#30 – Levels Member Story: How Charlette improved her quality of life & found what foods work best for her with Levels | Charlette Plinneke & Ben Grynol

According to our Member Charlette Plinneke, Levels helped her find a better quality of life, discover what foods work best for her, and use CGM data to support her food and lifestyle changes. As a teacher, Charlette hopes to pass on her knowledge to other people so they can live healthier lives, too. In this episode, Charlette shared the drastic changes she saw after using Levels, how she still eats some of the food she loves, and why Levels is a long-term fix.

17:29 – Food can change your body

When Charlette tried out a diet she created for a sick friend, she realized that food can actually help heal your body.

I went to work on making a diet that I was certain was going to heal her. After hours and hours of study and I tested recipes and I did the plan myself, and come to find out, it was basically Whole30. I had never heard of it, but I kind of reinvented the wheel. But in doing that, I healed myself. I had migraines, gone. I had a shoulder that they told me was ready for surgery. This is literally what they said after the MRI, “Just play tennis until you can’t play anymore and then we’ll fix it.” In tennis, they make all these gadgets. You can wear something on your arm for your elbow. You can wear a brace on your knee. All of a sudden, all of my joints started to heal. So these were huge. You would think as a science teacher, I could have connected the dots a little sooner, but that was the first time I really went, “Oh my gosh. There are foods that are changing my body.” So from that point forward, I changed a lot of things.

21:05 – Some foods aren’t as healthy as you think

Different foods spike different people’s bodies. Even “healthy” foods like root vegetables and oatmeal can cause an insulin spike.

Things that I thought were healthy, my morning green drink, I mean my green drink was mostly greens, heavy spiker. Everything was spiking me. Carrots, root vegetables were spiking me. So I began this journey of really kind of sorting out the foods and what kind of response I got. I literally had to take myself down to lots of different kinds of greens and sprouts and a really clean protein. That was what my body wanted and so I did that. I stayed there, and without realizing what was happening, put myself into ketosis. So I, again, didn’t know anything about ketones. It’s been such a learning trip for me. But I didn’t know what was happening, but I felt like I had the flu. So you Google it. You read, oh yeah, the keto flu, your body, toxins. So I got the general story. I’ve read so many books. My gosh, as I look to the right on my bookshelf, David Perlmutter, Sara Gottfried, Mark Hyman, Dr. Will Cole, Jeffrey Bland, Ben Bikman, I read everything I could get my hands on and started to understand what was happening.

29:52 – The self-cleaning oven analogy

Your body is like a self-cleaning oven, and when your cells aren’t working properly, they don’t self-clean as well.

The important story of Levels is it’s not just blood sugar. It weaves into so many different parts of your life in such a good way. I’m getting very proficient at helping people at the tennis club. Of course, all these ladies in tennis skirts and tight tank tops are going, “What happened to that belly roll?” They all have it. So they’re interested and struggling to find a way to tell them quickly in just a passing by kind of conversation. It’s like, “Well,” and I don’t even know where I heard this or read it, “but it’s like your body is like an oven and my self-cleaning button was broken. My cells were so crusty they couldn’t work properly.” Insulin couldn’t get in. Your mitochondria are just a mess. But anyway, this idea of your self-cleaning oven body, and the self-cleaning oven is broken. Your cells are crusty. They don’t work as well and they store the fat, every time I tell it, I can see people resonate. It’s like, “Oh.” Again, it’s taking a hard concept, putting it into really simple terms to kind of tweak their interest and then they all come back.

35:08 – Why Charlette became a teacher again

Because of Levels, Charlette became a student of her own body. Eventually, she realized she could take the knowledge she had learned and pass it on to others.

You learn a little bit and you realize how much more you have to learn. I’m so grateful for you guys and all the podcasts. A lot of these great functional medicine doctors getting on board. So I found support in places because I’m a learner. I have a science brain. I have a way of tuning into that, but I realize many people don’t. It’s equally as important for them to figure out how to do this. So then my real self started to get involved here. I’ve always had this innate pull to help people. It’s why I was a teacher. I think I was a great teacher. I think most people would tell you that because I really felt the pull to shape these little minds around these science concepts. But yeah, so I took it on as a student. I became a student of my own body and I really did have to separate out the fear and deal with that and realize my life is coming together full circle. I taught I learned how to understand and relate these concepts. I’ve always been a writer. Now, my writing is just hitting the mark for so many people. I mean, it took 64 years to get here, but I’m feeling like this message that really you guys have just brought it to the forefront and you’re bringing it to the forefront in a way that’s accessible. You’re not saying, “Put the button on. This is how it’ll go for you.” You’re you’re really just putting the data out there and your app is putting it out there in such a way that it’s understandable.

37:58 – You don’t have to give up good food

In the beginning, Charlette thought she would have to give up all the foods she loved. But she realized she just had to figure out a different way to eat them.

It was really scary in the beginning because I thought, “Wow, my life has been reduced to greens and clean protein.” That is just boring. Because I love to eat. I like to drink wine. I thought, “This is my life.” I was working with trying to accept that. Then I thought, “No, wait a minute. If I’m really uncrusting my cells and I have proof that I’m healing via all these test markers, I’m going out on a limb.” So I added in several fruits. I added back the root vegetables and I did them carefully because some seemingly very healthy food still spike me. I love sweet potatoes, but I have to eat it with the knowledge of what’s going to happen. Yet you learn, if you love that, well, you don’t need to eat the whole sweet potato, maybe a quarter. But all of a sudden, it’s like the world just got a little bit brighter because I had this revelation that you really can heal your body. For months, I thought, “That’s it. Greens.” I’m not much of a meat eater, but I live on the coast so whatever got caught that day is what I like to have. I thought, “Oh wine, gone.” But it’s not true. Then I learned from Levels. It’s like, “Wow, I bet I can drink wine. I’m going to have my protein first. I’m going to have a lot of leafy greens, stay away from the root vegetables this meal. I’m going to have two glasses of my favorite wine.” Voila.

40:30 – You aren’t locked in

Once you understand how your body responds to food, you can be creative and make different choices. But that doesn’t lock you in to one way of eating.

That’s part of this process too, since you have all this data, but you’re not locked into anything. I can have a day of a metabolic score in the 70s and still feel great. It’s not where I want to stay because I know long term, I don’t want to stay there. But boy, a week in the Maldives and staying in the 70s, totally good with that. So it’s this kind of give and take of learning your own body and the results are just incredible. When all of a sudden your energy level is up. Oh my gosh, what it did for my sleep is just phenomenal.

41:52 – Sometimes less is more

Charlette found that playing tennis twice a day was too much for her body. She had to find the optimal schedule for her body, which meant scaling back on intensive exercise.

I was playing tennis twice a day, my button said no. Loved once a day, I could play tennis once a day. My blood glucose was stable. If I played twice, it went up 30, 40 points and I couldn’t get it down. I thought, “Can that be possible because isn’t more exercise better?” It just didn’t make sense, which that’s the other thing, you guys are giving us such hard data and you have to come head to head with some of these really outdated beliefs you have around your health that you’ve learned growing up that you just… That for me was one of them. If a little exercise is good, a lot must be better. Yet my blood sugar is telling me something completely different. So I did the unthinkable. I started to, and it became a joke at the health club because it’s like, “Oh, are you done at 11? Do you want to play with us at 12:30? It’s like, “I can’t. I can only play once a day.” It would be this big laugh. I would just point to the button. But for me, that is absolutely true. That sort of high intensity exercise, my body likes it once, not twice.

48:09 – Why Levels is a long-term fix

People tend to phase in and out of diet plans. But with Levels, it’s not about weight or inches. It’s about living your best life.

Take any diet plan. People try it, they lose some weight, they lose interest. They gain all the weight back. But with Levels, you’re truly fixing things. The positive changes in your life with your sleep, with your mood, because your blood sugar, it sets off a cascade of all these other hormones, but you start to get the vitality back. It’s not about the weight. It’s not about the inches around your waist. It’s about truly your zest for life. I sit here in my adorable Project Beach House and tennis, and I’m going to go back to work. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m really am inspired by this. I have energy I’ve never had before. I’m going to make a stab at one last career. That’s the beauty of Levels is you guys are tip of the iceberg. As people start to see this data, start to implement changes based on what they see, it’s not just blood sugar they’re improving. It’s the quality of their lives going forward. That’s the hook. You just can’t deny that oh my gosh, I feel great feeling, which is how I felt when I made the video for you guys the first time. People really do become forever fans because you didn’t just tell me my blood sugar was in the tank. You gave me a way to improve my life. That’s the bigger story.

53:13 – When you feel good, you do good

Once your body gets to an optimal state of functioning, you have more energy to do the things you want to do.

Once you start to feel good, your brain is clear. Your body is able to do so many things in a day, all of a sudden you’re not dealing with, oh, I have a migraine, oh, I have a headache, oh, my knee hurts. All of a sudden you have space to say, What am I really supposed to be doing in the world? Where am I drawn? How can I help the most people by doing something that totally excites me?” That’s where I am right now. It’s like you get space back in your life, a very healthy mind, body space. To not get to philosophical, but you really need that in order to see your next step. Where are you going? What are you going to do? For me, it’s very profound at 64, a time that I really thought I was hanging up the work keys and picking up a tennis racket every day that I’m excited to do one more thing. It’s pretty incredible.

Charlette Plinneke (00:06):

This idea of your self-cleaning oven body, and the self-cleaning oven is broken. Your cells are crusty. They don’t work as well and they store the fat. Every time I tell it, I can see people resonate. It’s like, “Oh.” Again, it’s taking a hard concept, putting it into really simple terms to kind of tweak their interest, and then they all come back. They want to talk about it a little bit more, which is so funny, because this is exactly what I did for 20 years with 12 year olds, right? Introduce a concept, tweak their interest so that they come back wanting more. That’s the key to teaching science. That’s the key to having students want to learn science and get excited and now I’m doing the same thing.

Ben Grynol (00:58):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Charlette Plinneke spent the early days of her career in tech. Eventually, that led her to become a science educator. She spent more than 20 years doing that. Once she retired, she had this idea for Project Beach House. It was this idea where she would go live in a smaller place near the beach and she would take things every day that she loved doing like tennis, playing it on a regular basis. The idea was health, wellness and a lot of physical activity.

Well, Charlette, as a science educator, she had this lens on things like nutrition. She knew or thought she knew what was good for her body, what would be good for her own health. But it wasn’t until a doctor’s visit that set off a little bit of a flag for her. One day she visited her doctor and she continuously saw her glucose levels was going up and up. It was 110 and that was somewhat of the flag where she said, “Hey, I’m not super comfortable with what my doctor’s telling me. I’m not super comfortable that it’s okay or anecdotally okay that it’s going up,” and eventually she’ll be put on Metformin. That didn’t sit too well.

Serendipitously around the same time, she saw Kelly LeVeque talking about glucose, specifically CGMs and Levels. So she decided to explore it further. Well, next thing you know, a week later she had a CGM on her arm and she was actively engaged in using Levels. This was very much during our beta phase. She was an early beta member. Well, she kept with using a CGM, and over time, she started to stabilize all of these different levels, things like her fasting insulin, she was able to drop it down. Things like her fasting glucose, she was able to drop it down.

Her biomarkers got healthier. Her doctor saw what was happening and she saw these changes too. Physically, she felt better. Physically, she looked better. That led her to lose over eight inches on her waistline. It was something that at the age of 64, she didn’t even know was possible. But all of these things where she thought, “Hey, I’ve been healthy my whole life.” Well now, through biometric data through things like CGM and Levels, she was able to drastically change the way that she feels every day.

Now, she plays tennis five days a week. She feels great. It’s even inspiring her to think about what she wants to do next. She feels like she’s got one more swing at the bat as far as a career goes. Anyway, no need to wait. Here’s a conversation with Charlette. I truly appreciate you taking the time to do this.

Charlette Plinneke (04:04):

Well, thank you. It really is good to be here because I think the stories, if you follow the Instagram stories and you see the little clips and you see what people are doing, it’s very exciting, but it’s a much larger journey. I can see where you have to be a little bit brave to do this. It’s easy for me to see how people would want to take the button off because it’s a little scary to see inside and the journey gets tough. My journey was a super tough one. I think it’s helpful for people to know that’s there.

I’m literally expected to put the button on and see all good things. It was really a shock to me to realize there were some not good things happening inside. So it’s a lot of awareness. It’s a lot of acceptance. There’s some fear involved and it is a Journey with a capital J.

Ben Grynol (05:13):

Yeah. The interesting thing is that when you use that lens, like the heuristic of… I think we all will have some sense of confirmation bias. It’s like if you ask people like, “Are you great at something?” People might say yes. It’s like if we’re objective, it’s like, “Well, we’re all at the mean.” We should be. That’s why there’s a thing called the mean because we’re all sort of there.

But it’s really easy like, “Do you eat healthy or do you think you eat the right things?” If you ask a population of people that do focus on nutrition or health and wellness and they say yes, but maybe they haven’t had a look inside as far as having some biometric feedback to be like, “Here’s data that showed me exactly what was happening because of my lifestyle choices, because of my genetic makeup, because of my stage of life.” Keep going, there’s all these confounding variables, right?

But anecdotally, people might say like, “Yeah, I eat healthy.” But they don’t realize these little things that they do, these lifestyle habits of, let’s make one up that is, I eat healthy every day like a person’s eating a salad and they’re eating it with a salad dressing that might be filled with sugar, seed oils, just things that are objectively not great for you. You do that over time and they’re like, “Oh, I had no idea that was actually doing that for me.”

As you mentioned, when you start to see that data in front of you, it makes such a difference as far as you go, “Wow, I didn’t realize that,” and then you can start to adapt and that becomes a personal decision like, “Do I want to go to bed earlier because I now have data that shows me when I don’t, here are the implications of it.” Yeah. We should dive into all these different things about your journey with CGM and Levels, but more importantly, why don’t we take it all the way back to you’re a science educator, we know that. Give us some context for who is Charlette Plinneke and how did you get to where you are right now and then we will dive into CGM and all the great things.

Charlette Plinneke (07:21):

Well, I wasn’t always a science educator. I was always interested in science. So I came to California in the ’80s to watch the migration of the gray whales and immediately got caught up in the excitement of dotcom boom. So I relate to your feelings of being in the middle of a startup. I worked for Digital Research who was creator of the first operating system, CPM. So we started in garage and got very big very fast.

So I kind of got stuck there because it was exciting and there was all kinds of international travel and really liked it. But the pull of science was large. So after I had my kids, I stayed home with them. Then I really thought, “Do I want to go back to that?” The answer was, no. I want to be where they are. So I went back and got my teaching credential and got the science add-on which the state of California was so happy to have and started teaching and loved it.

It hit all the buttons for me because now I get to read science, learn more things in my free time and then spread the word to these middle schoolers. So that’s how I ended up as being a science teacher. It’s interesting because it’s come full circle because a part of me always thought I was meant to do more than teach science. Now, I realize my 20 plus years of taking really hard science concepts and distilling them down so that a middle schooler can not only understand it, but get excited about their body systems and how they work, has totally primed the pump for spreading the news about Levels.

Because you can talk to people about autophagy or mitopaghy and you’re going to lose them, sarcopenia, they don’t know what you’re saying and it’s intimidating and it’s confusing. Now, I’m using my writing. I’m using my skill to transfer these concepts into helping people understand their metabolic health, and in walks Levels. Yeah. Such a good story.

Ben Grynol (10:03):

Interesting. It’s it’s so cool because, I mean, you hit the nail in the head where I think in general, let’s be very colloquial about it, people have heard of this thing called metabolism in general. People sort of like, “I know that there’s this thing I should understand a little bit. It’s called my metabolism and it changes over time.” I think that’s like as colloquial as we can get. So everyone’s like, “Yeah, I kind of get that.”

But then you start talking about things like glucose that might be getting a little bit more foreign, and let’s take it to the extreme, autophagy, mitochondria. We start talking about all these things and all of a sudden people, they’re pushed back in their chairs and they’re like, “Whoa, we have to stop. I do not understand what’s going on.” So you need this feedback loop of saying like, “Hey, you ate Wonder Bread. Here is the data. This is what happened.” What that thing is, let’s just break down to two concepts.

It’s like you eat that Wonder Bread, that piece of Wonder Bread, and it gives you a glucose spike. Then the reason the spike is coming down, provided that everything is functioning well, it comes down because your pancreas has produced insulin and that is helping to offset or mitigate the glucose spike. It’s like even these simple concepts are harder to understand. So getting that, starting with these basic principles, as you said, it’s like, how do you make them accessible and meet people where they are? That’s the key of all of this.

Charlette Plinneke (11:29):

It’s the key. You have to meet people where they are and you have to meet them in a place that’s not intimidating, that’s not overwhelming, where they feel the possibility. You guys are really the tip of the iceberg. I mean, as you know, all these downstream effects of high blood sugar just lead to so many chronic illnesses later in life. So for people to get on board now is so, so important for their future.

Ben Grynol (12:08):

One of the things is that is so important is, which people know I think in general, is be physically active. The anecdote of we should all be physically active in some way, shape or form. But tennis has been such a big part of your life by the sounds of it. When you retired, you had part of a journey where you said you sold the big house and you moved to a smaller house. So that seems like it started this, sort of this starting point with Levels in the introduction. But why don’t we go into that of the way that you thought about what you were going to do with playing tennis and changing the way that you were living? Why don’t we go into that journey? Because it’s an interesting story.

Charlette Plinneke (12:50):

It is. It was called Project Beach House. It took me two solid years to execute on this big spreadsheet plan that I had made, because I needed to continue working in order to afford the beach house. I had to move out of the big house and rent something smaller and rent my house. There were so many moving pieces, but I was so drawn to the beach and teaching. I loved it. I think anybody you talk to will tell you I was a great teacher, but in the teaching profession, when you’re done, you need to be done. You can’t keep hanging on.

If you can’t walk in and give your best self every single day, you should get out. That’s where I was. I wanted to live at the beach. I love tennis. I’d never had a chance to play more than… I was always on a team. You practice once a week, but it’s like, “No, I want to play tennis. I want to get better.” I am an ocean lover. Project Beach House just became my focus and I did it and it was hard. We still laugh at dinner parties about what I did and how I did it because it was an ambitious plan. But here I am.

So yes, I did it. I moved to the beach. Absolutely love it. We call my house the nest because it is that comfortable and sweet and just a good feeling. I joined the tennis club. So I was playing tennis minimum of five days a week. Sometimes twice. I was just loving it. When you play that often, your game improves so much faster than playing once a week. So I was just loving life getting settled in.

Then of course I moved from the bay area to the Central Coast of California. I couldn’t keep driving back in forth four hours to see my doctors. So that is why I went in for the physical to establish myself as a new patient. But imagine this doctor, I’m walking in in a tennis skirt, right? Ponytail, all sweaty. I’m tall, five nine, never been overweight, always thin, in good shape. He said it more than once, “You’re the healthiest person I’ve seen all day.” But my blood work showed something completely different and ran all just the normal blood tests.

My blood glucose initially was 120. He said, “That’s got to be a mistake.” So he redid that test. It came back at 106 and he said, “Great.” But something just clicked because I’ve been watching my blood sugar rise steadily over the last five to eight years. It was 85, then it was 90, then it was 95. Now, I’m walking in and it’s 106. So there’s something happening here. He was not open to checking any further and because I was the healthiest person he’d seen all day and he said, “No worries. Just keep doing what you’re doing. In a few years, you’ll hit a blood glucose level that’s too high and we’ll put you on Metformin. Life doesn’t change for you. It’s great.”

He really believed that and it unsettled me. I walked out. I knew the trend was not a good one. I’d had some experience with healing my body before. I’ll try to make this story short, but my best friend in Bend, Oregon, which is now where Casey Means lives. Her daughter at the age of 19, 12 years ago was, in an ATV accident, paralyzed from the waist down. So about 10 years ago, she was having horrific digestion problems.

So I put on my science hat and I went to work on making a diet that I was certain was going to heal her. After hours and hours of study and I tested recipes and I did the plan myself, and come to find out, it was basically Whole30. I had never heard of it, but I kind of reinvented the wheel. But in doing that, I healed myself. I had migraines, gone. I had a shoulder that they told me was ready for surgery. This is literally what they said after the MRI, “Just play tennis until you can’t play anymore and then we’ll fix it.”

In tennis, they make all these gadgets. You can wear something on your arm for your elbow. You can wear a brace on your knee. All of a sudden, all of my joints started to heal. So these were huge. You would think as a science teacher, I could have connected the dots a little sooner, but that was the first time I really went, “Oh my gosh. There are foods that are changing my body.”

So from that point forward, I changed a lot of things. So walking into this doctor’s office and having him tell me, and he really said, “You’re 64. This is an age related disease. There’s nothing you can do.” Because I was trying to pick his brain like, anything that he would be aware of that I could do and he said, “No.” But of course, I walked out of there and put my science hat on, trying to think about what was happening, and just by chance, Kelly LeVeque’s Instagram that day, she put on her Levels, her button with her Levels patch.

I immediately went and checked out Levels. Saw several people that seemed to be fairly young and in good shape. I thought, “Hey, why not 64? Why not 64? If anybody needs to fix their blood glucose, it’s me.” You guys, I contacted you. Literally, I think I had the CGM on within a week. I mean, it was that quick. I didn’t expect perfection, but I didn’t expect an F, and my scores for a long time were in the 50s and it was eye opening. So I knew I had a journey ahead. I didn’t know exactly how hard it was going to be.

Turned out to be incredibly hard and a little bit scary at times as I started watching my numbers and realizing what food was doing to me. So for example, being the healthy eater that I was before I would go to play tennis, I always had a banana with a walnut in every bite. Sounds really healthy, right? I ate that. Went to play tennis and just scanned the button. My number had jumped to like 230. Incredible. With a banana and some walnuts.

So I started to notice these trends. The oatmeal story. Everybody knows the oatmeal story. That’s just a giant spiker and I was no exception. But things that I thought were healthy, my morning green drink, I mean my green drink was mostly greens, heavy spiker. Everything was spiking me. Carrots, root vegetables were spiking me. So I began this journey of really kind of sorting out the foods and what kind of response I got. I literally had to take myself down to lots of different kinds of greens and sprouts and a really clean protein. That was what my body wanted and so I did that. I stayed there, and without realizing what was happening, put myself into ketosis.

So I, again, didn’t know anything about ketones. It’s been such a learning trip for me. But I didn’t know what was happening, but I felt like I had the flu. So you Google it. You read, oh yeah, the keto flu, your body, toxins. So I got the general story. I’ve read so many books. My gosh, as I look to the right on my bookshelf, David Perlmutter, Sara Gottfried, Mark Hyman, Dr. Will Cole, Jeffrey Bland, Ben Bikman, I read everything I could get my hands on and started to understand what was happening.

But everybody said about a week. Well, on week four, I felt myself getting weaker. I felt like something was wrong with my muscles. So I went back to, this time, my endocrinologist and she had no idea. So then I went back to the doctor. They took my blood pressure, 90 over 50. They had me on the table. They did an EKG and immediately took me in to have big stress test for my heart. Scary. It’s like, “What is happening here?” The cardiologist, bless his heart. You have to run on the treadmill. He said, “Oh God, your heart is in great shape. Has anybody told you you need some salt?”

Nobody had ever mentioned electrolytes. Again, until I go back to these books, I swear everybody that’s on your board, I read their books. But so there was this journey, this learning about electrolytes, this learning of which one worked best for my body because they’re all different. Then I learned about ketones. My body probably hadn’t made a ketone in decades. That’s when things started to change. So what had happened is my body went through a detox like no other. I didn’t understand detox. So I’m all over all these functional medicine sites understanding that my liver is detoxing and all of a sudden I’m learning things I can do to help it along.

The cloud starts to lift. Then I was not looking to lose weight or inches, but thank you, Sara Gottfried and her book, I read about the waist to hip ratio. I had no waist. My waist of my hips were the same. I was thin, but there was no delineation. So my ratio was terrible. As I detoxed, my blood sugar numbers improved. All of a sudden, one inch, two inches, three inches, four inches. I had eight inches to lose around my waist. It’s no wonder my body releasing all those poisons from that visceral fat was really suffering. That’s a very scary part of this process and doing it without any help.

Doctors kind of throwing their hands up and ordering all these wild tests when really I just needed salt, when really I just needed to detox. So I’ve realized my story. I’m not sure if it’s because of my age and I’ve been insulin resistant for so long, or if this is a common story. But I know it’s a super important story for people that are going to improve their health, that need to jump over this fear of what’s happening to me because you think, “How can this be good?” But as my waistline started to shrink, I lost almost 20 pounds, which nobody would’ve thought that.

Interestingly enough, I just saw my sister and she said, “Wow, I thought you were going to look a lot thinner. You look exactly the same.” It’s like, “Yeah, I look exactly the same, but wow, is my body healthier.” So now it’s stabilized. Then you get to work on the real nitty gritty, what’s happening. My insulin when I started, I couldn’t get a doctor to test my fasting insulin, which is so crazy. So I found a lab before you guys had your wonderful lab test opportunities. I found a lab on my own. I paid for it. I was already in the healing side of this and my insulin, fasting insulin was still over 10. So insulin resistance to the hilt. I’m just a classic case. Today, my fasting insulin is 2.4. Beautiful.

Ben Grynol (27:15):

Good for you.

Charlette Plinneke (27:16):

Yeah, it’s great. All my inflammation markers that were high, no surprise with all of that kind of damaging white fat sitting right around the middle, that middle area where so many of us carry the extra fat is really dangerous. But yes, all my inflammation markers are down. What’s really interesting too is I don’t have a thyroid. So I had my thyroid removed in my thirties, which is another whole story. But I struggle with… I have to take Synthroid every day as synthetic thyroid hormone. But during this whole process, I dealt with this for a long time so I could tell my thyroid numbers were off.

So I called my endocrinologist. She sent in for a test. Levels undetectable. What? That’s what we call hyperthyroid. So hyperthyroid, it’s a little bit scary. I said to her, “I’ve detoxed my body. I fixed my blood sugar. I’m feeling so healthy. I think my cells are able to use the medicine I’m taking in a much more efficient manner.” She said, “Impossible. You must have thyroid cancer.” So here we go down the scary rabbit hole of testing for all these antibodies that would indicate thyroid cancer, which is really scary. Labs today don’t move quickly like the Levels lab.

Oh my gosh, you do it through you guys, and less than a week later, everything’s there on the app. But I had to sit through the endocrinologist ordering it and waiting weeks. The number of times she said, “That’s impossible,” is disturbing. She refused to believe that by, and she’s an endocrinologist, that by fixing your blood sugar, you might improve something like how your cells take up this thyroid medicine. But she’s come around because they’ve had to adjust it down twice. I’m on a third of what I used to take.

So this is the important story of Levels is it’s not just blood sugar. It weaves into so many different parts of your life in such a good way. I’m getting very proficient at helping people at the tennis club. Of course, all these ladies in tennis skirts and tight tank tops are going, “What happened to that belly roll?” They all have it. So they’re interested and struggling to find a way to tell them quickly in just a passing by kind of conversation. It’s like, “Well,” and I don’t even know where I heard this or read it, “but it’s like your body is like an oven and my self-cleaning button was broken. My cells were so crusty they couldn’t work properly.”

Insulin couldn’t get in. Your mitochondria are just a mess. But anyway, this idea of your self-cleaning oven body, and the self-cleaning oven is broken. Your cells are crusty. They don’t work as well and they store the fat, every time I tell it, I can see people resonate. It’s like, “Oh.” Again, it’s taking a hard concept, putting it into really simple terms to kind of tweak their interest and then they all come back.

They want to talk about it a little bit more, which is so funny, because this is exactly what I did for 20 years with 12 year olds, right? Introduce a concept, tweak their interest so that they come back wanting more. That’s the key to teaching science. That’s the key to having students want to learn science and get excited and now I’m doing the same thing.

Ben Grynol (31:51):

It’s an extension of your career and the path that you took for so many years to get to really full circle getting back to this point of making things really simple and making them accessible so that people can digest them, no pun intended, but digest them and really internalize it and say like, “What does this mean for me? How can I start to think about it?”

One of the questions that I’m curious about is this idea of the way that you felt both physically, physically we’ve talked about it a little bit, but going back to the journey of you put on a sensor, not really sure what to expect, and you see that, as you said, you were getting scores in the 50s, which anecdotally you’re calling the F, right? You go, “Wow. I had no idea.” But what did that feel like as far as was it encouraging that you could do something to change it or had to do something? Or was it a little bit deflating because of having the mental model of like, “I play tennis five days a week. I eat healthy”?

You think all of these things and you’re like, “I don’t know what to do anymore.” What did you feel like when you sort of saw that data for the first time? Was it one of those empowering things where you’re like, “I’m going to fix this”? Or was it a little bit deflating like, “What do I do? Where do I start?”

Charlette Plinneke (33:16):

Yeah, it was a little bit scary. It took me a while to realize my ego was all tied up in this. Project Beach House successful, I’m in shape, I’m playing tennis, living, I’m walking the beach every day. I realized I was too caught up in that image that is so unimportant. I had this data in front of me, which is the beauty of Levels. It’s not a I think this or I think that. It’s not someone subjectively telling you what might be good for you. It’s just good, hard data.

So once I got out of my own way, when I realized, “Great, you reveled in Project Beach House for a little while. Put it away. You’ve got work to do.” I think I’m so interested in the human body and how it works and the resiliency of what you can do with it, I never thought I can’t do this, even though I had that doctor’s voice in my head saying, “You’re 64.” Trust me, once you turn 60, that starts to mess with you. It’s like, “Hey, wait a minute. Maybe I am old.” You have to step back and say, “No, this is something I can deal with, something I can tackle.”

Project Beach House became project blood sugar. I took it on like that as a learning experience. I’m a voracious reader. It’s one of those things you learn a little bit and you realize how much more you have to learn. I’m so grateful for you guys and all the podcasts. A lot of these great functional medicine doctors getting on board. So I found support in places because I’m a learner. I have a science brain. I have a way of tuning into that, but I realize many people don’t. It’s equally as important for them to figure out how to do this.

So then my real self started to get involved here. I’ve always had this innate pull to help people. It’s why I was a teacher. I think I was a great teacher. I think most people would tell you that because I really felt the pull to shape these little minds around these science concepts. But yeah, so I took it on as a student. I became a student of my own body and I really did have to separate out the fear and deal with that and realize my life is coming together full circle.

I taught I learned how to understand and relate these concepts. I’ve always been a writer. Now, my writing is just hitting the mark for so many people. I mean, it took 64 years to get here, but I’m feeling like this message that really you guys have just brought it to the forefront and you’re bringing it to the forefront in a way that’s accessible. You’re not saying, “Put the button on. This is how it’ll go for you.” You’re you’re really just putting the data out there and your app is putting it out there in such a way that it’s understandable.

So you’re kind of doing the same thing I’m doing with my speaking and my writing. You’re doing it through your app and how you explain to people what’s happening in their body and how you help them be accountable. Trust me, if there’s a cinnamon roll in front of me, which I love them, I know exactly what’s going to happen if I eat that. it’s not a I wonder if anymore. You learn about your body. You learn about your body.

See, this I didn’t know either. So it was really scary in the beginning because I thought, “Wow, my life has been reduced to greens and clean protein.” That is just boring. Because I love to eat. I like to drink wine. I thought, “This is my life.” I was working with trying to accept that. Then I thought, “No, wait a minute. If I’m really uncrusting my cells and I have proof that I’m healing via all these test markers, I’m going out on a limb.” So I added in several fruits. I added back the root vegetables and I did them carefully because some seemingly very healthy food still spike me.

I love sweet potatoes, but I have to eat it with the knowledge of what’s going to happen. Yet you learn, if you love that, well, you don’t need to eat the whole sweet potato, maybe a quarter. But all of a sudden, it’s like the world just got a little bit brighter because I had this revelation that you really can heal your body. For months, I thought, “That’s it. Greens.” I’m not much of a meat eater, but I live on the coast so whatever got caught that day is what I like to have. I thought, “Oh wine, gone.” But it’s not true.

Then I learned from Levels. It’s like, “Wow, I bet I can drink wine. I’m going to have my protein first. I’m going to have a lot of leafy greens, stay away from the root vegetables this meal. I’m going to have two glasses of my favorite wine.” Voila. I mean, you start to have these success stories. Yeah, I watched my numbers go from the 50s. I celebrated the 60s. The first day I hit 60 was like, “Hallelujah, I got a D.” Then 70s, 80s, 90s, I could literally keep myself in the 90s if I’m super strict.

But my son just got married, the wedding. It was a destination week long wedding. You just realize a 70 is okay. That’s part of this process too, since you have all this data, but you’re not locked into anything. I can have a day of a metabolic score in the 70s and still feel great. It’s not where I want to stay because I know long term, I don’t want to stay there. But boy, a week in the Maldives and staying in the 70s, totally good with that.

So it’s this kind of give and take of learning your own body and the results are just incredible. When all of a sudden your energy level is up. Oh my gosh, what it did for my sleep is just phenomenal. For me, I always said I was not a flexible person. The reason I wasn’t flexible is because I had those eight inches around my waist, really hard to do a great twist with that many extra inches. So all these little gains that you get. Levels, sometimes you get lazy. I don’t want to log in my food. I don’t want to log in my exercise.

Although boy, what I learned about exercise too, I was playing tennis twice a day, my button said no. Loved once a day, I could play tennis once a day. My blood glucose was stable. If I played twice, it went up 30, 40 points and I couldn’t get it down. I thought, “Can that be possible because isn’t more exercise better?” It just didn’t make sense, which that’s the other thing, you guys are giving us such hard data and you have to come head to head with some of these really outdated beliefs you have around your health that you’ve learned growing up that you just… That for me was one of them.

If a little exercise is good, a lot must be better. Yet my blood sugar is telling me something completely different. So I did the unthinkable. I started to, and it became a joke at the health club because it’s like, “Oh, are you done at 11? Do you want to play with us at 12:30? It’s like, “I can’t. I can only play once a day.” It would be this big laugh. I would just point to the button. But for me, that is absolutely true. That sort of high intensity exercise, my body likes it once, not twice.

So I’m this big N-of-1 experiment. I just have notebooks full of what I’ve learned about myself, but that’s still true today. I can play tennis once, but if I play tennis twice, I’m going to pay for it blood sugar wise, because I think it starts to pull from my muscles, which is why it raises. I have lots of which that’s just who I am. I see the problem. I come up with all these hypotheses about why it might be happening. Then one by one, I start to test them. But for now that’s true.

Ben Grynol (44:04):

Very much the Sara Gottfried approach, the N-of-1 and constant experimentation to really understand like what is happening because we are so individual in everything. All of these, we’ll call them qualitative data points as far as data point being like I eat this thing, qualitative data point, I do this type of exercise, all these qualitative things come in and then you get some quant data back to say, “Here are the implications of doing that.”

But the important thing is which we constantly reinforce this point is you touched onit too, the not ever approaching things with the lens of deprivation, which is great to hear that you found that balance too. It’s more understanding the implications, right? Because deprivation… I think that’s one of the challenges with we’ll call it capital M marketing as far as media goes. The way that everyone is now a media company, wherein we’ve got 8 billion individual media companies on this earth and everybody has a megaphone and we can say whatever we want.

So you start to hear these anecdotes where people will, and I’m generalizing, but people will speak in absolutes, only do this, never do that. It gets very confusing because you hear information that is opposed where it’s like, let’s use something like strawberries, never touch a strawberry. Then other people are like, “Oh, they’re relatively fine to eat.” Right? You go, “Blueberries.” Right? You get polyphenols. Somebody says like, “Don’t ever eat these.” Somebody says, “Only eat these.”

I’m sitting here looking at data in the middle and you get lost in this noise. So figuring out what works for you, but more so eating whole foods, that is a starting point. More so understanding like, if you want to eat that cinnamon roll, eat it and just understand the implications. But don’t keep doing it as this daily thing, because that’s where we get down these paths of poor metabolic health or poor long term health because of consuming the wrong things.

Don’t sleep three hours a night consistently for 20 years. That’s just objectively unhealthy. But find what works for you. If you had one night where you slept three hours, we don’t have to beat ourselves up for it. Things happen. Your son gets married in the Maldives so you had a late night and it was fun. It’s life, right? It’s just the understanding what are my personal levers, what do we all have? What levers do we have and how do we push and pull them to have a balance life so that you can have Project Beach House and daily tennis and all the things and eating well, whether it’s fish and greens or whatever you choose to do.

But just understanding that, finding that balance and using data to reinforce like, “Hey, I’m on the right path and I can do check-ins when I want,” whether it’s through CGM or whether it’s through blood tests or different biomarkers. That’s the important way of getting people to understand these things. But the first thing is getting back to the women that you play tennis with, where they’re asking these basic questions like, “Wait, whatever you did, just prescribe me that thing.” You’re like, “Well, it’s not quite that simple, but I’ll help you on the journey.” Right?

So it’s incredible that you’re sharing that story with so many people because it’s helpful for anybody who makes changes based on it, anyone whom that story resonates with will go tell one other person and they’ll go tell one other person, right? So that’s the important thing of all the work, that everybody is very much part of this integrated community and spreading the mission and the education that we’re set out to do.

Charlette Plinneke (47:52):

Yeah. So exciting. You’re really not stuck listening to any one person or any one diet plan. It’s the N-of-1 and you guys are allowing that and the reason it’s going to be so successful. Take any diet plan. People try it, they lose some weight, they lose interest. They gain all the weight back. But with Levels, you’re truly fixing things. The positive changes in your life with your sleep, with your mood, because your blood sugar, it sets off a cascade of all these other hormones, but you start to get the vitality back.

It’s not about the weight. It’s not about the inches around your waist. It’s about truly your zest for life. I sit here in my adorable Project Beach House and tennis, and I’m going to go back to work. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m really am inspired by this. I have energy I’ve never had before. I’m going to make a stab at one last career. That’s the beauty of Levels is you guys are tip of the iceberg. As people start to see this data, start to implement changes based on what they see, it’s not just blood sugar they’re improving.

It’s the quality of their lives going forward. That’s the hook. You just can’t deny that oh my gosh, I feel great feeling, which is how I felt when I made the video for you guys the first time. People really do become forever fans because you didn’t just tell me my blood sugar was in the tank. You gave me a way to improve my life. That’s the bigger story.

Ben Grynol (50:10):

It’s so incredible to hear that though, because it’s, not to be cliche about it, but you hear age is just a number. What ends up happening is that when you wake up at 64 and you feel great in the morning because of knowing what time to stop eating, knowing what you ate the night before, knowing what you ate the day before, the day before that, and it keeps going on, but having this energy so that during the middle of the day, you’re not getting the typical head nod at the keyboard because you ate the wrong thing for lunch and it’s not understanding what that feeling is without going into hypoglycemia.

But the idea of feeling balanced, feeling great as far as balanced energy and just good. Objectively, you just feel better when inflammation’s lower. You can’t see that inside your body, but you feel better over time. So being 64, you can feel inherently better than a 27 year old who eats Doritos at 1 AM and Skittles and is drinking Coke and soda sugary drinks.

Charlette Plinneke (51:17):

Right.

Ben Grynol (51:17):

Doing all of these things night after night and getting poor sleep. Again, that’s very far off as far as very different, but what are the implications of doing that? It’s that you wake up in the morning and you don’t feel super great. Physically, you don’t feel great. Mentally, you start not feeling great either because physically you don’t feel great. You might be a little bit sluggish because you had a poor night of sleep. There are all these downstream implications to these lifestyle choices and habits.

So when you start to have more balance and more cohesion as far as all of the integrated lifestyle habits, whether they’re through nutrition or whether they’re through physical activity or sleep, all of these different things that come together to make up health and wellness, you can wake up at 64 and go, “I’ve got like at least one more in me. I’m going to swing the bat. Why not? This would be absurd not to do it.” Because you feel so good. But the motivation changes, all of these things change, and you’re like, “Wait a minute. This is what it was for so many years? This is what it took just to sort of feel good.”

The way that everyone can navigate the world differently, and I don’t mean to sound too philosophical about it, but the way that we can all navigate the world differently by feeling physically and mentally better, it really changes the trajectory for what we want to do or the way that we think about ourselves as being a being one of 8 billion on this planet and what we want to do with that as far as our autonomy to take charge and take things into our hands to say like, “I’m in control. I’m in control here and I can control these things.” So the way that you project that energy out into the world is very important.

Charlette Plinneke (53:04):

It’s very important. Really, Levels leads into so many things. But once you start to feel good, your brain is clear. Your body is able to do so many things in a day, all of a sudden you’re not dealing with, oh, I have a migraine, oh, I have a headache, oh, my knee hurts. All of a sudden you have space to say, What am I really supposed to be doing in the world? Where am I drawn? How can I help the most people by doing something that totally excites me?”

That’s where I am right now. It’s like you get space back in your life, a very healthy mind, body space. To not get to philosophical, but you really need that in order to see your next step. Where are you going? What are you going to do? For me, it’s very profound at 64, a time that I really thought I was hanging up the work keys and picking up a tennis racket every day that I’m excited to do one more thing. It’s pretty incredible.