The Ultimate Personal Health Experiment: CGMs, Sleep, Exercise & Other wearables.

Boris Berjan

Jan 25, 2022 • 7 min read

This blog post is going to encompass a four week health optimization journey where I in detail outline every single step and action item I take.

The issue with any effort is not having a target. The saying "I want to get healthier" is always destroyed by an emotional reaction/trigger when your will power is down - meaning, say you put in 12 hours of work, forgot to eat the whole day and you crave a pizza. The vague sentiment of "wanting to be healthy" will not stop you from having that pizza in the moment.

Everyone understands that in the long term being healthy is important, yet it's extremely difficult to make "healthy" decisions when you don't know what those are, why you are making them, how they are being tracked and planning ahead of time to setup for success.

Thus over the next four week I'm going to be giving you extreme levels of detail on what i'm doing, why i'm doing it and how I am going to as objectively as possible analyze the progress/non-progress. Let's get started.

Choosing Health Goals

When reviewing all the options offered by our service over at theiahealth.ai I decided to choose three that were most important to me currently.

Ordered in priority for me:

extend life
improve mental clarity and focus
understand how food affects my body

Tools i'm going to use in order to track my health goals:

CGMs (Continuous glucose monitors)
Theia (Reads and analyzes glucose data)
Apple watch (Fitness & Heart rate tracking)
Oura ring (Sleep and body temperature tracking)
Myfitnesspal (calorie counting, food log and eating windows)
Renpho (weight and body composition tracking)
Luminosity (IQ testing)
Motion (calendar organization, scheduling and measuring screen time activities)
Iqtest (i'm going to use two different sites - an initial site for my first test and a second site for my second test. This will avoid skewed data due to me remembering questions from the first test
Test 1 - https://iqtest.com/
Test 2 - TBD

Establishing A Baseline

For every health goal I outlined, I need to establish a baseline of where i'm at now and I will be taking proactive measures to improve upon those goals.

Here is a breakdown of how i'm approaching each goal:

Extend life

Below are all the key biometric data points that have longevity backed studies.

Fasting glucose range of 72-85mg/dL
Average glucose range of 79-100mg/dL
Post meal glucose goal of 115mg/dL with less than 30mg/dL spikes from pre-meal levels
6-7 hours of sleep (there are studies that state 7-8 hours is optimal - however i'm going to go with 6-7 as my personal bias is to have more hours in the day)
150 to 300 minutes per week of moderate aerobic activity (walking, running, swimming, biking), or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, or a mix of both
Twice per week resistance training
There is no clear clinical studies that show caloric restriction leads to a longer lifespan in humans - although there are numerous studies that show this in other species. Therefore I am not including caloric restriction as a life extension biometric.
Persistently high HRV (heart rate variability) seems to be a good marker of longevity.

Improve mental clarity and focus

There will be overlap on the biometrics I need to hit for all my goals, so i'm going to expand past biodata to get more granular in my tracking.

use screen Time to track productive vs. neutral vs. distracting time spent on the computer (I will post a screenshot once my first week is complete below)

track and tag deep work scheduled and completed on my calendar. My calendar app records when I did tasks and how long they took. I have provided a before screenshot below and will post an after screenshot with analysis after 7 days.

play IQ app everyday to see if I can start scoring better and also to see if I feel any sharper
conduct my first IQ test through https://iqtest.com/ - then conduct a second test from a different site in four weeks.

First IQ test - Conducted Jan 24 (ended it and got results at (9:19pm EST)

IQ Score: 126

The time it took me to complete the test.

Understand how foods affect my body

For this specific goal i'm going to plan my meals for the week and eat them without modifications. The meals aren't going to follow any strict diet, rather it will be things that I like to eat which would all be considered "healthy" by one type of person or another.

I will try to keep the meals at the exact times everyday in order to minimize variables as much as possible.

The point here is to see what actually happens inside the body vs. what people preach will happen.

I will be using the Theia app which uses continuous biodata learning through CGMs to show you how your body reacts to events (including food).
here is the meal plan I have chosen for a baseline of testing:

Mon - Sun

8:30am

black coffee (1 cup)

12:45-1:45pm - lunch

Protein French Toast

4 pieces of white bread (italiano)
200ml of egg whites
2 scoops of collagen protein (vanilla)
¼ tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp of cinnamon
1 sachet of stevia extract
40ml of makadamia nut milk
1 tbsp of maple syrup
1 cup strawberries
30ml of coconut whipped cream

Supplements

1 ADK tablet
3 NAD+ tablets

6:30-7:45pm - dinner

Steak, Rice & Salad

7-9oz steak
½ cup of white rice
Big salad
Mixed greens
Red pepper
Cucumber
Arugula
Green onion
½ avacado
1 tbsp of olive oil
1 tbsp of acv

Acknowledgement of Confirmation bias & placebo effect

Lastly I wanted to acknowledge a few things going into the experiment:

I have been experimenting and testing on my body for years, thus I know the levers to pull in order to optimize for my goals better than someone coming into the dark.
I will be able to influence better biomarker results by changing food and lifestyle events with almost 100% certainty because of where i'm starting at. For example I already have a clear path to optimize nutrition from it's starting point.
I have already used and learned from almost all of the biometric tracking devices I have listed.
My brain is wired to find "proof" of optimization merely since I created this experiment and I am sharing it publicly.

Knowing all of the above I will do my best to call out confirmation bias and rely on objective data analysis to do the talking.

Lastly, this experiment wasn't setup to show my optimal health performance out of the gate, rather to open your eyes in understanding the difference between what you think might be healthy vs. what actually is.

I also want to show how you can make small changes to lifestyle over a four week period that will get results ... or not.

Which one will it be? Let the games begin.

Day 1 - Jan 25 2022

Overall had a decent day - my glucose was a bit off and I have a lot on my plate. I just need to focus and block distractions.

missed the scale readings & missed doing luminosity

Day 2 - Jan 26 2022

I didn't plan properly and broke the mealplan - didn't have the same dinner. Will be back on it tmr. Just goes to show how much planning matters - since I wasn't ready i was stressed and at the end of the day since i've been working for 10+ hours I had little will power left to go shopping - especially in the Toronto Snow storm.

Glucose still high - i'm wondering if the protein french toast is keeping it there. Shall see over 5 days.

missed the scale readings & missed doing luminosity

Day 3 - Jan 27 2022

Getting a vaccine today so it will be interesting to see how the body responds. I'm expecting to feel a bit sick for a day.

Week 1 - Feb 1 2022

Overall review:

I didn't plan well or communicate with the people involved in my life how i'm going to execute this properly - this led to headaches and frustration
I didn't buy all the food on time and then had nights where I didn't eat according to my meal plan
The French Toast which I have kept as a constant has been taking a tool on me. I feel a little sluggish overall and it seems to have kept me in a pre-diabetic state. I have recorded some of my highest spikes ever just eating this one meal.
There is a lot of moving parts in my life right now and not being totally organized is showing how it throws off my flow.
For this upcoming week i'm going to focus on changing one variable

Glucose Overview

spikes really drove up my overall glucose levels

Week 2 - Feb 7 2022

adding 2 eggs and butter to french toast has started to curb the glucose
regardless anytime I eat french toast I want to eat carb heavy at night too
felt a bit chaotic with work last week and then all I really focused on was the one french toast meal to optimize