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Essays
Ideas on health, longevity and how the body works.
The Human Operating SystemWhy the human body is out of sync with modern life, and how we patch it.Imagine an airline that did not believe in instruments or tracking. No altimeter, no airspeed indicator, no gyroscope. The pilots just looked out the window or went with their gut, hoping they would land in the right place. Would you get on that plane? Now imagine an accountant who does not believe in numbers. No spreadsheets, no calculators, just vibes. Would you let them file your taxes? Probably not. These sound ridiculous — but that is exactly how most people manage the single most important asset they own: their body. No real data. No early warning systems. Maybe a doctor's visit once a year. Our company is named after the directional gyroscope — one of the most important instruments in an airplane. It shows what direction you are heading. It looks like a compass, but relies on its own inertia instead of external magnetic fields. We are building a similar instrument for the human body: one to help people get back on track and take control of the course of their life. For the first time in history, the raw signals of your body can be made visible, continuous, and understandable. Why Our Health Is BrokenYour instincts were written for a world that no longer exists. These are the bugs.More than half the US population is now overweight or obese. One in three people have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Burnout, anxiety, and stress-related illness keep rising. Every year, the numbers get worse. It is not because people are lazy or undisciplined. People are trying their hardest. The first step in fixing things is understanding why it is going wrong. Quite simply, the human body is obsolete. If you fly east or west, a strange thing happens. You are exhausted but cannot sleep. Hungry at the wrong times. Foggy. Irritable. This is jet lag — all your organs running on different times. Your liver thinks it is afternoon. Your brain is confused. The whole system starts to fall apart. The solution to jet lag is not surgery or a pill. It is resynchronization. Your brain has a master clock — the suprachiasmatic nucleus — that picks up light and realigns your biology over a few days. What we have done in the last few hundred years is much more drastic than changing time zones. Our entire environment has changed, and almost all your organs are struggling to catch up. Unlike jet laThe Installation ProcessMost health advice fights the brain. The fix is to rewire the feedback loop.The reason most health interventions fail is that they fight the brain instead of rewiring it. Diet for a few weeks, push through a workout streak, white-knuckle a sleep schedule — the moment your willpower runs out, the old defaults pull you right back. Your habits live in neural pathways. The more you repeat a behavior, the more automatic it becomes — true for bad habits and good ones. Bad habits usually have immediate rewards and delayed costs. Good habits usually have immediate costs and delayed rewards. Your brain is wired to pick the first option every time. Gyroscope does not just tell you what to do. It repairs the reward system so the right choice starts to feel good. By making the right data visible at the right time, it shortens the delay between action and reward. You see what last night's sleep did to today's mood. You see what this week's movement did to your resting heart rate. You see the system working. Feeling better leads to better decisions. Losing weight makes it easier to move. Seeing progress makes you want more progress. Each day you use the system, it keeps rThe Gyroscope Master PlanUpgrade yourself, help the people around you, change the default, then make us unnecessary.Most of what we think of as “normal” human behavior was shaped by a handful of companies and ad campaigns. Brushing your teeth every day was not ancient wisdom — it was a 1920s marketing campaign by Pepsodent. One company changed the daily behavior of an entire species. Plenty of other companies now shape behavior in the opposite direction: junk food, cigarettes, alcohol, streaming, social media. Until we take control of our own lives, our minds, and our eating, those systems will keep steering us. We have spent the last 10 years building a better one — powered by data, science, and daily practice. Gyroscope started as a personal project. Our founder Anand wanted to fix his own health, and it turned out thousands of people were facing the exact same issues. The hardest part has not been tracking the body, or even building the AI. It is convincing people that change is possible — that they can live a better future, and that they should start today. Here is the plan, which you are invited to start now: Step one: Put on your own oxygen mask. Start using Gyroscope daily. Upgrade your sleYour Body Is PricelessYou get one body, and it has to last a lifetime. Why it deserves better tools.Your body is the most sophisticated chemical factory on earth. It already manufactures everything it needs — dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, growth hormone, melatonin, endorphins, BDNF, oxytocin. You do not need to buy these from a pharmacy. Your body can produce them internally at the push of a button. Deep sleep triggers growth hormone. Morning sunlight sets melatonin. Intense movement releases endorphins and BDNF. Real food stabilizes dopamine instead of spiking and crashing it. Human connection drives oxytocin. Fix the inputs, activate the right code, and the factory comes online. When it is running, you can feel it. When it is not, you can feel that too. One of the richest investors in the world, Warren Buffett, has a way of describing this. Imagine that at sixteen, a genie offered you the car of your dreams — with one catch. “This is the last car you are ever going to get in your life. So it has to last a lifetime.” If that happened, you would learn how to care for it. You would keep it garaged, fix every dent and keep up with maintenance, because it has to last. “That is exThe Longevity JourneyA step-by-step case for living longer and better with science.Running a mile in less than 4 minutes was thought impossible for centuries. About a century ago, the New York Times said that human flight would probably not be possible for a million years. At first, no one believed these things could be done. Most people didn’t even bother trying. Then someone did it. Showed it was possible. And suddenly, people everywhere realized they could too. The limit was only in their head. Now running a 4-minute mile isn’t a world record but something many high-school students are doing. A new startup just built a new supersonic plane. Human potential works the same way. The limits for human health and longevity are also mostly in our minds. Currently most people look around and see everyone around them is obese and depressed or fighting debilitating conditions, so it is easy to assume that is just how life is and always will be. A limitation of the human body, or a curse of our genetics. There’s no point trying to fight it. Better to just numb ourselves with distractions. But actually we must. Change is possible. Now that we (mostly) understand the human bMeasure What MattersThe most important things in your life are the ones you are not tracking.You can check your bank balance in seconds. Your credit score, your follower count, your inbox — all one tap away. But ask a simple question like “how healthy am I, really?” and most people have no idea where to even look. This is strange, because your health is the one number that determines all the others. You can lose your money and earn it back. You cannot earn back a heart, a brain, or a decade. What gets measured gets managed. What goes unmeasured gets neglected. The things we track are not the things that matter most. We obsess over the number on the scale, which barely moves and tells you almost nothing. Meanwhile the metrics that actually predict how long and how well you will live stay completely invisible. VO2 max — one of the strongest predictors of how long you will live. Your sleep, night after night. Your glucose response to the food you just ate. Your resting heart rate and heart rate variability. Your strength, your muscle, your body composition. The trajectory of each one, over months and years. Almost nobody can see these. Not because they do not care, but because Are you strong or weak?The functional strength benchmarks that matter most for longevity.In the quest for longevity, it’s easy to get distracted by blood tests, wearables, supplements, and high-tech interventions. And while these tools have their place, one of the most powerful and predictive markers of long-term health is much simpler: your strength. Not strength as in “bench press max” or “how many plates you squat.” But the foundational, functional strength that allows you to stand up from the floor, balance on one leg, hang from a bar, or carry your body through space without pain or instability. There’s no pill for this yet. No injection that can build your glutes or stabilize your ankles. Until then — resistance training is the drug. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be intense or daily. Just 2–3 sessions per week of intentional resistance training can help preserve muscle, slow age-related decline, and radically change your health trajectory. Sarcopenia is the progressive loss of muscle mass, strength, and function that starts in your 30s and accelerates every decade. By age 60, most adults are losing 3–8% of muscle mass every 10 years. If you don’t lift, it’s even Everyone Needs a CoachThe best in the world all have coaches. Now you can too.Every elite athlete has a coach. Every world-class performer, every great CEO, every Olympic champion. Not because they are bad at what they do — because they are serious about it. The higher the stakes, the more obvious it becomes: nobody reaches their potential alone. And yet for the most important project of your life — your own health — almost everyone goes it alone. No plan, no feedback, no one in your corner. Just willpower and good intentions, which run out by February. A great coach sees what you cannot see in yourself. They keep you accountable on the days you would rather quit. They adjust the plan when life changes. They notice the small problem before it becomes a big one, and they remind you how far you have already come. It was never that you lacked discipline. You lacked a system, and someone to run it with you. For most of history, this kind of guidance was reserved for the wealthy and the professional. A personal trainer, a nutritionist, a sleep specialist, a doctor who actually knows you — that is a team most people will never be able to afford. This is exactly whatThe true cost of alcoholNew studies and real-world data on alcohol, health, and longevity.When you go to a gas station, you see “unleaded gasoline.” Why there was lead in the first place? In the 1920s, General Motors began adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline to reduce engine knock. The risks were already suspected. Health officials and even internal company chemists warned of toxicity. Still, it was marketed as a breakthrough. Over the next 50 years, leaded fuel contaminated the air, soil, and water. By the 1970s, pediatricians were reporting widespread cognitive impairment in children. Blood lead levels were researched and directly correlated with lower IQ and behavioral issues. This finally triggered a global phaseout. The U.S. banned leaded gasoline in cars in 1996—almost 20 years later. Even though the data was pretty obvious (lead is very bad for humans, and has no benefits) the last country stopped selling it in 2021, just a few years ago. Similar things happened with cigarettes, and now we are starting to see with microplastics. But human progress and society change is slow, taking decades. Now we’re learning the same about alcohol. The science is shifting. What wasEverything is ConnectedSleep, food, stress, movement: your body is one system, not ten apps.A bad night of sleep makes you crave sugar the next day. The sugar spikes your glucose, which crashes your energy, which makes you skip the gym, which raises your stress, which wrecks your sleep again. Round and round it goes. Your body is not a list of separate problems. It is one system, wired together by thousands of feedback loops. Pull on any thread and the whole web moves. You cannot fix sleep without fixing stress. You cannot fix weight without fixing sleep. It is all one loop. Most health tools see only a sliver. One app counts your steps. Another logs your food. A third tracks your sleep, a fourth your heart, a fifth your weight. Each one is blind to the other four. So you get five disconnected charts and no understanding. The steps app cannot tell you that you walked less because you slept badly. The food app cannot tell you that you overate because you were stressed. The story is in the connections, and the connections are exactly what gets lost. Gyroscope brings the signals back together. Sleep, food, movement, heart, mind — in one place, on one timeline, so the patterns How strong is your engine?Why VO2 max matters so much for power, endurance, and lifespan.Ever dreamt of owning a V12 supercar? Like a Ferrari 812 Superfast, Lamborghini Aventador, or the Aston Martin DBS... These beasts are built for one thing: performance. We're talking engines with over 800 horsepower, 0–60 acceleration in 2-3 seconds, and price tags north of $400,000. These machines are marvels of engineering, precise, powerful, and capable of pushing physics to its limit. Now imagine you’re handed the keys to one and told: “It’s all yours. Enjoy!” But there’s a catch… You’re only allowed to drive it in first gear. No redlining. No testing its limits. No pushing that engine to feel what it’s really capable of. Sounds frustrating, right? The thing is, you already own a high-performance engine: your body. And most of us are cruising through life stuck in first gear, never realizing what we’re capable of. That “engine” inside you—your heart, lungs, and muscles—has a real metric for performance: it’s called VO2 max. VO2 Max might sound like technical exercise jargon, but it’s essentially a measure of how powerful your body’s “oxygen engine” is. In simple terms, it is the How calories workA practical look at energy, calories, and how the body really works.A new asteroid was recently spotted, containing millions of tons of gold and precious metals. At current prices, those could be worth many trillions of dollars. Exciting. Imagine if we could get it. We would all be rich! That’s how we see gold today—scarce, precious, life-changing. Just a single bar of it could change your life. But the reality is, if we were able to bring that asteroid home, it wouldn’t be that valuable. With trillions of extra tons, gold would no longer be rare or valuable. Suddenly, lugging around a heavy, soft, shiny metal would be a hassle, not a blessing. Its value would vanish overnight. This has happened before—in the past we used to highly value rare things like salt, or tea. Companies made billions of dollars sailing around the world to procure these rare items. Now you can get them at any corner store for less than a dollar, For almost all of human history, calories were very rare, like gold or bitcoin. You wanted as much as you could get. But now we have flipped that equation. They have gone from rare, to having too much. Instead of trying to burn less caWhy calorie deficits "do not work"The most common reasons a supposed calorie deficit fails in practice.“I’m eating in a calorie deficit but not losing weight!” If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many people diligently try to cut calories, only to find the scale stuck. Does that mean calorie deficits don’t work? No – a *proper* calorie deficit does work for weight loss (it’s simple physics and biology). But if your deficit isn’t yielding results, chances are something is off in the way you’re implementing it. In other words, it’s not the deficit that’s broken – it’s how you’re tracking or managing it. In this article, we’ll look at the 5 most common reasons your “calorie deficit” might not be “working” and how to address each one. From hidden calories that sneak into your diet to metabolic adaptations that change your needs, we’ll cover what might be sabotaging your progress… and then what to do about it! One of the biggest reasons a calorie deficit “fails” is simply because you’re not actually in a deficit — often due to untracked calories. It’s incredibly easy to forget or skip logging certain items. Or just miss logging a meal or day entirely. Your MyFitnessPal app says you The Levels of HealthA simple framework for survival, performance, and longevity.When most people think of “being healthy,” they imagine not being sick. If you don’t have the flu, you’re good. If your doctor doesn’t call you with bad lab results, you’re fine. But health isn’t binary. It’s not just sick vs. well. In reality, health exists on a spectrum — and how far you climb on that spectrum determines not just how long you live, but how well you live. We like to think of it as three levels of health: Each level is important, but each comes with a ceiling. Stop at Level 1 and you’ll survive — but life will feel flat and fragile. Just one fall away from death. Climb to Level 2 and you’ll feel unstoppable most days. More powerful, life can be more fun. Reach Level 3 and you’ll give yourself the best chance of staying strong, sharp, and independent for decades. When you are born as a human, you are invited to play this game. If you are losing or struggling on level 1, it may feel like a terrible game. Badly designed. Not fair. But if you know the rules and can play it well, it is the most fun adventure in the world. So let’s dig a little deeper into each level… ThisWhy Track Your LifeWhy personal tracking matters and how to do it usefully.I was heading to the airport. About 100,000 people had viewed my realtime location that weekend, and many were keeping an eye on my every move. A few days before, I had put up my new website making all my tracking public. Steps, blood pressure, cholesterol, location, even my latest heart rate (which I was manually checking every few hours, since heart rate trackers hadn’t been invented yet). Everything was all out there for visitors to see. It gave me a lot of extra motivation to go be active, and do some interesting things to keep everyone entertained. Some people wrote in to say hi. One person told me my last run disappointed him (“a sneeze burns more calories”) but we met up for coffee and are friends now. This was about 10 years ago now, before the Apple Watch even existed. Before Gyroscope was started. Before tracking your life became a mainstream thing that millions of people would start to do, just by owning a phone. Since then, the world has changed a lot. And unfortunately, humanity has become even less healthy, at least if you look at the stats for obesity, prediabetes, dep
Questions from members
?Food photo portionsMy photos are being analyzed as high. Why is this?Generally when this happens, the photos are zoomed in and the food looks massive in the photo. Taking photos with a bit more perspective or from a distance of a few feet should help with accuracy. As long as it’s in focus, cameras are generally sharp enough so you don’t need to get extremely close up. You can also always type in details. For some obvious things it isn’t necessary, but it is always available as a way to share more details about what you ate. Especially if you didn’t eat exactly what is in the picture, like more or less servings.?Daytime sleep and Health ScoreI started sleeping in the daytime instead of at night, but now I am not seeing the sleep report and my Health Score has dropped. Is this a bug with the app?We highly recommend sleeping at night. You can follow other schedules and switch the app to “Nonstandard sleep mode” to turn off the built-in timing, but it is likely your Health Score will go down. This isn’t something we are doing, but just based on the signals of your body. The score is based on canonical signals like your benchmarks, HRV, blood levels, bodyfat, blood pressure and thousands of other signals. If you are getting bad sleep (or even jetlagged from travel), this will show up in your trends and show some warnings. If you are forced to work at night, this may be unavoidable. But if you have control over your schedule, we highly recommend sleeping at night for the best results.?Exercise and calorie targetsI cycled for four hours but my calorie target did not go up. Is the total daily energy chart wrong, or useless if it does not count exercise?It was already expected, and included in the day’s target. Gyroscope calculates your TDEE: total energy expenditure, which includes all factors like exercise. TDEE means BMR plus exercise calories, and based on your typical amounts it was already predicted and factored in. The daily allocation for exercise may be a little lower than what you did in an epic session, but then the next day it may be near 0, so the average is designed to be a realistic total based on a period of a few weeks. And if you did indeed start exercising 5-10x more than before every day, then your calorie targets will start to go up in the next calculation within a few days. If your Apple Watch says a workout was a certain high amount of calories, that doesn’t mean your total for the day has increased by that amount. It could very easily pull from other parts of the day, so your total expenditure remains surprisingly close to what was expected.