Right now my general plan for tracking health variables and results is pretty simple - I try to do blood testing (CBC and hsCRP) every quarter so I can track my Levine Phenotypic Age vs. Chronological Age (knowing that the absolute values don’t mean much, but the direction and variation/ change is what I’m really interested in), and I track my rapamycin doses, but thats about it.
I used to use a Fitbit, but because of the rash I got under the band on my wrist every time I took rapamycin - I stopped using the Fitbit.
And I use a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) periodically just to see how I’m doing with blood glucose management, with regard to my use of empagliflozin and acarbose, and the food I’m eating. But I don’t do that all the time because each 2-week CGM monitor is about $50, and things don’t really change that much from month to month.
I’ve been thinking lately about potentially increasing the number of things I’m going to track - and since Mike Lustgarten is the guy who I see doing one of the best jobs at tracking, I decided to reach out to him to see what variables he tracks (other than food, which I know he’s fanatical about).
Here is his response. I was wondering what other people here are tracking - please post your thought…
For me it will be a ton of blood tests, HRV, TruDiagnostic bio age, a bunch of different exercises, VO2Max and a Dexa scan, pre and post week 35, which will have seen me work up to 15mg per fortnight (from 2mg start) over the last 6 doses (assuming no adverse effects).
I’ll detail all once I have all the pre data in.
Just waiting for my delivery from Varun now.
My Oura ring tracks resting HR, HRV, body temperature etc.
I have a spreadsheet where I’ve logged my body weight and any drugs and/or supplements taken every day since 2013.
I also use Training Peaks which takes my Garmin data for power and duration (plus occasionally HR) to calculate ‘chronic training load’ (CTL) and ‘acute training load’ (ATL) scores each day. Typically CTL tracks closely with my CP20 which I test once or twice per month. TP will give you a graph of critical power over time for several durations (eg 1, 3, 5, 20, 60 minutes)
I’ve been a Lustgarten fan for the past year, and I want to be a mini-Lustgarten. I’ve been tracking all my food through Cronometer for a couple of years. I’ve been getting blood biomarkers 2-4 times/year for several years, and plan to up that to 6 times/year. I intensely track blood sugar. I’ve been tracking sleep and PAI (exercise average rating) for 6 months, but I’ve done nothing with the data. I recently decided to track HRV, RHR, and average daily HR with an H10 device, and I’m getting the baseline this week.
I wonder if PAI is superior to tracking individual exercises, since it accounts for time and intensity?
Besides blood tests, and easily tracked pheno age…acutely tracking liver and kidney function parameters as proxies of mTOR inhibition. In many chronic illness/rapamycin studies (aka metastatic cancer/transplant), monitoring of kidney and liver function is a good proxy for mTOR. Of course, we know the markers with too much TOR2 suppression.
I am a high exerciser, managing calories/muscle/weight trending, so not sure these would signal much to me n=1. I need to try and look under the hood at cellular.
Interesting - I had not heard of this. It seems valuable because it “should be” more accurate in terms of the actual activity measurement, but probably valuable in addition to individual exercises, but if you can’t do both, the perhaps easier and faster to just get PAI.
Exactly, I just press a button on my watch to get my current score: right now it tells me PAI=65, giving me my rolling average activity level for the last week. A score of 100 is ideal, so I know I should be a bit more active.