Tracking and monitoring your progress is critical for improving your health and wellness goals. Information about things like food intake, fitness, sleep patterns, and stress provide valuable roadmaps to know what works and what you need to work on.
1. Cronometer
A protein-first approach means you get 30-50 grams of protein at every meal. Don’t guess how much protein you’re getting. My Protein Cheat Sheet provides a list of foods containing 30-60 grams of protein to make it super easy, and you can download it for free.
2. Continuous Glucose Monitor
Balancing your blood sugar is crucial for achieving and maintaining good health. While you might associate blood-sugar monitoring with the traditional finger-prick tests, there's a more practical and less painful alternative: a continuous glucose monitor, or CGM.
CGMs track your blood-sugar levels around the clock, offering valuable insights into patterns that can help you improve your weight and your overall health.
With the assistance of a dedicated app, you can access real-time information about your blood-sugar levels whenever you need it. Additionally, you can review how these levels change over a few hours or days, allowing you to identify trends and potential issues.
Some CGMs have alarm settings to notify you if your blood sugar exceeds your healthy range. This immediate feedback lets you take the proper steps to bring your blood sugar back to normal. Did you skip a meal, eat a high-sugar-impact meal, or experience stress? Identifying the cause can help you prevent similar issues in the future.
I'm a big fan of Theia Health's CGM, which connects to an app and helps you optimize your metabolism through small changes, tailored to you and suggested weekly based on your insights.
Need a little extra support in the blood-sugar department? Berberine is a plant-derived compound that helps improve insulin sensitivity. The antioxidant ALA provides additional support for blood-sugar balance and cardiovascular health. Blood Sugar Support combines these two powerful ingredients in one easy-to-take capsule.
3. Body-Composition Scale
If you step on a conventional bathroom scale on your fitness and fat-loss journey, you might be discouraged to find that your weight has actually gone up. But these scales don’t tell the whole story. With more details, you might find that you’re gaining muscle and losing fat. It’s what your weight is made up of, not the weight itself, that matters most.
A bathroom scale primarily tracks your overall weight, which doesn’t give you a clear picture of metrics such as body fat and muscle. For a more comprehensive understanding of your progress, though, you'll need to use a body-composition scale. These scales measure body-fat percentage, muscle mass, bone density, water weight, and more.
Back when I started, body-composition scales cost a pretty penny. Not today: I’m a big fan of Oxiline Scales, and this one is under $100.
4. Garmin or Apple Watch
Fitness trackers offer valuable insights into your activity levels, helping you stay accountable to your fitness goals. Many of these devices have specialized workout modes designed for strength training. Depending on which one you have, they can track workout duration and calories burned during strength-training sessions and can recommend the right rest intervals between sets through heart-rate monitoring.
Another standout feature of fitness trackers is their ability to track your progress over time. By recording your strength-training sessions, you can see improvements in the number of reps, weight lifted, or workout duration. This feedback can motivate you to set and achieve new goals, essential for continuous progress in strength training.
As you consistently use your fitness tracker, it accumulates a wealth of data about your physical activity and workouts. Analyzing this data can reveal patterns and trends that inform your training strategy. You can learn which exercises or routines yield the best results, allowing you to refine your approach for more effective strength training.
Two of my favorite fitness trackers are Garmin wearable devices and Apple Watch.
My FREE Resistance Training Cheat Sheet provides everything you need for your fitness journey, including home gym essentials, an eight-week workout plan, and a progress tracker to track your sets, reps, and weights with each workout.
5. Oura Ring
One in three US adults say they aren't getting enough sleep daily.1 Sleep trackers, available as standalone devices or integrated into fitness trackers and smartwatches, provide valuable insights into sleep quality and patterns to help you improve sleep.
Sleep trackers use a combination of sensors and algorithms to monitor your sleep cycles, distinguishing between light sleep, deep sleep, and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. By analyzing these cycles, they assess the overall quality of your sleep and whether you're getting adequate rest.
Measuring sleep duration is a fundamental aspect of sleep tracking. Sleep trackers are sensitive to movements and disruptions during the night, detecting restlessness, tossing and turning, and environmental factors like noise or light that may affect your sleep. Identifying these disturbances helps pinpoint potential sleep quality issues.
Sleep efficiency, another key metric, gauges how effectively you use your time in bed for actual sleep. Sleep trackers calculate this by comparing total time in bed to exact time spent asleep, offering insights into whether you're getting enough restorative sleep.
These devices also record wake-up times during the night or in the morning, helping you identify patterns of early awakenings or sleep disruptions.
Over time, sleep trackers accumulate data that let you recognize trends and patterns in your sleep. For instance, you can determine if you consistently experience poor sleep on specific days or if lifestyle factors like late-night meals or caffeine intake impact your sleep negatively.
Many sleep trackers provide personalized recommendations based on your sleep data. They include adjustments to your bedtime routine, changes in your sleep environment, or adopting relaxation techniques to enhance your sleep quality.
My favorite way to track sleep (and more) is with an Oura Ring. This wearable device monitors your sleep duration, sleep stages, and sleep quality. It provides data on your total sleep time, sleep efficiency, and the number of awakenings during the night so you can assess the quality of your sleep and identify potential areas for improvement.
The Oura Ring also tracks your heart rate throughout the day and night, providing insights into your resting heart rate, heart-rate variability (HRV), and changes in heart rate during different activities.
One of my favorite Oura Ring features is a daily readiness score that is calculated based on your sleep quality, HRV, and physical activity.
Here’s how I’ve seen it personally play out: I'm careful about when I eat dinner; I stop eating three to four hours before bedtime. One night, however, I ate dinner late. My Oura Ring gave me a poor readiness score the following day, showing that I got no deep sleep because I had eaten late the night before. Fascinating!
My Optimal Sleep Kit contains three supplements (Sleep Candy™, Magnesium Body Calm, and All-In-One Shake) that help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep through the night, and wake up feeling rested.*
6. Heart-Rate Variability (HRV) Sensor
Nothing derails your health and wellness goals more than chronic stress. Stress impacts almost every system in your body, lowering your immune response and increasing the risk of illness.2
Biofeedback devices and wearables can help monitor and manage stress levels. These devices utilize key metrics like heart-rate variability (HRV) to provide real-time feedback on your body's stress responses. Tracking your stress data over time can be valuable for monitoring your progress and fine-tuning your stress-management strategies.
HRV is the variation in time intervals between successive heartbeats and an essential indicator of stress response. Research shows that HRV is a reliable, non-invasive way to measure stress.3
HRV sensors continuously monitor your heart rate and offer immediate feedback on changes in HRV patterns, helping you stay aware of stress levels and triggers. By tracking your heart rate throughout the day, these devices can provide insights into your stress levels. Elevated or irregular heartbeats can indicate stress, and these devices can alert you when your heart rate spikes.
If you already have the Oura Ring tracking your sleep, know that it tracks your HRV as well. Garmin’s Fenix and Forerunner fitness trackers as well as the Apple Watch provide this data, too.
Whichever option you choose, these devices offer personalized insights based on your stress data over time, helping you identify patterns, triggers, and trends in your stress levels. As I mentioned, some biofeedback devices and wearables also offer guided relaxation exercises and breathing techniques tailored to your current stress level, enhancing their effectiveness.
Take Ten Stress Support is a uniquely formulated product that provides gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), a key neurotransmitter in the body involved in a normal, calm stress response. This synergistic formula also supplies other calming nutrients including glycine, niacinamide, pantothenic acid, and vitamin B6.*
7. YourLabwork
Analyzing specific biomarkers through lab tests offers valuable insights into your health. Biomarkers are measurable indicators of particular conditions within your body like glucose levels.
Monitoring lab work allows you to engage in your healthcare journey actively. They can help you detect potential issues like insulin resistance before they become serious. In the past, you had to visit your doctor for lab work, but now you can conveniently order these tests online, bypassing the hassle of scheduling and attending doctor's visits.
YourLabwork is my preferred option for lab testing, offering cost savings of up to 50-80% by ordering directly. You can choose from various lab tests based on your health needs and concerns like stress, thyroid health, and more.
YourLabwork sends a test kit to your home, complete with detailed instructions for sample collection, which is usually a simple self-administered process, eliminating the need for a clinic visit.
Once you've collected your sample, return it to YourLabwork using the provided pre-paid shipping materials. They send your samples to a certified laboratory for analysis and offer secure online access to your test results. This process allows you to review your results at your own pace without needing a doctor's appointment or follow-up.
Manage Your Metabolism to Meet Your Health and Wellness Goals
Wearables, smartwatches, and other tracking devices are all-in-one solutions for monitoring and managing health and wellness, including macros, sleep, stress, and blood-sugar levels. They seamlessly integrate multiple health-monitoring functions into a single device, offering real-time data, personalized guidance, and valuable insights.
Incorporating these tools into your daily routine helps you make data-driven decisions, stay motivated, learn what's working and what isn't, and support health and wellness goals more effectively.
Optimizing your metabolism to get strong, lean, and healthy means that you're consistently tracking these metrics. What you monitor and measure, you can improve.
Whether you want to burn fat, build muscle, or have more energy and focus, my Metabolism Rescue Program is the ultimate way to get the results you want. This cutting-edge program features a comprehensive guide, an exclusive one-hour masterclass, and a hand-selected bundle of metabolism-supporting supplements (All-In-One Shake, Metabolic Reset™, and Collagen Peptides Powder).*
Learn more about the Metabolism Rescue Program here.
References:
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute: What Are Sleep Deprivation and Deficiency?
- Salleh MR. Life event, stress and illness. Malays J Med Sci. 2008 Oct;15(4):9-18. PMID: 22589633; PMCID: PMC3341916.
- Peabody JE, Ryznar R, Ziesmann MT, Gillman L. A Systematic Review of Heart Rate Variability as a Measure of Stress in Medical Professionals. Cureus. 2023 Jan 29;15(1):e34345. doi: 10.7759/cureus.34345. PMID: 36865953; PMCID: PMC9974008.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration. Products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The views in this blog by JJ Virgin should never be used as a substitute for professional medical advice. Please work with a healthcare practitioner concerning any medical problem or concern.
