If your boss asked you to start using a typewriter, you’d question their sanity. However, we don’t bat an eye stepping on a scale at the gym assuming that is our best indicator of health.
Every major company uses detailed metrics to set goals for their staff and then evaluates their progress. They aren’t doing this for their employees’ health or best interest, they are doing this to maximize profit and achieve results. Systems, tools, and automation are everywhere to help employees accomplish more with less. And yet, when it comes to our personal health we are still content with just stepping on a scale and hoping for the best.
As they say, hope is not a strategy – it’s time to take some inspiration from those successful corporations when it comes to our health. Here are three things we should shamelessly copy:
Gather Data
Corporations gather data and analyze metrics and so should we; and it’s not just about a Fitbit anymore. We can now track your sleep in detail with an Oura ring, blood sugars with a continuous glucose monitor like Freestyle Libre, and body composition and dimensions with a 3D Styku scan.
Use Additional Resources
In business it’s crucial to assign resources to the most profitable activities, and to do this a complete picture of how the company runs is required. Combining our wearable data with clinical tests like microbiome or hormone tests can provide all the information needed to identify key issues and spend our limited time on actions that will have the highest health impact.
Make a Plan
No successful company operates without a business plan, and it only makes sense that we start our health journey with a health plan. Like any good plan, it should set our health goals and biomarker targets, then outline key lifestyle actions, nutrition adjustments, supplements, medications, and treatments to realize success.
“I like to use extensive baseline lab values coupled with a patients’ wearable data to create a specific and individualized plan that helps them reach their goals in a highly efficient manner,” says Dr. Bastian, Medical Director at Aeon Future Health. “If a patient tells me they’ve been working hard but are still not reaching their body goals, they probably aren’t going to hear me tell them to spend more hours at the gym. We look at targeted diet adjustments based on glucose response, technology to decrease stress and improve sleep patterns to decrease cortisol levels, or an efficient once weekly based AI training protocol.”
Planning does take effort, but the key is to start by truly knowing what’s going on inside our body. As they say, we have the technology – now let’s use it!
