Five things you can learn from Levels without a CGM
The latest Levels app offers much more than glucose insights. Here’s how to use it to be your full-time health partner, improving diet, fitness and more.
Levels' core promise has long been "We show you how food affects your health," and that's never been more accurate than with the current version of the Levels app. We believe that step one to improving your health is data---seeing the hard numbers around your diet and lifestyle choices and your key biomarkers---and step two is turning that data into action, whether changing your meals, your exercise habits, or your sleep routine.
The latest Levels app offers the most expansive take yet on that mission, with a wealth of information and suggestions even when you're not measuring your real-time blood sugar with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). With fast, easy food logging and highly customizable habit and data tracking, Levels is a powerful tool in your health-improvement toolkit, regardless of your journey.
Here are five critical things you can learn from Levels even when you're not wearing a CGM.
1. What do your biomarkers actually say about your health?
Blood testing reveals things about your health that you simply can't feel or see. You might have great energy but elevated inflammatory markers. You could be eating "healthy" but have suboptimal nutrient levels. Or you might feel fine while having early signs of metabolic dysfunction.
You can access a 28-marker panel covering metabolic, cardiovascular, liver, kidney, and inflammatory health, or test 100+ markers for deeper insights into hormones, micronutrients, and advanced aging markers.
Your results are analyzed by a licensed clinician, who provides feedback not just on your marker values, but also your lifestyle and glucose data, so they can make the most effective and comprehensive suggestions on where you can focus for the most return on your health.
Each test comes with optimal ranges based on the latest research, clear explanations of what your results mean, and personalized recommendations for improvement. You can schedule testing directly through the app and track changes over time---many members see meaningful improvements in key biomarkers within 3-6 months of making targeted changes.
The best part? You don't need to wait for your annual physical or navigate complex lab ordering. You can test as often as you want and see exactly how your lifestyle changes are affecting your actual health markers.
2. Is your diet helping you meet your goals?
When it comes to diet, macros matter. Understanding the macronutrient content of your food is vital to improving your health, from consuming enough fiber to support your gut to getting sufficient protein for muscle growth to balancing carbs for stable energy. The only way to see that is to log your meals with a tool like Levels that gives you the complete breakdown: protein, fat, carbs, fiber, sugars, and calories.
Research shows that most people vastly underestimate how much they eat when they're not logging, so managing macros on your own is nearly impossible. And many studies suggest successful weight loss is tied to food logging. But tracking is an extra step, easy to forget or avoid. That's why we've worked hard to make meal logging quick and painless.
The Levels app offers several ways to log, including search and barcode scanning, but the two quickest methods are our AI-powered options: AI Describe and Photo Detect. With AI Describe, simply write or say what you ate in natural language: "omelet with peppers and ham," and AI will log the individual ingredients with macros. With Photo Detect, just snap a picture, and the app will analyze it in the background; pop back in later to review and edit if necessary.
Beyond macros, you get personalized feedback on food quality and suggestions for ingredient swaps based on your health goals and biomarker results. The app connects your food choices to your lab data, helping you see which dietary patterns support better inflammatory markers, metabolic health, or nutrient status.
3. Are you building habits that actually stick?
Improving health is simply a matter of stringing together practices that are good for you, from exercise to diet to sleep and stress management. These essential habits create a flywheel effect: as you improve one, it becomes easier to improve others. For instance, getting good sleep reduces carb cravings the next day, making it easier to stick to your nutrition goals. Regular exercise helps you maintain a healthy weight, which can improve your sleep.
However, managing all those habits can be a pain if you have to jump from your meal tracker to your sleep app to your workout app. Levels combines all your relevant data into one place and uses it to generate insights that help you do better.
First, there's Habit Loops, a customizable visual tracker for monitoring essential habits at a glance. You can use Habit Loops for macros, exercise, sleep, hydration, and stress. As you move toward your goal each day, you see the loop complete.
For metrics you're not tracking in Habit Loops, you can still see daily, weekly, and monthly views on your My Data page. The app integrates with Apple Health and Google Fit to automatically pull in exercise and sleep data, so you don't have to manually log everything.
AI-powered insights analyze your complete health profile to surface patterns like "Your late-night meals are correlating with poor sleep quality" or "Your workout consistency is improving your stress management scores."
4. What should you be eating or doing differently?
While some food logging apps are simply a way to keep track of your meals, Levels constantly surfaces insights based on your data and patterns.
For example, when you log a meal, the app will automatically analyze the ingredients and give you more information about them:
- Why that particular ingredient supports or hinders your health goals
- Ideas for ingredient swaps that better support your biomarkers, like trying cauliflower rice instead of white rice
- Recipes that incorporate your favorite foods or can help you hit your macro targets
The app shows sophisticated insights based on looking at all your data holistically. For example, "In the past month, there were 11 days where you logged ≥200 calories in the 2 hours before bedtime. Your sleep quality scores suggest this might be affecting your rest." or "Your fiber intake has been consistently low. Here are some simple swaps that could help improve your gut health markers."
Levels Programs are personalized and guided strategies for achieving a particular outcome, such as Hearth Health or Weight Management. They tell you exactly where to focus and help you track your adherence.
In addition to personalized insights, the Levels Library has nearly 600 articles and videos spanning health optimization basics, member stories, recipes and product recommendations, and scientific deep dives. All the articles are based on primary research and informed by our expert advisors so you know you can trust them.
5. Are your long-term trends actually improving?
The hard truth is that none of this matters if you're not confident that you are, in fact, getting healthier. Part of the reason so many people fail to sustain healthy behavior is that it's often hard to see the results of their work. Improving health is a long-term project. It's not the result of one week of hitting protein or step goals.
The best way to see your progress is by measuring biomarkers---either with a CGM or by getting Levels Labs---seeing long-term trend data demonstrating that you're feeding that health flywheel can give you confidence that your daily inputs are moving in the right direction.
That's why Levels makes it easy to see streaks and long-term trends. When you hit the calendar icon, you can see an entire month's view showing how many days in a row you hit your Habit Loop goals. The My Data page shows data for up to 90 days across all your core metrics, including curves and distributions, so you can quickly view trends in areas like weight, exercise duration, or sleep consistency.
Most importantly, you can track your biomarker trends over time---watching your inflammatory markers improve, seeing your metabolic health optimize, or monitoring how your micronutrient levels respond to dietary changes. Weekly and monthly reports summarize your progress and highlight areas where you're making meaningful improvements.
Conclusion
Levels is both your dashboard and your guide to better health. By regularly testing your biomarkers, logging meals, setting Habit Loops, and checking in on longer-term metrics, you create a comprehensive system for understanding what's working and what isn't. The app empowers you with insights and feedback you can actually use, which in turn empowers you to sustain the behaviors that keep you living your best life.
Take control of your health with expert guidance
Levels pairs real-time glucose data and comprehensive lab testing with clinician analysis and personalized support—everything you need to turn insights into real health improvements. Click here to get started with Levels.
