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Lifespan & Longevity Guide

Tools to measure and extend your lifespan

Until now we have talked about more abstract ideas. Obesity, food quality, NAD levels, blue zones...

Now we will move from theory into application. This final part of the guide sets you up with the exact devices, tools and systems to set up in your life to actually maximize your longevity. These tools can be the difference between losing steam after a few days, or staying consistent and reaching the 80/20 balance needed for real results.


The Framework

Using data in your life is simple. There are just three steps: Track → Understand → Improve. Many people get stuck at step 1, but this is a powerful loop once started.

Can you get away without any of these steps? Without using tools? Just memorizing every word of the guide instead of delegating it to an app or a coach? Yes, but success is much less likely...

We use tools & technology in most of our lives to enable things that would have otherwise been difficult. Driving somewhere instead of walking for hours, or writing something in your notes instead of hoping to memorize it forever.

Similar tools can help you get a lot further with your health. With the right tools set up, you may be able to get everything done with 10-20 minutes a day, while otherwise your health could take many hours a day or get ignored entirely.

Tracking

Should you track your health? Some people already have a strong mental sense of these numbers or in touch with their body and signals. Others may have no idea where they are and will benefit from setting up real tracking. If everything is already going perfectly and you can sense differences in each day, you may not need it. For others who have not seen good results with that approach, setting up real tracking can be life changing.

In either case, being more precise and having the history can be useful. If this approach of winging it hasnt worked well for you in the past, then you should try switching. Also some people get overconfident about their health with the ease of being young and fit, but as they get older more and more people find they need these systems.

Understanding

Fully understanding the cause and effect and how everything fits together will put you in much more control over your life and body. Right now people have limited free will and agency over themselves, but this can be changed.

Can you accidentally get results even without tracking data or understanding why it is happening? Yes, sometimes. However, it is harder to maintain.

Skipping this step can lead to dangerous superstitions and ignorance about how to manage your own health. With more data and history to review, you can validate your theories to question your assumptions and constantly improve your mental models.

Improving

Helps you make better use of your time and energy by focusing on the right thing at the right time. Currently most people spend a few weeks a year (generally around Jan 1) focused on improving these things, and the rest of the year it gets ignored. More balanced and consistent application will provide much better results and help avoid significant health issues later.

You may want to change some important metrics, like your bodyfat levels, high blood pressure or A1c levels which can be measures of your diabetes risk or longevity. Perhaps your doctor said they need to be better. However, they can’t be changed in a day. So can you still make it happen? Instead of just giving up or say it is impossible, you can try looking at all the leading and lagging indicators to make sure you are on track.

All the metrics to monitor

What do we mean when we say data? It’s not just weight or steps or calories. Those are some of the most key players here, but there is a whole wealth of information to monitor and optimize. People often over-focus on calories and end up ignoring the dozens of more actionable metrics.

Short Term (Review Daily)

There are many actionable and changing metrics that you can check about yourself daily. You can start with reviewing your previous day’s report in the morning, and then keep an eye on your stats throughout the day to manage them directly. Note that weight isn’t involved here — managing these leading indicators of your health will eventually have an impact on your weight, cholesterol, Health Score and all the important but longer term metrics.

  • Meal Grades
  • Protein total
  • Fiber total
  • Sugar total
  • Fasting time
  • Calories in
  • Total Steps
  • Mood Levels
  • Stress & Cortisol
  • Sleep Timing
  • Places visited
  • Walking time
  • Driving time

The info shown in Gyroscope’s food XRAY or similar food trackers will give you much more actionable details than simply looking at calories, for example.

Medium Term (Review Weekly)

Check these every monday when weekly report comes out. They take a while to change in meaningful ways.

  • Health score
  • Sleep quality
  • Weight trend
  • Average calorie intake
  • Average protein amount
  • Average sugar amount
  • Resting heart rate & HRV
  • Immune score

These metrics can be reviewed in the app, but also seen on your computer in the larger Trends dashboard. Browsing these is similar to checking your bank statement occasionally, making sure everything is as you expected.

Long Term (3-6 months)

Other things may take even longer to see significant changes. You can check these a bit less frequently to make sure everything is going in the right direction. If the short and medium term things were managed properly, then these should end up closer to where you want them.

  • Bodyfat levels
  • A1c
  • Cholesterol levels & other lab tests
  • Blood pressure
  • Vo2Max

Setting up your trackers

In the past, getting all these metrics cost many thousands of dollars and was a lot of effort. Only the extremely wealthy or professional athletes had access to this level of detail. In recent years, these tools have become more mainstream and the costs have come down significantly, while the experience has also improved.

Tracking has become much more automatic and accurate. Everything we listed above is now easily available to everyone, for just a few hundreds dollars in commonly available components.

Almost everything can now be measured with just the Gyroscope app with an Apple Watch! Many of the sensors used are already embedded in your phone and watch, so you may not even need anything else. Here we will share some of the most common devices and apps that people use, along with their benefits and prices.

Your weight & bodyfat

In a guide for losing weight and bodyfat, of course tracking weight and bodyfat will be a priority.

What gets measured gets managed. If you’re trying to manage your weight, but don’t actually know it, it will be harder to know if you are going in the right direction. Without monitoring, it is easy to get disconnected from reality. It is not impossible to get results without actually tracking your weight, but means all other metrics need to be watched much more closely.

Checking your weight daily can be useful for:

  • Showing you are going in the direction you want
  • Verifying you are in a calorie deficit
  • Warning you if it isn’t actually working
  • Warning you when you reach a plateau
  • Differentiating between muscle and fat loss

When you are making progress, you will see gradual changes in your trend week over week that will start to add up. If it starts going in the other direction or stalls for more than a week (short-term fluctuations are different and need to be ignored), that can be a sign you need to investigate deeper. Possibly the culprit is some junk food that recently entered your diet, increased stress, decrease in sleep, or many other culptits. Having that knowledge can let you respond to changes or find issues within a few weeks, where otherwise you may have gone weeks or months.

Your weight can be one of the most simple and useful metrics to keep an eye on. Tracking your bodyfat is the only real way to measure your calorie surplus or deficit. All the other methods (like calculating it by your age and height) or estimating it based on your total movement are just statistical, based on population averages and not necessarily what you burned that day.

It is essential to have a high level view by seeing the 3-6 month or year term trend. Do not look at just the last few readings, or consider just a single number on the scale. Not only will they not be as useful, they can actually be misleading. Your bodyfat won’t change much — up or down — within a day or two. If you see those changes in your weight, that isn't bodyfat modification and shouldn't be considered.

Learning how to use a scale is important to get any of these benefits. Otherwise, you may as well be looking at a random number generator. The incorrect way to do it is: stand on the scale, look at the number, think that is your accurate weight, and start making decisions or changing your behavior based on it. This is what most people do, but things start to go very wrong with this approach.

If your weight is higher than yesterday, you can feel you did something wrong or may give up entirely on the plan. “I ate healthy and it didn’t work! I was penalized for it!” In other cases, you may have been more unhealthy but the number went temporarily lower, and made you think that you “got away with” no consequences. “Hey I lost weight after eating that pizza, let’s do that every day!” If you’re using the scale and using it for this type of decision making, or finding the process to be very emotionally triggering, you may be better off without one. Other data points like how your clothes fit or your resting heart rate can provide equally useful signal in the short term.

The most optimal and useful dataset will be weighing yourself consistently every morning, with a scale that gets weight and also estimates bodyfat. Otherwise, check it as often as you can to ensure a strong signal in your graph.

What scale should you buy?

  • Any scale that gets weight
  • Cheap renpho scale ($20-30 and does bodyfat)
  • Withings wifi scale (most common — $99)
  • Fitbit scale (bit more expensive, very similar)

Wifi vs bluetooth? Wifi is more luxurious, sending the measurement through your home wifi directly to Gyroscope. Just step on it and your data is there like magic. Having this kind of setup in your house will make tracking your weight every single day very trivial.

If you don’t want to shell out for a wifi scale, there are a lot of other cheaper or free alternatives.

Bluetooth scales are still digital, but needs to go to your phone first and adds a bit more friction. Use an app that syncs to an app on your phone, then that saves to Apple Health, and then gets synced to Gyroscope

You can also use any low-tech scale, like the one often at your gym. Just enter the number into the + button in Gyroscope to store it! The measurement may also be slightly less precise, if you are wearing all your clothes when you use it — compared to a scale you may have in your bathroom at home.

If you are traveling, you can often find scales at gyms or locker rooms, but it is a challenge! It can be common to arrive home to unexpected changes. Generally if you're not tracking your food you will want to check weight more frequently, and if youre not tracking your weight then youll want to be more vigilant about tracking food and being more disciplined. Tracking both together will give you the most complete visibility into what is happening.

Tracking your food!

Food is the most complex part of this process, and tracking it has a huge variety of options.

A) Fasting Only

You can simply take photos of your food in Gyroscope, and the fasting times will be automatically calculated for you. If you are more disciplined, popular apps like Zero can also let you track fasting with a start and stop button.

With Gyroscope it can be retroactive even if you forget to press the button, adding a photo later. This is especially useful because you don’t have to remember to open an app exactly when you start or stop eating, which often results in incorrect data.

Pros: Free and simple to get started, very little effort to track. The simplicity and ease of just tracking fasting times makes this appealing for many, and is still tracking to start getting results.

Cons: other aspects of nutrition can easily get overlooked, like if you getting enough protein or your meal quality. If you are fasting and only eating one or two meals, having your remaining meals have all the nutrients you need is even more important for your long term health.

  • Gyroscope: Free for fasting tracker
  • Zero: Free, $69/year with features

B) Calorie counting apps

Calorie counting apps like MyFitnessPal are the most commonly used. This category has exploded in the last 10 years, with hundreds of similar apps now available in the App Store letting you search for your food and enter in the calories and macronutrients.

Pros: can see macros of your foods in realtime to learn a bit more about what you are eating

Cons: Overfocus on calories, lot of work, the data is often wrong (20 or 30% misreporting is typical) since they are selecting from a database that other users have input and most people dont have the nutrition background to correctly self analyze weight or serving sizes.

Myfitnesspal: Biggest food database so there is higher chance of seeing your item in the search, BUT it is mostly just user-input data. Generally you will only be able to track calories and macros, and not the complete breakdown of what is in the food. The data from these types of apps is often not synced correctly into apple health, since it loses all the details like time and food name, just writing the calorie number which has limited context

Chronometer: Similar design to MyFitnessPal, but tries to get micronutrients too. Not all the data shown in the app is exported accurately to Apple Health, limited data quality (often info is double-saved or written into a day in the future without actually being eaten)

C) Nutritionist or dietitian

Another approach is to hire a professional to work with you and give suggestions. This is similar to working with a trainer at a gym, but for your food. Sometimes they will also help with gym workouts and other parts of your health.

Pros: can provide additional accountability, more insightful suggestions than a calorie app like myfitnesspal would provide, higher chance of success.

Cons: can be much more expensive than using an app on your own, costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars depending on how much time you spend with them. Limited tech integrations often mean talking over text or sending spreadsheets and screenshots back and forth. Not everyone will be true experts in nutrition.

D) Coaching within Gyroscope

You can join Gyroscope Coach to have a human guide you, with the benefits of Fasting & Nutrition data similar to tracking it yourself but also the guidance and accountability of a human. .

This provides the same benefits as above, but in a whole platform so your data and history is automatically there. The human just provides the insights and accountability. At scale, the costs are much lower than hiring someone yourself, but still higher than using an app on your own.

Pros: Everything is integrated and tracks as easily as possible. Having a human expert is the best way to get accountability. Can get feedback on sleep, exercise and much more at the same time, leading to better balance.

Cons: Paying humans is still more expensive than an automated app, costs $199/month to provide a great experience.

E) Food XRAY

A middle-ground between having a human coach or doing everything yourself. In XRAY, nutritionists analyze your food photos and craft a metabolic grade for each meal.

Combine the high quality macro and micronutrient data with AI coaching to get daily insights on how to eat and lose bodyfat. With all the information from this guide, you should have a simple plan to follow on your own.

Pros: Lower cost, save time and energy, still have a human nutritionist to do your food analysis, have an accurate history

Cons: Some people may need more accountability or guidance from a coach, requires taking photos of your food.

F) Glucose Monitor

Tracking your glucose can be an alternative, or extra addon to the above options. When on a ketogenic diet or fasting, monitoring ketones and glucose levels can reveal things happening in your body that you were unaware of, compared to just storing more details about food you remember eating.

You can keep an eye on your glucose with a traditional monitor (more accurate and cheaper) or CGM (more automated and less effort) to see your blood sugar graphs.

Everyone should track their glucose with a classic monitor for at least a few weeks before upgrading to a CGM. Generally, both are used together to calibrate your metrics and verify accuracy. Skipping normal trackers and going straight to a CGM is like refusing to learn to drive on any car that isn’t a Ferrari.

Pros: Glucose monitoring can be effective for those addicted to sugar, at high risk for diabetes, or not sure whether carbs are having a negative effect on their body. Seeing the graph go up and down can be more motivating to stop than just reading it in a guide somewhere.

Cons: However, it is still very possible to gain bodyfat while not having any glucose spikes. Many other variables must also be considered that are not covered by a glucose monitor. $400/month just for the DEXCOM hardware, sensors only last a few days — it is not like an Apple Watch where you buy the device and then you can use it for years.

Glucose covers one important aspect of your health, but still leaves you to self-track and manage everything else like energy balance, protein, etc.

Optimizing your glucose & ketone levels

Avoiding high glucose spikes and reducing insulin resistance are important for weight loss, but also general health even if you are happy with your weight. There are a few easily available tools to focus on those metrics to understand and prioritize your glucose levels.

Most ketone and glucose monitors can be easily purchased on Amazon for less than $50, while some more exotic monitors designed for Type 1 Diabetes patients (who use them to constantly administer insulin) have more limitations and can require a prescription.

  • Precision Xtra ($50 + refills)
  • Keto Mojo ($50 + refills)
  • Food XRAY ($99/month)
  • Freestyle Libre ($200/week) (requires doctor’s note in the US)
  • Dexcom G6 ($400/month) (requires doctor’s note in the US)

Glucose tracking is a complex topic that is explored in the Glucose & Ketones chapter of the Academy.

The basics are: if you follow the instructions in Part 3 exactly (having balanced, high protein meals with mostly whole foods), you will likely never need one and your blood sugar will be well managed by your body for free.

If you are not following those guidelines and have a higher sugar and processed food intake, or if you are already obese and have developed symptoms of prediabetes, then it will be useful to know and improve your glucose until you are back to a healthy baseline.

On the other hand, ketone monitoring can also be a useful tool for those who are already metabolically healthy to pushing themselves to their limits with a ketogenic diet or longer fasts.

The simplest approach is just tracking your food with the Food XRAY. You can get warned in the app about what meals are not well balanced and likely to cause a glucose spike. This is fully non-invasive, and implements the guidelines mentioned in this guide — like avoiding excess added sugar from processed foods, and prioritizing high protein whole foods.

For 90% of people, just following those recommendations will be sufficient and save them hundreds of dollars a month. Others may want to see for themselves. In that case, we suggest you prick your finger 30 minutes after a meal to get an official reading of your glucose (or ketones if low-carb). If the number is much higher than 100, then that can be a sign of a blood sugar spike or potential developing insulin resistance.

If you are constantly finding your blood sugar levels are high after meals, a more extreme option is to set up a continuous glucose monitor. Generally only prescribed to people with Type 1 Diabetes, some people who are prediabetic may also find significant value in this experiment. These can be obtained from your doctor or purchased online on Amazon (depending on where you live). In the US, some companies will sell a prescription for a monitor for an additional fee.

There are two types of monitors on the market: the cheaper Freestyle Libre (the round one), which doesn’t have bluetooth or save to Apple Health, or the higher-end Dexcom which will automatically notify you when your glucose goes up, and save the data into Apple Health so it can be seen in your Gyroscope reports. If you are going to spend the money for a nice CGM, we highly recommend the Dexcom G6.

For extremely rapid spikes and drops, continuously monitoring may provide a better insight into the shape, while a fingerprick at the wrong time may not capture a rapid spike. However, in most cases a fingerprick will actually be more accurate since a CGM is about 30 minutes delayed from your actual blood sugar (due to looking at sugar levels in your skin rather than your blood).

The main downside here is the cost, of $10+ per day for a Dexcom CGM is not cheap. It is also not a complete solution, and only provides benefit in addition to the other food tracking. The cost is literally equivalent to buying a new Apple Watch and then throwing it away every month (about $400 for a set of sensors). Since it is so expensive, we recommend using it under the supervision of a Gyroscope coach to get the best insights and food recommendations from that expensive data.

A free alternative is to look at the graphs of other people who have done this, and copy their answers. While everyone will have slightly different reactions depending on their muscle mass and metabolic health, generally it will be close enough. For example, @glucosegoddess on Instagram posts common food swaps and her glucose levels.

Tracking other aspects of your health

For weight loss, food and bodyfat are the essentials that should get you most of the way to your goal. However, there are many more variables in this equation. For some people, that will be enough to start seeing results. For others, tracking your entire life accurately can help to keep things optimized and avoid failing when things get harder.

Sleep

  • Apple Watch
  • Oura Ring
  • Eight Sleep
  • Just your phone! (Gyroscope sleep AI)
  • Other iPhone apps

Included in Track membership ($5/month)

Apple Watch at night — measures resting heart rate and HRV, highly recommended. Data feeds into Gyroscope so you can get your sleep score.

Oura ring at night — another way to track sleep, if you dont like watches it could be a good option. Simlar data to apple watch but a bit more sleep focused, also gets temperature! ($300)

Eight Sleep mattress — another option that doesn't require a wearable but still gets your HRV and other metrics. Also provides cooling for people who may not have AC or get hot at night. ($2,000)

These are not the only options. There are hundreds of other Apple Health connected apps & devices. If you just have your phone, you can also use the built-in Sleep AI feature in Gyroscope to estimate your sleep time from your phone’s motion.

What is HRV or RHR? Why do you want to know yours?

The most powerful metrics that will come from your Apple Watch or other heart rate monitor are resting heart rate and heart rate variability. One single data point of these does not mean very much, but seeing your trend in Gyroscope over time will add up to a powerful signal about how your body is doing.

  • Check your sleep score in the morning
  • Check your heart trends weekly
  • Get warnings when problems are detected

Resting heart rate can reflect your physical fitness more closely (or be thrown off by drinking or eating too close to bed), while HRV is more of a signal the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Generally as people lose bodyfat and improve their health, these metrics improve dramatically. This can be a good fallback if you don’t track your weight, and provide more actionable feedback than the fluctuation of a weight measurement.

Running, Cycling, Gym, Yoga & other workouts

Wearing an Apple Watch during the day can help to better track your steps and workouts. They can be tracked even without (via the Places tracker or manually entering in the start and end times), but with the watch you will have heart rate data and more precise detection.

Remember, the point of tracking your workouts is NOT for measuring the calorie burn count (an inconsequential change to your total daily expendiure), but for the many other important benefits of exercise, including preserving your muscle mass, reducing stress levels, increasing cardiovascular fitness, and more.

If you do outdoor running or cycling, VO2max can be estimated too based on your heart rate and speed.

Places & Travels

As you may remember, exercise accounts for just about 5% of your daily calorie expenditure, while non exercise activity can be around 15%. Since this is a much bigger part of your day and total usage, it can be useful to understand and optimize these as much as your gym workout.

You can use the Places tracker to track where you spend your time, where you walk when you leave the house, transportation types like driving, and more. The restaurants, gyms and other buildings you visit can also have relevance in your life. Seeing these in a timeline or map can be more insightful than just trying to remember what you did yesterday.

Beyond the health implications of tracking your activity and places, there are other potential benefits for wanting an accurate history of where you were, like tax reporting or visa applications where you need to know how many days you spent somewhere, contact tracing, or just having memories of your life in the future.

Mood & Stress

One of the most underestimated parts of weight loss is your mental state. If stress is not managed correctly, it will generally lead to bad eating habits and a likelihood of storing more fat rather than getting rid of it.

If you have a job or family or do anything challenging in life, it is likely you are facing continuous stress. New problems like the pandemic make this even harder. How can you handle it? Do you have to wait until those issues have gone away to start losing weight?

There are many ways to manage stress, including exercise and meditation. Measuring your levels daily can be a useful tool in the process, to know whether they are properly being managed or if it needs more attention.

You can also check your DNA (using 23&me linked to Gyroscope) to see how your brain processes stressful situations and dopamine levels — known as the Worrier/Warrior gene. Some people are much more adversely affected by it (worriers), while others may perform fine in a more stressful situation or even need a moderate amount of tension (warriors) to reach peak dopamine levels.

  • Mood Tracker in Gyroscope (Free)
  • Measuring HRV with Apple Watch

The two primary metrics we use to track stress and estimate cortisol are your total mood scores (measured in the app using a technique called profile of mood states) and your HRV metrics, which during sleep can be a powerful indicator of how stressed your body is. Together, these signals can give you a very accurate understanding of your physical and mental stress.

Meditation

Meditation is a powerful tool that can address your stress more directly. However, it is not easy and can take a lifetime to learn. Some apps and guides can help get you started. Most popular meditation apps can also save to Apple Health and Gyroscope. Here are some of the most used...

  • Insight Timer
  • Wim Hof Method
  • Headspace
  • Calm
  • Waking Up
  • 10% Happier
  • Many more...

In addition to these apps, you can also meditate in Gyroscope directly. In the Score tab you can find a variety of guided meditations & breathwork classes.

Blood pressure

For those who are older or focused on longevity, blood pressure can also be useful to measure. There are a variety of low-cost blood pressure monitors on the market that can save to Apple Health, or the data can be easily logged directly (since it is just 2 numbers).

Tracking this metric over time can provide useful context on how losing bodyfat is affecting your general health, as well as may be relevant to share with your doctor.

Understand

So you’ve got your trackers set up and data is coming in every day. You see it in your daily report.

Now what? Often this is where people stop, but this is just the starting point! The Gyroscope is designed to help with the unique problem of how to understand all this valuable data.

You can start by finding your current averages to get your starting baseline. In that process you wlil get a much better idea of what needs focus, uncovering things that are below ideal or seeing where you are average. Or perhaps everything is great right now, and your challenge is simply to keep it that way.

There are a few tools available to help you better understand the data...

Trends Board

The most fundamental tool here is being able to see all your trends in one big view. This is like being able to look up your bank account online, you should always be able to pull it up and see your balances.

Health Score

Looking at all your trends every day is not very practical. You may not even know exactly what is a good or bad amount for each level. Your Health Score analyzes all of those for you every day and gives you the big picture analysis, the same way as an expert coach would.

This helps you make sure you are spending your time and energy in the most useful way. For example, if your sleep has gotten worse lately, you may want to go to bed earlier. If your steps have been really low, then walking more for a while may be wise. In other cases, nutrition may need more attention. Doing all of them perfectly is the goal, but if you are busy then you should make sure you spend your extra 10 or 20 minutes of attention where it is most needed and lift your lowest grade.

In the process, you will be alerted if there is a big drop in one category that is particularly urgent, if you haven’t been sleeping well, or if it seems your immune system is particularly weak. These warnings can be important alerts, like a check engine light for your car, to make changes and focus on repairs before a more serious issue arises.

Often when we push ourselves to the limits, our body has a variety of signals. If ignored, then more serious problems can occur. If you don’t always sleep perfectly or take complete care of yourself, or if you are in a high stress situation like an important job, monitoring these signals and using them to your advantage is essential.

These can have a significant impact on your weight and reaching your long term goals, as getting sick, injured or having a long period of high stress can set back or even undo all your hard work.

Metabolic Coach

The scoring in Gyroscope XRAY and Coach will provide a better understanding of your meals. Was it very processed? Is it deficient in protein, promoting muscle protein breakdown rather than synthesis? Is it low in the micronutrients you need, even if the calories were ok? Is it imbalanced and likely to cause a harmful glucose spike?

If you eat the same thing every day, these are extremely important insights to understand and adjust. Losing bodyfat without addressing these issues is possible but will be much more of a painful process, feeling hungry and unsatisfied along the way, as well as is less likely to last, adding the weight back on in the future.

Improve

Just tracking and observing isn’t enough. Now you need to start using it for good!

Otherwise, it is like buying a car and a GPS and just hanging out in your driveway. Let’s take this baby for a spin! Let’s review our roadmap here...

  • Set up a moderate and repeatable defic
  • Improve your diet so you dont feel hungry!
  • Increase deficit or reduce feeding window as your body adapts
  • Maintain steady weight loss and check your graph every week
  • Use the data and reporting to plan your life — more accurate and freeing , human brain is just not designed for long term health planning
  • As you get close to your ideal bodyfat, or after many months of deficit, start to switch back to maintenance or surplus to reset your set point
  • Continue eating high quality foods and the habits that got you there

Then, you have the option to switch to muscle building with a surplus, or just maintain for a few months. Helps to find a sustainable balance, reset your set point, make sure your body isn’t cutting costs on essential things like sex hormones, muscle production, mental productivity, etc.

Weekly Goals

Once you have the data, making very slight changes will add up over time. For this purpose, we have the Weekly Goals feature in Gyroscope Track.

Human coach

Everyone needs a coach. Some can get by with an automated version in the Health Score, while others may really benefit from having a human that can understand them and tailor their guidance.

The main downside of this is the cost, an expert human is much more than an algorithm. Generally, you should spend 3-5% of your income on your health, reinvesting in your body and mind. If you make six figures, investing some of it in having a coach is a no brainer. If budget is a concern, the Health Score and Academy can provide comparable benefits but require more time spent reading and planning.

TLDR

Tools like tracking, dashboards and coaching are not necessary but greatly improve your chances of success. Staying consistent for an entire year is the hardest part of the process, and good tools can help to motivate and guide you. There is no substitute for a human to keep you accountable — whether it is just your friends on a leaderboard, or a professional coach.

Much of the tracking you need can now be done simply with your phone — taking photos of your food for example, or seeing your daily steps. Accessories like a scale to measure your weight, or an Apple Watch for sleep and workouts, can give further details.

A lot of money is not required to start this journey. A cheap scale can cost just $20. Your Mood, Fasting & Weight can be tracked for free in Gyroscope, and are all you truly need.

Your life and health is constantly changing. One week you may need more sleep, another week you may need more exercise. This should be re-evaluated frequently rather than just memorizing one solution. Your metrics can help use your time most efficiently.

Misunderstanding your weight or calorie numbers can lead people down the wrong path. Your body is a marvelous machine that can self-regulate and repair. Focus on keeping it healthy through metrics like protein, sleep, steps and stress, and your weight and calories will often naturally take care of themselves.

If you want to track your calories or weight, we highly recommend having a coach interpret them for you, or at the very least using good software to do so.


Getting started

There is a lot to do here! We’re excited to help you get started.

Reading it once will just give you a high level overview. You can come back to this guide anytime to review all the insights and keep making adjustments or remind yourself of the process. It may take many weeks or months for these new habits to become part of your new routine. With the right tracking and tools, you’ll be able to monitor your progress along the way and keep on track.

The next step is to get the Gyroscope app and start setting up your free profile. Then, you’ll be able to start on the first chapter of the Health Academy (setting your goals) and start tracking your fasting times and mood for free.

Beyond that, you can select a human coach to be your guide, or start with just automated dashboards and tools like the Trends Dashboard and Health Score. In either case, you can start taking photos of your food to add them in the app and maintain a powerful visual history.