Technology has long conspired against our health by making us fatter, more sedentary and sleepless. However, we can recruit tech as our ally in building healthy habits. Here is a review of the tech that is helping me keep off 100 pounds.
Image from Plenity website
Highlights:
Tech Can Make Us Less Healthy but It Can Be Good for Us Too
Getting Help in Weight Loss Is Really Powerful, You Can’t Do It Alone
MyFitnessPal App
Noom App
Fitbit Charge 4 Tracker + Fitbit App
WHOOP Band and App
Shoutout to the Great Products from Hoplark
Plenity, FDA-Cleared Weight Control Device (Does Not Act Systemically)
“I used it [Plenity] as an on-ramp for my HMR diet...”
Fitbod
Life Fitness Elliptical Cross-Trainer
NordicTrack Cross Country Exerciser
Tonal
Bowflex SelectTech
$19.99 Chin-up Bar from Amazon
Marathon Sports
PowerStep Arch Support
The Drive: Podcast with Peter Attia, M.D.
Huberman Lab Podcast
HMR: for When You Are Really Serious About Losing Weight
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of, “Tech & Weight Control”
Guest: Sal Daher
Tech Can Make Us Less Healthy but It Can Be Good for Us Too
Sal Daher: Technology and markets push us to be fatter, more sedentary and more sleepless than ever. Yet these twin titans of modernity can also be made to serve the thriving of humans. In my decades of keen but unsuccessful attempts to control my weight, I tried a lot of technologies and services. Here are my reviews of some that I've found useful. I'm Sal Daher. I invest in early-stage biotech in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm also working really hard to keep off 100 pounds of body weight in my 60s.
I'm doing this solely through healthy habits. I'm not using any drugs; I did not have any surgery. I've recorded this series of audio essays to get across the point that no matter how many times you've failed in weight control before, I confess to at least five failed attempts before, you can build habits of eating, exercising, and sleeping, that will keep you at a healthy weight. All you need is commitment and support. Now, these technologies and services can be very helpful, and certain services in particular lend tremendous support.
Getting Help in Weight Loss Is Really Powerful, You Can’t Do It Alone
It's not something that you necessarily want to do alone. If you have a little bit of weight to lose and you have a history of controlling your weight, you weren't overweight when you're a child, yes, there's certain apps that can be useful, but if you have serious weight to lose, you need some support. Anyway, weight control, I should say, is a highly individualized thing. So, my way of doing things may not be yours, but the important thing is that for every person, and I really believe this, there is a set of habits, which after a lot of efforts, will lead to weight control.
MyFitnessPal App
You just need to find what that is. That's my experience. What follows, I'll list technologies and services that have helped me and explain why they were helpful and in some cases for whom they might be of help. In the one case where I have a tenuous financial interest, I'll mention it. Otherwise, assume I have no stake in any of these products. So, let's start with MyFitnessPal which is an app which I've used for 11 years to keep track of calories. I do it every single day, so I'm pretty practiced in doing it. I've recorded meals.
I have typical, very structured eating, so I have very typical meals, and as a result, it's become a really low-burden exercise for me to know just how many calories I'm consuming every day. It allows me to go back and look how I did over certain times. It was that management consultant, Drucker, who said, if it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get done. It really gives you an objective read of what calories you're burning, what calories you're consuming, which is the most important thing. Calories and weight control is really, really important.
MyFitnessPal also provides details about protein, because I do track my protein. I want to have a high-protein diet, and particularly making sure that I have protein in the morning and so forth. It helps me track fiber and fat levels in my diet. I find it really useful. I've gotten used to using it. I'm not saying it's sort of like head and shoulders above everything else there. A lot of apps have caught up. I think it was the first app that did this and there's been a lot of catch-up. Anyway, I find MyFitnessPal really useful.
Noom App
I have this annual subscription, provides a lot of details about it. I'm assiduous about keeping track of my calories every single day. After a while, it really becomes easier. Now, another app that I've seen people use with great success is Noom. It's an alternative to MyFitnessPal. It takes a behavioral approach and it's also more expensive. It's a very different experience from MyFitnessPal in a sense that it seems to be more tailored to people who are doing this on their own. I've subscribed to it just to check it out.
Not that I'm going to use it because I'm quite content with the tech stack that I have, but a friend of mine, a founder who is very high functioning and who bikes a lot, lost 17 pounds on it. It provided just enough change in his diet that it allowed him to lose the 17 pounds. Once again, you can't lose significant weight just by exercise alone. Exercise is essential, but it's not enough for weight control. It's very easy to eat the calories that you burn exercising. You need to control the intake.
I find that the world is separated between people who are triggered by food and people who are not. People who were fat when their kids and people who are not. I think there's emerging science on this that says that a lot of people being overweight has to do with how they respond to food cues. If you're someone who can take it or leave it and so forth, like my brother who's younger than I am, he enjoys food, but it doesn't trigger him like it does for me or my sister. We've both struggled with our weight our whole lives and my brother has not.
I would check out Noom, but if you need really heavy-duty weight loss, serious weight loss, if you've been overweight your whole life, or if you're really struggling with losing weight right now, I would recommend that you look for a program such as HMR. I really am very partial to HMR. I've looked at other programs like WeightWatchers and so on but I'll tell you later exactly how HMR works and why I find it so that it fits my particular way of being. Another bit of technology that I find really, really useful is the Fitbit. I wear a Fitbit.
Fitbit Charge 4 Tracker + Fitbit App
I track my calories with MyFitnessPal but also the app talks to-- I track my exercise on MyFitnessPal [Fitbit, I meant], but a lot of what I do walking and so forth, it's optimized for that. The Fitbit Charge 4 is what I have, and I find it really a very well-designed device. It has a decent battery life compared to the Apple Watch. I've looked at the Apple Watch. I just don't want to be charging something every day. The Fitbit lasts three or four, sometimes five days between charges. It's really sturdy. It's lightweight.
It does less than the Apple Watch, but I find that it does plenty and it's really, really well-designed. I started using the Fitbit as part of a study at Mass General Hospital. I was enrolled in a study where they were trying to find out what the role is of exercise in whether people developed diabetes, people who are overweight. This is one of the reasons why I got this whole fat but fit delusion that I could be fat and still be fit, which I was. I was relatively fit. I had a fairly low resting pulse. I could do a lot of stuff.
I could play some pretty fit people in squash court and be very successful doing that, but of course, it was a delusion. I really needed to take the weight off because it has a massive cost. Even if you have cardiovascular fitness, carrying on that extra weight is not a good thing. Anyway, getting back to the Fitbit, I'm now approaching a 600-day streak of 10,000 steps per day, and it's very nice about that. Admittedly that 10,000-step gold is an artificial thing, there's no magic about it, but it does work out to be something like four miles of walking every day, which I tend to walk pretty quickly.
That acts as zone 2 training for me, if I do a lot of fast walking to get from place to place, and I build it into my life. The Fitbit also is pretty good at tracking sleep. I've tracked my sleep on Fitbit now for many years, I don't know how long I've been using this. It's less than 12 years, but I think maybe 8 years I've used a Fitbit or 9 years, something like that. I have data going back all that time about how I've slept. I noticed that I don't sleep as well over that time as I used to. I work on my sleep.
WHOOP and Fitbit on Sal’s wrist
WHOOP Band and App
Another technology and app that I use is the WHOOP Band and the App.
The Fitbit measure steps it keeps track of your heart rate and so forth. The WHOOP does one step beyond that. It doesn't have a watch face. It's not a watch, it's just a band. What it does that the Fitbit does not do is it looks at your heart rate very closely and measures heart rate variability, which it's emerging science about this, that how much your sleeping heart rate varies is an indication of how ready you are to take on a load of exercise during the day. If your heart rate variability is high, you're primed for taking on a lot of exertion.
If it's low, it means your heart is on recovery mode, and you should seek to rest as much as you can on those days. I got the WHOOP to optimize my workouts, but I found that it was really useful for sleep. It does require a subscription but it's really well worth the money just for sleep advice alone. It also has a feature that they developed with Andrew Huberman about measuring stress levels. A curious thing that the WHOOP Band, in addition to sleep, it has been coaching me with sleep, and that's been really helpful, is that it tells me when alcohol, for example, might affect my sleep.
I've had some times when I've had-- I don't drink much. If I have three or four drinks in the afternoon, my WHOOP will pick that up. My numbers will be characteristic resting, temperature will be higher. My resting heart rate will be higher. My body would begin to stress at night, which has caused me to drink a whole lot less. I've never been a big drinker, but sometimes I might have had three or four drinks at a sitting, or two or three drinks at a sitting on rare occasions. I might do that five, six times in a year on social occasions.
Shoutout to the Great Products from Hoplark
Now, I find ways to have no more than one alcoholic drink at a sitting. I use things like Hoplark 0.0 to drink along with a beer that I'm drinking or some fizzy water with wine that I'm drinking just to pace it and to reduce my drinking. Thanks to WHOOP, it really opened my eyes to the effect of alcohol on my sleep. It also has a feature for keeping track of your activity while you're doing weight exercises, lifting, and so forth. It's really nicely designed. It's WHOOP Band W-H-O-O-P. I find it really useful.
Plenity, FDA-Cleared Weight Control Device (Does Not Act Systemically)
Another technology that I've found really useful in my diet is a product called Plenity.
It's a capsule that is a diet aid. It helps you feel full when you take it along with two of the meals in the day, plus some water about 20 minutes before. It simulates having vegetables, like a bunch of cut-up cucumbers before your meal. It causes you to eat less. It's been really shown in studies that were-- has been FDA cleared to make a claim that it is effective at weight loss. It provides modest effects, but the side effects are really minimal. It provides modest weight loss, but the side effects, it's a very, very safe product as has been well demonstrated in clinical trials.
“I used it [Plenity] as an on-ramp for my HMR diet...”
I used it as an on-ramp for my HMR diet because the HMR diet, as I'll discuss later on, I was doing these shakes and I had a cereal in the morning, and I had a couple of entrees in the day. I was trying to do about 1400 calories a day. The shakes are nice to take. They're filling, but I liked having something more. I wasn't having vegetables. I like taking Plenity because it slowed the progress of food through the gut. It made the shakes and complimented the whole thing and just made me feel fuller and more satisfied.
It helped me make the adjustment to being on the diet, which I was on for 9, 10 months that much easier. The first five weeks that I was starting on that diet, I used Plenity. I call it my on-ramp for my HMR diet. People use it if you have a body mass index of 25 or higher, you qualify for a prescription. It's prescribed online. It's very easy to get. It's very safe. I was an early investor in Gelesis which invented Plenity. I still own the stock. Anyway, it doesn't really affect whether you use it or not. I just found it to be really useful.
Fitbod
Another app that I've found useful is an app called Fitbod. Think of it as Peloton for bodybuilding. It has videos. It shows you how to do weight exercises. I use it to learn the exercises because it has these videos and it shows you how to do the various weightlifting exercises. I track the exercises on my WHOOP band.
Life Fitness Elliptical Cross-Trainer
Another piece of equipment that I've used a lot in my life, and I've had these in my house. I don't currently have one because of the space that I have but I plan to have something like it or one of these again is a Life Fitness Elliptical Cross-Trainer.
This is the kind of cross-trainer that they have in gyms. It's really sturdy. You can get a lot of cardiovascular exercise on this without a lot of stress on your joints. It's pretty easy in your joints. There's no pounding. It's just that elliptical movement. Life Fitness, I think is really the gold standard. The ideal one that I liked is with the one I had at the gym many, many years ago. I haven't been able to find one. It wasn't even plugged in. It generated its own power. I liked Life Fitness equipment in general. I think they call it integrity now.
That's the model. It's pricey. It's something like $5,600. You can get one that's refurbished. Some of the older ones. These things just last forever. They're built for gyms. I have spent a lot of time on cross-trainers, and that's really helped me with my fitness.
NordicTrack Cross Country Exerciser
Another exerciser that I've spent a lot of time on, I still have one and I use it occasionally for very intense cardiovascular exercise, is the NordicTrack Cross Country Exerciser. It's really lightweight, it doesn't require power. It's a really clever design, and it is just the best cardiovascular exercises you can do.
However, it's not easy to do. It's not for everyone. It folds, it has a relatively small footprint when you have it standing up and put away. In terms of pound-for-pound and getting cardiovascular exercise, I don't think there's anything better if you have the sense of balance to stay on the thing. It's not easy. It's the NordicTrack Cross Country Exerciser. I'm not even sure you can get those anymore. You might be able to get them used. NordicTrack has gone on the bigger and better things, I suspect, but the original cross-country exerciser was just really awesome.
Tonal
I'm thinking of getting a Tonal weight set for after I do this refurbishment of the basement. A Tonal is like a screen that has these arms and you pull stuff down and you do exercise on that. It has videos and I think you also have classes on it and so forth. That is something that I'm thinking about using.
Bowflex SelectTech
In the context of talking about Tonal, and I should also mention that I have the weight set that I use right now. I have these Bowflex, they call it SelectTech weights. For free weights, it's really convenient. You can just set the weight and just click and you can pick it up.
$19.99 Chin-up Bar from Amazon
I find it really, really useful and it doesn't occupy a lot of space, so really nice. By the way, I have this chin-up bar that goes in the doorframe. I got it on Amazon. I tell you, it's the best $19.99 I've ever spent in my life. It fits. It doesn't have to be screwed in or anything. It just fits into most door frames. Then you can just do chin-ups. I use it. My grandkids use it. Everybody is climbing the doorframe. The kids climb the doorframe and they get on it and then they do chin-ups. It helps me develop upper body strength. I don't remember the name of it, but it's an Amazon chin-up bar.
Marathon Sports
If you can just search that, it'll show you. That thing is really very useful. Since I walk and I run a lot, and I have my arches pronate, I'm very particular about the shoes that I wear. What I do is I usually go to Marathon Sports and I ask them for whatever shoe they have right now that is neutral. It changes because it's crazy. The shoes are always changing their designs and lasts and all that stuff. You never know what shoe. You cannot be guaranteed that a brand is going to be reliable a year from now.
PowerStep Arch Support
What I do is I know that Marathon Sports, the store, is very knowledgeable about this. I ask for neutral shoes with not too much cushioning, but some cushioning and stable shoe. Then I get artificial. I get arch support. I take out the insole from the shoe and I put in this arch support with the PowerStep arch support off the rack at Marathon Sports. I've had the unfortunate experience of spending a lot of money having custom-made the arch support, disappointing. The PowerSteps are great.
I use them for three months and then I throw them out because I change shoes every three months and sometimes more quickly than that because pronation and all that, the shoe, the millimeter that wears off in one side versus the other is enough to create problems with my feet. I change my shoes that I'm walking in a lot, and I wear the right PowerStep arch support for me. It really is very important when you're walking for the 8, 10 miles every single day to have the right footwear.
I also found at the Marathon Sports store; they have these Balega running socks.They're made in South Africa. They're really outstanding and tremendous. They provide cushioning, and they're really great socks.
The Drive: Podcast with Peter Attia, M.D.
Let's take a different direction. I'll talk about Peter Attia, his podcast. I've mentioned this before, but I highly recommend that you subscribe to his podcast. It's like $150 a year. It's really well worth the money because Peter spends a lot of time reading through all the literature topics related to that contribute to longevity, exercise, diet, all kinds of treatments, and so forth.
He has a mind of an engineer and a physician and a great integrity. He will tell you exactly where he's coming from and why he has convictions about something. Although he does change his mind frequently, he talks about deep convictions, likely held. He's always experimenting with ideas. I highly recommend the Peter Attia, The Drive podcast, and his book Outlive, which I hand out to people. If you know me, I might have given you one of these.
Huberman Lab Podcast
Another podcast that I listen to a lot is the Andrew Huberman podcast. Now Andrew Huberman is more in the brain science side of things.
He's a researcher and a professor at Stanford. He looks at a lot of things having to do with behavior and physiology and so forth. I found one episode really great about caffeine, really intriguing. Another episode that I found really helpful is this episode on sleep. I also subscribe to the Andrew Huberman podcast. I think these are the most useful things.
HMR: for When You Are Really Serious About Losing Weight
To wrap up this review of technologies and services, I've reserved a pride of place here for HMR. As I say, I have no stake in HMR. The people at the Native clinic here in Boston area, friends of mine, they've really helped me a lot.
I've gone through HMR now six times. I've been involved, used their services since the early '90s. It's very serious. They do a really good job. I find that their approach to having people build habits, but in a way that is adding things and Noom touches on this, too, by the way. They use this. This is becoming accepted broadly as the way to control weight is to add things and not be telling people you can't do this, you can't do that. Rather put things into your diet, put things into your exercise, into your habits that drive out the things that are driving their putting weight on.
In HMR, they call it more is better. They're always pushing you to instead of say, "Oh, no, you can't have the candy bar and so forth." Of course, if you're eating candy bars all the time, you're not going to lose weight. They say, "Have more shakes, have more prepared meals," the entrées, they call them. Have more vegetables, more fruit, more water. Go out for exercise and so forth. Instead of feeling the, "Oh, I can't have any pancakes." Maybe you can have a pancake or maybe you can have a small slice of pizza.
You'll be so satisfied from eating all this other stuff that you're eating that you're not going to end up putting on the 2,400 calories on your body from eating pizza, which can very easily happen. Another feature of this is weekly support group. Now, weekly support group, in person, they do Zoom groups, but the Zoom groups are not as effective. I'm sure that some of that has to do with the fact that self-selection. The people who are most committed will show up. The people who are less committed are going to be in the Zoom group.
It's like a self-select sample. I think there's also the effect of being in person, making the commitment to do that. That builds an identity of someone who really is committed to managing her or his weight. I highly recommend in-person support groups for people who have serious weight to lose and keep off. This is an ongoing thing. It's not like you do it for three months and then you go off on your vacation and eat like crazy and put on 50 pounds. It's a way of life that you have to accept. There are people who don't need that.
If you're someone who struggles with weight, HMR is like the last stop before going to gastric bypass surgery or taking drugs and so forth. Which, by the way, Peter Attia's podcast looks at it very closely because he uses GLP1 agonists and so forth in his practice for some of his patients. He has had some programs on this. It's a personal choice for me. If I can control my weight without taking drugs, glad to do it because I can do it. The drugs are very powerful. It's very impressive what they're capable of doing, and we're discovering more and more how they work, but there's still a lot they don't know about them.
They do have side effects. I've managed to create the habits for controlling my weight without the weight loss drugs. I'm happy to do it. I'm not saying don't use them, but for me really the best choice is controlling my eating and exercise. Now, getting back to the idea of the weekly support group. I've said this before on a podcast. That the support group is tremendously powerful. I told the story of this researcher on stress who they heard that support groups for cancer patients helped improve outcomes for cancer patients.
The researchers on stress were all excited, "Oh, geez, they must be because it's reducing stress and it's having an effect of helping to deal with the cancer." After more than a decade of all sorts of research into this, they found out that basically what was happening is that the support groups helped people better put up with the really unpleasant effects of chemotherapy and therefore you get better results. If you can stay on your chemotherapy, you're going to get better more frequently than if you don't do it, because it's so unbearable.
My point here is that if support groups can improve people's compliance or people's adherence to chemotherapy, heck, it can be so powerful in helping you adhere to your weight loss program. That is my plug for the weekly support group that HMR does. It's a really important aspect of it. As I said before, this is my sixth attempt and I'm succeeding at my sixth attempt. I'm in my 60s. The first time I went through HMR was in the early '90s. I don't claim to be the number one student here. [laughs] It took me a long time to catch up, but I've managed to do it and it can be done.
To wrap up, I want to say that all of these technologies and services make it easy to build the habits needed for weight control. However, the most important factor is your commitment to weight control, supported by confidence that with enough effort anyone can build the habits that will result in weight management. What I'm trying to do here is really to get you to believe that you can do it. I think you can. I think anyone can do it. It may be a journey. It may take you several trials, but I can tell at least in my experience, that every time that I went through it, I learned stuff.
Eventually, I knew enough and I was committed enough to be able to do it. I hope you found this review of tech and services for weight loss useful. This is the Angel Invest Boston podcast. Thanks for listening. This is Sal Daher.