A tips and technique ‘toolbox’ for optimising nutrition and health

Biohacking has become a popular term and is used to describe a wide range of techniques to improve our health or fitness. You will likely have already participated in some form of your own biology experiment, whether it be a change in diet, trying green tea or intermittent fasting or even tracking your sleep patterns and using a step counter during the day.

These are all examples of ‘tools’ we often use every day to help move us towards our own health and fitness goals. In this series, I hope to use evidence-based science to you gain significant improvements with your goals over time. Some methods act fast and others should be used together over long periods.

Overall I will use the term biohacking in the context of only natural methods and tools that I have explored myself and definitely not the weird and wonderful that are considered to be controversial. Think of these as tools in the toolbox of health and fitness.

The series will be divided up into categories of techniques and methods that tackle various challenges we might face, often they may be difficult to understand or find an answer for. Where possible I will divide them up in to ‘fast facts’ or ‘technical’ sections depending on difficulty and what you are trying to achieve, you may be just looking for extra information for your own research.

Some of the areas being covered:

• Sleep and eating habits
• Genetic testing to understand how your body may process nutrients
• Macro ratios, how eating protein, carbs and fats can impact our biological switches
• Nutrients and homeostasis
• Plateau control, why losing weight sometimes doesn’t work 
• Hunger control, the hormones that make us hungry
• Thermogenesis, what it is and why it can be important
• Weighing scales, weighing at various times of the day can offer interesting insights
• Fibre fuel, how can we use fibre to maximise health
• Biological switches, what are they and how to use them to achieve our goals
• Immunity strengthening, simples techniques to improve this complex system
• Fasting, one of the best tools to master for overall health
• Set-point theory and why it can be so hard to lose or gain weight
• Pulsing theory, how to rotate methods over time to be more beneficial long term

Single formulas sound great

Success does require an understanding of what you are trying to achieve. Not all methods of nutrition and lifestyle approaches are compatible in the long term, although short term benefits may be used as tools to achieve your long term goals.

Don’t get bogged down in finding single formulas, the magic pill! It is fine to learn formulas and identify methods and their resulting outcomes, but our bodies were definitely not designed to do a single thing all the time, permanently! As an extreme example, lifelong bodybuilding is unlikely to be compatible with an ultimate goal of longevity based on what we know to prolong life expectancy. That said, that doesn’t mean that doing bodybuilding for a percentage of your life would be beneficial when you become much older. Often, it’s in the timing of events that seems to be the important part.

Your body is a biological machine and is totally obsessed with trying to stay in the natural balance of homeostasis. After all, we are looking after, what is likely, the most complex machine in our known universe, particularly if you include the human brain. If we move past looking for single magic formulas, I hope that this series can help in your journey of research and improve your own health and fitness goals.