Committing to a glucose monitor for one year (Natalie Vanderpump & Ben Grynol)

Levels community member Natalie Vanderpump started tracking her blood glucose when she found out through bloodwork that she was prediabetic. Now with the help of a CGM and Levels, she’s able to experiment to find her healthiest foods and lifestyle choices. In this episode, Level’s Head of Growth Ben Grynol talks to Natalie about her hacks for staying disciplined and the importance of being in tune with your body.

05:46 – Taking control of pre-diabetes

Natalie found out from a naturopath that she was prediabetic. That’s when she started her journey to change her eating and exercise and start tracking her blood glucose.

Her advice when I left was one, my body fat was like 42%. She’s like, you need to start lifting weights and stop doing all this cardio that you’re doing. And every time you eat, you’ve got to use protein, fat, and carbs together. So I was eating apples and bananas all the time. And then the other thing she said to me that was really key and difficult was to cut out all fruit except berries. And I thought, oh crap, how am I going to do that, because I’m from the Caribbean. There’s mangoes and bananas and all these things. So those that was my foray into, oh, crap. I’m pre-diabetic. And so I did all that she said, weight came off, numbers went down, and everything was looking really great. But every time I went in for a check, I never knew what my A1C was going to be. It would bump back up to 6.0, it would go down to 5.5. So it’s this little roller coaster thing.

09:35 – A fruit-heavy diet

Natalie is from Jamaica where she had a steady diet of fresh fruits every day. As she’s gotten older, that has presented more of a problem.

I will say when I think about it, it was more carb-heavy, but as a child you’re running around, so you’re kind of burning it off. I remember coming home from school, sitting on the back steps that lead to the garage and there was a pomegranate tree to the left of me. And I would just pick one and sit there and eat it and then I’d be running around. So I don’t know that my body had opportunity to really sit with all that glucose. And then our dinner was more protein-heavy. But looking back now, I remember older people talking about their sugar. They would say, oh, I have sugar. Meaning they had diabetes and I didn’t put those two things together. And then I think what happens in society there is that we eat these very carb-heavy provisions, things from the ground as children and we’re moving. And then as adults, we’re still eating them and not moving. And so there is a little bit, I don’t want to use the word epidemic, but there’s quite a bit of diabetes in the Caribbean, in Jamaica where I’m from.

12:19 – Correlate food to glucose readings

Natalie wasn’t able to figure out how specific foods were affecting her until she got the CGM. Now she’s able to experiment to see what works.

Let me take this out. Let me add this in, that kind of thing. I think my biggest thing was the first month. So when I went to a nutritionist, I’m like, here’s my smoothie. She goes, that’s really great. I had that smoothie and my CGM or my result was off the chart. And I’m like, how is that? Because I have coconut water in here. I’ll go to the Vietnamese store here locally and buy fresh coconuts. So I pop it in the morning, put in my smoothie. I had some protein, I had all the right things, but proportionally, it was completely off. And that was my first big, whoa, what’s going on? And so tweaking that, I was reading the blogs like crazy that you guys are writing and learning so much from that. And I never liked chia seeds really, because they’re kind of, is the right word glutenous? And I was just like, all right, I’m going to put those in there. And then voila, within like seven or eight days of experimenting and kind of figuring it out, I got my glucose response down to like nine versus I think it was a 30 something.

15:58 – A warning signal

CGMs can help you to see that something is off in your body before you notice other symptoms.

To your point of that line with sleep and stuff, I wasn’t well last week. And prior to not feeling really well, I kept going, why am I waking up at 95, 100 when I usually wake up around 80, between 80 and 85. And so the entire week had been like this little roller coaster and it was just up there, up there, up there. And in this moment that we’re talking today is the first day since the third that I have gotten up at like 83. And I feel my best today. I don’t know if I had COVID, I got tested. There was all this stuff going on last week, but I saw it signaling in my glucose and I wear a Whoop as well. And that was kind of off too. So those two things were signaling to me that something was going on in my body almost before I started to feel it. So it’s been very interesting.

19:10 – Be in tune with your body

Natalie tries to stay in tune with her body through mindfulness and being present.

In society today, we have so many things occupying our mind at the same time. So there’s this idea, and I catch myself sometimes like if I’m washing dishes or something, to just be intentional about washing the dishes and not be washing the dishes and listening to a podcast or watching something. And feeling the water on my hand and the temperature of the water and the soap and the impact, just being completely present. And I try to do that every once in a while with very mundane tasks just to practice the whole thing of being mindful throughout other activities. So it’s just sort of a five-minute practice to just remember what it’s like to be mindful and that will help translate into other things throughout the day. I have a thing for popcorn sometimes, but the interesting thing is when I see popcorn, I can then now stop and go, okay, what is about, did I not have a proper balanced meal earlier? Am I too hungry?

25:01 – Be disciplined

Natalie plans out her weekly meals and structures her days around her goal of being healthy.

Everything that I consume is on this one piece of paper. So I meal plan and then I go and I look at what I have, because I always try to eat down my fridge. I don’t want to have stuff in there. I look at what I have and then I go and I buy what I need in order to support that meal plan. So therefore in my home are things that are going to support what I’m going to eat for that time. But that is a tool which is supporting who I want to be as a person. And then I have a discipline about certain things, again, not perfect, but I am an early riser. And so I go to bed early. So I discipline myself to make sure I eat at least two to three hours before bed. So that’s in there as well. For the most part I’m really good with what I do. And then I allow myself to just do whatever I want once in a while, just because I’m human. But those are the things I build structure around myself. I create my life, my home, my activity around supporting my goal of being healthy.

28:54 – Trace the cause of loss of willpower

If Natalie gives in to the temptation to eat food that isn’t healthy for her, she’ll use the data from Levels to figure out what was going on.

If I give in, I would, later on for the most part would sit down and ask myself how and why did that happen? Because there are times where I can go in the store and I’m just going to use pizza as an example, not something I eat all the time, but I may walk by pizza and I have no desire or need for it. But another time I might walk by it and I might say, I’ll just go ahead and eat it. It’s going to screw everything up. My sleep’s going to be off blah, but I don’t care. I’m still going to go do it. And in that moment, the question becomes. You can have a series of questions like, well, why did that happen? What did you eat before? So I’ll go back to my CGM and I’ll go to my Levels app and I’ll see, okay, here’s what happened. And I didn’t have enough breakfast or whatever. Something was off in my body that caused me to want that. Or it may be emotional where I was upset about something and I didn’t deal with it.

32:50 -Put processes in place to guide you

If you want to establish good habits, put in processes that help you stick with them, like putting out your exercise clothes the night before.

So it would be, I’m going to exercise in the morning and you wake up in the morning, you might have your alarm, your clothes are right there. And then it’s two things, it’s preparing yourself the night before. I think you’re putting that in your mind before you go to bed, like these are the things you’re going to focus on. This is important to you. Then you wake up in the morning and then I think it gives you a bit more strength, push to just get through and do it. That’s how I got through, like with the exercising. Back in the day, when I was in college and my 20s, I used to run a lot but I didn’t have any discipline to it. And then later on in life, when I was like, wait a minute, I’m gaining weight. What do I do? I need to go out and do this or whatever. I literally put that process in place to just get me going.

39:50 – Set up micro-habits and cues

If you want to start a new habit, begin with small increments of it that you can easily do. It also helps to tie it to another action you take every day.

James Clear talks about that. Can you do it for a minute or two minutes? He has examples where, well, when you’re brewing coffee, can you do one pushup? And Dr. Hyman talked about that the other day in one of his, I think he was talking to BJ Fogg where he did one pushup while the hot water was coming up. Because he has to wait for the hot water before he takes the shower. And then it was two pushups and he says, now he is doing 50 pushups. That was his thing. And so now yesterday I said to myself, I said, okay, Natalie, you can sit and stretch and be present with your body for two minutes. But the thing is you have to cue it with when and where are you going to do that. So I decided yesterday that at the end of my workday, like when I shut down my work computer, I would sit and do that for two minutes, that’s it. There’s no reason like you said with the treadmill that you can’t do this for a minute.

45:55 – Notice your habit patterns

Levels is working on a feature where it will remind you of events that seems to happen regularly, like a more indulgent meal on Fridays, so that you can be more aware of your choices.

I have picked up a new habit towards the end of the year of going to my co-op grocery store on Fridays after work and they have a hot bar there and it’s got lots of different things on there and I just sort of allow myself to do, I mean, they have healthy things. I don’t want that. And I went there a couple or three Fridays in a row and I ate there and then I went, I got a bag of plantain chips because I told myself, well, I’m screwed anyway. So let me just do it. And what happens for me is, so my blood sugar goes up and then it crashes and I’m hot at night. I get like this, because it just down, it goes. And then I’m roller-coastering and then I have a conversation with myself the next day like, that really wasn’t worth it. Why did you do you that? So if the app were to prompt me, that would be pretty sweet. And I also want to add that there’s a layer of why am I doing that on Fridays?

Natalie Vanderpump (00:06):

I have a thing for popcorn sometimes, but the interesting thing is when I see popcorn, I can then now stop and go, okay, what is this about? Did I not have a proper balanced meal earlier? Am I too hungry? If I’m standing there looking at popcorn, I tap my CGM is 94. Like you’re not hungry. This is an emotional thing. This is something else. So deal with that and not get the popcorn to fix something. What’s really going on, and that’s one of the things I really love about the CGM, because it’s telling me if it’s food or emotion.

Speaker 2 (00:44):

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. Everyone has a different path into continuous glucose monitoring, that’s using a CGM. Well for Natalie Vanderpump, it was about a year ago that one of her friends exposed her to this idea of monitoring her blood sugar in real time. What were the benefits and why would she do it? Well for Natalie, she became more aware of the benefits of continuous glucose monitoring as she started to think about her A1C, her average glucose Levels. And so she committed to using a CGM for a year and she wanted to see what would happen.

Speaker 2 (01:39):

Over time, what she realizes that her A1C started to drop and things like her glucose levels started to stabilize. Natalie grew up in Jamaica and as she states it, she grew up eating foods that were delicious. She grew up eating foods like mango and pineapple things like plantains, sweet potato, things that were all part of her regular diet, but she realized were having an impact on the variability of her glucose. And so when she started to get insight about the way that certain foods affected her health, well, that’s where Levels came in and she started using it regularly. She’s been a very active member in the Levels community over the past year. And it was really interesting to learn more about her background, the way that she thinks about health and wellness and why she uses Levels as a product. And so here’s our conversation.

Speaker 2 (02:34):

You’ve got an interesting story. Your path into Levels was interesting in itself. And then the way that you kept experimenting, if you want to call it that. The way that you kept sort of trying to figure out your own health and wellness, it felt like this mechanism or this path and that as we had more and more of these community conversations and got to know each other over the past year, it’s been a nice platform or a nice starting point to say like, hey, these are the things that are changing my life. These are the reasons why I keep using this thing. And so you’ve got a very interesting lens on it. And we always talk about how cool it is that we’ve got members like you that have these stories. So start me with your path in, like how you discovered Levels and we’ll take it from there.

Natalie Vanderpump (03:21):

Sure. So the summer of COVID a dear friend of mine ended up in the emergency room, like around August of 2020. And when she got home, she gave me a call and said, I’ve just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. And I was in shock because it was not on her purview at all. And in that conversation, she mentioned that she was given a CGM and I had never heard of that before, which is continuous glucose monitor. And I had been pricking my finger and trying to figure out things for myself.

Natalie Vanderpump (03:57):

And I thought, oh, I want to get one of those because then going to tell me continuously how I’m doing it. I wouldn’t have to prick my finger anymore. And then I found out that I couldn’t get one, unless I had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and my doctor would’ve prescribed it for me. So I went searching around trying to figure out a way around that. And that’s how I discovered Levels. And then I just started reading all the blogs and put myself on the wait list. And it was just like crazy, so that’s how I ended up finding out about you guys.

Speaker 2 (04:26):

Like you were doing finger pricks before your friend, what was it that led you to that? The reason I ask is there’s a certain portion of the population that’s commonplace. They’re like of course that’s what I do, but that’s from such a minor subset, there’s so many more people that don’t do it. And so it’s interesting to hear when people are doing that early on, what was it that led you to the point that you started exploring that?

Natalie Vanderpump (04:52):

So in 2013 I was really struggling losing weight and I’d been going to the doctor and they said, well, you’re getting older, it’s your hormones. It’s this it’s that. And then I went to a naturopath who did some blood work and came back and told me that I was pre-diabetic, that my A1C was 6.0. And I sat there in absolute shock because I had a perception of what a person with diabetes would look like or what their lifestyle would be like. And that was not in line with who I was. And so I just sort of sat there frozen for a minute, like what? And she said to me that while you are a healthy eater, so I’ve always adhered to eating and preparing my own meals and eating natural foods and so forth. She said, there’s something about the combination of what you’re eating.

Natalie Vanderpump (05:46):

So her advice when I left was one, my body fat was like 42%. She’s like, you need to start lifting weights and stop doing all this cardio that you’re doing. And every time you eat, you’ve got to use protein, fat, and carbs together. So I was eating apples and bananas all the time. Right. And then the other thing she said to me that was really key and difficult was to cut out all fruit except berries. And I thought, oh crap, how am I going to do that, because I’m from the Caribbean, there’s mangoes and bananas and all these things. So those that was my foray into, oh, crap. I’m pre-diabetic. And so I did all that she said, weight came off, numbers went down, and everything was looking really great. But every time I went in for a check, I never knew what my A1C was going to be. It would bump back up to 6.0, it would go down to 5.5. So it’s this little roller coaster thing. And then in 2019, someone recommended Kelly’s book.

Speaker 2 (06:47):

Kelly LeVeque.

Natalie Vanderpump (06:48):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:49):

Great friend of Levels.

Natalie Vanderpump (06:50):

Yeah. And so I discovered her book, someone recommended it to me and she talked about finger pricking. I was like, oh, so let me do that. And so I had these elaborate spreadsheets trying to figure things out and wasn’t doing really well with it because is it an hour, is it two hours, that kind of thing. So I kind of got lost in that a little bit. So I would do it sometimes not do it, but that’s how I learned about finger pricking because I didn’t know anything about that for* either. And my goal there was to be able to go in and do my blood work and actually have a good number, like to consistently say where I am pre-diabetic. That’s always been my intention, so that’s how the finger pricking started. And then I learned about CGM in 2020. And so yeah. And it was my intention to do it for a month, then I said three months and then I said a year and now a year has passed and there are all these other things I want to experiment with. So I’m still here.

Speaker 2 (07:49):

Yeah. I mean, it’s so interesting because let’s rewind to growing up because we’ve talked about this loosely, I think probably synchronously once or twice, but through email, I think it’s come up this idea of what life was like growing up. So you grew up in Jamaica and what did food look like? I know when we’ve talked about it before you said it’s sort of this idea of fresh, like everything was fresh and plentiful. When you talk about mangoes and pineapples and bananas, all these things that are healthy when consumed the right way. Maybe that’s a way frame it, it’s like let’s be hyperbolic about it. What’s the wrong way to eat a pineapple? Well, for one person to sit down and eat that entire pineapple by itself is probably like not going to be very good for glucose stability. It’s inevitable that on its own, it’s going to get a spike. But what did that look like as far as what you were surrounded by the food that you grew up with?

Natalie Vanderpump (08:47):

So all our meals were prepared at home. So breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We’d have lunch at school, but even in that environment, our school lunches were things that were made at school. So there was never anything out of a box or a bag or a bottle per se. The thing I remember eating most out of a can or like a package thing was sardines. There was a thing like we had sardines all the time, but to answer your question, every meal, I think had plantains, which is sugar and avocado. We’d eat avocado with like every single meal, which I hadn’t really thought about until I kind of got into Levels and thinking about fat and proteins and things like that. But I think one of the things is that you get up in the morning and your breakfast consists of a protein, a fat and a carb just naturally.

Natalie Vanderpump (09:35):

Although I will say when I think about it, it was more carb heavy, but as a child you’re running around, so you’re kind of burning it off. I remember coming home from school, sitting on the back steps that lead to the garage and there was a pomegranate tree to the left of me. And I would just pick one and sit there and eat it and then I’d be running around. So I don’t know that my body had opportunity to really sit with all that glucose. And then our dinner was more protein heavy. But looking back now, I remember older people talking about their sugar, they would say, oh, I have sugar. Meaning they had diabetes and I didn’t put those two things together. And then I think what happens in society there is that we eat these very carb heavy provisions, things from the ground as children and we’re moving.

Natalie Vanderpump (10:24):

And then as adults, we’re still eating them and not moving. And so there is a little bit, I don’t want to use the word epidemic, but there’s quite a bit of diabetes in the Caribbean, in Jamaica where I’m from. And also because people are eating the same things that they grew up with and that’s emotional. Right. And I deal with that here too. So yeah. So growing up, it was just, everything was fresh. A lot of fish, a lot of seafood because we’re right on the island, lots of avocado, plantains. And I think I ate those every single day with some meal.

Speaker 2 (10:57):

And so then how did it change into adulthood or was it one of those things where it’s like your food, we’ll call it your food system, right? Your food somewhat gets set, we’ll call it like we’ll generalize you say. Your food somewhat gets set. And then that carries into adulthood. When was that point that it started to change? Was it when you started finger pricking that you’re like, whoa, sweet potato, plantain, this is doing something or was it insight that came later from doing it consistently through a CGM? What was that point, I guess that gave you the insight that you’re like, okay, this equals that, if that makes sense.

Natalie Vanderpump (11:34):

Oh, okay. Yeah. So the finger pricking I was doing for numbers, but I couldn’t do a correlation with a specific food until I got the CGM. Right. So perhaps what I do with the CGM, I could have done with finger pricking, but I wouldn’t have known what to do because I was just doing something. Even when I was finger pricking, I went to see a nutritionist and I took my food journal. I took all my finger prick stuff and she says, oh, you’re doing great. You eat healthy. Everything’s great. I was like, no, but something is still off because every time I come in from my A1C, it’s all over the place. Right. So I didn’t get that correlation, that knowing until I had the CGM until I’m like, okay, here’s my plate of food.

Natalie Vanderpump (12:19):

This is what’s on it. How’s my body going to respond. Okay, let me take this out. Let me add this in, that kind of thing. I think my biggest thing was the first month. So when I went to a nutritionist, I’m like, here’s my smoothie. She goes, that’s really great. I had that smoothie and my CGM or my result was like off the chart. And I’m like, how is that? because I have coconut water in here. I’ll go to the Vietnamese store here locally and buy fresh coconuts. So I pop it in the morning, put in my smoothie, I had some protein, I had all the right things, but proportionally, it was completely off. And that was my first big like, whoa, what’s going on? You know? And so tweaking that I was reading the blogs like crazy and that you guys are writing and learning so much from that. And I never liked chia seeds really, because they’re kind of, is the right word glutenosis something or?

Speaker 2 (13:12):

Yeah. That’s a good word.

Natalie Vanderpump (13:13):

And I was just like, all right, I’m going to put those in there. And then voila, within like seven or eight days of experimenting and kind of figuring it out, I got my glucose response down to like nine versus I think it was a 30 something. I can’t remember now it’s been a while, but that was my huge aha. And I’m like, okay, so it’s not that I’m eating bad food. It’s that I’m not having the right proportion and combinations. And so that was my beginning and what I’ve been experimenting with.

Speaker 2 (13:46):

Interesting. Yeah. I guess the insight, let’s use… You’re an engineer, so we use good old spreadsheets. Let’s make an assumption. This is the way Josh actually started this, he was doing finger pricks and he was inputting it into a spreadsheet. And you’re looking at these numbers and you look at numbers and when you look at them in isolation, it’s hard to start to draw patterns. But what you can see when you start to look at continuous data. So you’ve got all of these logs of data and you’re looking at it in a row and you’re going, okay. I start to see, let’s make an assumption, your sleep changes because it’s the holidays. And it’s the holidays and your patterns for sleep change your window. You’re sleeping less instead of sleeping more because you’re maybe going to bed later and still getting up at the same time.

Speaker 2 (14:38):

And then your stability might be the same or your variability. It might be the same, like your line, right. It’s looking pretty continuous. It’s looking pretty consistent. And you’re like, why? Like this is weird. Overall, my average glucose over the course of this week seems to be higher. Again, we’ll just generalize. It’s gone from being 90 to like 100 or just over 100. I’m not really sure because these lines look the same. They’re not sitting at the same in place on the graph.

Speaker 2 (15:13):

What could that be? It’s so much easier to start to get these insights and go, oh, lack of sleep or poor sleep patterns causes different metabolic function as far as the way that your body is actually going to use the glucose or it’s it not using it the same way because your cells are performing differently. Right? And so that’s where you get these insights of continuous data versus a number that is a point in time and you look at it and you’re like, oh six, like 6.0 versus five three, right. 5.3, just like number. And you’re like, cool.

Natalie Vanderpump (15:45):

It’s static.

Speaker 2 (15:46):

It’s so hard to figure out that insight. And so it’s interesting to hear that your point in time where you found the correlation between X and Y was related to continuous data.

Natalie Vanderpump (15:58):

Absolutely. And you can see if your body is responding in a half hour an hour. I know on the app we have this two hour window, but sometimes like if I just throw all the carrots out and decide to eat a bag of popcorn, after two hours it might give me a three, but that number just keeps going because my body is just like, well, I can’t handle this right now. But to your point of that line with sleep and stuff, I wasn’t well last week. And prior to not feeling really well, I kept going, why am I waking up at 95, 100 when I usually wake up around 80, between 80 and 85. And so the entire week had been like this little roller coaster and it was just up there, up there, up there.

Natalie Vanderpump (16:52):

And in this moment that we’re talking today is the first day since the third that I have gotten up at like 83. And I feel my best today. I don’t know if I had COVID, I got tested. There was all this stuff going on last week, but I saw it signaling in my glucose and I wear a whoop as well. And that was kind of off too. So those two things were sort of signaling to me that something was going on in my body almost before my eyes started to feel it. So it’s been very interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:25):

Yeah. And it carries forward. That’s the thing is what you said about popcorn as an example where it’s not just about… And again, everyone metabolizes things…

Natalie Vanderpump (17:35):

Differently.

Speaker 2 (17:35):

In completely different ways. It’s very hard to say we’re taking A and B and benchmarking it against each other perfectly. It’s always going to be somewhat different. But what you do find is that a person might get a super sharp spike and then they’ll come back down, right? That’s like metabolic flexibility. Or some people will get more of an oscillation. It depends on what they ate. It depends on how much cortisol is in their blood, it depends on how much they slept. Like there’s so many factors that…

Natalie Vanderpump (18:04):

Variables.

Speaker 2 (18:04):

You can’t say like here it is, here’s the reason why. But when you start to see things like let’s use the popcorn. You eat the popcorn later at night, assume you did get some oscillation. And that starts to carry on into the next day where you’re like, I’m not sure why my variability is. It’s not oscillating with extreme peaks and valleys, but there’s something that’s not as stable about it. And you might be sitting a little bit higher, because assume you haven’t done exercise that next day. There are all these implications that come downstream and you start to compound these things over time, right. Where it’s like the popcorn, the plantain keep going on in perpetuity, eating anything that is carb or sugar heavy. Right. Pomegranate, same thing. It’s like, great. It’s very good for you when you eat it properly not sitting down and eating an entire pomegranate at once. That’s what gets really difficult is like everything must be done with intent I guess. Everything must be thoughtful and done with intent. And it’s what makes it challenging for people to find consistent behavior change.

Natalie Vanderpump (19:10):

Yeah. I think especially in society today, we have so many things occupying our mind at the same time. So there’s this idea. And I catch myself sometimes like if I’m washing dishes or something, to just be intentional about washing the dishes and not be washing the dishes and listening to a podcast or watching something, and feeling the water on my hand and the temperature of the water and the soap and the impact just being completely present. And I try to do that every once in a while with very mundane tasks just to practice the whole thing of being mindful throughout other activities. You know? So it’s just sort of a five minute practice to just remember what it’s like to be mindful and that will help translate into other things throughout the day. You know? I have a thing for popcorn sometimes, but the interesting thing is when I see popcorn, I can then now stop and go, okay, what is about, did I not have a proper balanced meal earlier? Am I too hungry?

Speaker 2 (20:18):

So how have you created discipline around behavior change? Because that’s one of the hardest things, right? You can give a person a gas gauge on their car, but if a person chooses not to fill up their car, when it’s on empty or like you’re giving them the feedback loop, but it’s still, you have to be willing to go to the gas station and fill up your car. Same thing with a CGM. You give a person the tool, the platform, the insight, but there is point of behavior change that we all have to make individually. So how have you made behavior change knowing that it’s just like inherently hard, like for all of us, because we’re human beings. We’re so imperfect. We’re human beings, so what is it that you do?

Natalie Vanderpump (21:05):

So by no means I’m perfect. Right? So I’ll go in and grab a bag of popcorn or plantain chips, which is like home for me being so far away from home. Back in the day, I used to have a goal and then I would write out how I would get to that goal and I would execute. Right. And that’s part of inherently being an engineer and having goals and you’d be able to do that. What I have found, and I love James Clear Atomic Habits where he talks about who are you? Who is a person that you’re trying to be, start there. Right. So I might say that I want to be a person who is connected with myself physically and spiritually. Right. Okay. So right now for me, I’ll tell you in all vulnerability, I have a hell of a time stretching every day.

Natalie Vanderpump (21:55):

I absolutely hate it. I don’t like stretching. Right. So if I go back to, well, who am I, if I want to be connected with my body and my spirit, and then just maybe looking at stretching from that perspective of having that be part of my day, to just quiet my mind and be present with my body, even if it’s for two minutes or five minutes or whatever it may be. Right. So I’m working on that. But there’s some things I’m really good at like with food, because it is important to me to be healthy, to be present, to have a vital life to play with children, my grandchildren, that’s really important to me. And part of the stretching too, is to have the flexibility to run around with the children. So I think it’s finding and recognizing and loving whatever it is that you aspire to be for yourself. And then the tools and stuff are really to support what that is. So I don’t know if…

Speaker 2 (22:58):

What is it that you’ve done, are there hacks that you’ve found to create routine or to create that discipline because it’s so hard. Like it’s very hard if we all have habits that we want to make, whether it’s getting rid of a bad habit or creating a new habit, that’s a positive one. So a bad habit might be, somebody wants to stop eating a Snickers every day because they know inherently starting your morning with a Snickers is probably not beneficial to long term health. I think everybody would generally agree on that. And then the opposite end of the spectrum is like the positive behavior I want to run every day. I want to run three miles, five times a week. Right. And it’s great to say, I want to get rid of the bad habit. I want to start doing the good habit, but everyone has to find the way of hacking the routine. And there’s some great books like Habit by Charles Duhigg, oh sorry, Atomic Habits. There is, I think Habits by…

Natalie Vanderpump (23:59):

Yeah. BJ fogg has one Tiny Habits, which is also pretty good.

Speaker 2 (24:03):

And there’s so many books and tools, what is it that you’ve done that has helped you to create this? hack yourself, if you want to call it that, that’s what it is. How do you hack yourself? Like what is it that you’ve done that’s helped you create discipline?

Natalie Vanderpump (24:20):

I mean, if we want to talk about food, for example, part of it for me is planning. So first I have to decide that this is who I want to be. Yeah. And not perfect because I’ll have my days where I just go off the rail, but I have to decide, okay, this is where I want to be. So I’m very good at meal planning, so every week I’ll have a plan. I have a grocery list that’s pretty structured. I go to a co-op grocery store and I have, my list is set up by the way the store’s organized. Oh God. Did I just share that? It’s so yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:55):

I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only person with that maniacal behavior. It is definitely something that I do every week.

Natalie Vanderpump (25:01):

Yeah. So the list is set up that way. And then I have like Costco list or something at Costco or some things out order from Amazon. But everything that I consume is on this one piece of paper. So I meal plan and then I go and I look at what I have, because I always try to eat down my fridge. You know, I don’t want to have stuff in there. I look at what I have and then I go and I buy what I need in order to support that meal plan. So therefore in my home are things that are going to support what I’m going to eat for that time. Right.

Natalie Vanderpump (25:32):

But that is a tool which is supporting who I want to be as a person. Yeah. And then I have a discipline about certain things, again, not perfect, but I am an early riser. And so I go to bed early. So I discipline myself to make sure I eat at least two to three hours before bed. So that’s in there as well. For the most part I’m really good with what I do. And then I allow myself to just do whatever I want once in a while, just because I’m human. Yeah. But those are the things I build structure around myself. I create my life, my home, my activity around supporting my goal of being healthy.

Speaker 2 (26:14):

Are there things that you do when… We’re all going to have wiggle room, as you said where it’s like, sometimes it’s easy to say I and life should never be about deprivation where you are depriving yourself of some something when it’s done consciously if that makes sense. Right. Everyone has to do what’s right for them. And that’s something that we highly promote. The goal is to not deprive your life. It’s to understand the implications of certain things like certain lifestyle habits. What are the implications of those. In isolation, everyone is going to be relatively fine having rice or sushi once in a while, but you should probably not have sushi three times a day in perpetuity. Like that’s not going to be good for long term metabolic health. So it’s and those are like very, very extreme ends. But it’s somewhere in the middle of saying, what can you do?

Speaker 2 (27:08):

So what do you do when there’s the person on your shoulder that’s going, just do it, Natalie. Just do it. Right? Like, because that’s where like maintaining discipline versus allowing yourself wiggle room is really hard. And I think it’s something that everybody will have that person on their shoulder going, eh, don’t lace up the shoes today. You don’t really need to run. And then the other side of it’s going like lace up your shoes, you committed to running, lace up your shoes. It’s this dichotomy of these two thought processes that we all go through. Whether it’s exercise, whether sleep, whether it’s food, we all have these things. Hey, I’m going to sleep more and then you don’t go to bed earlier because you’re going like, no, keep doing this, like it’s not that bad. But over time, these are not good things to do. How do you deal with those? Like people on your shoulders, the angel and the devil on those sides that are going, don’t do it, Natalie, definitely do it. What’s your thought process for that?

Natalie Vanderpump (28:06):

I think sometimes I just give into it. I give in and sometimes I ask myself, what is my intention and what is my goal? So those are my two ways of being. And when I give into it that I would consider my wiggle room. I prefer my wiggle room to be intentional to where I’m saying, okay, today I’m going to eat a slice of pizza. You know what I mean? Rather than it being in the moment, I find that when I’m having to make a decision of a temptation in the moment, there’s something else behind that. And it’s not about the food. It’s something else behind that. Something else that’s unresolved or I didn’t get enough, something, something right. So…

Speaker 2 (28:53):

Interesting.

Natalie Vanderpump (28:54):

In a situation like that, I would. And if I give in, I would, later on for the most part would sit down and ask myself how and why did that happen? Right. Because there are times where I can go in the store and I’m just going to use pizza as an example, not something I eat at all the time, but I may walk by pizza and I have no desire or need for it. But another time I might walk by it and I might see, I like, I’ll just go ahead and eat it. It’s going to screw everything up. My sleep’s going to be off blah, but I don’t care. I’m still going to go do it. Right.

Natalie Vanderpump (29:23):

And in that moment, the question be comes. You can have a series of questions like, well, why did that happen? What did you eat before? So I’ll go back to my CGM and I’ll go to my Levels app and I’ll see, okay, here’s what happened. And I didn’t have enough breakfast or whatever. Right. Something was off in my body that caused me to want that. Yeah. Or it may be emotional where I was upset about something and I didn’t deal with it. And then that brings me back to this place of comforting myself, because I didn’t take care of myself emotionally or I didn’t do what was, I didn’t respond in a moment that was authentic to who I was. And so I’m now dealing with that and that comes out to your food. Does that make sense to explain that correctly?

Speaker 2 (30:08):

Yeah. How much do you rely on? There’s these two camps if you want to call it that. One camp is mindset and the other camp is tooling. So one is very conscious and one is unconscious. And so when you rely on tooling, like let’s use exercise every morning, you get up and there’s this thing, it’s an alert on your phone. And you’ve agreed with yourself. It’s just an agreement with yourself that when this notification pops up on your app, that is like, hey exercise this morning. And you’ve agreed. You’re like, this is, you’ve carved out that time. It’s like every day, that is your habit.

Speaker 2 (30:46):

And so you rely on that tooling where it becomes unconscious. You no longer have to think about it. But the other side of it is having the mindset to stick with certain habits saying, I am committing myself to doing a certain thing, eating healthy. Like you sleeping, it’s a mindset of like sticking with a thing without tooling. How much do you personally use either or maybe it’s a blend of both. Like, do you find tooling to be a thing that helps to invoke your own behavior change in habits or do you find it’s more mindset in the way that you think about yourself back to James clear, like the life you want to live?

Natalie Vanderpump (31:27):

I think it’s a combination of both. So let’s take the exercise thing for example, if I have something I’m really working on and one of the things I’ll do at night is before I go to bed is I’ll think about my day. So I have this thing I learned from Benjamin Hardy. If you ever heard of him…

Speaker 2 (31:42):

No.

Natalie Vanderpump (31:43):

Is this thing where it’s like, what are several people talk about, their ideas and many people talk about them. And then you hear it from the right person at the right time. But he has this thing about what are the three most important things you’re going to do tomorrow and kind of decide what… You may have 20 things to do tomorrow. But if you get these three things done, then you would feel better. Right? So it’s like eating the frog he calls it, like getting that thing done first in the morning.

Natalie Vanderpump (32:08):

So at night I tend to, I do take time whether I sit and do it or right before I close my eyes, like what is happening tomorrow? What is important to me for tomorrow? And so if you take exercise for example, when that was a thing that I was really focused on, I would have all my clothes out the night before. Right. So when I get up, I’ve now set up. Maybe that’s a tool it’s setting up right. Where I get up, the clothes are right there. So now you have to make a decision. Like, wait a minute, I made a commitment. Am I really going to not do that right now? The clothes are right here. Why not? You have a conversation with yourself if you’re struggling. Right. And so the idea is like the night before you have your intention for the day.

Natalie Vanderpump (32:50):

So it would be, I’m going to exercise in the morning and you wake up in the morning, you might have your alarm, your clothes are right there. And then it’s two things, it’s preparing yourself the night before. I think you’re putting that in your mind before you go to bed, like these are the things you’re going to focus on. This is important to you. Then you wake up in the morning and then I think it gives you a bit more strength, push to just get through and do it. That’s how I got through, like with the exercising. Back in the day, when I was in college and my 20s, I used to run a lot but I didn’t have any discipline to it. And then later on in life, when I was like, well, wait a minute, I’m gaining weight. What do I do?

Natalie Vanderpump (33:29):

I need to go out and do this or whatever. I literally put that process in place to just get me going, you know or you have a class or you have commitment or you have people that you’re going to meet that you’re not, because a lot of times we will disappoint ourselves before we disappoint someone else. So it’s like putting that in place. So in terms of exercise, that’s how I would respond to that. And that’s what I’ve done in the past. And so with food for me, it’s that planning and here’s what tomorrow looks like. Where’s my wiggle room. What am I doing? What does the day look like and plan out. I’m a really good planning execution person. So that’s just kind of built inside of me. Yeah. So it’s having a tool, but it’s very, I think emotional, I genuinely believe it’s about having an awareness of who we are and being in integrity with who that is. Does that make sense? So yeah,

Speaker 2 (34:22):

That’s what Charles Duhigg brings up in the power of habit where it’s the idea of you’re creating your own personal algorithm. So in order to create a habit or the muscle memory behind it, right? Because you are relying on your own tooling, your own like internal tooling, your mindset. So creating this idea of the cue, the routine, the reward, like the habit loop is you lay your clothes out. You’re hacking yourself. Essentially you’re saying it’s very likely because I’m a human being. It’s very likely that I’m going to forget to exercise in the morning or I’ll think about it, but it’s easy to push off because I haven’t given myself a cue. But when your cue is staring you in the face and you’re trying to create that positive behavior change, it becomes a lot harder to ignore it. You have to consciously decide to stare at those clothes…

Natalie Vanderpump (35:14):

Yes,, exactly.

Speaker 2 (35:15):

And be like, I’m not lacing up my running shoes, but you’ve committed to yourself. Like I want to do this thing. So you give yourself the cue, it easier to follow through with the routine and the reward becomes building this habit, right? Because you start and the reward is the positive outcomes of doing things like when it’s good habits, right? The positive outcomes are, you get healthier by exercising more. That’s inevitable. You get healthier by eating consciously and eating the right things. Same with thing with sleep, right? If you give yourself the cue to put your phone in the drawer at 9:00 PM and you start to create a routine around that, the reward becomes getting more sleep because you go to sleep earlier. Like that’s how you’re trying to build habit. Everyone’s going to have their own system. But that’s why I ask is like sometimes it’s tooling where it might actually be an alarm goes off on your phone at 9:00 PM. And that’s your cue to like put it in your drawer.

Natalie Vanderpump (36:10):

Right? And so the same, if we go back to the exercise thing, as I’m talking here, I didn’t realize I still do that at night before. If I’m going to the gym in the morning or whatever I do put out my stuff, that’s just a habit right now. I don’t exercise every single morning, but 5:00 AM is my sweet spot of when I’m doing my exercise or I’m either at the gym or I’m working out at home. But if I know that, that’s what I’m doing the next day that I put my clothes out. I always cue myself that way for the morning. But where I was going with this is that when you do it, then the next time that you are deciding, do I want to do this or not? Part of it is remembering the feeling you had when you did it. Because that also propels you into making the right decision to go ahead and do it.

Speaker 2 (36:59):

Yeah. Have you thought about micro habits? The reason I ask is I think that intent is there. So when people make a commitment to themselves and say, I want to eat healthier, it’s a generalization. I want to eat healthier. I want to sleep more. But it’s not a good commitment with yourself because you’re not giving yourself a concrete way of going about it. And so maybe an easier thing is for one week, like you give yourself a timeline one week or one month, you have to start somewhere. And I think that’s where sometimes it’s easy to like veer off the road and start going into this direction. When you say, I want to eat healthy, I want to like do this.

Natalie Vanderpump (37:36):

Right. It’s starting with a thing. Right. So if you like the snickers bar, for example, right. Maybe if you have one every morning, maybe it’s I won’t have it on Monday.

Speaker 2 (37:48):

Exactly.

Natalie Vanderpump (37:49):

Right. You start not somewhere.

Speaker 2 (37:50):

I’m going to bed every Tuesday for this month. I’m going to go to bed at 9:30 PM and I’m committing to that. And then you set the alarm for like every Tuesday, there’s the touring. So the habit becomes a micro habit and say, you can do the same thing with exercise. I’m going to exercise every Wednesday. Like the periods of time that you’re trying to carve out, have to be small enough that they’re achievable. I’m going to like one that this is totally absurd, totally absurd.

Speaker 2 (38:17):

But this is something that I’m doing because I have a really hard time with exercise. Very hard time. Not because I don’t enjoy exercise. I’m willing to waiver on my commitment with myself to exercise every day, because it’s easier to get consumed by doing other things if that makes sense. And it’s not out of being lazy. It’s out of saying I’m consciously making the trade off to air quotes, answer email, which is totally absurd. This is my problem with myself. So I made a commitment to run every single day for one minute on the treadmill. And if I can’t run for one minute, then I am letting myself down. Because there’s no reason why you can’t run one minute.

Natalie Vanderpump (38:55):

Can’t do it for one minute.

Speaker 2 (38:55):

And it sits around the corner for my office. So there’s literally no reason, like the hack was okay, you don’t need to lay out gym clothes. You don’t like, you could. But it’s like, you’re not going to break a sweat running for one minute. Right. So it was like these things where, because then I’m like, okay, I’m just going to do. Once I’m on it then it’s like, oh I’ll knock out five miles or I’ll knock out… but in miles. The mileage doesn’t matter. It’s the fact that it’s like, I can just walk by it and be like, there’s that thing. It’s a lot easier to do it. And so breaking, that’s why I ask is like, everyone’s going to have these things. So I was like, oh this is what you have to do to build this muscle memory to get back to it. It’s a lot. Yeah. It’s very easy to waiver. And so I’m like, you don’t waiver. That’s not what you do. You commit. And so commit in small, small increments.

Natalie Vanderpump (39:50):

Right. I’m so happy you shared that because one of the things working on again, is a stretching thing. Right. And I literally just yesterday said, and this is one of the things that James Clear in Atomic Habit. So there’s several people, again, we talk about habits. James Clear talks about that. Like, can you do it for a minute or two minutes? He has examples where, well, when you’re brewing coffee, can you do one pushup? And Dr. Hyman talked about that the other day in one of his, I think he was talking to BJ Fogg where he did one pushup while the hot water was coming up. Because he has to wait for the hot water before he takes the shower. And then it was two pushups and he says, now he is doing 50 pushups. Right. That was his thing.

Natalie Vanderpump (40:36):

And so now yesterday I said to myself, I said, okay, Natalie, you can sit and stretch and be present with your body for two minutes. But the thing is you have to cue it with when and where are you going to do that. So I decided yesterday that at the end of my work day, like when I shut down my work computer, I would sit and do that for two minutes, that’s it. There’s no reason like you said with the treadmill that you can’t do this for a minute, it’s that crazy?

Natalie Vanderpump (41:06):

Like why would I not do that for a minute in your case? Right. And I said, okay, I’m going to do for two minutes. But I’m also cuing that when I shut down my computer at the end of the day, my work computer, that I would do that one thing before I do anything else. So that’s what I’m trying right now. So I think it’s adding in when and how long and that kind of stuff for me is what I’m going to do to make that work. Yeah. Those little cues really help you, it’s just like little things. If you come home and you have a habit of putting your key, like you put a little key…

Speaker 2 (41:42):

Key holder.

Natalie Vanderpump (41:42):

Yeah. A key holder.

Speaker 2 (41:45):

Whatever that thing is called. I can’t think that.

Natalie Vanderpump (41:50):

Yeah. You have like a little hook there and you always put your key there. Then you always know where your key is. So you’re never looking for your key. So you’re cued for that. Right. And it becomes autopilot. And so it’s just putting things in your life that are autopilot. And there, I know that there’s some things I cannot bring into my home because they’re triggers for me like popcorn or chips or things like that. Those are triggers for me that I just won’t bring it to my home. So it’s creating a space within your life that’s going to support what you want.

Natalie Vanderpump (42:22):

And then if I want popcorn, I have to leave the house to go get it kind of thing. But I’ll tell you one of the things that happened when I first started using my Levels, I was like, all right, that’s cool. So these carbs are going to do this, I’m learning all this stuff. And then I realized, oh, I could just keep eating nuts. And it wouldn’t affect my line so much, but that’s a boatload of calories. So that was a learning for me as well. You know I was adjusting on creating new habits and using my CGM as a tool to support that.

Speaker 2 (42:51):

Yeah. It’s where things are headed. Where it’s really interesting is from a data science standpoint, from a product platform standpoint, once we can get deep enough, I mean the data there, we have to build against it. Once we can start to create very personalized insights where you get a cue, like this is back to where tooling can be beneficial. You get a cue that goes and it’s so granular that’s like, hey… Let’s just use as an example. Hey Natalie, it looks like on average, on Fridays around 5:00 PM, you tend to eat plantain. So then on the Thursday, you get a queue or maybe it’s the week before when you’re doing your shopping. Right. You’re doing your shopping. Heads up to just remember if you’re going to shop for the week, if you’re going to shop on Wednesday or Tuesday, you’re going to shop for Friday, like heads up.

Speaker 2 (43:42):

Like you tend to have this thing where you like to eat plantain on Fridays. We’re not saying don’t eat the plantain, but like heads up that it…

Natalie Vanderpump (43:49):

Be aware.

Speaker 2 (43:50):

It’s a habit that you tend to do. I mean, personally, if you look at my data, it’s like, you can always see, breakfast quite stable, lunch stable, dinner is where I will have spikes. Because dinner it depends on what I eat. But the further along you get in the week, like you hit Friday. And if Pam says, hey, let’s crush pizza. If we make it at home and we make it with like flat breads that have very low net carbs, right. They’re like on flat breads, fine. If we get, even if it’s like wood fire pizza, that’s not full of crap. Like it’s made super fresh.

Speaker 2 (44:28):

It’s like, I’ll still get spikes. Right. And then you start to have, let’s say I have wine with it. And it maybe blends the spike and it looks fine at the time. But then like on Saturday I’m oscillating a little more and you’re like, huh, I wonder if tooling would help there where it’s like, hey, heads up, you can have the pizza or whatever you’re going to have. Like, you should have the pizza, have it but just like heads up you tend to have this habit you might make…

Natalie Vanderpump (44:54):

On Friday.

Speaker 2 (44:55):

Yeah. And then giving you an alternative choice, just saying, if you want to have the pizza, remember when you make it at home, this is the product talking to you. So personally you do pretty well when you do it with a flatbread, that might be an option or do cauliflower crust instead. There are all of these things that you can do to create your own behavior change, where it’s like you hack yourself. That’s where things will be really neat is when we can start to help people make conscious decisions because they’re aware of their own habits.

Speaker 2 (45:25):

And you only become aware when you start to see, like I didn’t realize that Fridays were when I tended to have spikes most like Friday at dinnertime, not because I think it’s a free for all. It’s just like that we might eat differently. And you know those foods are going to give you spike. But when I look at the data all aggregated together and I’m staring at it, it’s like, you’re a goofball. What are you doing, you know better. But it’s also like live your life. Do things, so lots of cool things to do with.

Natalie Vanderpump (45:55):

I love that example because I would benefit from that because I have picked up a new habit towards the end of the year of going to my co-op grocery store on Fridays after work and they have a hot bar there and it’s got lots of different things on there and I just sort of allow myself to do, I mean, they have healthy things. Like I don’t want that. And I went there a couple of three Fridays in a row and I ate there and then I went, I got a bag of plantain chips because I told myself, well, I’m screwed anyway. So let me just do it. And what happens for me is, so my blood sugar goes up and then it crashes and I’m hot at night. I get like this, because it just down, it goes. And then I’m roller coastering and then I have a conversation with myself the next day like, that really wasn’t worth it.

Natalie Vanderpump (46:53):

Why did you do you that? So if the app were to prompt me, that would be pretty sweet. And I also want to add that there’s a layer of why am I doing that on Fridays? Is it because it’s end of the week, it was just getting back to the why really helps us to… And that’s harder, right? It’s like what is it like the why getting underneath that really helps to influence our behavior as well. So we can have cues and so forth that I think will help. But I think long term, figuring out the why, and then maybe coming up with a better way to do whatever it is I was doing on Fridays.

Natalie Vanderpump (47:31):

And then we had the holidays, I didn’t do that, but yeah, that’s a habit I started and I’m like, what are you doing? What is this Friday night thing? So that would be pretty cool if the app was kind of, because you see my patterns, you see everything, you know that I’m doing right now, so that would be pretty sweet. I’ll sign up for that.

Speaker 2 (47:56):

We’ll strive to work towards that. We’ll strive to work towards it faster and faster. No, I appreciate you jumping in to do this and making time early in the morning too.

Natalie Vanderpump (48:16):

Yeah. I’m a morning person. I wake up at 3:45 AM every day. So I’ve done like a host of things already.

Speaker 2 (48:26):

When we first connected, I remember you said that you get up early. I didn’t remember it was that early, but given that it is that early, you’re quite welcome to come and get up with the kids at that hour at time you want. I prefer not to get up at 3:45 AM, but…

Natalie Vanderpump (48:45):

It’s become a habit now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:46):

You and Jocko Willink those are like the two people that are getting up at 3:45 AM or 4:00 in the morning.