This is why we've added lab testing to Realize Me, because people should be able to inspect their health from any level, whenever they want, for a reasonable price, without having to justify their proactivity through a doctor's appointment first.

Other products out there leave a lot to be desired.  They are expensive, have limited available tests, or have lousy user experiences.

We knew we could build something better, so we built the lab-testing product we wanted for ourselves. We focused on building an excellent end-to-end experience for our users:

• packages for comprehensive coverage

• a wide range of a la carte tests

• a beautiful and informative view of your results

• all at an excellent price.

PhenoAge

PhenoAge or phenotypic age is a widely accepted form of biological age testing. You can learn more about it in this post.

As long as you have the required markers in your results (almost all our packages do), we’ll do the calculation for you and include the results for free.

A note on pricing

We wanted to offer the best possible prices for our members, especially for those ordering packages or a bunch of tests. By way of example, our Comprehensive Male Health package costs $299.95 (plus a $40 processing fee) and includes 65+ markers, our most well-known competitor charges $699 for 48 markers.

It’s easy

1. Order labs

2. Schedule a draw at a Quest

3. Get your blood drawn

4. View your results in Realize Me

Markers of Cardiovascular Health

When it comes to understanding heart health, one term you'll frequently encounter is 'lipids’, but what exactly are these microscopic substances, and how do they contribute to cardiovascular health?

Lipids are fat-like substances that play essential roles in our bodies, serving as building blocks of cells and storing energy. The three primary lipids relevant to heart health are triglycerides, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL), and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL). Triglycerides, the most abundant fat in the body, provide a significant energy source. LDL and HDL, on the other hand, are involved in transporting cholesterol within the body.

If you’re interested in how this all works, Peter Attia has an incredible series of posts explaining it all. Special proteins, apoproteins, are essential in moving cholesterol around the body and facilitating their interactions with other cells.  The most important of these is the apoB class. The critical takeaway: the number of LDL particles (LDL-P) and/or apoB are the absolute best predictors of adverse cardiac events. Pretty much everything else is just noise.

Unfortunately, most people only do a standard lipid panel, which does not measure either of these markers. If you or your doctor are basing your “cholesterol levels” assessment based on just LDL, HDL, and triglycerides from a standard lipid panel, that’s just not good enough.

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Increasingly, it is believed that it’s the combination of the amount of cholesterol particles and insulin resistance over time that may cause cardiovascular problems.  To reduce risk, you need to improve both your cholesterol numbers as well as focus on metabolic health, specifically your blood sugar levels. 

This is why we incorporate apoB, HbA1c (which reflects your average blood sugar levels over the past 2-3 months), and hs-CRP (a measure of systemic inflammation) testing in our Cardio Care package and offer our members Quest’s Cardio IQ Panel (which has both LDL-P and apoB).

Diet and Lifestyle

Any approach to improving cardiovascular risk should account for improving metabolic health and lipids, which is why we focus on a few essential diet and lifestyle principles:

1. Emphasize a Low Carbohydrate Diet: A diet low in carbohydrates can help manage insulin levels, potentially preventing metabolic diseases that can lead to heart disease.

2. Prioritize Quality Over Quantity: Focus more on the food quality rather than just its caloric content. We encourage the consumption of nutrient-dense whole foods, such as vegetables, lean proteins, and healthy fats.

3. Include Healthy Fats in Your Diet: Incorporate healthy fats into your diet, particularly monounsaturated fats (as found in avocados and olive oil) and those high in omega-3 fatty acids (as found in fish).

4. Limit Processed Foods: Generally avoid heavily processed foods, which often contain high levels of sugars, unhealthy fats, chemicals, and sodium.

5. Engage in Regular Cardiovascular Exercise: Cardiovascular exercise can make your heart stronger and more efficient at pumping blood throughout the body, reducing insulin resistance and systemic inflammation.

In addition to following a heart-healthy diet, a number of supplements have also been shown to improve lipid profiles. A relative newcomer to this group of supplements is berberine.

Berberine

Berberine is a well-researched botanical that has been tested in numerous clinical studies. It has a long history of use in traditional Ayurvedic and Chinese herbal practices, where it is used for a broad number of applications.

Berberine is thought to reduce LDL cholesterol through a number of physiological mechanisms. In a meta-analysis of six trials, 229 patients with high cholesterol who took between 900-1,500 mg of berberine supplements per day saw improved LDL cholesterol levels with reductions of 20-50 mg/dL (about 25% reduction from baseline).

Kong et al. reported that compared with placebo, oral berberine reduced the serum total cholesterol by 29%, triglycerides by 35%, and LDL cholesterol by 25%. 

Additionally, Berberine has been shown to support healthy blood sugar metabolism and insulin sensitivity.

For the geeks here, this paper talks about “Lipid lowering nutraceuticals in clinical practice,” in which they explain the various mechanisms that these different supplements work to help lower cholesterol. One of the benefits of berberine specifically is that it may have an effect on the inhibition of PCSK9 which can result in the lowering of apoB specifically.

Berberine may lower blood sugar or blood pressure, so if you take medication for diabetes or hypertension, be sure to monitor your blood sugar and blood pressure while taking this supplement. Other potential side effects of berberine include constipation, diarrhea, abdominal distention, and bitter taste. Berberine is unsafe to take if you are pregnant or breastfeeding.

While berberine has been shown to reduce LDL cholesterol, it is important to talk to your healthcare provider about any supplements you plan to take.  This is especially important if you are taking any prescription medications - please see WebMD’s list of possible medication interactions. 

Summary

Advanced lipid tests focusing on LDL-P and apoB are more predictive of heart health than conventional lipid panels.

There is a synergistic risk posed by high cholesterol levels and poor blood sugar control, which is why we emphasize regular checks for HbA1c and hs-CRP levels.

Start with a focus on diet—low in carbs, high in whole foods and healthy fats—alongside regular exercise.

Additionally, we introduced berberine, a supplement that has been shown to improve lipid profiles and support healthy blood sugar metabolism.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Check out our new Cardio Care package here.

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At Realize Me, we've been (and continue to be) focused on what you can do with your health and fitness data when it's collected in one place. Part of that meant bridging the gaps in your data that would otherwise require more apps; we built native tracking to allow you to track your supplements, fasting times, qualitative metrics, hydration, and more. As our Beta program has gone on, we've come to a conclusion: being able to track your data is great, but it needs to be super easy. We decided to spend more time and concerted effort coming up with a solution that would work for busy people who are focused on their health. 

With that, we're delighted to announce a feature that we’re building under the (working) name Action Plans. Everything that we aim to do can be boiled down to an action. We try to drink enough water, exercise a certain amount, get more vegetables in our diet; you get the drift. Whether it is already part of your regimen, or it’s something new you’re trying out for the sake of an experiment, it belongs to a collective body of actions that represent your approach to health and well-being; hence, the name Action Plans.

Each of us has an action plan; some might be more rigorous than others, some might stick to their plan better than others, but there is a collection of things that we aim to do on a regular or semi-regular basis.

An additional highlight of the name is that the body of actions is representative of what we are interested in learning from each other when it comes to health and performance—when we hear a piece of illuminating advice from someone, we don't assume that is the one thing that they have knowledge on—we are interested to learn how they approach other things as well, because the collective body of actions is what shapes us in the end. 

How it Works

With each action that becomes part of your Action Plan, a target will be set. These targets encompass a variety of different ways people may be tracking; for example, targeting a specific number (work out 3 times a week), a directional goal (get enough vegetables in), or a simple yes or no (measure blood pressure).

These targets also feed into reports that give you a look back at how you’re doing. They will include a sense of not just how you’re doing toward your targets, but how you’re doing with logging at all—if you’ve tried manually tracking before, you know that recording the data in the first place is often where we fall down, and one of the reasons people shy away from logging is because they know they didn’t do well. we believe that you manage what you track, and tracking even when you’re not proud of the results deserves credit too.

Of course, given our focus on data integration as well, there are actions that are tied to metrics from various data sources, and can automatically mark themselves as complete; for example, if you have an action item to run once a week, and you track that run on your Garmin, we will automatically detect that run without you having to log it.

Where We See This Going

In addition to this feature being useful to our users in their day to day tracking, our bet is that it also opens the door to community. People have long depended on each other to hold themselves accountable; from exercising regularly to sticking with a chosen diet, the external commitment to others that we are going to do what we said we would is a very powerful tool. Much more on this later!

If this sounds interesting to you, please join our waitlist!

Consistency is king

So what does this look like in practice? First, make a plan that is realistic for your lifestyle. It’s better to start simply and add to it than to start with too much and be unable to achieve it. This might mean working out three times a week instead of six or setting a goal to eat more vegetables instead of cutting out entire food groups. The key is to make a plan that you can realistically stick to … and then stick to it!

Once you have a plan, the most important thing is to be consistent. Don't keep changing it just because you’re not seeing your desired results quickly enough. Stick to it as best as you can, and trust that the small changes you make over time will add up to big results.

Track what you’re doing, every day

You’re not always going to feel motivated. Your overarching goal, regardless of the specific change you are trying to affect, is to develop the discipline to stay committed regardless of how motivated you feel. Your mentality should be to accomplish your intended actions 100% of the time, because life happens, and realistically, you’re often going to reach 80-90% completion even with that mindset. You have your plan; don’t talk yourself into doing it, don’t convince yourself that you should stick to it because of your goals, just go down the list and do it.

An effective way to do this is to track the daily activities that are part of your plan. By tracking your daily activities, you hold yourself accountable and identify areas where you might be falling short. It allows you to reflect on your daily habits and make any necessary adjustments to your plan to ensure you're on track to achieve your goals.

I don’t just mean keeping a mental checklist—literally, track your actions and cross them off as you complete them (another perk: it’s oddly satisfying!). This should be easy and fast, ideally completed in a few seconds. I’ve tried all kinds of approaches, but the best so far is a list of my actions on a whiteboard in the kitchen that I check off (we’re working on something big at Realize Me to support this process, more on that soon).

Progress takes time

On a weekly basis, I like to assess how well I did at sticking to my plan. There is something that feels really good about having a bunch of checkboxes that have been completed. If I didn’t do as well that week as I would have liked, I resolve to do better in the coming week.

I tend to look at trends on a monthly basis, if not quarterly. Again, it’s important not to change your plan repeatedly because you’re not seeing your desired changes within the span of a few days or weeks, but if you’re not making progress towards your goals over a few months, re-assess your approach. Don’t stay with a plan that isn’t working.

Summary

The key to achieving your health and fitness goals is to trust the process and focus on the day-to-day habits that will get you there. Change takes time, but with a good realistic plan and consistency, you can achieve the results you want.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.

We believe that it’s important for healthy people to get regular lab testing done for two reasons:

1. It allows you to identify any results that are well out of range early and, if necessary, investigate further with a medical professional.

2. It establishes a set of baseline values for you to measure progress and identify if anything has changed unexpectedly.

Measuring the effectiveness of your health optimization efforts

While some results shouldn’t change much over time, many will change if your health and fitness optimization efforts are working.

If you’re adjusting your diet in a way that should cause fewer insulin spikes, improve your cholesterol, and/or lower systemic inflammation, you should see changes in your HbA1c, lipids, and hs-CRP.

If you’re improving your lifestyle or supplementing to improve your testosterone levels, you should measure your hormones.

If you’re supplementing with vitamin D, you should be getting your levels checked to zero in on your ideal dose. For example, below, you can see how my vitamin D levels have changed as I’ve zeroed in on an optimal supplementation protocol for me:

Some of your results shouldn’t change much over time

One of the earliest indicators of something potentially “going wrong” is a sudden unexpected material change in a measure for you.

There can be significant variance in many reference ranges for lab tests, and knowing where you typically lie helps you know when things have changed in an unexpected way, indicating you should evaluate further.

As you can see, my values are pretty stable. If I suddenly saw a result of 4.3 or 5.7, while technically in the optimal range, I’d investigate that further with a medical professional.

Furthermore, if at some point in the future, you need to investigate an issue with a medical professional, being able to share your historical results and data on where you typically lie in the reference ranges, can be invaluable in helping identify causes.

Comprehensive testing doesn’t have to break the bank

At Realize Me, we offer our members blood testing from Quest Diagnostics at massively discounted prices. You can order individual tests or select one of our packages.

By way of example, our Comprehensive Male Health package costs $299 for members and includes nearly 80 markers, compare that to our most well-known competitor that charges $589 for 43 markers.

We’re currently in our beta and membership is free.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.

I am a 41-year-old male. I own and operate a couple of businesses, and I have two young children, so stress is a huge aspect of my life. The bigger issue is age does not serve performance in the gym well. Stanworth (2008) stated, “Total testosterone levels fall at an average of 1.6% per year whilst free and bioavailable levels fall by 2%–3% per year.” This is amplified by a stressful lifestyle, as you will see with my testosterone results. 

My levels had always been good (700-800 ng/dL Total, 125-150 pg/mL Free). I had the opportunity to test my testosterone and other labs, specifically cholesterol, at the beginning of 2022 through Realize Me and was in disbelief. My levels tanked to 296 ng/dL and 30.7pg/dL:

In case you are unfamiliar with the Total Testosterone test, it is a test that measures free testosterone and testosterone that's attached to proteins. Whereas the Free Testosterone test measures only the "active" form of testosterone. The general idea is you have enough testosterone to begin with, and you are using the amount you have effectively. If both are low, that is a problem. 

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I train really consistently and I eat really well, however, that was not enough. I ran into a brick wall of age and stress that resulted in low Testosterone levels. In some ways, this was inevitable: almost two decades of really poor work-life balance, not sleeping enough, caffeinating too much, not taking enough time away from work, etc. At the end of the day, males in their 20s and 30s take for granted their resilience. It is not until we lose something that we really value it. 

The big question was, what do I do about my low testosterone? I often wonder about my purpose and how it is tied to my personal actions. I am an S&C coach, and with that comes a certain level of responsibility to others. A large part of our job is to push people in areas they struggle with, such as personal discipline, consistency, and execution. I ask others to at least try adjusting basic things like training, lifestyle, and nutrition before doing anything rash; asking something of them that I could not or would not do myself is the ultimate hypocrisy as an S&C coach. 

I want to pause and give my stance on TRT (testosterone replacement therapy). It is critical to a lot of people, such as the immunocompromised, and it holds a ton of value. However, males in my age bracket are the most vulnerable demographic to starting TRT, even when they aren’t ideal candidates for this treatment. When you start TRT, it becomes a commitment for life. You begin to lose the ability to produce testosterone and the efficiency of using the testosterone you have. 

The psychological effect of someone with low testosterone starting TRT is easily the most potent aspect. Confidence through increased libido, recovery from stress, and positive response to training make TRT intoxicating. The desire to maintain that feeling will keep a strong psychological hold on continuing. Even if one were to utilize a taper following with a great post-cycle therapy, it would be hard to leave behind the feeling. 

With that being said, it was not off the table that I should use TRT as a method to restore my testosterone levels. However, as I stated earlier, I am a coach, and my responsibilities to others should be extended to myself. So I started inventorying my life and what exactly I could do about this. 

Phase I was getting to averaging 7-8 hours of sleep a night, committing to getting three days of resistance training a week, and two days of cardiovascular fitness a week. That was it! I do well with nutrition and hydration, so I was not overly concerned there to start. But with the stress and overall workload, I lost motivation to train. I really wanted to get that back and find that interest in training again. 

A key feature was doing a cohort with Realize Me. It was structured training, it was goal based, it was community, it was igniting. Each week we had our program, we tracked weekly, and we compared results - it was exactly what I needed. Sleep, on the other hand, with two little children and a wife who works full time as well… we had to get creative. My biggest thing was establishing circadian rhythms. 

Most of the time, I cannot control when my kids want to relent and go to bed, and even more importantly, stay asleep. I can control what kind and how much light I expose myself to. At night I wore blue light blocking glasses, put red filters on all screens, and used red light for reading. This allowed for natural melatonin production and the hormone cascade that happens when we sleep. In the morning, I got outside immediately, limited cell phone and tv usage, and got my feet on grass/soil to ground. This allowed for natural elevation in cortisol and created natural rhythms. All this led to getting better quality of sleep (tracked through Oura) and actually led to longer sleep over time. 

Phase II was utilizing supplements to improve testosterone levels. I supplemented it with Tongkat Ali and Fadogia Agrestis. Tongkat is a herb that is known to assist with increasing testosterone production (Ang, 2001). 400mg of Tongkat is something that I plan to take every day and establish the relative impact from energy and training drive. Fadogia is a botanical that is shown to increase testosterone in several trials (Yakubu, 2005). Fadogia was not a permanent solution, as you can develop a plateau to its benefits my plan was to take 600mg for 1-2 months after I established Tongkat as my baseline supplementation, like multivitamins or magnesium.

The results speak for themselves. I was able to take my total testosterone from 296 to 534 ng/dL and free testosterone from 30.7 to 75.5 pg/dL. My energy was up, my confidence was up, I look and feel better.

When changing your testosterone levels, one common thread is its relationship with cholesterol. Part of the issue is that cholesterol is a precursor to testosterone, so if we are doing TRT, we will not use the cholesterol for one of its natural outcomes. The other issue is that TRT makes you more efficient from a muscle-building perspective, and you gain more latitude with stress and nutrition. As you can see, my cholesterol went down:

My hope in writing this was to show that it is possible to raise your testosterone levels naturally. There are a lot of us out there who are facing their 40s and 50s with the realization that we do not have the same latitudes we once had. We hope we can hold on as long as we can, but time is inevitable. While the drop in testosterone levels is unavoidable, the causes (and therefore, options that are available) vary from person to person. Solutions such as TRT may seem easy to reach for, but the most important aspect in determining a long-term solution is to make data-oriented decisions and focus on the least extreme actions first.

Ang HH, Cheang HS. Effects of Eurycoma longifolia jack on laevator ani muscle in both uncastrated and testosterone-stimulated castrated intact male rats. Arch Pharm Res. 2001;24(5):437-440. doi:10.1007/BF02975191

Stanworth RD, Jones TH. Testosterone for the aging male; current evidence and recommended practice. Clin Interv Aging. 2008;3(1):25-44. doi:10.2147/cia.s190

Yakubu MT, Akanji MA, Oladiji AT. Aphrodisiac potentials of the aqueous extract of Fadogia agrestis (Schweinf. Ex Hiern) stem in male albino rats. Asian J Androl. 2005;7(4):399-404. doi:10.1111/j.1745-7262.2005.00052.x

Weight training should be the exercise foundation for most people, and you don’t need to do that much to achieve great results. Realistically, for most of us, our goal isn’t to get as muscular as possible or move the heaviest weights. We want to feel strong, look good, and, most importantly, optimize our overall health.

Consistency is king

Building muscle and getting stronger takes years. The most important thing is to have a routine that you can stick to consistently. The two most significant factors that prevent that for me are 1) getting “busy” and finding it hard to make enough time to work out and 2) getting injured and not being able to properly work out.

I’ve found that 2-3 times a week for an hour total, including warmup, is achievable indefinitely and minimizes how often I'm injured as long as I’m disciplined and progressively overload.

Put more simply, you’re going to get better results working out 2-3 times per week for a year than 5-6 times a week for a few months only to give up or get injured.

My general protocol

I plan for 3 strength workouts a week but make sure that I hit all the most important things in the first 2 days. Days 1 and 2 are rather simple - 3 main exercises and a couple of accessory exercises. Day 3 is typically a circuit designed to hit most muscle groups and elevate my heart rate significantly. On weeks when I can’t get my day 3 workout in, I don’t stress because I know I’ve already done my essential exercises.

• Day 1: Lower body push; upper body push; upper body pull; accessories.

• Day 2: Lower body pull/hinge; upper body push; upper body pull; accessories.

• Day 3: Full-body circuit of 4-8 exercises with no rest between exercises.

I change exercises, rep ranges, and tempo every 4-6 weeks; we call this a “block.” In the first week, I use lighter weights and calibrate, progressively adding more weight over the rest of the block.

My current block

I just finished a block that was dumbbell focused and had mostly unilateral exercises. My new block is barbell focused and looks like this:

• Day 1

  • Barbell Back Squat: 3 warmup sets, then 4 sets of 8 reps with 90-120 seconds of rest between sets

  • Incline Barbell Bench Press: 2 warmup sets, then 4 sets of 8 reps with 60-90 seconds of rest between sets

  • Barbell Row: 1 warmup set, then 4 sets of 8 reps with 60-90 seconds of rest between sets

  • Superset: Banded face-pulls/Hanging Knee-raises, 3 sets of 10 reps

• Day 2

  • Barbell RDL: 3 warmup sets, then 4 sets of 8 reps with 90-120 seconds of rest between sets

  • Weighted Pull-ups: 2 warmup sets, then 4 sets of 5 reps with 60-90 seconds of rest between sets

  • Weighted Dips: 1 warmup set, then 4 sets of 8 reps with 60-90 seconds of rest between sets

  • Superset: Tib-trainer/Reverse Flys/Ab-wheel Rollouts, 3 sets of 10 reps

• Day 3

  • Circuit of the following with no rest between exercises:

    • Dumbbell Split Squats 8 reps per side

    • Ring Pushups 8 reps

    • Inverted Rows 12 reps

    • AbMat Crunches 12 reps

    • Kettlebell Swings 12 reps

  • 5 rounds with 60 seconds of rest between rounds.

Conclusion

It all comes down to your goals. Unless you’re a pro athlete or focused on packing on as much muscle as possible, 2-3 strength training workouts a week is enough to be muscular and strong and is a maintainable cadence for most people.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.

When sugar enters your bloodstream, it attaches to hemoglobin, a protein in your red blood cells. Higher blood sugar levels result in more sugar being attached to your hemoglobin. HbA1c is a measure of the percentage of your red blood cells that have sugar-coated hemoglobin.

Doctors generally test HbA1c for diabetes screening, diagnosis, and management. However, blood glucose is an important marker for everyone and can be a helpful metric in monitoring your overall health. For health and fitness enthusiasts trying to optimize our health, measuring HbA1c can be a valuable tool.

Fasting Blood Glucose vs. HbA1c

Many people get their fasting blood glucose levels tested when getting routine labs done. While it’s important to see what that number is, it’s a point-in-time measurement and can be affected by a number of things, such as the timing and composition of your last meal, activity levels, stress, and hydration level. Because HbA1c reflects your average blood sugar levels over the past 2-3 months, I find it a more valuable measurement in assessing how my diet and lifestyle changes are affecting my blood glucose.

Normal Levels

According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), HbA1c results fall into three categories:

• Less than 5.7% signifies normal and healthy metabolism

• 5.7% to 6.4% signifies prediabetes

• 6.5% or higher signifies full-blown diabetes

So while most medical doctors would say any result under 5.7% is normal, is it optimal?

Consequences of Sub-Optimal Levels Over Time

There are a number of studies (including this, this, and this) that indicate that chronically sub-optimal HbA1c levels damage tissues, blood vessels, and your organs most susceptible to glucose, leading to an increased risk of certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, and increased annual brain shrinkage.

This is why, despite what the ADA says, many integrative medicine doctors have tightened their target A1c to between 4.6% and 5.3%.

How HbA1c Correlates with Average Blood Glucose

While there are individual differences that can alter how A1c correlates with average blood sugar, generally speaking, it looks like this (you can do further calculations here):

• A1c 5.0% → Average Blood Glucose 97 mg/dL

• A1c 5.5% → Average Blood Glucose 111 mg/dL

• A1c 6.0% → Average Blood Glucose 126 mg/dL

• A1c 6.5% → Average Blood Glucose 140 mg/dL

Optimal Levels

The “ideal” range for your blood sugar is generally considered 80 - 110 mg/dL. Even accounting for some spikes, we’d be targeting an average level under 100 mg/dL.

While there are many optimizers that target an A1c even lower, I’m personally targeting a value of 5.0%. I’m not quite there yet, but I’ve made progress this year.

What I’m doing to improve

Our blood glucose levels are affected by a number of things beyond just carbohydrate intake, including sleep, exercise, stress, protein intake, and fiber intake. The most important baseline things I was easily able to do to improve my levels were reducing my intake of refined carbs and sugar and improving my sleep.

My baseline diet and lifestyle are in a good place. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been focusing on increasing my fiber intake, eating even fewer processed carbs, and eating out less. I’ll do another set of labs in the next month or so and will update you on my results.

What about Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs)?

I’ve used both Levels Health and Nutrisense. They both provide CGM hardware from Abbott Labs; Levels recently started offering Dexcom devices too. I’ve gotten significant value in using these services to baseline how my body is responding to food and lifestyle changes. Given I’m not diabetic and because I don’t change my diet regularly, I’ve found that I get the most value by periodically using a CGM to assess how specific changes are affecting my blood glucose.

I’ve found that the devices are often quite off in their absolute measurements for me, so focusing more on relative changes, like how much I spiked after a specific meal, has been more valuable than focusing on whether I’m in a specific range. A fasting finger stick blood glucose test can be used to calibrate these devices to get more accurate absolute results, and it seems like Levels is increasingly changing its app to be more focused on relative changes too.

Periodically using a CGM has also allowed me to experiment to figure out how various “hacks” work. Some examples include consuming fiber and protein before carbs, going for a walk after carb-heavy meals, and things like cooling and reheating rice before eating it. On Instagram, glucosegoddess has many eye-opening strategies and hacks.

Summary

The HbA1c test reflects your average blood sugar levels over the past 2-3 months. While anything under 5.7% is considered “normal” by most doctors, that’s not optimal, and there are likely health consequences of sub-optimal levels over time. Many integrative medicine doctors have tightened their target A1c to between 4.6% and 5.3%. I’m targeting under 5.0% as part of optimizing my health. Focusing on my diet this year has improved my results, and I’m now trying to eat more fiber, even fewer processed carbs, and eating out less to try to hit my goal. CGMs can be a useful tool to baseline how your blood sugar levels respond.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.

The importance of having your own baseline results

An important reason for a healthy person to get semi-regular lab testing done is that it allows you to determine a baseline for yourself. One of the earliest indicators of something potentially “going wrong” is a sudden unexpected material change in a measure for you.

There can be significant variance in many reference ranges for lab tests, and knowing where you typically lie in that range helps you know when things have changed in an unexpected way, indicating you should evaluate further.

As you can see, my values are pretty stable. If I suddenly saw a result of 4.3 or 5.7, while technically in the optimal range, I’d investigate that further with a medical professional.

Furthermore, if at some point in the future you need to investigate an issue with a medical professional, being able to share your historical results and giving them data on where you typically lie in the reference ranges, which can be invaluable in helping identify causes.

When trying to optimize health and performance, it’s important to set quantified goals, and you can’t really do that if you don’t have a baseline to compare your results. For example, below, you can see how my vitamin D levels have changed as I’ve zeroed in on an optimal supplementation protocol for me:

The CBC test

The two tests that will almost always be included in a panel are a complete blood count (CBC) and a comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP). These tests are inexpensive and give insight into how your core systems are working.

This post focuses on the CBC test, which measures a number of components of your blood, which change in response to other things going on in your body. We offer the “CBC with differential” test, which includes 32 measures that give you insight into the following:

• White blood cells - help our bodies fight infection and other diseases

• Platelets - help with preventing and stopping bleeding through clotting

• Red blood cells - carry oxygen from our lungs to the rest of our bodies

• Hemoglobin - the oxygen-carrying protein in our red blood cells

• Hematocrit - the ratio of red blood cells to the fluid component (plasma) in your blood; you can think of this as how “thick” your blood is

You’re evaluating a few things when looking at these results:

• Are there values outside of optimal reference ranges?

• Has there been a sudden increase or decrease in one of the numbers from baseline results?

Either of these may indicate that you have an underlying medical condition or that something else is going on with you that calls for further evaluation with a medical professional.

PhenoAge

PhenoAge is a way of calculating your biological age that I talked about in this post. Dr. Steven Horvath and Morgan Levine, Ph.D. (among others) wanted to find a simple, inexpensive way to determine biological age and mortality risk, which lead to the development of the PhenoAge formula. They found that “while this biomarker was developed using data from whole blood, it correlates strongly with age in every tissue and cell tested” and “this single epigenetic biomarker of aging is able to capture risks for an array of diverse outcomes across multiple tissues and cells, and provide insight into important pathways in aging.” Impressive stuff!

The PhenoAge formula has 9 inputs from labs, 4 of which come from the CBC test. When you order lab tests from Realize Me, we will automatically calculate your PhenoAge for you.

The other inputs into the PhenoAge formula come from a comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP) and C-reactive Protein test, which I’ll cover in upcoming posts.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.

As the web has evolved, the usage and scope of javascript have exploded as a means to build increasingly complex applications on both the client and server. In this rapidly changing environment, there has been an influx of tools aimed at helping developers manage this complexity, with new frameworks emerging and being replaced constantly. Once an organization has chosen a technology, switching is expensive, time-consuming, and so cumbersome that it is frequently neglected to the detriment of the product. Thus, choosing appropriate tools that satisfy the product requirements, promote rapid development and iteration, and will continue to grow and mature to meet the needs of the future is critical for the success of an organization.

With this in mind, when we set out to build Realize Me, we chose tools that would allow us to best achieve the goals of the platform within the constraints of our organization. The starting point was the decision to build the app in React. Realize Me is a health and performance optimization platform with complex interactional requirements, so a powerful and established UI library is a must. At this point, React is so well-established that I doubt I need to give too much justification, suffice it to say that React is an unopinionated, declarative library that makes it very easy to build clean, fast, maintainable user interfaces; it has a gigantic community surrounding it and actively maintaining the ecosystem, and it is only getting bigger. Here is a screenshot of NPM trends for React, Angular, Vue, and Svelte.

As you can see, in terms of usage, the others don’t hold a candle to React. Moreover, not only is this trend not slowing, the rate of adoption is actually still increasing, so you can be fairly confident that it will continue to be a viable option with plenty of developers long into the future. Add to that the fact that you can get pretty far on both iOS and Android with React Native (a feature that is especially attractive for startups like Realize Me that may not have the time nor resources to create three entirely independent engineering teams for each platform), and React is an obvious choice.

Once we had settled on React, the options for how to build the application narrowed considerably. The first question is whether to use a framework at all or to simply build the entire application from scratch simply using React as the UI layer. This is by far the most flexible option available. However, with flexibility also comes overhead, and having to handle things like module bundling and compilation, routing, server-side rendering, code splitting, and a multitude of other complex tasks on your own quickly becomes unsustainable (or at the very least, unnecessarily onerous), and it is incredibly difficult to do well. For this reason, the vast majority of production applications opt to use a framework so a lot of this low-level work is done for you and handled with meticulous precision.

Because we (1) have no desire to reinvent the wheel for all of these tasks, and (2) are quite confident that any attempts we would make to solve these problems would fall far short of dedicated teams of the brightest engineers in the world, we knew we wanted a framework to do some of the heavy lifting. Within the React ecosystem, the three most popular frameworks are Next.js, Gatsby, and create-react-app (CRA). A promising newcomer on the scene is Remix, created by Ryan Florence and Michael Jackson from React Router. However, we ruled Remix out solely based on the fact that it is so new (they finished their beta within the last few months) that it has not been battle-tested enough to stake a production application’s future on it. The main differences between the remaining frameworks are the way and degree to which the React UI is constructed and available prior to loading in the browser, as well as various bundled helpers and optimizations to make the code more performant and improve the developer experience.

As a refresher, the content visible on a web page is constructed out of HTML elements styled with CSS. Javascript is the programming language that allows interaction within this structure, and which can be used to dynamically alter the content on the page. In traditional web pages, 100% of the content already exists, and javascript essentially just handles simple things like sending and receiving data for things like form submissions. In single-page applications (SPAs), that paradigm is flipped. None of the content on the page is built into the application initially, and what the browser receives instead is a huge chunk of javascript code, which, after loading, executes and creates the content on the page. Because javascript is dynamic, this not only allows for incredibly interactive, customized, and fluid content on each page but further allows for instant navigation between pages; the content for the next page can be created on the fly by the javascript code without the need for a full page refresh while waiting on a request for new HTML from the server. This speed and dynamism come at a cost, though. Most obviously, because the page content is populated with javascript only after the js bundle has been executed on the client, the initial page load is a blank screen. This is not only jarring for a user due to the significant layout shift and lack of interactivity while the content is injected into the page, but is devastating for SEO as many crawlers do not run javascript, and thus see nothing on the page. The second issue this causes is page load times at scale. If one of the goals of a single-page application is instantaneous navigation between pages, then the code responsible for pages beyond the current page must already be loaded in the browser. If I navigate from page A to page B, the code to create page B must be on page A, and thus when I load page A, the server needs to send the code for both page A and for page B. Extend this example to a site with thousands of pages, and you can imagine the problem.

I know from experience that solving these two issues well is incredibly difficult. Thus, CRA – which aims to provide a tool for rapidly bootstrapping React apps while leaving the implementation of the server, routing, server-side rendering, lazy loading and code splitting entirely up to the developer – was off the table.

That left Next.js and Gatsby. On paper, both frameworks share a similar feature set, have an excellent developer experience, and produce lightning-fast built applications. However, a look at their origins and underlying philosophies gives insight into which use cases each is best suited.

Gatsby was created on the idea that most of the issues facing react applications could be solved by fetching the vast majority of app data at build time, statically generating the content for every page in an application (static site generation, SSG), and then serving these pages as static files which are then hydrated with only the javascript required for user interaction and for lazy loading any code required for subsequent navigation. If the page has dynamic content, which cannot be reliably fetched at build time, the recommended approach is to make skeleton pages that share the same layout as the final page, build these, and then serve this with the required javascript to make any data requests client side and update the page. By doing this, Gatsby generates incredibly lean, performant, pages split into very basic static files which can be cached easily and served from a CDN without even requiring one's own server for hosting. The downside to this is that pages with dynamic content (think e-commerce or social networking sites) end up having to either serve stale content or rely on skeletons that are only filled in on the client, and build times can get prohibitively long as the number of pages increases. For this reason, Gatsby is mostly used for building websites where the number of pages is predictable, and the content remains mostly static.

Next.js started with a server first approach in which each time a page is requested, the server handles the data fetching on the fly, and then uses that data to render the react tree on the server (server-side rendering, SSR) and send back the fully formed HTML with the corresponding javascript to hydrate the page after the initial page load. It also provides a rich API for page-based routing with complex dynamic routing structures, allowing for the possibility of an infinite number of indeterminate pages which are all fully formed on page load with up to date data. The drawback to this is that each request now needs to hit the server directly, and the response will only be able to be sent after the data has been fetched and the server has rendered the react tree into HTML.

As time has progressed, both frameworks have added features to combat their own shortfalls and have adopted popular elements of the other. As it stands, each is now capable of both SSR and SSG, and they have both even added techniques to enhance SSG by only pre-generating a subset of the pages and allowing individual pages to be selectively regenerated as new data becomes available (incremental static regeneration, ISR). However, functionally speaking, the SSR capabilities and dynamic routing within Next.js are significantly more optimized, performant, and extensible, and its SSG and ISR abilities are now on par with Gatsby (in fact, SSG is now the Next.js team’s recommendation for most use cases, reserving SSR only for when truly necessary). Additionally, because Next.js was designed from the start to be a server-centric framework, it not only does not restrict what you can do server-side, it even provides a vast amount of server-specific utilities and helpers giving you much greater control over how your application runs and what it can do.

Bearing this in mind, although both are suitable candidates in terms of core functionality, Next.js is better suited to handle the dynamic data and complex requirements we have. Realize Me is primarily concerned with real-time data monitoring and altering, which Next.js handles flawlessly. We also rely on a significant amount of bi-directional server-client communication with graphql subscriptions, sockets, and a number of custom API services which would be difficult if not impossible within the confines of the Gatsby framework without creating an entirely separate service. Beyond this, we are developing a subset of social networking functionalities that will increase these demands even further. In short, Next.js gives us the best of both worlds: lightning fast, cache-able, pre-generated static content, as well as robust server functionality with pre-optimized, developer-friendly utilities baked in, and escape hatches to customize as desired.

The final reason we chose Next.js is less quantifiable and is instead more of an accumulation of experiences and appraisals of a multitude of different features. Basically, after using both, and observing countless others experiment with each framework, we have found Next.js to be a much more robust, extensible, and scalable framework throughout the full spectrum of possible requirements you might encounter in app development. At times, this comes at the price of needing to write code in the “Next.js” way, but even if mildly inconvenient or requiring a slightly steeper learning curve, the Next.js ecosystem, opinionated as it is, is solid, and when you stay within it and follow the rules, your application benefits. This is clearly a generalization, but when you look at the data, they corroborate it. Gatsby doesn’t last long at scale. Far more of the world’s largest companies vote with their feet in support of Next.js over any other framework, including Uber, Netflix, Starbucks, Nike, Target, and countless others. Similarly, Next.js stands at over ninety thousand GitHub stars as opposed to Gatsby’s fifty, and the npm trends show that Next.js has been pulling ahead of Gatsby at a staggering rate in the past two years.

In the end, the “correct” choice for any project depends on the requirements. For small projects with no immediate need for capabilities beyond the client, and where development speed is critical, CRA is a great choice. As your application grows and speed and/or SEO become important, upgrading to a framework like Next.js or Gatsby with performance baked into it becomes a necessary upgrade. And for us at Realize Me, given the scale and breadth of tasks required of the application, and the need for real-time, updatable content with minimal performance sacrifices, Next.js has been a fantastic choice.

1. Supplement Stack Introduction

2. My Morning Supplement Stack

3. My Lunchtime Supplement Stack

4. My Afternoon (Workout) Supplement Stack

5. My Evening Supplement Stack

In part 4 of this series, I took you through the supplements I take pre and post-workout. In this post, I’m going to take you through my evening routine and supplement stack.

I consume most of my calories in the evening. I’ve never been one to eat a lot in the morning, and I became even more accustomed to this when I was intermittent fasting. More than anything, this works for my schedule and is a lifestyle I enjoy. Preparing and then sitting down for a big yummy dinner with my partner is something that gives me joy.

My partner intermittent fasts most days, and she usually breaks her fast at around 5:30pm or 6pm, which is when we have a snack together. This usually consists of things like unsalted nuts, a little cheese, and some biltong (a South African style of cured meat that we make ourselves or buy from Stryve). If my workout that day was intense or I otherwise feel like my blood sugar is a little low, I’ll have some carbs like a sandwich made with Dave’s wholegrain and seeds bread and some peanut butter or fish paste (another South African thing that I’ll elaborate on another day).

I tend to drink plenty of water in this early evening period as I’m usually thirsty at this time, and I like to get close to my water intake targets earlier in the evening, so I don’t drink too much before bed.

We eat dinner at 8pm or 8:30pm and aim to finish eating by 9:30pm so that we have a couple of hours to digest before our regular bedtime of 11:30pm. I take Magnesium Bisglycinate and more Omega 3s with dinner.

My sleep would probably benefit from finishing eating even earlier than this, but honestly, my sleep is good, and there is a balance on how far I’ll go to optimize vs. parking in things I enjoy.

I take my sleep supplements at around 11pm and then go to bed at 11:30pm.

Designs for Sport Omega 3 Hi-Po

In my Lunchtime Supplement Stack post, I talked about the importance of Omega 3s and that I supplement with 2,000 mg of EPA and 1,000 mg of DHA a day. I take Thorne Super EPA Pro with my lunch which has 1,300 mg EPA and 320 mg of DHA, and then take Designs for Sport Omega 3 Hi-Po with my dinner, which has 750 mg of both EPA and DHA in a triglyceride-bound form for enhanced bioavailability.

There’s an interesting clip on YouTube with Dr. Rhonda Patrick and Morgan Levine, PhD where they talk about how having a higher Omega 3 Index is correlated with a 5-year longer life expectancy. My goal for this biomarker (which comes from a blood test) is 8%, which I was able to hit on my last lab test with the above protocol (you can check out my post on PhenoAge, created in part by Morgan Levine, here).

Designs for Sport Magnesium Bisglycinate

Magnesium plays many crucial roles in the body, such as supporting muscle and nerve function and energy production. Low magnesium levels don't always cause obvious symptoms, but they can negatively affect mood, energy levels, athletic performance, and sleep. Chronically low levels can increase the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and osteoporosis.

I mentioned the importance of consuming enough vitamin K and magnesium when supplementing with vitamin D in my Lunchtime Supplement Stack post. While vitamin K helps make sure that calcium goes to the right places, magnesium is needed to move vitamin D around in the blood and activate vitamin D.

I measure my magnesium levels when I do my labs. Using the Magnesium, RBC test (which is far better at determining levels than serum tests), I saw that my levels were lower than I’d like, so I’ve increased my supplemental intake. I take 1 capsule of Designs for Sport Magnesium Bisglycinate with lunch and another with my dinner.

Designs for Sport Neuro Complex

A fancy name for what is essentially “just” Magnesium L-threonate.

Magnesium L-threonate is superior to other forms of magnesium at getting through the blood-brain barrier because it is able to transport magnesium ions across lipid membranes, including those of brain cells. Researchers at MIT concluded that elevating brain magnesium content via supplementation with magnesium L-threonate may be a useful strategy to support cognitive abilities and decrease common age-related memory decline.

Designs for Sport Neuro Complex contains a patented form of chelated (meaning that the molecules are bonded to another molecule) magnesium called Magtein®. It’s best taken on an empty stomach, and I take a serving of this about 30 minutes before bed.

I personally find that I get a little more REM sleep when I take it and wake up feeling more refreshed.

That’s it for the Supplement Series! In the coming weeks, I’ll put a post together that summarizes my entire stack.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.

Tim Caron Guest Series:

• Data Silos

• Data Integration into a Single Platform

• Interpreting Data

• Creating Experiments

We have worked through a lot in the last few blogs. If we are collecting data, we need to organize that data. We have to establish some sort of goal with what we are doing and we need our data to support that. 

We have done the hard work of collecting a ton of data: Resting Heart Rate, Heart Rate Variability, Sleep Quality, Sleep Quantity, Blood Pressure, Body Mass, Body Composition….. We laid out a goal:  I want to lose weight, gain weight, get stronger. How are we supposed to leverage our data to meet that goal? 

This is where Realize Me comes in - we create experiments. What would a scientist do if they were faced creating a solution to a problem? They would start forming a hypothesis on how to solve the problem, form an experiment, test that hypothesis against a control, and evaluate the results. That is what we should do with our training and tracking, think like a scientist and create experiments to test our hypothesis.

Realize Me allows you to create experiments to test your hypothesis(s). Want to see the effect of taking a supplement relative to a goal? Want to see the effect of training 3 versus 4 days a week? Want to see the results of backing off volume every fourth week of training? Realize Me allows you to customize your dashboard to see the effect from a specific intervention. 

This is such a critical piece to have with any dashboard. We have established that it is so hard to corral your data into a single dashboard. That data now has to communicate with each other to be meaningful. We need to reference these data points to a goal through our interventions. This makes what we do meaningful and objective. 

Investing time and energy into any resource is all about how you go about leveraging its full capacity. Realize Me was made for high performance individuals and coaches. This is the response to frustration with spending all this time training and tracking to perform at a higher level, but not knowing why it did or did not work. 

Seamless integration from multiple platforms creates a huge data set to evaluate. Directing that information to targeted outcomes helps us to quantify our progress. We build our dashboard to serve our needs. We all have different goals, diverse responses to certain methods or protocols, different schedules, we are just different. We should have a dashboard that allows us to customize that to our individual needs. 

You now have a tool where you can take your training and health to the next level. You can get the value from any supplement, training/nutrition plan, and tracking you are doing. You can see the direct results from your effort. You can find out if something is not working and why. You can be the best version of yourself with Realize Me.

1. Supplement Stack Introduction

2. My Morning Supplement Stack

3. My Lunchtime Supplement Stack

4. My Afternoon (Workout) Supplement Stack

5. My Evening Supplement Stack

In part 2 of this series, I took you through all the supplements I take in the morning, including Athletic Greens AG1, Designs for Sport Collagen Complete, and Adapted Nutrition Keto K1000 Electrolyte Powder.

In part 3 of this series, I took you through all the supplements I take with my lunch, including Vitamin D, Vitamin K, Omega 3, and CoQ10.

In this part, I’ll take you through what I take pre and post my afternoon workout. I usually eat a pretty light lunch around 12:00 pm and do a strength and conditioning workout around 4 pm, 3 days a week (M/W/F).

Pre-workout

I’ve been weight training for 30 years now. When I was younger, my main focus was on ensuring my workouts were super intense and that my muscles got everything they needed to grow. That meant often using strong pre-workout energy powders, BCAAs, and a lot of whey protein. As I’ve gotten older (I’m 44 now), I’ve gained an appreciation for the importance of focusing on my connective tissue, avoiding injury, and not feeling like I got hit by a bus after my workouts. That means a lot more mobility work, including supplements like collagen, and not going full throttle at every exercise in the session.

60 minutes before I work out, I take the below supplements, and I then do a 15-20 minute mobility session. So if I’m working out at 4 pm, I take my pre-workout stack at 3 pm and then do my mobility routine at 3:40 pm.

UCAN SuperStarch

SuperStarch is a complex carbohydrate or starch that is completely absorbed. It is semi-resistant to digestion but is eventually completely absorbed into the bloodstream, giving it a slow time-released absorption profile. Because of the low glycemic impact, there is also little stimulation of insulin following ingestion, which I’ve verified a number of times for myself while using a CGM.

I’ve found that I have excellent energy for my workouts, and UCAN has been proven in independent clinical trials to improve your body’s metabolic response to exercise.

HVMN Sprint

Caffeine is the tried-and-true pre-workout stimulant. Studies have shown that caffeine can benefit endurance performance, high-intensity exercise, and power sports. A lot of products have way too much caffeine and a lot of other “rubbish” in them. HVMN Sprint has 200 mg of caffeine, 200 mg of Theanine, and 400 mg of Panax Ginseng.

Theanine is a naturally occurring amino acid that‘s found in the tea plant and attenuates some of the stimulating effects of caffeine, resulting in an increase in energy and focus without some of the jittery side effects and the “crash” associated with the consumption of larger doses of caffeine. Theanine has also been shown in studies to increase nitric oxide production, which helps increase blood flow.

Panax Ginseng also helps with energy and has beneficial effects on blood pressure. A growing body of research backs up this herb's ability to increase exercise performance by increasing energy and delaying fatigue.

I’ve found HVMN Sprint gives me a great energy boost without any jitters, and I don’t crash a few hours later.

Designs for Sport Collagen Complete

Designs for Sport Collagen Complete contains 5g of Fortigel®,  2.5g of Verisol®, and 5g of Fortibone®. Fortigel has been shown to reduce post-exercise joint discomfort in athletes and to improve collagen in joints, cartilage structure, and tendon strength and elasticity. Fortibone has been shown to improve bone mineral density, and Verisol is great for your skin and nails.

Consuming it an hour before working out theoretically helps get it to your connective tissue because there’s an increase in blood flow to those tissues (that otherwise have little blood flow) during training. I haven’t found any studies to back this up, but on days I do weight training, I like to get an extra serving of collagen in any way, and the theory makes logical sense.

I also use this in My Morning Supplement Stack. Qualitatively, I have noticed a material decrease in joint aches when I use this product consistently.

Post-workout

Post-exercise nutrition is important. The stimulus of training triggers signaling pathways within muscle cells that allow for enhanced muscle protein synthesis rates. These pathways do not stay active for very long, so there is a window of opportunity post-exercise in which one can significantly increase the effects of ingested nutrients.

I tend to wait about 20 mins after my workout, but no more than 40 mins, and then consume the following:

Designs for Sport Hydrolyzed Iso-Whey Protein

The Designs for Sport Hydolyzed Iso-Whey Protein is a great-tasting protein powder with unique benefits beyond standard whey protein.

“Hydrolyzed” means the protein has been broken down into more of the important di and tri-peptide protein molecules, known to play a key factor in protein synthesis, the muscle-building process in the body. These forms of proteins are more easily absorbed and enter the bloodstream more quickly, allowing you to better take advantage of the increased protein synthesis rates post-exercise.

A study published in the Journal of Science in Medicine and Sports found that subjects consuming hydrolyzed whey isolate post-workout experienced better recovery and performance, shortly after an intense muscle-damaging session, in comparison with those consuming whey isolate.

Another reason for the muscle-supporting effects of whey is its high leucine content, which activates the mechanistic target of mTOR to stimulate muscle protein synthesis.

You can read about the experiment I did where I added 3.5 lbs of lean mass in 6 weeks by increasing my supplemental protein intake in this post.

Additionally, whey protein has also been found to be beneficial for cardiovascular health and metabolic health. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses found that whey supplementation reduced both systolic and diastolic blood pressure, fasting blood sugar levels, HbA1c, insulin, homeostasis assessment-estimated insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), triglycerides, and total cholesterol, in addition to improving body composition.

LMNT Electrolytes

I drink 3.5 to 4 liters (135 oz) of water on non-workout days and try to get in an extra liter on days I work out. Given the loss of electrolytes through sweat and the volume of water I’m consuming, it’s important to replenish my electrolytes.

When it comes to electrolytes for hydration support, you want to ensure you get enough sodium and balance it with potassium and magnesium. LMNT Electrolytes have the ideal ratio of sodium (1,000 mg), magnesium (60 mg), and potassium (200 mg), and they taste pretty great too.

I’ll take you through my evening supplement stack in my next post.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.

• Data Silos

• Data Integration into a Single Platform

• Interpreting Data

• Creating Experiments

Here is an obvious statement - most of us are not statisticians or physiologists. We can all agree upon one simple fact, that taking huge data sets about our performance and biometric data is not the easiest thing to break down. Since we are not experts in stats or physiology, we have to rely on the platform that a tracking tool gives us, which may not be the best solution. 

On one hand there are tracking tools that are extremely simple - think a pedometer just giving you steps. On the other hand, we can get extremely complicated with some HRV tracking devices. We can easily look at the simple singular metric tracking tool as less than compared to the tool that tracks seemingly infinite markers simultaneously. The question we have to ask ourselves, if we are not experts in stats or physiology: is adding more variables in performance or biomarkers the best strategy to optimize our training?

If you have ever read anything about Key Performance Indicators, you know that the performance can be generally funneled into simple diagnostics. A concept of Occam’s Razor is that the most logical answer is traditionally correct. We can make a simple comparison to the health of a business - if we are making more money than we spend (profitable), the business is considered healthy. Crude, simple, but accurate. Same is true with physiology and performance. 

Goals are pretty standard - gain muscle, lose weight, perform at something specific. Bottom line, are we making progress towards that or not? We can lean in on metrics that are irrelevant to the goal and call that progress. If we are not making progress towards the main thing, we have lost touch with our original goal. We have to have discipline with measuring what is relevant to the goal in the first place. Are we profitable or not is really the only question.

Multi-faceted tracking tools could actually be a distraction from the main thing. If someone who wants to improve body composition focuses on body mass but avoids metrics around muscle mass and fat mass, you could be wasting time. We are all human, we covet that validation from what we are doing as working. Just because we have data that is saying something is happening, does not make that data valuable. Same could be said for business: we are making money in this one area of the business, but we are losing money overall. Making unrelated progress does not help towards a specific goal. 

Organizing data forces to be disciplined is critical to effective tracking. Cause and effect relationships of what we are doing relative to a goal is all that matters. We need a platform that allows us to create experiments that directly show us if we are making progress or not. This is where Realize Me comes in. We can take all this data we are collecting and sift through the metrics that matter. We can be specific with what we are doing and customize the platform to support that.

Check out the next post, where we will dive into how Realize Me allows us to customize our dashboard to create experiments to accomplish specific goals.

1. Supplement Stack Introduction

2. My Morning Supplement Stack

3. My Lunchtime Supplement Stack

4. My Afternoon (Workout) Supplement Stack

5. My Evening Supplement Stack

In part 2 of this series, I took you through all the supplements I take in the morning, including Athletic Greens AG1, Designs for Sport Collagen Complete, and Adapted Nutrition Keto K1000 Electrolyte Powder.

In this part, I’ll take you through what I take with lunch. I usually eat a pretty light lunch and follow it with all my fat-soluble supplements taken with 500ml (16oz) of water.

Thorne Vitamin D

Vitamin D is key to maintaining bone health, immune function, cardiovascular health, and hormone balance. It promotes lean muscle mass and supports healthy brain function. My protocol is to take 10,000 IU 5 days a week together with vitamin K. If I could only take one supplement, it would be vitamin D. You can read about how I experimented my way to my ideal vitamin D supplementation protocol in this post.

Mark Sisson gives a good overview of vitamin D in this post and suggests that “A good general rule is 4000 IU per day supplemented”.

When you’re supplementing with vitamin D, it’s important to have adequate amounts of vitamin K and magnesium. Vitamin D affects how we absorb calcium, vitamin K helps make sure that the calcium goes to the right places, and your body depends on magnesium to make vitamin D available. I talk more about vitamin K below, and I’ll go into further detail on magnesium in part 5 of this series.

In part 1, I talked about how important it is to have goals in place for your supplementation. Taking too much vitamin D can be dangerous, so it’s critically important to have your goals and protocols informed by lab testing. My goal is to maintain my serum vitamin D levels at 50-70 ng/mL (measured by a Vitamin D, 25-OH blood test). The amount of supplementation required for this varies greatly by the individual; I’ve found that taking an average of 7,000 IU/day gets me to this level (roughly equivalent to taking 10,000 IU 5 days/week). I take Thorne Vitamin D, but there are many good vitamin D products on the market.

Thorne Vitamin K

Vitamin K supports the normal and healthy ability of the blood to clot, promotes strong bones, and helps maintain the health and elasticity of arteries. It "pairs up" with vitamin D in the body to help keep calcium in the bones where it belongs and out of the blood vessels and other soft tissues.

Mark Sisson has a good overview of the benefits and forms in this post where he suggests that “Almost everyone should take a vitamin K2 supplement containing both MK-4 and MK-7”.

Thorne Vitamin K provides the highest quality, clinically studied forms of vitamin K1 (1 mg) and vitamin K2, as MK-4 (5 mg) and MK-7 (90 mcg). It contains significantly more MK-4 than most products on the market, and the MK-7 is MenaQ7®, the form used in the majority of MK-7 research. 

If you are already supplementing with vitamin D and it has vitamin K, or you want to use a different vitamin K supplement, vitamin K2 in MK-7 form is the most important. I’ve seen it recommended that you get ~100 mcg if you're taking 5,000 IU of vitamin D per day or more.

Thorne Super EPA Pro

The two forms of omega 3 to focus on are EPA and DHA. They help maintain normal triglyceride and cholesterol levels, support healthy circulation by promoting blood vessel elasticity and blood flow, enhance mood, support cognitive health, and promote a healthy inflammatory response throughout the body.

It seems that a 2:1 EPA to DHA ratio is optimal for mitigating inflammatory risk factors, and Andrew Huberman suggests taking 1,000-3,000 mg of EPA per day for brain health based on all the research he has reviewed. It is tough to do with most supplements on the market without taking several servings and potentially consuming too much DHA. Thorne Super EPA Pro contains 1,300 mg EPA and 320 mg DHA per serving.

Because omega 3s can easily oxidize, which negates a lot of the positive effects, it is critically important to ensure you’re taking very high-quality supplements. I personally would not take any that come in a mega-sized container from the grocery store.

I take Thorne Super EPA Pro with my lunch, and I take Designs for Sport Omega 3 Hi-Po with dinner (which contains 750 mg of both DHA and EPA). This results in around 2,000 mg of EPA and 1,000 mg of DHA per day for me. My HDL and triglyceride levels are the best they’ve been since I started with this protocol.

There’s an interesting clip on YouTube with Dr. Rhonda Patrick and Morgan Levine, PhD where they talk about how having a higher Omega 3 Index is correlated with a 5-year longer life expectancy. My goal for this biomarker (which comes from a blood test) is 8% which I was able to hit on my last lab test with the above protocol. P.S. you can check out my post on PhenoAge (Morgan Levine, PhD was one of the creators) in this post.

Thorne CoQ10

Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) is a nutrient found in the mitochondria of cells. It provides support against oxidative stress by enhancing the activity of the body’s master antioxidant – glutathione. CoQ10 is particularly supportive for the cells of the heart, liver, brain, kidney, and muscles. It promotes normal heart rhythm and blood vessel function and helps maintain healthy blood pressure.

I take CoQ10 primarily for heart health benefits. While I’m not currently on a statin, they appear to decrease CoQ10, so it might be particularly important to supplement with it; of course, you should talk with your doctor about this.

I take Thorne CoQ10, which is a proprietary, lipid-based, non-crystalline form of coenzyme Q10 that is nearly three times better absorbed than ubiquinol (the form that most other CoQ10 supplements contain).

Designs for Sport Beef Protein

I drink a protein shake at lunchtime on days when I feel like I did not get enough protein with my lunch or don’t have time to eat a meal. I already drink Whey protein post-workout and sometimes in the evening to increase my protein intake, so I use Designs for Sport Beef Protein at lunchtime to keep my protein sources varied.

This product is made from a bone broth protein called HydroBEEF™. The beef comes from animals raised in Sweden without hormones or antibiotics.

I’ll take you through my pre-workout and post-workout (afternoon) supplement stack in my next post.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.

• Data Silos

• Data Integration into a Single Platform

• Interpreting the Data

• Creating Experiments

In our last blog in this series, we talked about the biggest problem we will face is not what to use, but how to organize our data. This is important because we create a bottleneck without even knowing it. Investing a lot of money into a wearable or some piece of technology that helps us with what is happening from training/life is completely obsolete without an efficient way to organize that data. That organization actually allows us to interpret that data and subsequently use it to help our decision making. 

Imagine all that data is a cluttered desk. Some people can get work done, but most will struggle. The ability to have all of our data organized is critical to being able to interpret that data. Getting reliable and valid data is so hard from a logistics perspective. It is exhausting just to be consistent with this. Most wearable companies understand this and make their hardware easy to use, their data transfer seamless, and their data presentation compelling and easy to understand. That single wearable data presentation is the same as handing someone a desk file organizer - without an actual system there is no point having a single organizer. 

The problem is that most of us end up tracking multiple things simultaneously. All that data gets stored in siloed off locations. This is the bottleneck to interpreting that data to actually use that information. We have all this data that is hard enough to process on its own, with the extra challenge of having it organized in a single location. This is where Realize Me comes in.

For both myself and my business, data is a huge part of the process. Providing the best possible training has to include data collection. Getting the data is not easy. There are a lot of logistics that go into daily collection. As we have discussed, this is not the biggest problem, we have to organize this. Not only that, we have to organize this with a minimal time investment. 

Realize Me essentially created a dashboard for seamless integration of all data into a single source platform. They took the challenge of getting this incredibly time consuming and tedious job of organizing this endless list of data points completely off our plates. We simply decide what we want to track and migrate directly over to the Realize Me Dashboard. 

We still have to do the work of interpreting this information, but a huge weight has been lifted off us.. We have a fighting chance now to actually use this data to benefit our health and training now that it is seamlessly organized from collection to dashboard. 

Realize Me is your command center for health and wellness data. We will dive into how we optimize this dashboard in the coming blogs. Before diving into our next blog, take an inventory of all the wearable platforms you are looking at. How much of that is interference to you using this information to its full potential? Are you making your spreadsheets? Are you looking at your data in isolation? Ask yourself how sustainable that is. If you are struggling with the simple aspect of organizing your data, Realize Me is your best chance to solve this problem - make sure to check out our next two blogs on interpreting data.

1. Supplement Stack Introduction

2. My Morning Supplement Stack

3. My Lunchtime Supplement Stack

4. My Afternoon (Workout) Supplement Stack

5. My Evening Supplement Stack

In part 1 of this series, I talked about the importance of having a solid baseline in your foundational pillars of nutrition, recovery, and activity before you start haphazardly adding in new things and how important it is to have goals in place for your supplementation.

In this part, I’ll take you through my morning routine and supplementation.

Upon waking, I urinate, step on my Withings body comp scale and then drink 500 ml (16 oz) of water. I get back in bed, do a few minutes of breath work, check for any urgent messages, then get up and get going for the day.

Now that I’m up and about, I make my morning shake with 500 ml (16 oz) of water, Athletic Greens, Collagen powder, and electrolyte powder:

Athletic Greens AG1 

I’ve been using Athletic Greens for many years as it is the simplest way for me to cover all my bases of important vitamins, minerals, and probiotics. I get B6, Folate and B12 for cardiovascular health, Vitamin C and Zinc for immunity and some magnesium and potassium (which I also get some other supplements to ensure I’m getting enough in). Importantly, it has prebiotics and probiotics to help my gut microbiome.

Designs for Sport Collagen Complete

Not all collagen powders are created equal. Designs For Sport’s product has Collagen Peptides from Fortigel®, which has good data showing its benefit in promoting the growth of cartilage tissue. It also contains Verisol® and Fortibone®, which help with skin and bone. I also take this about an hour before my strength workouts. Qualitatively, I notice a material decrease in joint aches when using this product consistently. I’ve seen good results with Momentous Collagen too.

Adapted Nutrition Keto K1000 Electrolyte Powder 

I mostly take this to increase the amount of potassium I’m consuming, which has positively impacted my blood pressure. Keto K1000 is one of the few products that has 1,000 mg of potassium. I also try to get plenty of magnesium in during the day, and it has a decent amount.

I’ll take you through my lunchtime supplement stack in my next post.

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.

Tim Caron Guest Series:

• Data Silos

• Data Integration into a Single Platform

• Interpreting the Data

• Creating Experiments

This will be a four part blog series. One of the major things I want to dig into is the value I've gained as a user of Realize Me. Over the next four blogs we are going to go over two major problems with anything data related: siloed data and interpreting data. Addressing these problems is the first priority, and then we will  dive into how Realize Me helped solve this for us. 

For a lot of people, there is a threshold to cross when deciding to track their performance data on both an individual and a group level. This however, is the wrong concern to be having. The deliberation of what to track or what hardware to use is a fair concern, but the bigger limiting factor will not be what to track or what to track with, but how to manage that information. 

Data silos are a huge problem for anyone who is tracking. After getting through the process of deciding what is the best thing to track relative to a goal, and choosing the right tool to track that, you will be soon faced with how to store that information - data silos. You will be faced with several different places where individual metrics are stored creating individual silos. You can look at these silos as bottlenecks in how you will use that information to help you. You will either have to create a dashboard and manually transfer that information over or you will try to interpret the information on individual platforms - both are really inefficient and will come at a cost of actually using that information.

In either scenario, user fatigue will set in. This seemingly well intentioned step will be met with frustration from having to do all these extra steps to evaluate your data. The key behind this is the companies that create hardware or software around tracking work hard into you using their product over others. I would not say that they discourage you from using other tracking tools, but we can all agree that it is not in that company’s best interest to have their users using several platforms at once. 

What you will find is that there are several aspects about tracking you will have to unpack. What is the best hardware or software, what is the most reliable, what is the most user friendly, what is the most durable, etc. You can easily be distracted from eventually having to organize, interpret, and use this information to help with training or health. Last thing on your mind when trying to decide what body composition or HRV tracker is how this will migrate to a single dashboard to be able to compare to other data points. 

The goal of this first blog is not to intimidate you from tracking, but to bring up a critical point - eventually you will need to evaluate this data. This is what I learned as a person that wants to track for myself and with my clients. There is a bottleneck point when you are faced with the logistics of organizing your data and then interpreting that data. 

Check out the next blog in this series on how Realize Me created a solution for that problem.

1. Supplement Stack Introduction

2. My Morning Supplement Stack

3. My Lunchtime Supplement Stack

4. My Afternoon (Workout) Supplement Stack

5. My Evening Supplement Stack

I get many questions about my supplement stack. Usually, my response is that while I use several supplements, having a strong foundation is essential before you start haphazardly adding in a bunch of new things. That foundation for me is getting to a solid baseline on the three pillars of health and fitness - Nutrition, Recovery, and Activity.

If you’re not drinking enough water, please start there. Many people are chronically mildly dehydrated and would feel significantly better in terms of energy, mood, and performance just by drinking more water. I personally feel the best drinking around 4 L (135 oz) a day, but a good place to start for most people is half your body weight in pounds, converted to ounces - so if you weigh 180 lb, you should get at least 90 oz (2.7 L) of water in - and an additional 1 L (32 oz) on days you workout.

The supplement industry is also poorly regulated, and quality can vary greatly. I only use supplements from a few trusted companies that I know do thorough testing and produce high-quality products, and I typically avoid anything with a “proprietary blend.” And usually, if it has a name like “Mega Ultimate Animal Burn Intensifier” it’s likely best to avoid it.

With those caveats out of the way, I will share with you what I take, why I take it, and when.

This introduction is part 1 of a 5-part series. I’m going to break it down into:

• Part 2: Morning

• Part 3: Lunch

• Part 4: Afternoon (workout)

• Part 5: Bedtime

It’s important to have a specific goal for any supplement you add. Too often, we see people arguing about which supplement is necessary or better without a clear goal in mind. This is true of any intervention - know why you’re doing it and have some way of measuring its effectiveness. Those goals include things like better sleep, improving performance in a specific type of physical activity, improved body composition, increased energy, and affecting a blood biomarker.

Your goals need to be realistic; you’re not going to suddenly look like the guy clearly on large doses of anabolics just by adding whey protein and creatine, and you’re not going to increase your IQ by 20 points by trying some nootropic. Once you have defined your goals, you need to measure progress towards them, and this is why the Realize Me platform enables users to track their supplementation and tie it to specific metrics to measure efficacy.

Realize Me members are typically enthusiasts and optimizers who already have a solid baseline of health and fitness and are supplementing for specific goals. We see people who take very few supplements and some that spend many hundreds of dollars a month on a wide array of things.

Either way, we understand that supplements are an important component of many of our members’ regimens. We’ve recently established partnerships with two of the best supplement companies in the business, Thorne and Designs For Sport, and offer significant discounts on those products to our members. On average, our members spend $150/month on supplements and have reduced that to less than $100/month (sign up here to join the waitlist!).

I’ll take you through my morning supplement stack in my next post.

My most significant improvements came from improved immune function, indicated by white blood cell volume and percentage of Lympocytes, and decreased systemic inflammation, indicated by C-Reactive Protein (hsCRP).

How do you start?

To calculate your PhenoAge, you’ll need the results from a CBC (complete blood count) and CMP (comprehensive metabolic panel) panel as well as hsCRP. There are free calculators available online where you just plug in values from your results.  

Realize Me provides advanced software for health optimization. Our members receive significant discounts on high-quality supplements and lab testing. Sign up here to join the waitlist.