Your First Hypothesis Statement: The Lifestyle Experiment Hypothesis

You have completed your full assessment and now you have been able to self-diagnoses with several very important conditions. They are:

1. Prediabetes or diabetes

2. Metabolic Syndrome

3. Overweight

4. Obesity

5. High Body Fat Percentage

6. Excess abdominal fat

7. Normal or low muscle mass

8. Elevated cholesterol

9. Elevated triglyceride

10. L:ow HDL

11. Elevated fasting insulin (likely insulin resistance)

Now, we will use these diagnoses to write our overall hypothesis statement for all 4 experiments of the lifestyle experiment. Each stage of the experiment will take place over about 2 months, so the fastest that you could possibly go through an entire cycle of the lifestyle experiment would be 8 months, but we generally ask our patients to plan for about a year. A typical hypothesis statement for the entire lifestyle experiment would be as follows:

Knowing that I am overweight, have prediabetes and evidence of inflammation, a comprehensive program of diet, exercise and sleep improvements over a 10 month period will:

• Improve my body fat percentage by 5% points, from 24 to 19%

• Improve my muscle mass by 1.5 kg.

• Lower my HbA1c by .5, from 5.9 to 5.4

• Lower my fasting insulin level from 17 to < 10

• Lower my LDL by 30 mg/dl from 164 mg/dl to 134 mg/dl

• Lower my triglyceride by 75 mg/dl from 150 mg/dl to 75 mg/dl

• Lower my hsCRP from 1.8 to < 1.0

We recommend ambitious goals for the overall experiment and generally speaking "normalizing" your metabolic parameters and achieving very good or excellent levels for body composition measures is the best way to ensure that you have mitigated your risk.