#LUMEN REVIEWS UPDATE#

I really enjoy the dynamic aspect of adjusting how I eat to how my body is metabolizing the food, rather than blindly moving forward daily with the same average and hoping it evens out.Īll this is fantastic, but it does mean committing to the Lumen. As a result, today’s suggestion ups the fat and protein side of my macros and lowers the carb count. It also means Lumen will suggest new macro goals for you each day.Ī few days ago, Lumen suggested around 150g of carbs for the day, but this morning I blew into it, and it determined I was still burning carbs (which makes sense I had rice with dinner last night, so it was more carb-heavy than usual). When I blew into the Lumen 30 minutes post-workout, it determined I had used up my carb reserves, and it recommended eating a bit heavier on carbs to replenish and recover. Lumen solves that to a significant extent-by measuring metabolic response before and after a workout it captures the intensity more accurately.įor example, before a workout, Lumen determined I was burning carbs and fat, and therefore I didn’t necessarily need to fuel up. I might do 3×10 overhead presses that aren’t challenging for me, but they would require immense effort from someone else of the same height/weight therefore, the caloric burn and overall metabolic impact will differ. Short of slapping electrodes directly onto my body, it’s hard to determine objectively how “hard” a lifting workout was because that can’t be easily captured by heart rate or even length of time. It’s the nature of the beast since it’s far easier to measure cardio effort-your heart is beating faster, you’re working harder. They’re limited to measuring your heart rate and steps most of the time, which means that a day where I did an intense, painful lifting workout might not register or be measured as intensely as if I went for a long walk/run/bike ride. One thing that I often discuss with my personal trainer is that when I review any sort of athletic watches, they often struggle with where to rank my day in terms of fitness when it comes to weightlifting and muscle-building. What I really love about Lumen is that by measuring your CO2, it’s taking into account your actual metabolism instead of guesstimating based on cardio health. So the daily “nutrition plan” suggested a slight uptick in carbs to fuel my workout appropriately. For example, I told the app I planned to do a 45-minute high-intensity interval workout. The more I measure, the more Lumen learns about my body, and the more personalized and specific the macro plan can become.

#LUMEN REVIEWS UPDATE#

Lumen is helpful because it sees those macro breakdowns as dynamic, not static, and it will update and change them based on your breath measurements and what you tell it about your plans for the day. Some people can eat intuitively, but it’s not that simple for many of us. But why is it necessary or helpful? It’s one thing to know that you need to balance fat, protein, and carbs, and it’s another to figure out how that looks on a daily basis. It’s a bit heavy on the science, but it’s worth a read if you’re curious about the background of using CO2 as a metabolic measure. The study isn’t specific to Lumen, but it looks at the general health and nutrition guidelines that can be helped from understanding this ratio. We’ll get to the mechanics of using Lumen in a moment, but first, let’s talk about the science behind it. The Lumen app provides you with a snapshot of the macros you want to be hitting in terms of fat, protein, and carbs, based on the reading it gets from your breath. The idea here is that you want to be using carbs before a workout where high-energy food might be helpful, but you want to be burning fat in the morning since that helps with weight loss.

Lumen has a device that measures your metabolism via breathing into it it then interfaces with a companion app that lets you know if you’re burning fat, carbs, or a combination of both. You can track what you eat and guess pretty well, but being able to quantify whether you’re burning fat or carbs and how your body responds to workouts can make a huge difference - enter Lumen, which aims to “hack your metabolism” to maximize your health. There are many ways to track your overall health, but most focus heavily on physical markers like heart rate this is helpful, for sure, but that doesn’t always tell you how your body is doing when you’re not actively working out.

Lumen reviews