Overview of the Lifestyle Experiment

The Lifestyle Experiment is a comprehensive way to change your habits and create meaningful, measurable improvements in your health. The emphasis for the program is on reducing insulin resistance through self-experimentation to try and find the ideal formula specifically tailored to you.

Insulin resistance occurs as we age or gain weight or body fat. Your body becomes progressively resistant to the natural insulin that you produce and this creates a vicious cycle of weight gain, inflammation and further worsening of insulin resistance. The Lifestyle Experiment is a way to break that cycle and return your body to good metabolic health.

The program is formulated as a series of 4 smaller experiments with measurements after each one to keep you motivated and make clear the impacts of your efforts. In the parlance of researchers, these would be called "interim outcomes". Each experiment starts with a "hypothesis statement". For example:

Knowing that I have prediabetes, I can lower my hemoglobin A1c from 5.9 to 5.6 over 2 months by adopting a new low carb elimination diet.

This statement describes all of the elements of the experiment that you will, perform.

1. The inclusion criteria for the study, in this case prediabetes.

2. The outcome of interest, in this case lowering the HbA1c by a predetermined amount.

3. The Intervention, in this case the elimination diet.

4. The time frame, in this case, 2 months.

   
   

Before you start the entire experiment and before each of the 4 smaller experiments, you will write a hypothesis statement describing your starting point, what you hope to achieve with the experiment, how you will do it and the time frame over which you will run your experiment.

The 4 experiments in the Lifestyle Experiment are as follows:

1. The Sugar Experiment: In this experiment, you will use a continuous glucose monitor to adjust your diet as a way to combat insulin resistance.
   

2. The Fitness and Strength Experiment: In this experiment, you will first estimate or directly measure your fitness level, strength and muscle mass. Then you will amp up your exercise program with a goal of achieving measurable improvements in all 3. Finally, you will measure the impact of those changes on body composition and metabolism.
   

3. The Sleep Experiment: In this experiment, you will use a wearable device and keep a journal to identify the duration and quality of your sleep. Then you will do 7 all natural interventions to try and improve your sleep. Once you have measurably improved it, you will once again determine the impact of that sleep improvement on body composition and metabolism.
   

4. The Food Experiment: This is a 2 part experiment where you will first focus on the timing of your meals to try and activate the fat burning switch in your metabolism. You will learn about the use of urine ketone measurements to ensure fat burning. The second part of the food experiment is to make a final adjustment to your diet and eliminate processed food and reduce intake of some animal products. Once you have followed this food and timing plan for 2 months, you are ready for the final reassessment.

   
   

   The entire Lifestyle Experiment is intended to be performed over a 1 year period of time, with each smaller experiment following one after the other. The goal is to maintain the interventions from each stage as you move to the next stage so that by the time you have completed all 4 experiments you can assess the impact of your entire program on your body composition and metabolism.