EP 64: A Lifestyle Device Enabling Data-Driven Health

Josh Clemente, co-founder of metabolic fitness company Levels, used his experience developing life support systems for SpaceX astronauts to create technology that can optimize individual health and combat global metabolic dysfunction. Josh was interviewed by James Hilliard on the Founders & Funders podcast from Alumni Ventures to discuss the origins of Levels, what metabolic fitness means, and how data can drive change and prevent disease.

• Check out Levels
• Follow Levels on LinkedIn or Twitter
• Connect with Josh Clemente on LinkedIn or Twitter
• Check out the Founders & Funders Podcast
• Connect with Alumni Ventures on LinkedIn or Twitter

02:21 – The astronaut model for healthy living

While developing the life support programme at SpaceX, Josh studied how astronauts can train to be at peak physical and mental fitness by taking a holistic approach combining diet, exercise, mindfulness, and other interventions like fasting.

“It’s kind of the ladder where we are learning more and more, and NASA is certainly doing a lot to better understand specifically what health is and how to maintain it. Especially when you’re talking about long duration missions that are far from earth, where you don’t have access to emergency medical services or even primary care. And so they are taking seriously this health equation. Certainly the Astronaut Corps is physically fit, they’re mentally fit. They spend a ton of time exercising and maintaining really high quality lifestyles. I was first exposed to a lot of the holistic side of health, you know, going beyond physical fitness, going beyond the gym, when I was reading the research that is being done by NASA with people like Dominic D’Agostino from the University of South Florida. And the way that they’re thinking about diet and mindfulness and fasting and all of these other elements of what health is and the ways that they can introduce them to these long duration astronaut missions.”

03:31 – You can’t measure health on the scales

Optimal health is about more than weight loss. Josh was going to the gym twice a day but eating mindlessly and getting little sleep. His high stress lifestyle soon led to physical and mental fatigue.

“I was just kind of consuming whatever I wanted absentmindedly because I knew that I was going to go work out twice a day. And you know, as long as I wasn’t gaining weight, I was healthy, right? That was the measurement stick I was using and that kind of caught up to me after a few years in the super stressful environment of SpaceX, where you need to be on your game mentally and physically. You know, these are many cases we were working straight through long weekends without sleep. And so any additional burden on your system is amplified in those environments. And especially obviously given the context of what we were working on. And several years into my time at SpaceX, I got to the point where I was burning out physically and mentally, I was going through kind of these waves of energy crashes and mood crashes multiple times per day. You know, I was on kind of a life support drip of coffee, and it went well beyond the calming ritual that we all have in the morning to the point where like, if there was not a pot of coffee available at all times, I was in trouble and I may not make it to the next meeting.”

05:00 – The life-saving diet?

Researchers at the University of South Florida found that a ketogenic diet could increase survival in a high pressure oxygen environment, at least for rodents.

“I’ll give an example of a study that he was working on. It was showing that rodents can survive five times longer in a high pressure oxygen environment if they were on a ketogenic diet. And the reason that was interesting to me is because I was working on the oxygen systems at SpaceX, and to see that this research demonstrated that just a dietary change was giving superpowers to these rodents and extrapolating that to humans and to myself and thinking, how is it possible that a diet can literally preserve life in a threatening scenario, just diet?”

05:46 – Sugar is like a lightning charger

The body converts food into energy through a process called metabolism. Although energy can come from carbohydrate, fat, or protein, the main source of energy used by the human body is sugar from carbohydrates, which is used to fuel cells throughout the whole body.

“So I started to just do some superficial research on what is energy and in the human body energy is produced in the cells from our food and environment and those processes, all of those energy producing processes are called metabolism. And so what I started to do is dig into the research on metabolism and try to understand better where my energy is coming from and how to improve it and what that led me to is glucose. So there are three primary molecules that we can use to produce energy, and those are fat, carbohydrates, and protein. Carbohydrates break down into sugar in the blood and so that’s why we talk about blood glucose and the primary molecule that we use in the modern world is glucose. So our brains need it to survive, our muscles run on it for exercise. It’s used in every tissue throughout the body.”

08:40 – Information is powerful

With information coming directly from the body, people can be empowered to take their health into their own hands. Informed people make better choices, reducing risk of disorders like diabetes.

“I’m a person who strongly believes data is crucial to any decision-making process. And it was confusing to me in this pursuit of information about my body, I was being told I could not have access to that data. And I wasn’t asking for someone else’s blood sugar information, I was just asking for my own. And it seemed bizarre to me that I would have to wait for a diagnosis of illness in order to get access to the data that describes the illness and the onset of the illness. Why would I not want to know that decades in advance of that? Especially when the CDC says that chronic illnesses like type two diabetes are entirely preventable. I think I have some understanding of the environment, the regulatory environment that physicians are operating under, and I do understand they have the intent of doing what’s best for the patient. And in many cases, they want to avoid unnecessary expenditures and reduce costs on the system, so on and so forth. And that’s why I truly believe in the direct relationship, the direct to consumer product approach, where an individual says I want this information and I’m willing to pay for it, I don’t require a reimbursal from insurance. And in that scenario, I truly believe that the best way to improve our medical system and improve frankly the social metabolic epidemic we’re facing where 88% of American adults are metabolically unhealthy. The way to improve this is to enhance the accessibility, to make this a product that people don’t wait until after diagnosis for, they’re using it every day to optimize little decisions that they’re going to make anyway and they’re just going to make them now in the context of their own data.”

11:01 – Metabolic fitness is the foundation of mental and physical fitness

Metabolic fitness is when the body produces energy efficiently. The more efficient that process, the more energy is available for optimal mental and physical performance.

“Metabolic fitness means your body is equipped to use and store energy properly such that you can access that energy as needed without unnecessary byproducts and breakdown. It means you are operating efficiently and your fuel stores and your fuel systems are functioning properly, such that all the tissues in your body, whether the muscle that you need to exercise or the brain that you need to think and focus and recall, all of those tissues and all of the cells within them can access and have the energy they need…Without metabolic fitness, without properly functioning energy systems, we cannot have mental fitness and physical fitness. We can have mental function and physical function, but we can’t reach our optimal. We can’t reach truly true fitness. And so this is an aspirational concept, but we look at the two pillars of mental and physical fitness all day long, but we never look at the foundation beneath them, which is the metabolic control, the metabolic fitness. So again, I reinforce it, metabolic fitness and the ways to achieve it requires a lot of mindfulness. It requires a lot of exercise. All of the systems involved have to be worked in order to achieve true metabolic fitness. And so it will by default build better mental and physical faculties as well.”

13:58 – Maybe you should only eat cookies

While Josh doesn’t actually recommend a cookie-only diet, there is compelling research that shows that individuals react drastically differently to dietary inputs like cookies and bananas.

“Two people without diabetes who eat the exact same two foods can have an equal and opposite blood sugar response. In that case, it was a banana in a cookie made with wheat flour. And so one person would have an elevation on the banana and be flat on the cookie and vice versa for the other person. And that has implications for all of the hormones downstream of what you were eating. So insulin, cortisol, all of the hormones responding like ghrelin and leptin, which control our hunger and satiety, all of them will change the way that they are released into the blood if our blood sugar is not spiking from a specific meal or if it is. And so it’s critical that each person understands whether they are the banana person or the cookie person in this case. And it’s not to say that you should eat cookies only and not bananas, but it’s to say, are you sensitive to fruit sugars or grains sugars? And how are you constructing your diet? What this tells me is that in order for people to make lasting behavior change that is grounded in objective data that is best for them, we have to tighten the feedback loops. We have to have information available at the moment that it’s relevant.”

17:26 – Stay in control of stress for better health

Stress has a direct impact on blood glucose. Techniques like mindfulness and breathing reduce the stress response.

“I think the biggest aha moment was the effect of stress. And I had previously really dismissed stress as something that people used as an excuse. And I’ve now seen the way that a stressful meeting can cause a blood sugar spike that is worse than a candy bar for me. And all of the effects that causes and instabilities thereafter, the crash back down and the mood and the hunger and the general irritability, that’s that simple lack of mental control that I had in that meeting, allowing my stress to get the better of me introduced a metabolic consequence. And so I am now a firm believer in mindfulness and breathing practices and basically the extra little techniques, these micro optimizations we can bring to help manage our environment and stay in control to the best of our abilities.”

18:33 – With the right knowledge it’s possible to optimize

Levels wants to help people interpret what their body is telling them. That knowledge helps to reinforce good habits and make small changes to optimize negative ones.

“Right now it really genuinely feels like if you want to use a tool like this effectively, or if you just want to know what should I eat for lunch and why, you kind of need to have a PhD in either computer science or in signal processing or in metabolism and physiology. And so Levels is here to take away that burden and say we’re going to log your lifestyle decisions and we’re going to analyze the way that they’re affecting your metabolic control and your blood sugar control and we’re going to surface the areas of opportunity. We’re going to give you the simplest insights, the areas that you can make very, very small micro optimizations will give you the receipt, both for what that costs you in terms of what changes you have to make and then the quality of the improvement. That way you can start to close those loops with positive and negative reinforcement. Oftentimes we’ll have to remove something from our diet or we’ll have to make a change to our sleep schedules, but oftentimes we’re going to see actually that thing that I thought was really indulgent and probably bad for me like that ice cream and that cheesecake, it actually works really well for me, quite a bit better than the blueberry muffin that I was going to grab. So this positive and negative reinforcement just allows us to constantly reinforce habits and create accountability to ourselves without having to ask someone else’s permission. This is direct between your body.”

James Hilliard: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Founders and Funders. I’m your host James Hilliard on this podcast, we’ll share the engaging and inspiring stories of entrepreneurs and the investors that support their vision of a better future on founders and funders. Doing well and doing good drives us every day. Today we are joined by Josh Clemente.

He is co-founder of levels health. The company is developing a wearable device and dashboard for your body’s metabolism, offering personalized insights into how different foods affect your body and your health levels is part of ABGs base camp portfolio. That’s a fund focused exclusively on seed and pre-seed investments.

As we dive into our conversation, you’re going to hear how Josh has founding of levels. Health had an out of this world beginning while he was working at space X, helping develop systems to support, travel to the international space station. May 30th, 2023, 22 Eastern daylight time. What were you doing?

Josh Clemente: [00:01:09] I was sitting on the couch in Stratford, New Jersey, watching the vehicle on the pad, getting ready to take Bob bankin and Doug Hurley to the international space station.

And, uh, that vehicle was near and dear to me because I worked on a few systems on board. It was kind of a surreal experience to see so much of, um, You know, not just my work, but also the work of people that I love in my life. Friends and family have, have put in years and going on decades into, uh, not just building that specific vehicle, but building the organization and the series of vehicles that could make space, travel, human space flight from the United States possible again.

And so, uh, you know, that, that. Level of just historic awareness and involvement with was just huge. And then obviously the, the kind of personal element I had worked on life support systems at space X and specifically with Bob and Doug and I had met them during that process. And, and so there was a personal component there.

Are they healthy

James Hilliard: [00:02:15] astronauts in general? Do they take health more important than you and I? Are they like us? Eh, yeah, we try and do good, but sometimes

Josh Clemente: [00:02:21] we cheat. You know, once again, I think it’s, it’s kind of the ladder where w we are learning more and more, and NASA is certainly doing a lot to better understand specifically what health is and how to maintain it.

Especially when you’re talking about long duration missions that are far from earth, where you don’t have access to emergency medical services, or even. Primary care. And so they are taking seriously this, this health equation. And certainly the astronaut core is, is physically fit. They’re mentally fit.

They spend a ton of time exercising and maintaining, um, really high quality lifestyles. I was first exposed to a lot of the holistic side of health. You know, going beyond physical fitness, going beyond the gym. When I was reading the research that is being done by NASA with people like Dominic, D’Agostino from the university of South Florida, and the way that they’re thinking about diet and, um, and mindfulness and fasting and all of these other elements of what health is and the ways that they can introduce them to, uh, these long duration astronaut missions.

How about your

James Hilliard: [00:03:24] personal health journey always been something on your mind? What was your journey like?

Josh Clemente: [00:03:31] I’ve always been competitive. I love sports. I’ve, I’ve been an active person, my whole life, because I’ve never really had much of a weight issue previously, you know, for most of my life just indulged in whatever I wanted whenever I wanted in terms of food, it was, uh, you know, I had it.

Terrible sweet tooth was kind of addicted to candy. I was just kind of consuming whatever I wanted absentmindedly because I knew that I was going to go work out twice a day. And, uh, you know, as long as I wasn’t gaining weight, I was healthy. Right. That was the measurement stick I was using. And, uh, that kind of caught up to me after a few years in the super stressful environment of space X, where you need to be on your game mentally and physically.

Um, you know, these are many cases we were working straight through long weekends. Um, Without sleep. And so the, any additional burden on your system is amplified in, in those environments. And especially obviously given the context of what we were working on. And, um, several years into my time at space X, I got to the point where I was burning out physically and mentally, I was going through kind of these waves of energy crashes and, and mood crashes multiple times per day.

You know, I was on kind of a life support, drip of coffee, and it was, uh, it, it went well beyond the. The calming ritual that we all have in the morning to the point where like, if there was not a pot of coffee available at all times, I was in trouble and I may not make it to the next meeting. And, uh, that was happening, happening simultaneously with my exposure to the research.

I mentioned from, from folks like dumb at university of South Florida, talking about for, I’ll give an example of a study that he was working on. It was, uh, showing that rodents can survive five times longer in a high pressure oxygen environment. If they were on a ketogenic diet. And the reason that was interesting to me is because I was working on the oxygen systems, space X, and to see that this research demonstrated that just a dietary change was giving superpowers to these rodents and extrapolating that to humans and to myself and thinking, how is it possible that a diet can literally.

Preserve life in a threatening situ scenario, just diet. Is that

James Hilliard: [00:05:36] where then levels health, is that what you can point back to and say, this is where those ideas started coming and led you to found levels health, and then follow up with what is

Josh Clemente: [00:05:46] levels health. Yes, those were the very first moments where I started to think, okay, I need to approach my health the way that I approach every other problem I solve in my life, which is with data.

And I have no data. That is driving my decisions today. So I started to just do some superficial research on what, what is energy and in the human body, energy is produced in the cells from our food and environment and those processes, all of those energy producing processes are called metabolism. And so what I started to do is dig into the research on metabolism and try to understand better.

Where my energy is coming from and how to improve it. And what that led me to is glucose. So there are three primary molecules that we can use to produce energy, and those are fat carbohydrates and protein carbohydrates break down into sugar in the blood. And so that’s why we talk about blood glucose.

And the primary molecule that we use in, in the modern world is glucose. So our brains need it to survive our muscles, run on it for exercise. Um, it’s used in every tissue throughout the body. And so I said, you know what, I’m going to start measuring my glucose. And so I went to the store and I started pricking my finger with a, an over-the-counter finger prick, glucometer.

I got a whole cloud of, of data points that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. And, um, eventually I, you know, it got so deep into the research that I, I learned about this device called a continuous glucose monitor. And this device you wear on your arm full-time and it sends your data right to your phone.

And so I asked my doctor for one of these, he said, no way, you’re, you’re super healthy. That’s for people who have diabetes. And I asked several other doctors, they gave me the same response. Ultimately I did get one of these devices and I quickly found out that I was pre-diabetic or borderline pre-diabetic depending on who you ask.

And that was a total shocker for me. I mean, that was a light bulb moment. And I then use the data from that same device. To tune my choices as it related to nutrition and to identify the huge impacts that poor sleep had on my, my blood sugar control and also the power of things like exercise and that personal experience is what triggered, um, I had at this point, decided to take a leave from space X and go pursue a different entrepreneurial pursuit, which I’ve I’ve since left to found levels, which is.

The company that is taking real-time bio wearable. So real-time health information like continuous glucose information and enhancing access to it and providing the actionability layer. So taking that raw data and turning it into a lifestyle tool that can tell people here’s how you can improve your diet, exercise, sleep, and stress.

You sit down every day, you’re going to eat lunch. What are you eating and why this tool answers that question.

James Hilliard: [00:08:30] Your talk about accessibility. I want to dive into that for a moment. Is there a frustration that you had with accessibility that also drove you this direction?

Josh Clemente: [00:08:40] Yes, absolutely. Um, I’m a person who strongly believes data is crucial to any decision-making process.

And it was confusing to me in this pursuit of information about my body. I was being told I could not have access to that data. And I wasn’t asking for someone else’s blood sugar information, I was just asking for my own. And, uh, it seemed bizarre to me that. I would have to wait for a diagnosis of illness in order to get access to the data that describes the illness and the onset of the illness.

Why would I not want to know that decades in advance of that? Especially when the CDC says that, uh, chronic illnesses like type two diabetes are entirely preventable. I think I have some understanding of the environment, the regulatory environment that physicians are operating under. And I do understand they have the intent of doing what’s best for the patient.

And in many cases, they want to avoid unnecessary expenditures and reduce costs on the system. So on and so forth. And that’s why I truly believe in the direct relationship, the direct to consumer product approach, where an individual says, I want this information and I’m willing to pay for it, and I will pay for it.

I don’t require a reimbursal from insurance. And, uh, and, and in that scenario, I truly believe that the best way to, uh, improve our medical system and improve, uh, frankly, the, the social metabolic. Uh, epidemic we’re facing where 88% of Mo of American adults are metabolically unhealthy. The way to improve this is to enhance the accessibility, to make this a product that people don’t wait until after diagnosis for they’re using it every day to optimize little decisions that they’re going to make anyway.

And they’re just going to make them now in the context of their own data. So ultimately

James Hilliard: [00:10:16] your goal. If I’m hearing correctly, you want to help us all of us out there work on focus on our metabolic fit. So here’s what I did. I went to Google and I Googled what is metabolic fitness. I’m going to read you the definition I got.

I think this was the national institutes of health, some derivative from there, but this is the definition I got a definition. Of metabolic fitness is proposed as the ratio between mitochondrial capacity for substrate utilization and maximum oxygen uptake of the muscle. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to turn to you as a real life.

Google translate, translate what Google told me and told everybody what is metabolic fit. Yes,

Josh Clemente: [00:11:01] we, we touched on what metabolism is, right? It’s the energy production systems. So metabolic fitness. Means your body is equipped to use and store energy properly, uh, such that you can, you access that energy as needed without unnecessary byproducts and breakdown.

It means, uh, you are operating efficiently and your fuel stores and your fuel systems. Are functioning properly, such that all the tissues in your body, whether the muscle that you need to exercise or the brain that you need to think and focus and recall all of those tissues and all of the cells within them can access and have the energy they need in the proper proportion.

And you do not have a unnecessary byproducts like rep. Yeah, the radical oxygen species or a breakdown in inflammatory cytokines, like IL six, TNF, alpha, all the other, uh, unnecessary products of a metabolic dysfunction. And that allows you to both feel your best, but also maintain control for the long-term.

And so our definition of metabolic fitness is again, uh, when those systems are running properly without unnecessary byproducts, you have metabolic fitness. We talk

James Hilliard: [00:12:09] about and teach our kids in school, physical fitness, mental health, right? Psychological fitness still needs more of a push in this country, but is seeing some of those pushes from some sides, metabolic fitness.

It’s not something that I’ve heard anyone ever talk about. Is it something that should be at the level of those two, our psychological and our physical fitness. Do you feel it deserves the same type of attention?

Josh Clemente: [00:12:36] I actually don’t feel it deserves the same attention. I think it has to have more attention than both of those because it’s the prerequisite for mental fitness and physical fitness.

Again, the brain is, is composed of tissues of cells that require energy in order to operate. And the muscles are composed of cells that require energy in order to contract and bill in and. Improve and build and grow. And so without metabolic fitness, without properly functioning energy systems, we cannot have mental fitness and physical fitness.

We can have mental function and physical function, but we can’t reach our optimal. We can’t reach truly. True fitness. And so this is an aspirational concept, but we look at the two pillars of mental and physical fitness all day long, but we never look at the foundation beneath them, which is the metabolic control, the metabolic fitness.

So again, I, I reinforce it metabolic fitness and the ways to achieve it requires a lot of mindfulness. It requires a lot of exercise. All of the systems involved have to be worked in order to achieve true metabolic fitness. And so it will by default build a better mental and physical faculties as well.

James Hilliard: [00:13:42] What is your ultimate pie in the sky land on the international space station and do it successfully desire for levels health to help give us information to start changing our behaviors.

Josh Clemente: [00:13:58] The, the technology that we’re using, the real-time continuous glucose monitoring technology. It was developed originally for the manager management of diabetes and recent studies in people without diabetes have shown exactly what you just mentioned, which is that, uh, two people without diabetes who have, uh, who eat the exact same two foods.

Can have an equal and opposite blood sugar response. In that case, it was a banana in a cookie made with wheat flour. And, uh, so one person would have an elevation on the banana and be flat on the cookie and vice versa for the other person. And that has implications for all of the hormones downstream of what you were eating.

So insulin cortisol, all of the hormones, responding like ghrelin and leptin, which control our hunger and satiety. All of them will change the way that they are released into the blood. If our blood sugar is not spiking from a specific meal or if it is. And so it’s critical that each person understand whether they are the banana person or the cookie person in this case.

And it’s not to say that you should eat cookies only and not bananas, but it’s to say, are you sensitive to fruit sugars or grains sugars? And how are you constructing your diet? What this tells me is that in order for people to make lasting behavior change, that is grounded in objective data. That is best for them is we have to tighten the feedback loops.

We have to have information available at the moment that it’s relevant. We can’t wait for, you know, in, in, in the example you just gave, which is, you know, you only gave gained seven or eight pounds. You were using the bathroom scale as your metric, you know, and, and that’s a very long feedback loop. That’s multiple months, most likely.

And what we need is we need minutes. And so that’s the technology that we’re building today. It is to close the loop between the actions we take and the reactions, our bodies experience in the moment. And I look to the future as we’ll be using personal health information. The way that we use financial data.

So right now health and wellness are the, is the only space in our lives where we have no data. We are just flying blind. And in the future, you’re going to pull out your phone and you’re going to have in real time, an understanding of your quote, unquote deposits and withdrawals. You’re going to see how the interest is compounding positively or negative based on the choices you’ve been making.

You’ll be able to send that data to an expert that you trust to get their input. And all of this is going to be. Be able to build a plan for you that you can project into the future and confidently feel that, you know, you’re, you’re not just going to be financially set up for retirement, but you’re also going to be physically well enough to enjoy it.

And that’s the goal. The goal is for people to have confidence in the choices they’re making and if data-driven lifestyle to support it, level’s

James Hilliard: [00:16:20] health.com center of the page request access. I clicked the button. I got put on a wait list. What does that mean for me?

Josh Clemente: [00:16:28] Right now we are in a, what we’re calling beta mode.

So we’re still in development. We are increasing access every week. And so we’re, we’re basically bringing in people who we turn into, uh, parts of the team. So we, we interview everyone right now. Our goal is to maximize the effectiveness of what we’re building. We’re not interested in producing a toy. We want people to be making concrete.

Positive behavior change. And we want to ensure that our product is striking the right notes to make that possible. So at the moment, we’re still in that development phase, like I said, we’re increasing access, uh, quickly, and, uh, we will be going, uh, to our launch stage in the coming months. And so everyone on that wait list will have the opportunity, um, as quickly as we can get it to them to, uh, be a part of what we’re building and try the product out.

It’s a, it’s just a stage release, so to speak. What is the

James Hilliard: [00:17:20] biggest personal aha moment that you’ve had on this journey within levels health.

Josh Clemente: [00:17:26] So as it relates to glucose control, I think the biggest aha moment was the effect of stress. And I had previously kind of. You know, really dismissed stress as something that people used as an excuse.

And I’ve now seen the way that a stressful meeting can cause a blood sugar spike that is worse than a candy bar for me and all of the effects that that causes and instabilities thereafter, the, the crash back down and the mood and the hunger and yeah. The general irritability that that’s that simple lack of mental control that I had in that meeting, allowing my stress to get the better of me introduced a metabolic consequence.

And, uh, and so I am now a firm believer in mindfulness and breathing practices and basically the extra, the, the. Extra little techniques, these micro optimizations, we can bring to help manage our environment and stay in control to the best of our abilities. Is that something

James Hilliard: [00:18:18] that levels health is going to then bring to us as well down the road?

Not just the data points, but one of the issues we have in this world of big data in all this data we’re generating great. What do we do with that data? So what are you going to bring to us to help us deal with the data

Josh Clemente: [00:18:33] that we’re seeing? The focus of levels is to filter through the noise and find the signal.

And, you know, right now it really genuinely feels like if you want to use a tool like this effectively, or if you just want to know what should I eat for lunch and why you kind of need to have a PhD in either computer science or in signal processing or in, in metabolism and physiology. And so levels this year to take, take away that burden and say, you know, we’re going to tap.

Log your lifestyle decisions. And we’re going to analyze the way that they’re affecting your metabolic control and your blood sugar control. And we’re going to surface the areas of opportunity. We’re going to give you the simplest insights, the areas that you can make very, very small micro optimizations will give you the receipt, both for what that, that costs you in terms of, uh, what changes you have to make.

And then. The quality of the improvement. And that way you can start to see close those loops positive and negative reinforcement. So, uh, you know, oftentimes we’ll have to remove something from our diet or we’ll have to make a change to our sleep schedules, but oftentimes we’re going to see I’ll actually that thing that I thought was really indulgent and probably bad for me like that ice cream and that cheesecake, it actually works really well for me.

Quite a bit better than the blueberry muffin then I was going to grab and said, and so this positive and negative reinforcement just allows us to constantly reinforce habits and create accountability to ourselves. Without having to ask someone else’s permission. This is direct between your, your body.

James Hilliard: [00:19:51] And again, folks that was Josh Clemente. And again, he is the co-founder and levels health. I want to thank him for chatting with me, really appreciate the chance to learn more about his background and how levels health is advancing consumer understanding of metabolic fitness. As a reminder levels, health is part of ABGs base camp portfolio, which invests exclusively in seed stage startups.

If you would like to learn more about the fund and AVG, we invite you to visit AVG funds.