Gyroscope Newsletter: March
New drugs for obesity, testing habits from Huberman Lab, and opening the new Bento Box
The last few months have been an exciting time, with great leaps in artificial intelligence and some new developments in health.
In this month’s March newsletter, we look into:
• Reviewing the top ranked experiments in Gyroscope Labs
• The latest GLP1 drugs you may be hearing about
• New app update with brand new Bento Box
• A preview into the future of AI
Ready? Let’s go…
01
🏆 Top Rated Labs
Last year we invested a lot in our Guides and Labs, which now have pretty much everything you need to know about managing your health.
In the Labs you can find dozens of powerful habits, along with reviews and ratings on each from members who tried them out. The available habits include some of the foundations of health, as well as tips or some studies you may have seen mentioned in the Huberman Lab or Peter Attia podcasts.
These habits have now been tested by Gyroscope members in thousands of experiments and reviews. Let’s look at the community rankings to find which habits were rated as most effective or which are the easiest to do.
Here are the top rated habits by overall rating.
The top one currently is “Eat one meal a day.” This is a bit advanced, and has a lot of details in order to do correctly (listed on the experiment page), but can also be very effective for metabolic health and productivity.
Below that are L-Theanine + Coffee, Avoiding eating before bed (sometimes challenging combined with the first), and Using a gratitude Journal.
What if you are really busy and want to do something easy?
Here are what people rated the most easy to do… surprisingly using a weighted blanket is the highest. Supplements like cordyceps and L-theanine come soon after, which are also quite easy to implement.
Having some easy options is important because the most effective and powerful habit in the world is going to be useless if you don’t actually do it.
We see this All or Nothing mentality very often, it is just human nature but unfortunately holds many people back, and one of the first things that is addressed in our Gyroscope Coach program. They either want to do the maximum extreme most optimal thing, or not bother at all. But the best strategy is generally doing whatever you are able to. Some days it could be just a few minutes, some days it could be more.
Which habits have you tried?
Our top TWO picks for this month are…
🌈 Setting your Phone to Greyscale!
This is a simple change in iOS settings, and then you can switch it back and forth in less than a second. The colors are not actually necessary for using your phone, but do make it a lot more addictive especially for things like social media.
Doing this can be a way to counteract that, while still being able to use your phone. It is the digital equivalent of switching from highly processed foods to whole foods.
🌞 Morning Sunshine!
This comes highly recommended from the Huberman podcast and many scientific studies showing the importance of the sun.
This is a new habit in the Labs and doesn’t have many reviews yet, but now that it is Spring, it is a perfect time to take this for a spin and add your rating.
Semaglutide: Weight Loss Wonder-Drug?
There’s been a lot of chat in the press about the new weight loss wonder-drug “semaglutide” in recent weeks, so much so that you may be sick of hearing about it. However having now been approved for use on the UK’s NHS it’s clear that it is here to stay, so we thought we’d chime in with a few thoughts and opinions. It’s possibly one of the biggest developments in health and best ways since we launched Gyroscope X 3 years ago.
First of all, what is it?
Semaglutide belongs to a class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which basically increase insulin secretion while reducing glucagon secretion, leading to increased feelings of fullness. If you don’t know what any of these words mean, you may want to review the Gyroscope Hunger & Satiety guide.
It’s used to treat both type 2 diabetes and obesity, Ozempic being the version used to treat diabetes and major cardiovascular issues, and Wegovy is prescribed for chronic weight management. Different names, but the same thing. Right now, Wegovy is authorized for use in adults who are obese (BMI >30) or a BMI over 27 along with medical issues due to your weight. It’s also been approved for obese children 12 years and older.
Pros
- May lead to significant weight loss by reducing appetite and in turn calorie intake
- May improve blood sugar control
- May improve other health markers, such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels
- May lead to better quality of life and increased self-esteem due to weight loss
Cons
- Wegovy can cause side effects, including nausea, diarrhea, abdominal pain, constipation, headache, and fatigue
- Wegovy can interact with other medications, including insulin, sulfonylureas, and other drugs that stimulate insulin secretion, increasing the risk of hypoglycemia
- The long-term safety and efficacy of Wegovy have not been established beyond 2 years
- Wegovy is expensive and may not be covered by all insurance plans
One of the undeniable benefits of Wegovy is the acute response it can bring about in the patient, which could be used to life-changing effect when a patient is in many ways a “ticking health time bomb” and there is simply not enough time to get to the “root cause” and focus on long term behavior change.
For people who are morbidly obese (this is a clinical term) and need a fast solution, this could literally save their lives. It could allow people to lose weight before something terrible happens and then spend time working on long term habits. Or not — maybe some people will need to take this all their lives, and if they suffer no serious side effects it may be better than the alternative. Obesity is not just a physical problem, it is often coupled with serious mental health conditions that all feed into each other and these can take years or entire lifetimes of continued work to deal with, often without conclusion.
The ideal scenario is that this gives a helpful boost and helps turn the tide of a person’s battle against obesity, helping people go in the right direction while also implementing all the other changes to lifestyle also. Since being obese is quite an urgent issue, it makes sense to use all available tools to combat it.
For this select few, perhaps it is literally the panacea that is needed and we should be careful not to apply biases against this, or have our views influenced by any of the many logical fallacies that are particularly prevalent in the health space.
For others who may not need it quite so urgently, but are suffering from health conditions due to overweight or obesity, this could also be a valid form of treatment while they work on the long term habits and factors that will allow them to eventually come off the drug and stay healthy.
However, remember this drug essentially helps you control your calories. Reducing energy intake will cause you to lose weight, and if you are obese we know that will improve a multitude of health markers independent of other factors. However, it is not magic. Nutrients and behaviors still matter.
Right now the data shows that when most people stop taking Semaglutide they regain weight. Sound familiar? This happens with every form of dietary restriction unless long term behavioral change and sustainable, personalized improvements in dietary habits are implemented. In the long run you must continue to strive for mostly good quality whole foods, balanced meals, adequate protein, high fiber, plenty of vegetables… everything that is needed for a healthy gut and system that GLP1 drugs do not help with.
This is the type of experience that we’ve been working on building into Gyroscope, though unfortunately it is a lot more work than simply taking a pill or injection. However, there are still no shortcuts. For most people, we suggest a more holistic approach in Gyroscope Coach — plus at just $99/month, it is less than half the cost of taking these drugs.
Further to this, if you do not resistance train and consume enough protein while losing weight — both things that we strongly recommend for optimal longevity — you will lose a lot of muscle mass along with your fat mass, which is particularly bad.
So while this is undoubtedly going to help many, it is not a silver bullet — nutrients, sleep, exercise and all the fundamental pillars of health still apply. Semaglutide simply helps certain people control their caloric intake.
Losing weight is simple, keeping it off is hard. Right now it seems that Semaglutide, while effective, suffers from the same problems that every other diet does: lack long term sustainability if not implementing long term planning, coaching and behavior changes.
Therefore, our recommendation continues to be to find and solve the root problems here, and especially focusing on increasing meal quality to reverse or avoid obesity, and adding in resistance training as soon as possible.
We know people are hungry for a very simple and easy solution, but unfortunately the human body is quite complex and does have these many requirements, and there still seem to be no shortcuts around it. However, with tools like Gyroscope the process can be automated considerably.
The good news is that it seems based on the studies that semaglutide can be a powerful booster in that journey while also making all these core changes, or as training wheels to get some momentum to implement them.
Opening your new Bento Box
Last month we released a major update to the Health tab, streamlining all the trends and making it faster than ever to see your latest data.
The goal here is to be able to see any of your graphs within 5 seconds or less! This makes it easy to check on these frequently, whenever you want, to keep an eye on how you are doing.
You can see just the last weeks to get a sense of where you are now, or zoom out to a whole year to see your overall progress.
The Health Score will add more grades and insights alongside your data, to help explain what it means and highlight which specific sections are improving or need attention.
Also in the same spot now you can easily access the relevant guides, explore habits to make improvements, or practice the fundamental insights from the Academy.
At the very top is an easy time-selector to switch between week, month quarter or an entire year.
All of these are included in the Gyroscope Pro membership. For 100% free, everyone can track their mental health & meditation in the app and see those associated trends and patterns. Even if you’re not ready to start tracking your sleep, steps, food and other data, starting with your mind is often a great first step.
The Gyroscope Roadmap
One of our focuses this year is to continue to make big changes and improvements to the app without confusing our existing users. Now we are exploring exciting new ways that we can implement AI technology into the app experience, to work alongside our data and our human coaching team.
We have been testing out some of new AI features in the app for the last few weeks and it has been really mind-blowing. This has never been done before, so there’s a lot to figure out and test before it is ready for release, but so far it is really promising!
It feels similar to the start of the internet, or the first iPhone — one of those things that seems pretty simple, but hard ever go back from once you’ve tried it.
The best part? We’re almost ready to add a few new beta testers to try out the first wave. More details coming next month…
This year on the roadmap we have three main phases for the app…
V5: The generation we are right now. Fixing and improving all the current views so they are really powerful. This includes all the analytics, reports, guides, quizzes, and more. We recently made some progress here with the new Bento box and simplified design of the Health tab, and have a lot more coming soon.
V6: New AI experiences. Using new technologies to keep simplifying what we have now to be more unified and intuitive for new members, and to deliver more advanced insights and life-changing coaching to our longtime members who already have all their data.
V7: Going deeper into longevity with new trackers and metrics…
Whether you’ve been here since the beginning or are only recently with us, we appreciate you and can’t wait to share more of what we’ve been working on!
