Written by: James Han
Reviewed by: Emily J., MSc RD
Sign up for Veri newsletter
Join Veri today to find your optimal diet and improve metabolic health.
5 minutes
Veri’s Four Pillars are your key areas for making a lasting change when it comes to metabolic health. Learn what they are and how Veri can empower you to build positive long-term habits.
We’re in a metabolic health crisis. More than 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, and most don’t even know it [1]. Globally, obesity is projected to affect 2 billion people (25% of the population) by 2035.
Even if you aren’t overweight or prediabetic, there are many reasons to pay close attention to your metabolic health, which is linked to everything from your energy levels to your hormones, mood, metabolism, and more.
But that begs the question — where do you start to improve your metabolic health? And even more importantly, how do you build sustainable habits that you can stick to?
This is where the Four Pillars come in.
The Four Pillars are food (or nutrition), exercise, sleep, and stress.
When we talk about behaviors that influence metabolic health, we at Veri often refer to our Four Pillars: food, exercise, sleep, and stress.
The Four Pillars are the most impactful areas for improving behaviors that are linked to balanced glucose levels, greater insulin sensitivity, and all-around better metabolic function. We call habits in these pillar areas your “metabolic habits,” and each one plays an important and unique role in your health.
Research indicates that the Four Pillars are the most powerful levers you can pull for your metabolic health [2, 3, 4, 5]. Like the pillars of a building, they provide a strong foundation that supports a life free from disease, pain, and illness. Put another way, they help you extend your healthspan so you can enjoy a higher quality of life, even as you age.
The Four Pillars act as a team, though food and exercise play a bigger role than sleep and stress. When you neglect even just one, the entire foundation takes a toll.
This isn’t cause for alarm — missing a few hours of sleep here and there or taking a break from exercise isn’t going to significantly hamper your goals or affect your health. But if you consistently neglect the Four Pillars over a long period of time, you may set off a vicious cycle that can lead to conditions such as insulin resistance, prediabetes, obesity, and even metabolic syndrome.
The key to understanding the Four Pillars is glucose, your body’s preferred energy source. All the food you eat is ultimately used or stored as glucose, which circulates through your bloodstream to fuel your cells.
In order to turn glucose into energy, your pancreas releases the hormone insulin to “unlock” cells and allow glucose in. If you think of glucose as “money” for the body, insulin is the “money manager” hormone that helps you regulate spending and saving.
If your insulin response isn’t working normally, your body can’t make proper use of glucose. As it turns out, the Four Pillars all affect your body’s ability to regulate glucose via insulin in different ways.
A lot of traditional health advice is centered around numerical results — such as eating a certain number of calories, or losing a certain number of pounds. But focusing on the end result puts too much pressure on the “output” rather than all of the hard workthat goes into producing the desired result.
In other words, this mindset doesn’t empower you to make long-term changes to your lifestyle and, in turn, your health.
On top of that, every body is different — and even though we can make educated predictions about the effects of the Four Pillars on health, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
This is where the Veri Method comes in.
Veri can help you building lasting habits that contribute to improved metabolic health.
The Veri Method focuses on bite-sized inputs, which are your metabolic habits related to the Four Pillars (nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress). By using Veri as your guide, you can create positive feedback loops that help you build lasting habits towards lifestyle change and better health.
The personalized feedback you receive along the way, as measured by reports in the Veri app (your glucose graph, meal scores, daily scores, and healthspan), helps you understand exactly where you are succeeding, and what areas of your health need tweaking. It’s precisely this science-backed methodology that can help you reach your health goals and make changes that stick.
Put another way, using Veri helps you look inside your body to see what’s working for your health and where you can make adjustments. Then, we help you build lasting habits around areas for improvement — so you can make long-lasting lifestyle changes that will compound over time into better health.
Everything in the Veri app is designed around improving metabolic habits as they affect the Four Pillars. That means you can monitor your glucose levels throughout the day and connect the dots as they pertain to meals, sleep, exercise, stress, and other events in your life.
For example, you may notice that eating a certain food triggers a glucose spike. Using this knowledge, you can experiment the next time you eat it to isolate factors that might be contributing to that glycemic response. For example:
Don’t worry if you’re new to all of this. With the Veri app, you don’t have to interpret your own results or jump to conclusions blindly. Instead, we empower you to build lasting habits by acting as a personalized 1:1 metabolic adviser, helping you decode the data into meaningful, actionable steps.
Here are some ways we accomplish this:
Whether or not you use Veri, paying attention to the Four Pillars can often lead to significant improvements in your metabolic health. To get started, take a look at our educational resources for each of the pillars below, focusing on one to get started. If you use the Veri app and have already identified areas where you want to build better habits, you can head straight to those pillars for more guidance.
Similar articles