a little bit more about your personal journey as you were first experimenting with glucose monitoring yourself and you found out that you were actually experiencing some signs of pre-diabetes? Obviously this is not a medical advice podcast, but I’m curious what changes that might have triggered in your own approach to wellness, training and nutrition?
Josh Clemente: [00:08:40] Yeah. Great question. By the way, Brandon Heavey. I was just on his show, Strength & Scotch and he’s a great guy. We fall in the same circle, very cool.
David Thomas Tao: [00:08:46] That’s a fun – If you haven’t listened to it, if you listen to the Barbin Podcast but you don’t listen to Strength & Scotch, do yourself a favor. They’re like us, but more fun.
Josh Clemente: [00:08:54] TBD. Yeah. Great guys. As it relates to my own experience, and this is what was so fascinating is that we traditionally look at metabolic health as binary. It’s like you’re healthy and then something happens to you and you’re not healthy anymore. And most people ask that question, when you’re talking about metabolism, “Am I metabolically healthy?” And what we’re needing to do is reframe this entire conversation. It’s not binary.
We all live on the spectrum of metabolic function and that’s called metabolic fitness. Right? The same way we go into the gym and we train our strength through focus, effort, and repetition. That applies to you, all of the lifestyle choices we’re making throughout the day which build into a hormonal environment, a chemical environment in our bodies that determine whether or not we’re functioning properly.
And so for me throughout my life, I’ve just been focusing on the physical fitness piece, just been focusing on strength and conditioning, putting up big weight, running fast. Those were like my metrics for health. It’s important for sure, but there are several other levers and those are sleep, stress control and nutrition. And so I had never paid enough attention there. I had always been the type person that’s like, “I can outwork any diet and I can – I’m a machine I can just – As long as I have the right mindset, I’ll be able to go without sleep and I’ll be able to just manage my stress levels. That’s for other people to worry about.” And the realization that I had with CGM extended well beyond the foods I was eating to the environment I was building for myself. I realized that by watching how my body responded, the value of sleep specifically and so going from, let’s say, a red-eye flight, jumping off and going straight to work and working a 16-hour day. Seeing how my body responded to something like that, which was to say disastrously, blood sugar elevated fasting level in a dangerous, borderline pre-diabetic or pre-diabetic soon. Every meal I ate major blood sugar elevations and then shortly thereafter, reactive crashes. Horrible energy dysfunction just needing tons of coffee versus stringing together multiple days of high-quality eight hours of restful sleep, shutting down, winding down before sleep, not going straight from email into bed.
Seeing just how dramatic the difference was, the quality of sleeping being at stake, was totally mind blowing to me. It really drove home that this science is legitimate when it applies to me and then stress. So I can have, and I have had a stressful meeting where without eating anything, I’m sitting there, my blood sugar has gone into a pre-diabetic state, a post-meal pre-diabetic zone just by basically the cortisol that is flooding my system and creating a fight or flight scenario.
So cortisol it’s a hormone that falls into the glucocorticoid territory. So basically it tells the liver you’re in danger. You need to produce a ton of energy to escape this. And so your liver starts flooding your system with blood sugar and what’s fascinating about that is that in the gym, this is exceptional because it’s going to give you all the fuel you need for your muscles to function properly and get that workout done. But when you’re sitting at a desk and stressing out about emails or stressing out about that complex project you’re working on day after day. This is creating hormonal mayhem. And this is what was happening to me. I was just working a crazy stressful environment and not sleeping well and those were the factors that were dominating my life. Add into that just the fact that I was guiding my nutrition based on the Internet and based on friends at the gym, just whatever was working for them I was doing that, and it was not at all, nuanced. It wasn’t formulated for me. I was eating hundreds of grams of carbohydrates thinking I needed to replenish glycogen or carb load for a workout and I was just causing these huge blood sugar elevations and then dealing with the hormonal consequences thereafter.
And so seeing all this stuff in real time from my body in front of my face, it led to embracing mindfulness, breathing techniques, stress management, sleep hygiene, seven to nine hours of sleep at all cost. And then deemphasizing workout specifically in favor of a balanced recovery and workout scheme and then, of course, nutrition changes.
David Thomas Tao: [00:12:54] Yeah. Yeah. I’m curious about on the nutritional side, obviously, there are a lot of buzzwords people have heard on this podcast before and if you’re a BarBend reader as well, we’ve covered some of that and it can be tough to keep up on the science and it can be very difficult from a content producers perspective to separate science from fad. Just because a lot of people are interested in something, a particular dietary trend, does not mean there’s evidence to necessarily support it. The two do not necessarily go hand in hand and the Internet has exacerbated that in a big way. I’m curious what your personal, and again, just your personal thing. It will not, as you mentioned, this is not carte blanche for everyone to say this will work the same way for every person. What is your current dietary framework? Are you incorporating fasting, anything like that? How would you describe it?
Josh Clemente: [00:13:37] Yes. My approach is to try to optimize metabolic flexibility. Essentially, the way the body works is you put molecules in, chemicals in, and then chemicals respond to it, depending on which ones you just consumed. So in this case, the difference between how your body metabolizes fat, protein and glucose are pretty dramatic. So you eat a bunch of carbohydrates. In order for your body to get those into the cells to be used as energy it has to release insulin and insulin tells the cells to open up and let the glucose out of the bloodstream into the power plant, the mitochondria. And the issue there is that insulin, if you are creating a massive blood sugar elevation, you have to release a large amount of insulin to compensate for it. And over time, there’s this phenomenon called insulin resistance, which sets in, which is essentially the cells stop responding to the insulin hormone. And this is important because it is essentially the underlying factor that determines how you specifically should be setting up your macronutrient balance.
If you’re creating an environment where you’re constantly spiking glucose and constantly spiking insulin without depleting those stores or using them for Immediate expenditure, you can create this insulin resistant environment, which is the beginning of metabolic dysfunction and breakdown.
And so over time, I think that’s what I had been doing. I had doing a lot of carb loading before every workout or even the night before I would ensure I got in a few hundred grams of complex carbohydrates. I wasn’t eating pop tarts or anything, but it was brown rice. It was sweet potatoes. It was making sure that I was fully loaded up and then even just before my workout, I’d have to drive 25 minutes or whatever to the gym and I would have a smoothie and that would be a banana. It would be bran flakes, protein powder. I’d throw in some spinach in there to make myself feel good and I thought –
David Thomas Tao: [00:15:17] A little bit of fiber and iron in there, right?,
Josh Clemente: [00:15:19] Exactly. It’s green. And so that would be my pre-workout fuel and I was going to do typically a CrossFit workout, so this would be a high intensity WOD. And what was fascinating was as soon as I got real-time blood sugar data, I saw that that smoothie was causing – My blood sugar would go into a diabetic range. Most people should not exceed 140 after a meal, except rarely. Mine would be going well into the 180s and above and that spike would then come plummeting back down. I’m sitting in the car. I’m not using that energy. I’m on my way to the gym. It would then come plummeting back down within about 45 minutes or an hour. And just as I’m mid set, my blood sugar is reaching a reactive hypoglycemic low. I’m feeling shaky. I’m feeling cold sweat. I’m blaming it on my workout but the reality of the situation was, I was causing myself to ride this rollercoaster and I was not optimizing my energy. And seeing that caused me to go to a very different macronutrient balance for my pre-workout, which would be essentially almond butter. It would be – Sometimes I’ll mix in some bran flakes or something high in fiber and make sure I’m getting fats and proteins and so I have a much more slow burn. There’s a product called You Can!, which is a slow release carbohydrate, which I’ll also sometimes use. And so just completely removing the very high, fast-acting carbohydrates, which I was getting from the banana and those bran flakes and replacing it with something that’s more balanced and in some cases, even removing the meal altogether and going with a fasted exercise. And so the rationale for the fasted exercise, what I touched on in the beginning, which is training my body to tap into available energy stores that are not necessarily coming from my food. And in this case, that would be body fat. The concept of metabolic flexibility, I’m sure it’s been talked about a lot, but it’s essentially ensuring that your body is hormonally set up to switch between fuel sources effortlessly.
A lot of us are basically dependent on a life support drip of food in order to keep running. And you take that away for one meal time and you’re feeling shaky. You’re feeling like you need to go pass out. So with essentially setting up a training regimen where you are depleting your glycogen reserves and forcing your body to switch over onto your fat reserves, you can start to balance out that hormonal environment and predispose yourself to more easily tap into that energy.
And it’s really interesting. If you just look at the raw numbers, most people, an average size person, has the ability to store about 2,500 calories of glucose as glycogen. But that same person will typically have, and this is like 10% to 15% body fat, they’ll have about 80,000 calories of fat stored on their bodies. There’s plenty of energy there. The concept that we’re going to run out of energy and pass out or die is just completely nonsense. It’s just training yourself to be able to tap into it. And so that’s what I’m focusing on.
David Thomas Tao: [00:17:52] So yeah. What kind of fasting protocol seems to work for you? And again, I love giving disclaimers. They call me the disclaimer king at Barbin. It’s not necessarily ideal for everyone, but for Josh, what might your fasting regimen look like and how do you incorporate that around training? Because I really like how you’re showing this through the lens of training, which is something that everyone listening to this podcast, or a lot of people, I should say, listening to this podcast, are always curious about. They’re like, cool. But how does that apply to your training schedule?
Josh Clemente: [00:18:19] Yes. What I’m doing right now is I will typically not eat until around noon to one o’clock and the goal here is I’ll shut down before – About 7:00 or 8:00 PM, I’ll try to be done eating and that will give me a solid, greater than 12 hours before I start a workout. So in the morning, if I’m getting up 12 hours after my last meal, my glycogen is pretty well depleted at that point. It’s typically, it’s going to take 18 to 24 hours for most people to be totally cleared out. But I’m certainly not fully stocked up and that’s when I’ll do an endurance training session or lightweight kettlebells or something like that. If I’m going to be pushing really intensely in the gym I certainly do not need to eat. I’ll get into that, but if I’m doing a longer endurance ride, two hours or a long run or something like that, I will probably bring along some fuel because the reality of the matter is I will bonk. I still do not have that amazing metabolic flexibility where I can just seamlessly transition. I’m still training that, but I’ll be prepared with a little sports drink or something along the way.
Now, one of the other guys on our team, it’s pretty amazing, he’s doing marathons completely fasted where he’ll do an 18-hour fast and then he’ll start a 26-mile run and has been able to do so with perfectly flat blood sugar and with no exogenous calories. And that’s a demonstration of the fact that this can be trained.
So now, going back to the high intensity stuff. Because the – I mentioned how cortisol affects the liver and it tells your liver to crank out glucose. That kind of cortisol impact happens for me at around 85% to 90% of my maximum heart rate. So if I’m sustaining high intensity for more than 5 to 10 minutes, I’m going to see a huge blood sugar elevation. And that’s my liver kicking in producing all of this extra energy, and that happens regardless of fasted state. I’ve done 24-hour plus fasts and done a high intensity workout. And it certainly doesn’t feel great initially, but once that kicks in, I’ve got all the energy I need. I do not feel like I’m going to crash. And so that’s how I’m approaching it. I like to go until noon, one o’clock. I typically – My mornings are sacred to me anyway, so not having to do a whole meal preparation and cleanup is great. It unlocks an extra hour of my day. And yeah. And then I’m biasing towards, and I’d love to get into the personal aspect of this, but right now, just from all I’ve learned about how I function metabolically, I’m biasing towards a high protein, moderate fat and low carb lifestyle. And so I certainly am not ketogenic. I prioritize protein above all else and I tend to be just extremely, unfortunately, sensitive to most carbohydrates and due to some personal choices around what I’d like to achieve for longevity and personal health, I’m choosing to bias away from carbs generally.
David Thomas Tao: [00:20:52] That makes a lot of sense and I like how – This is true for any early stage technology or at least a new framing or a new way in adapting it. You and your team, you’re the guinea pigs in many ways. You’re still in beta, I believe. Is that correct? At Levels?
Josh Clemente: [00:21:06] Yep. That’s right.
David Thomas Tao: [00:21:07] And the best accolades and the best test cases and the most data you all can really get is from the people working on the products. So it’s really neat to talk to someone in that stage. You don’t get to do that every day, especially in health and wellness, because so many things are just rehashes of things that have already been done in health and wellness. There’s nothing new. We like to say there’s nothing new in strength training. It was all done in the ’70s and ’80s and people just republish it under a different program name is what we like to joke about.
What are some of the early responses, if you’ve had them, regarding the product and the impact it can have specifically on strength athletes?
Josh Clemente: [00:21:41] Yeah. As you touch on, it’s such a nascent space. It’s brand new and we’re learning a huge amount literally weekly and one of the things I wanted to just quickly loop back on is the personalization component here. Continuous glucose monitoring, I touched on this beginning, but it’s a very new technology, just in the last five years, it’s become readily available for people with diabetes and Levels is one of the first to get it to the general population.
And the interesting thing is, in 2015, a study was published in the Cell Journal of Biology covering this personalized nutrition component. And essentially these researchers put 800 people through a one week experience where they wore continuous glucose monitors and they ate essentially standardized foods. And they showed that two people can eat the exact same two foods and have equal and opposite blood sugar responses. And so in this case, it was a banana and a cookie made with wheat flour. And so two people, two of these subjects, one would have a huge blood sugar spike from the banana and no response to the cookie and the other person had the opposite responses. And it’s probably something like fruit sugar versus grain sugar or something along those lines and then their genealogy, their genetics, their microbiome, their stress environment, body composition, all of these factors come to play to determine how they respond to it. But the point is that they are going to experience an equivalently different hormone response. So their insulin response is going to be different, how they gain weight as a result of that, how energized they feel as a result of that.
So that study really flipped the table over on the one-size-fits-all approach. Okay. There’s a profound amount of difference between people and a follow on study actually showed that even identical twins who share a hundred percent of their DNA have the same degree of variability available. So it’s not even entirely genetics. And so that’s the circumstances we’re operating under. And so what Levels is doing is saying, we aren’t embracing some dietary philosophy here. What we want is for you, no matter who you are, where you are, what your goals are, to be able to ground your day-to-day choices in objective data coming from your body. So rather than you focusing on what the population average does or what somebody on the Internet says to do, have real data from yourself that you can then use to iterate towards something that works best. And that’s apparent on the team as well. My Co-founder, Casey Means, she’s a vegan, plant based 100%. I’m not and several of us have different approaches. But we all are striving and using daily this data.
And so anyway, that’s the foundation that we’re building on. And given that historically these devices have been used to study diabetic populations exclusively, with the exception of those recent studies I just touched on, this is an unstudied area and continuous glucose monitoring, continuous molecular monitoring for fitness and strength training has just not been done yet. We have some athletes right now across all professional sports, in CrossFit and UFC, in all of the pro leagues using this as a very early sort of exposure to how their bodies are actually functioning and starting to ground their nutrition training in it.
But we’re a little too early for conclusions just now. One of the big things people are noticing is what I touched on myself which is, a lot of the time the pre-workout and the post-workout that they’re using are just not working well for them. And so they’re starting to see, “Ha! This whole shake smoothie thing I’m doing before hitting the gym, I actually feel way better and based on my blood sugar availability, maybe do not need it at all and can instead deliver the nutrients for recovery in a much slower burn fashion.” And then contrary to that, some people have triple headers where they’re working, they’re doing back-to-back-to-back performance and they need to have tons of energy available. They’re depleting glycogen all day and they can see basically delivering fuel just in time is made possible by seeing the data happening in the moment.
David Thomas Tao: [00:25:16] You’re going to have a lot of Broscientists really upset if you debunk the strongly held metabolic window theories. I’ve seen so many great memes, by the way, slightly just slightly off topic about what happens when you violate the 30 minute metabolic window. I first heard that from a sports coach back when I was playing team sports and it’s just something that’s just – It’s so sticky. It stuck around. So get ready for that.
Josh Clemente: [00:25:41] No doubt. No doubt.
David Thomas Tao: [00:25:43] If they haven’t already.
Josh Clemente: [00:25:44] Oh, it’s going to happen and it’s funny because I’m totally open to – What we’re trying to do is not just call these things into question, but then follow up with what the actual science says. What is optimal? What does it look like to have optimal blood sugar control for a specific set of goals and a certain body composition? And that I think we genuinely can crack this and the 30-minute window, for sure it doesn’t apply to everyone and certainly it depends on how you respond to what you’re consuming. There’s no question in my mind –
David Thomas Tao: [00:26:10] Heresy! Heresy on this podcast.
Josh Clemente: [00:26:14] Hold me accountable. I’ll die in a cell, but there’s definitely more nuance to it than that. I’m looking forward to uncovering exactly how the athlete and then the individual who’s trying to lose a hundred pounds or the person who’s just trying to perform better as a new parent and just trying to keep their wits about them as they’re completely compromised on sleep and trying to just make their way through life without losing it. You know what I mean? Being able to find an edge. No matter what your performance goals are, I think is going to become increasingly possible with real-time data in the moment. Being able to answer the question, “What should I eat and why?” The why oftentimes is driven by your goals, but answering that with your own objective data is what we’re striving for here.
David Thomas Tao: [00:26:55] And if you piss off a few Broscientists along the way, that’s the price of moving the industry forward. Right?
Josh Clemente: [00:27:00] No doubt. I’m sure we’ll be creating a whole new class of Broscientists with this real-time data too. So we’re going to try and balance the scales.
David Thomas Tao: [00:27:09] If I were a smarter person, I could come up with a good product, like glucose bros or something like that. But we’ll have to workshop that another time.
Josh Clemente: [00:27:17] We’ll work it out. Yeah.
David Thomas Tao: [00:27:18] Maybe we’ll have you back on the podcast. We’ll spitball some ideas.
Josh, where’s the best place for folks to keep up to date with the work you’re doing and also with what Levels is doing?
Josh Clemente: [00:27:27] So we’re building a huge content platform right now with the intention of getting the latest science, not just from within Levels, but the latest metabolic science out into the mainstream. And then we’re also producing our own content on people and their use cases that are currently going through our development project. And that’s the blog at levelshealth.com. On the main website, you’ll also be able to sign up for our waitlist, which is, we have an email list and a newsletter and we distribute a lot of details about the product and features and then also new developments in the space.
So whether or not you’re interested in real-time glucose monitoring, when it comes to metabolism, metabolic flexibility and this new science of real-time data, it’s a good place to start. And then you can follow us on social on Twitter and Instagram, both @Levels.
David Thomas Tao: [00:28:07] Excellent! Josh, very much appreciate your time. It’s fascinating to chat with folks in the nascent stages of these developments because the learnings that you have, I’m sure, will be groundbreaking in many ways and a bit unpredictable, as you’ve already alluded to. So very excited to see how things develop. Thanks so much for joining us.
Josh Clemente: [00:28:24] Thank you, David. It was great. .