Keeping your blood glucose levels stable is essential for ensuring long-term health, and making your day to day life a lot easier in the short term. Now, with the help of cutting-edge continuous glucose monitoring technology (CGM), it’s easier than ever. But monitoring your blood glucose levels is one thing. Understanding what your blood glucose levels mean, and even better, how to improve them, is where the Hello Inside App can help.
Hello Inside is all about allowing you to say hello to what’s going on inside your body. Our data-analytics and tracking app can allow you to spot patterns and log your food, sleep and exercise habits to help you understand why it is that some days your blood glucose is stable and you feel great, while on others you’re faced with multiple spikes, and not feeling your best.
Not only can your Hello Inside App help you understand what’s going on with your blood glucose, it is also full of features like recipes, experiments and coaching programs to help put you in the driver’s seat of your own health. By tracking your glucose levels you can find out what combinations of food, at what times of the day, and in what order can help keep your blood glucose stable, your mind focused, your weight healthy, your menstrual cycle on track, and your body glowing.
How does Hello Inside help me manage my blood glucose?
The Hello Inside App takes information from your CGM and presents it to you in easy to understand way with graphs, scores, and statistics. These insights will help you see which foods you should and shouldn’t be eating to keep your blood glucose steady.
Are carbs the enemy? Can you ever eat cake again? What about things like pasta and rice, should you avoid them? The truth is that nobody can answer these questions for you, except you, and your body. That’s exactly what Hello Inside can help you find out. Some people realize that cakes, candy and chocolate bars have little impact on their blood glucose levels, whereas other people will find their blood glucose levels soar the moment they’ve had one bite.
The Hello Inside App will instantly give you the answers to the questions of how your lifestyle choices, from nutrition to exercise, and from sleep to stress, affect your glucose and overall health. And once you’ve got a good idea of what’s already going on inside your body, you can start taking steps towards making a difference, and living a healthier, happier and longer life.
What are the benefits of improving my blood sugar with Hello Inside?
Have you ever had days when you had a hard time focusing? Do you sometimes have severe mood swings or trouble finding the energy to do anything? All of these things could have to do with your blood sugar levels.
Your blood glucose is a great indicator of your health so making changes to keep it stable is not only good way to increase those slumps in your energy levels but also can help prevent more serious diseases in the long term such as cancer, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases.
For women, there are additional benefits to be had from stable blood sugar levels. Many women suffer from things such as period pain, PMS, and menopause symptoms (e.g., hot flashes, low mood, etc.). All of these uncomfotable symptoms can be made more manageable when we feed our bodies the foods that work best for it.
With the Hello Inside App you will be able to tell you whether it’s your blood glucose that’s the problem and how you can optimize it in order to reduce all those pesky symptoms you suffer from.
How do you start your health journey with your Hello Inside App?
When starting your health journey, no matter your goal, your Hello Inside App will accompany you every step of the way. There are tons of features to help you discover more insights and keep you on track but we think everything should come at its time to get the best out of your glucose tracking. The start of your glucose health journey is best followed in these 4 phases:
- Set up
- Observe and listen
- Explore and experiment
- Well-being and check-in
For each phase of your journey we have specific features to check out or insights for you to learn. Learn more about them below.
Phase #1: Set up
To get the most out of your Hello Inside App we recommend wearing a CGM to sync your blood glucose levels and undestand what’s going on inside your body. Your membership plan may come with a sensor you can apply when you are ready or you can always buy one to try out.
You’ll need to set up an account and follow the instructions in the app to apply and connect your sensor correctly and start logging your glucose data.
The programs
Once you’ve set up your app, feel free to explore it! We recommend taking a look at the programs we offer and their lessons. These lessons contain important information regarding what glucose does in your body as well as how and why making changes causes changes. Start one of the following programs now depending on your health goals:
- Glucose Foundation
- Hello Sugar
- Hello Hormones
Phase #2: Observe and listen
Phase 2 of your health journey with us is all about observing your glucose levels and listening to your body! In this phase you will apply your CGM and start to see and learn how your blood sugar reacts to different foods.
Your first few weeks of using Hello Inside will be a journey to discover the secrets of your body and your metabolism.
Event Tracking- Meals, snacks, and drinks
Manually log your meals for the day. It's best if you also add the specific ingredients of your meal. This will be useful later on when you want to start making changes or experimenting.
Once you log a meal, you will be able to see your blood glucose curve develop and change as your body reacts to your food. After 2.5 hours your logged meal will be given a score.
Food scores range from 1-10 (10 being the best score) and will give you a strong indication of how the food you just ate is affecting your blood glucose levels. A low score indicates that your body had a hard time balancing your blood glucose levels. A higher score shows that the food you ate needed less control for your blood glucose, which is a good thing.
- Activity
Food is not the only thing that affects your blood glucose levels. Exercise and physical activity can also have a big impact on blood sugar levels. Movement after a meal can lower your blood glucose levels while intense workouts can make them go up. In contrast to a meal response a short term glucose increase is a good thing. You can let your Hello Inside App know whether a blood glucose spike is from physical exertion by logging it in the app, using the sports activity log.
You can also connect your Hello Inside App with your Apple Health to have your activities synched automatically. Adding your activities will support your score calculation.
- Mood
Last but definitely not least, don’t forget to input your mood. How did you feel today? You might also want to add a stressful meeting to your logs and observe what this means for your blood sugar. Wether good or bad log it! This will be an important part of your health journey to reflect on and see what improvements you have made or if there are any specific things you want to work on.
Scores
In this phase it’s important to look at the meal and day scores provided by the Hello Inside app when you log your meals and ingredients.
Day scores range from 1 - 100, but a score of 80 or higher is already considered a high Day Score. This a quick statistic you can take a look at to see how good all the foods you ate that day were for you.
Individually logged meals, snacks, and drinks will also get an individual score ranging from 1 - 10. By looking at these scores it makes it easier for you to identify more precisely what foods would be best to avoid or to keep eating in the future.
Phase #3: Explore and experiment
This is where the fun really starts! Phase 3 is for you to explore an start experimenting with different types of foods. Once you’ve established your glucose baseline, in phase 2, and have started to see how your body reacts to certain foods, it’s time to start making some small changes.
These are some of the Hello Inside App features to try or look at during this phase:
Experiments
Pancakes vs. waffles. Traditional pasta vs. whole grain. Find some of our most popular experiments under the “Coaching” tab in your Hello Inside App or create your own! Changing just one ingredient in your favorite meal can already make a big difference in your glucose levels.
When experimenting, it is important to try and have the same routine when testing the ingredients you want. This was you can have more accurate results and see which foods your body reacts better to and in the long run will make you feel your best self.
Expert Insights
With so much new information it you may feel a little lost as to where to start. This is normal and why we are here to help. From your previous logged foods you can see some expert insights with tips on what you can do the next time you eat this food again. Check out their suggestions and see if making these changes helps you.
Recipes
Looking for some glucose-friendly recipes to try out? We’ve got you covered. Check out tasty ad easy to make recipes in the app.
Phase #4: Well-being and check-in
Give yourself a pat on the back! You made it to the final phase - well-being and check-in.
Statistics and Weekly Reports
On the "Statistics" page of your Hello Inside app you can find all the data and average values of your glucose curve. Here you can see the following statistics:
- Average daily value
- Average score for meals
- Average blood glucose
- Number of spikes
To give you an even better overview of your health status when measuring with a CGM, you will receive a weekly report of the last 7 days in your email inbox. Here we give you more detailed information about your values of the last 7 days.
After 14 days of blood glucose monitoring, we recommend you take a look at these two pages, not only to see what areas you can improve in, but also to reflect on all the positive changes you've made!
Your Daily Journal:
You might have added your mood, energy, social interactions or mental state during your daily journaling. Did you already see any patterns? Check in an see if you feel different on certain days. Refelcting is a big part of your health journey.
What happens after these 4 phases?
After you have completed your tracking time of 14 days with one sensor and you went through all the phases above you probably already found some hacks and you started integrating some new habits into your lifestyle. Now it’s time to make them stick.
With each round of tracking with a CGM, your feeling for your body's response to certain foods or activities will get better. You will also be able to feel if a portion of food was good for you or not, even without the direct sensor data. You can make assumptions and maybe even a list of things you would like to test and verify during your next tracking period. This can for example be: different habits, lifestyle factors, seasonal foods, sleeping patterns, exercise routines and much more. With your next sensor you can also check in again and see if your blood sugar levels improved since the last time you wore a sensor and after you implemented your first lifestyle changes.
After a few weeks, you might see further improvements or changes, like better weight control. And in the long term, you can reduce the risk of chronic disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and other illnesses.
If you don't want to wait for the delivery of your next sensor or want to test even more, you always have the option to buy an additional CGM sensor. (Link) If you have a Hello Inside membership, you can even get the sensor at a discounted price.
You are not alone on this journey
Starting a new adventure can sometimes be scary or confusing, but we are here for you! Please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions, comments or concerns. You can do this directly through your Hello Inside app. Just go to your profile page and search for "Contact support". Or simply send an email to [email protected]. Our experts and support team will be happy to help you.
