Your body is stuck on mute.
But what if you could turn up the volume and hear what it’s trying to tell you? That’s the power of tapping into your glucose levels.
This isn’t another article about how Veri works, but rather what you can expect to learn when you can get real-time feedback from your body on all of your food and lifestyle choices.
Below you’ll find the six key discoveries you make when you start listening to your body with Veri. We’ve put these six discoveries in a specific sequence to show you how you can use Veri to turn data about your body’s responses to food, sleep, stress, and exercise — and translate them into practical, actionable lifestyle changes that have long-term benefits for your metabolic health.
1. The unseen ways your metabolism (and glucose levels) respond to your lifestyle
“Surprise.”
It’s the most common answer when we ask first-time Veri users to describe their emotions upon seeing their glucose levels. It comes from an experience they’ve never had: seeing what’s happening inside their body in real-time.
We’ve spent the majority of our lives staring at the mirror, looking at the scale, or reviewing unclear numbers on a sheet of paper from our doctor. We’re left to guess what’s happening in our bodies based on how we look, feel, and perform.
Wearing a continuous glucose monitor and seeing your biological data in Veri is like opening a window into your body.
Our blood sugar is supposed to rise and fall throughout the day (and even at night) — after all, our metabolism is an engine that is always running — but many of us walk around with roller coaster glucose levels that leave us feeling tired and foggy, and will eventually lead to chronic health issues and weight gain.
Seeing how this engine runs is an empowering first step to improving your metabolic health. Below are some things people notice within their first couple of days.
The source of cravings and energy dips
The first thing that happens is finally being able to connect your subjective feeling to objective data. Those confusing cravings, dips in energy, and brain fog? You’ll notice they tend to happen when your blood sugar levels spike and crash.
It’s one of the reasons we focus on small changes. Stabilizing our levels in the short term can immediately improve how we feel, which is a powerful spark that creates the momentum for building sustainable, long-term change.
The “healthy food” lie
“I can’t believe my ‘healthy’ smoothie spiked me like that!”
One of the earliest discoveries is how some foods we think are healthy, either because of marketing or dieting advice, actually send our glucose levels to the moon.
It’s a wake-up call that enforces a guiding principle at Veri: our bodies are unique, and the best way to eat, move, and sleep should be based on our own data, not a trend or advertising. You’ll immediately be able to identify what foods aren’t serving your body.
Veri is a lie-detector test for fad diets and Big Food marketing scams.
Not all spikes are bad
One of the myths that we always try to dispel — and users soon learn for themselves — is that all glucose spikes are bad.
It’s simply not true.
First, moderate glucose rises and falls are a part of normal physiology — it’s actually a sign of your metabolism working. If flat levels were the goal, we would eat bacon all day. We need to embrace the curve.
Second, some spikes can be a healthy response. For instance, if you did a high-intensity workout and you didn’t eat, you might still see your glucose levels spike as your liver releases stored glycogen that gets converted into glucose — giving you the energy you need to perform.
Having a healthy relationship with your glucose level — one where you’re curious and not fearful — is the best way to make the right decisions for your health goals. This enables the growth mindset required for change.
2. Easy hacks to avoid blood sugar spikes throughout the day
It’s remarkable how tiny changes to your routine can produce big results. While Veri is all about long-term, sustainable change, you get there by making small tweaks. Sometimes called “glucose hacks” — there are a few tips and tricks that our members learn that can immediately reduce their spikes.
Below are a few favorites, but it’s important to try each one for yourself to see what has the biggest impact.
Give your carbs a buddy
The best part about a lifestyle built around your body is there isn’t much that’s “off limits.” For instance, if you find that bananas spike your glucose levels, often pairing them with your favorite nut butter — high in protein and healthy fats — will drastically reduce the spike. So you can keep them in your diet.
By learning how to pair carbs with fats and proteins — giving them a “buddy” — you can keep eating your favorite foods and keep your levels stable.
Take a post-meal walk
There are few things as simple and powerful for stable levels and avoiding an energy crash as taking a walk after meals.
There are two reasons: it slows stomach emptying so glucose doesn’t hit the bloodstream as quickly, and your body always chooses the most readily available energy source [1]. If you’ve just eaten carbs, that’s going to be the easiest for your body to use — meaning it’s accessible and takes less energy to process.
You’ll see from your glucose graph that this results in lower levels after a meal than if you hadn’t taken the walk. Wearing a CGM is a powerful way to know when and how long to walk.
Eat vegetables with every meal
Fiber is one of the most overlooked pieces of a healthy diet. Not only are veggies packed with fiber, but they’re also loaded with polyphenols — antioxidants that protect the body’s tissues against oxidative stress and inflammation. This combination is your secret weapon to reducing spikes when eating carbs [2].
Learning what type and how much is needed to keep you stable helps you build the perfect plate.
3. The best time to eat your meals for your specific health goals
We often obsess over what we eat, but knowing when to eat is the missing piece that’s only accessible through wearing a CGM paired with Veri.
Intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting (IF) or time-restricted eating (TRE) is the practice of restricting your calorie intake to a specific window of time — usually 8, 6, or 4 hours.
It’s become popular for everything from weight loss to longevity. The research is still evolving, but one thing users discover is IF it can be a useful tool for lowering their glucose levels and variability. Using Veri allows you to see the right time window for you. This is why we encourage all our members to be their own scientists — running studies on themselves when the popular research is still unclear.
Eating around exercise
We burn calories throughout the day and can switch from burning fat or glucose for energy — a concept known as metabolic flexibility. During exercise, the fuel our body uses can depend on everything from when you last ate to what your heart rate is. Veri even shows you the relationship between heart rate and your glucose levels so you can understand when the best time and type of food to eat is around your workouts.
Knowing what and when to eat around workouts helps you get the most out of your exercise routine and can even help you work in your favorite high-carb foods that would normally spike your levels.
Eating before bed
We talk a lot about sleep as an important part of keeping your glucose levels stable, but did you know your glucose can affect your sleep? That’s right, it’s a two-way street.
Eat a big, carby meal before bed, and you’ll notice your sleep quality takes a hit. But there is no universal protocol for when and what to eat for your last meal. Veri allows you to see what works for your body so you can improve your sleep.
4. The diet that works for your body (and your body alone)
Paleo diet.
South Beach diet.
Carnivore diet.
Atkins diet.
What do all these diets have in common? They’re not built for you. The best diet is one built from foods that work for your body, not someone else's.
Getting real data and insights from the foods you eat is the only way to discover what works for your goals.
And it’s not just about weight management. Fixing your metabolic health is at the core of what we do. Do that first, and your weight will follow — whatever your ideal weight is.
The right carbs for you
Whether it’s genetics, environment, microbiome, or lifestyle, carbs in particular have a very different effect on blood sugar depending on the person. While measures like glycemic index and glycemic load are helpful on a large scale — fine-tuning your carbs is one of the best ways to eat a balanced diet that fits your goals and doesn’t feel restrictive.
Veri members quickly discover which carbs make their bodies happy and which don’t. Sometimes that means getting to enjoy their favorites like white potatoes while learning key ingredient swaps they can make like choosing chickpea pasta instead of traditional pasta if that improves their levels.
Restriction simply isn’t sustainable. Learning the type and amount of carbs that work for your body is how you can lead a healthy and happy life in the long term.
Macronutrient balance
There are plenty of people who have had success with keto or similar diets. If you like it and you can do it sustainably, that’s great. But we see too many similarities between the current anti-carb rhetoric and the previous anti-fat rhetoric. Let’s stop demonizing macronutrients and start embracing balance.
Elimination diets tend not to work for most people because there are too many social and environmental factors that make adherence difficult. The best diet needs to have adherence and flexibility baked into it. That’s why building your ideal diet includes real-time feedback, takes into account the foods that work for your body, and minimizes (but not necessarily eliminates) those that don’t.
Veri shows you how the right balance of carbs, fat, and protein allows you to flexibly eat a variety of whole, delicious foods. Food is an important part of our unique cultures and the human experience — let’s embrace variety.
5. The lifestyle and habits that actually help you feel your best — not what the “gurus” tell you
We’ve written at length about our frustrations with one-size-fits-all diets, but the same can be said for exercise, sleep, and stress. Here’s how monitoring your glucose can show you the best lifestyle for your body.
Exercising for health
Exercising with the goal of losing weight can be de-motivating. Not only can it be unpredictable, which discourages healthy training patterns, but it can also take the joy out of exercise because we associate it with a triggering topic: our weight.
By building a more personal connection with your body through data, and focusing on wellness, we can build joyful, sustainable habits.
Veri shows you the right mix of cardio and strength training, as well as the right timing that works for your body and lifestyle. One of the first insights Veri members get about exercise is how to eat to support exercise and maintain healthy glucose levels rather than trying to force a calorie deficit.
The impact of sleep
We mentioned the impact of your glucose on sleep — and the impact of sleep on your glucose is just as eye-opening. An early insight that Veri members get is a meal can have a completely different effect on your glucose levels depending on whether you have slept well or poorly.
Understanding this relationship can help reinforce good sleep habits and also gives you the tools to make better in-the-moment decisions about what you should eat after a poor night’s sleep, so you don’t get knocked off track.
The role of stress
There is no denying the parallel increase of metabolic health issues and stress in our world. Research shows chronic stress is correlated with insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease [3, 4].
But it’s hard to really understand the impact of chronic stress because it seems like a problem of the future. What Veri members immediately notice is the profound effect that acute stress has on their glucose levels.
You might have a stressful meeting and see your glucose levels spike, even if you haven’t eaten anything. Or your go-to glucose-friendly lunch might send your levels skyrocketing during a stressful, busy day.
Being able to see how stress impacts your health in real-time is a powerful motivator for prioritizing stress management. It can also cue you into what you should eat on a stressful day to keep your levels in check.
6. Where you land on the spectrum of metabolic health
Metabolic health is a spectrum — not just “diabetic or non-diabetic." And we often don’t know where we fall on this spectrum until we’re at the extreme and unhealthy end of it.
Typically, the only tool we have is an HbA1C test, which does nothing to capture your glucose variability and can be less accurate for non-diabetics.
That’s why we co-developed Metabolic Healthspan with Veri’s advisors of researchers, endocrinologists, and cardiologists from universities like Stanford and Harvard and institutions such as the American Diabetes Association (ADA).
On day 7 of using Veri, you’ll see your Metabolic Healthspan for the first time, and it will update every 7 days you wear a sensor.
Your Metabolic Healthspan integrates 5 evidence-based metrics — average glucose, morning fasting glucose, glucose variability, glucose oscillation, and body mass index (BMI). You’ll be able to see detailed data on which metrics are in the optimal range and which aren’t, so you know exactly where to focus.
By learning where you are on the spectrum of metabolic health, you can make lasting, sustainable changes.
Key Takeaways
If you take away anything from this article, it’s this: your body is unique, and a CGM allows us to tap into it to see exactly how food, exercise, sleep, and stress impact your health in real-time.
The Veri app takes it to the next level by giving you personalized insights and guidance that a CGM alone cannot provide. The result? You’ll be empowered to improve your metabolic health — on your terms.
