Ep. 017 - Weight Loss Technology

SHOW NOTES

If you’re a tech nerd like me, then you’re going to love today’s episode because we’re talking about everything related to weight loss technology.  More specifically, I am featuring a number of different devices that have come on to the market in the last 5 years and now gaining more momentum in helping people lose weight.  From apps to scales to wearables, I’ve got you covered.  

TRANSCRIPT

If you're a tech nerd like me, then you're gonna love today's episode because we're talking about everything related to weight loss technology. From apps to scales to wearables, I've got you covered today. So let's dive in.

Welcome to Man in the Arena, your go-to podcast for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity. Hey guys, and welcome to Man in the Rita Podcast.

I'm your host Craig Spear. If this is your first time stopping by, I wanna welcome you, and if you've been here before, thank you for coming back. Today we're talking about weight loss technology, and more specifically, I'm featuring a number of different devices that have come onto the market in the last five years, and now they're gaining more and more momentum in helping people lose weight.

Now, most of these devices, they have multiple applications, but for this episode, I'm going to focus in on their use with respect to weight loss specifically. Maybe in a future episode I'll highlight different tech related to workouts and recovery and hydration and all that stuff. But for today, I'm talking about weight loss tech only.

Before I jump in, I just wanna let you know that I'm not affiliated with any of these companies or these devices. I have used them all at some point, so I am going to speak to them from kind of an anecdotal experience. In saying that, if you wanna learn more about different products that I recommend and personally use, head on over to the spear method.com/gear and you can see all the different stuff that I use and recommend to my clients.

So with that, let's start with ketosis monitors. So when we burn energy, we primarily burn two sources. And I mentioned this before in other podcasts, but. We burn carbohydrates and we burn fat. When we are on a keto diet, that means that we're primarily consuming proteins and fats and we're not eating a lot of carbohydrates.

And the goal with that is to get into ketosis, whereby our body primarily uses our stored body fat as energy. And there's a number of different ketosis monitors out on the market. The most basic ones are not unlike a glucose. Monitoring device where you kind of prick your finger, you get some blood, you put that on a paper strip, and then a device analyzes that and tells you whether you're in ketosis or not.

And so you can get those on Amazon. They're fairly inexpensive, but there's a really cool device that's come out in the last few years called Lumen, L U m e N, and it's a breathalyzer style tool that uses the concentration of carbon dioxide in your breath to determine. If your body is using fat or carbohydrates for energy, I bought one of these and it's a really cool device because the tech in it is, it means handheld, so the tech in it is just phenomenal.

If you wanted to do this even just a few years ago, you had to go to a lab, like a sports lab, and they'd get you all fitted up and you know, it would take a lot of time and energy and money, and now you can have this device in your home and you can measure, you know what? Source of fuel you're using for energy.

And when it comes to weight loss, this is really key because then you know what your body is burning. And then as a result, you could optimize your diet or you could optimize your exercise routine to meet your specific needs. The other benefit of this device is just paired with the mobile app, and that gives you real time feedback on your metabolism.

And then this can provide personalized meal plans with this data. With the goal of improving your metabolic health. And so I just love this because I think that as a society we've become a snacking culture. We eat a lot of processed packaged foods that are primarily, you know, carbohydrate in nature. And so I think we've really become metabolically unhealthy and that, and of course, that's why we're seeing, you know, people with obesity and type two diabetes.

So this is a phenomenal device, really cool technology. The downside is, is it's pricey. So it starts at 249 US dollars, and that gets you three months of using this device and then they just cut you off. So they give you the device, but after three months it won't work with the app anymore. Now you can continue, but you know, their sort of business model is predicated on recurring use.

So that's how they keep making money. Okay, so that's something to consider. But I love this technology. I think it's really cool. I've used it. I gained some insight as to what foods were allowing me to get into ketosis and burn fat. And then it also showed me when it was time for me to actually eat more carbohydrates and helped me become more metabolically flexible.

The next type of tech that I want to cover is very similar to a ketosis monitor, but it's a continuous glucose monitor. Again, they have the old-fashioned device that's been around for a long time that diabetics have used where you can prick your finger, use the test strip, measure that in the sort of monitoring system.

But what they're doing now, which is really cool in the last few years, are these devices that stick onto the back of your arm. They get covered with a waterproof patch, and then they just continuously are measuring your blood and giving you real time feedback as to what the level is of your. Blood glucose.

And this is really helpful because you start to see trends and patterns with respect to your sleep, your exercise, how that impacts your blood sugar. And then of course you can test what types of foods will cause your blood sugar to spike. And then that's just really important information because as we know when it comes to weight loss, we want to keep our blood sugar low.

And again, not only does that help us use body fat for energy, but it's just a much healthier. Way to live. We know that high levels of insulin lead to so many different lifestyle diseases. So there's a couple of products if you live in the US that you can use. One is Levels Health. And it's a great product, really cool app.

Very similar is Nutrisense, which again, they're all very similar. They all use the same device, one manufacturer kind of manufacturers, the actual monitoring device, but they all have their own proprietary app and software that you can use. And of course there's different dieticians that will then analyze that data and help you make better choices.

If you live in Canada, you can't get access to these devices. They just can't simply ship over the border because of regulation. But if you live in Canada, you can go to Amazon and get what's called a Libra Freestyle two Device, and this is made by Abbott Technologies. The app isn't nearly as sophisticated or, you know, cool in, in how it looks in its interface, but you can still get that data that you need to make better choices and know how different foods are impacting your blood sugar.

So continuous glucose monitors, you know, this is the one device that I wish I could get every client on. I would have all of them on it just so they could see real time how certain foods are impacting their health and their body. The next device that I wanna talk about, it's not really device, it's more technology and it's AI technology.

And more specifically it's chat, G P T, so chat, G P T, and all these AI services that are coming out. I think there's gonna be even more and more specific to the weight loss space that are gonna get developed, but you can really ask chat G P T using a number of different prompts to help you meal plan. To determine your macro needs to determine your caloric needs, and you could really use it to specifically create a plan, a weight loss plan for you.

And this is really helpful to give you more information as to what foods you should be eating. You know how many calories, but it all comes down to how you prompt and what kind of questions you ask. So that's really important. Now, of course, the AI is still. A little inaccurate, and it's relying on old data, I think from September, 2021.

So you don't wanna rely heavily on this, but I personally have been using chat G P T to plan my meals each week. So what I'll do is I'll just say, Hey, you are my registered dietician. I want you to create me a five day meal plan that is predicated on intermittent fasting. And I want to eat 2,800 calories a day.

I want to have 120 grams of protein. I'm going to eat four meals, and then hit enter and it'll spit out all this information. It'll essentially give you a detailed meal plan, and then from there you can just give it other prompts, like, you know, Hey, I wanna have a cheat meal on this day. Can you supplement that?

And just keep the conversation going? And what I love the most about this is at the very end of that, What I'll do is I'll say, now give me a detailed grocery list based on this meal plan, and boom, I'll get that detailed grocery list spit out. So again, just a really helpful tool to help you just streamline maybe your meal planning process.

The next bit of technology that has been around for a while, nothing new but really helpful are wearables, and I wanna focus in on just a couple here. The one that I personally use is called Whoop, W H O O P. From a weight loss perspective, what's really great is we know how important sleep is when it comes to weight loss, and so I use this data religiously.

I always look at my sleep data. I want to know, did I get into r e m sleep, which is for cognitive repair? Did I get into deep wave sleep, which is for physical repair? How many disturbances did I have during the night? You know, what was my breathing frequency, my respiration rate? My heart rate. So all of this data just really helps me make more informed decisions as I go through my day.

And what I love about Whoop is they have a specific sleep coach that will use their algorithm and tell you based on, you know, how much strain you've had, how recovered you were from the day before, or how much sleep you got the night before or didn't get when you should go to bed in order to optimize tomorrow and be at your peak performance for tomorrow.

So just really cool stuff. The downside with Whoop is it can be really difficult to determine what these stats and all this data means can kind of be overwhelming. So that's where you can really leverage a coach or a health professional to help you dive into that data and make more informed decisions.

Other wearables, Fitbit, the Apple Watch, those are great. They aren't as detailed as whoop, and so you're gonna get more baseline basic data with respect to. Those devices. The cool thing about Apple Watch though, is they're working on a way to continuously monitor your glucose using an Apple Watch, and rather than wearing that device that pricks the back of your arm and measures your blood, the Apple Watch, I don't think it's gonna make it into the next iteration of the watch, but in future iterations, that's going to be possible and that's gonna be really cool.

And if and when that happens, I just might move to the Apple Watch because again, I really believe in the importance and the value of monitoring your blood glucose levels. So the next bit of tech that I want to highlight are certain apps. In my experience as a health and weight loss coach, I don't think there's a lot of great apps that do justice to the weight loss process.

They all have sort of something they do really well, but then they miss the mark in a lot of other ways. Now, if I am gonna download an app to help me eat better and track different data about my food, there's two in particular that I would focus on. The first one is chronometer. So many of you probably have never heard of that.

But that's a really great app in terms of journaling your food and seeing different trends and whatnot, and then measuring your activity levels against that. Another app that's very similar, it's a competitor of Krome and you guys have all heard of this, is MyFitness Pal. The thing I love about MyFitness Pal is you can type in to the app, you know your foods and you can journal your foods.

You'll get really accurate macros in terms of what's the content of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and fiber and sugar and all that. So, Those apps are probably my two favorite. There's obviously thousands of other weight loss apps out there, but again, in my opinion, they all kind of fall short. There's no real great app.

The next bit of tech that I wanna focus on is scales. Now obviously it's important to measure our weight as we proceed through our weight loss journey, but it's just one data point. There's a number of scales out there that have added other data points, whether it's your bmi, your body composition, your water, your muscle mass, all these different things, your bone density.

But I want you to keep in mind that all of these scales are very inaccurate. So they'll give you a number, but these numbers aren't very accurate, so you gotta take 'em with a grain of salt. Now, they're probably relative to you, so what that means is wherever you start, And as you progress, you see the numbers go down.

That's great, but it's a relative number. It's not, again, not very accurate. The scale that I recommend to my clients, if they need a new scale or they just wanna upgrade their existing scale, is the repo scale. It's on Amazon, you get it for 50 bucks, and it's got a nice app that pairs with it and will track your weight as you go.

But again, these scales and most weight scales these days that measure your body fat, they rely on technology called bioelectrical impedance. And you'll notice there's usually four metal sort of dots on the scale. Sort of one on your four foot, one on the back heel, and then the same on the other foot.

And what this does is it sends a really slight electrical current through your body. You can't feel it obviously. And it measures how long does that electrical current take to pass through your body and then come through to the other side. And the theory is that, you know, muscle transmits electricity faster.

So if you have a lot of muscle mass, then that will be a very quick sort of electrical transaction, I guess. And if you have more body fat, then it's a little slower. But this device doesn't really get into the visceral fat doesn't get a lot up into your upper body fat. So again, it's not very accurate. So if you want to get a more accurate sort of gold standard when it comes to your body composition, a highly recommend going for one of two measuring devices that do this.

One is the BOD Pod and one is the DEXA scan. And they're both very similar. You can't do this at home or you have to go to a lab. You have to go to a place that specifically has this device. If you search Bod Podd in my area, I guarantee you'll find something close by. There's either a gym or a lab or a university that will have one of these and you can go and either pay, you know, a hundred bucks or you know, get two tests for a hundred bucks or something like that.

But if you're really serious about not just your weight, but your overall health and your body composition, this is a great way to measure that. So check those out. That's much better than obviously your at home scale. And it's best to do it before. And then whenever you achieve your target weight, your goal weight, because you're gonna kind of see more than just how much weight you lost, you're gonna see how did your body transform in terms of lean mass, muscle mass, versus.

You know, body fat and what you're carrying, so there's a lot of great weight loss technology out there. If you have any specific questions regarding the weight tech that you're using or that you're considering using, please don't hesitate to reach out to me, Craig, at the spear method.com. I want to hear from you and even better, head on over to my website, the spear method.com.

You can book a one-to-one free consultation. We can talk about all these different devices that you can use. We can come up with a plan that's gonna be specific to you to help you achieve your health and weight loss goals. That's what I have for you today. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to next week's episode, and in the meantime, keep leading the legacy of good health and longevity.

If you're ready to step inside the arena and change the trajectory of your health, head on over to the spear method.com and download by free guide to learn simple and effective strategies on how to optimize your health today.