by Dave Korsunsky | Sep 30, 2020 | Case Studies, Self Tracking, Stories of Transformation
How many of us find ourselves slipping in our health habits and fitness levels from time to time? Heads Up user Danny Davisson’s life has been filled with amazing athletic endurance achievements, such as completing five double centuries and climbing the infamous steep Mount Baldy on his bike. And at age 60, even though he isn’t where he used to be, Danny, an endurance athlete from Southern California, is using Heads Up to plan his future health goals, aiming to live a long life.
Maybe not all of us have been at the level that Danny Davisson’s been at as an endurance athlete.Yet how many of us have made strides in our fitness and health, progressed, yet at some point, especially as we age, lose some of that progress? That’s just the human experience. None of us, even the most dedicated biohackers and health optimizers can be 100% perfect. Whether it’s our diet, exercise regimen, sleep, stress management, productivity or performance, none of us can be fully on 24/7. Life has a way of throwing curveballs at you, just when you least suspect it. (A global pandemic, anyone?)
That’s what’s great about Heads Up. You can use your own health data to empower you, to motivate you. To see where you’ve been, where you are now. As the captain of your own ship, you can always chart a new course!
And that’s exactly what Danny is doing: Taking back control of his own health, his level of fitness and his life.
“I’m learning how to step back and say, ‘How’s my plan?’ Gotta go slow to go fast. I wanna train to live up to 95,” he shared with us in a recent interview. “Heads Up helps me bring data together that I care about to figure out where I’m going. It’s one of the main tools that I’m using to track where I’m headed from a health perspective.”
“Heads Up helps me bring data together that I care about to figure out where I’m going. It’s one of the main tools that I’m using to track where I’m headed from a health perspective.” – Danny Davisson
Danny Davisson’s Health Journey
In spite of his athlete lifestyle, Danny, an avid cyclist and ultra runner, running 7-minute miles, has faced lifelong chronic sinus infections. As a result, he had taken repeated antibiotics which has taken a toll on his body. To combat the infections, he had started a Mucusless diet of lean meats, fruits and vegetables from 2013 to 2016, which reduced his infections to once a year.
In September 2016, Danny injured his right calf on a 45-mile High Sierra run, which led him to stop all running and cycling for two months. This was when he lost 30% of his fitness.
A month later, in October, after a 16-day Mediterranean cruise where he ate a lot of different foods, the sinus infection reared its ugly head and he was back to starting antibiotics again. From November to January, he experienced erratic heart rates without chest pressure. At that point, he couldn’t regain fitness or energy, continuing the antibiotics for his sinus infection, feeling like he wasn’t getting enough blood to his legs.
But since he began a low-carb keto diet in February 2017, he’s been antibiotic free, showing the power of diet to impact your health.
Even though Danny hasn’t regained the fitness level he used to be at in 2016, he trusts that he has a plan. “I’m not where I want to be but I’m working on it,” he says with confidence.
Taking Back Control of His Health with Heads Up
Ever since he heard about Heads Up on Jimmy Moore’s podcast around 2017, shortly after he began eating low-carb, Danny has been using Heads Up because it allows him to bring together everything he uses to stay healthy — Garmin for sleep and steps, his blood tests and medical records via Labcorps and Kaiser, and more — allowing him to see trends in his health.
“Heads Up is great for me, it’s really cool. What I love is that you can bring all the sources of data together to see the trends. Where I’m at. Where I’ve been. My primary use for Heads Up is seeing my bloodwork all in one place. Cholesterol, glucose, triglycerides, blood pressure and more.”
Danny takes his blood pressure everyday, seeing it on his dashboard, along with the other health data he’s interested in such as those mentioned above.
Danny Davisson – 45 Mile Rae Lakes Run
When one of our team members stacked 30-days of a nose-to-tail carnivore diet with a prolonged fast near the end of January, she wanted to see how these two self-experiments impacted her fasting glucose, ketones, and weight, her last six months captured in this graph on the left. It’s interesting to see how glucose takes a nose dive and ketones rocket upwards, while weight begins to drop after sandwiching a week-long fast between carnivore-eating.
In His Own Words: Interview with Danny Davisson
How are you using Heads Up?
Using Heads Up to bring health data together in one place so I can see trends.
Blood Work
Blood Pressure
Sleep via Garmin
Activities
Some nutrition (My FitnessPal) when I input.
Weight
etc.
What is your favorite feature on Heads Up?
Heads Up gives me the ability to see health trends.
What metrics do you track?
See above
Have you connected Heads Up to any devices, apps, wearables, and/or medical records/blood tests?
Yes, Garmin, MyFitnessPal, LabCorp, Kaiser.
Are you using a health coach, nutritionist, naturopath, and/or functional doctor?
Just sent my link to a nutritionist, but have not connected yet.
Advice for others about taking control of your health?
Do your research and commit.
Any favorite ___(ex. podcasts, books, recipes, other) you want to share?
Books:
Podcasts:
Ready to Take Control of YOUR Health?
At Heads Up, we’re excited and inspired by Danny Davisson’s health journey, happy to play a part in helping him steer his ship back on-course. As long as you’re alive, you have a chance to keep going. To not give up hope. You CAN regain your fitness levels. You can regain your health. No matter what the world is throwing at you, YOU can control your own lifestyle choices. Progress is rarely linear. As Jimmy Moore says on his podcasts, “Progress, not perfection.”
Like Danny, you can use Heads Up as a tool to track your health trends and stay motivated to keep going. This is an excellent way to keep yourself accountable. With our one stop dashboard you can aggregate all the various health wearables, devices, apps and even your medical records and blood test results to track and trend how different lifestyle choices are affecting your particular and unique body. At any point in your health journey, you can also share with your practitioner or loved one the story of where you’ve been, where you’d like to be heading, and easily share using our report feature.
With Heads Up, you can track as little or as much as you want. Did you know you can also import your blood tests to correlate how a particular diet or prolonged fast is impacting your HbA1c or other markers, such as CRP and HDL? You can also keep track of other vital markers such as sleep data and HRV via wearables such as Oura or EliteHRV. You can even see how cryotherapy sessions are impacting your health!
You can read more inspirational health journey stories such as 60+ year old Ginny, a retired long haul driver, who reversed her prediabetes using Heads Up as a tool to take control of her own health.
by Dave Korsunsky | Apr 18, 2020 | Features | Self Tracking | Stories of Transformation, Stories of Transformation
We love hearing about empowered Heads Up customers who are transforming their health. It brings us great joy because, after all, when all is said and done, health is the best wealth.
When Benjamin “Ben” Becerra, a commercial truck driver and dad — aka Keto Trucker Ben — went in for his physical at the Department of Transportation, his doctor declared him “morbidly obese” based on his weight and BMI. Instead of letting that discourage him, Ben used that as motivation to research viable diets that would fit his mostly sedentary lifestyle driving an 18-wheeler.
Within 17 months, Ben transformed his body and health using lifestyle modifications (keto/fasting/exercise), keeping it up by tracking his health data with Heads Up and Keto-Mojo. He began posting onto Instagram his new keto life on the road, revealing gains over time. He’s proof that mindset and keto tracking is key to optimizing your health. It doesn’t matter if you’re a commercial truck driver with a sedentary job possessing only one skillet and one small refrigerator. Ben is proving, to himself and everyone else, that when it comes to transforming his health, he’s unstoppable!
Extending Healthspan with a Healthy Keto Lifestyle
In October 2018, Ben Becerra jumped into the keto lifestyle and hasn’t looked back. Beginning at 262 lbs and a BMI of 38.4, now at age 38, Ben has dropped his weight to 212 lbs and lowered his BMI to 30.4 This young dad isn’t letting being on the road for work stop him from eating healthy, exercising or fasting, determined more than ever to be a healthy model to his 28 month old daughter, to extend his healthspan to see her grow up.
“I use Heads Up as my go-to app for all the information I collect from my Keto-mojo meter. I’m a data person so I enjoy monitoring my data to make the best choices and stay motivated.”
How Ben Becerra Uses Heads Up for Tracking Keto
Ben Becerra checks his fasting glucose and ketones using Keto-Mojo, his ketone meter and glucometer, then syncs that info directly to the Heads Up dashboard (see below for mobile app) where he can see his numbers displayed, GKI (glucose to ketones index) automatically calculated, and other desired health data (ex. weight, BMI). He also uses Heads Up’s built-in fasting timer to start or stop his fasts. This is a great way to get a feel of how lifestyle choices such as what you eat and drink (and when you don’t) impacts your metabolic health.
Using the mobile app with Keto-Mojo, Ben can customize his personal dashboard to track the metrics that he cares about to achieve his health goals. (Active on Instagram, you can follow Ben at @keto.trucker.ben and keep inspired by how he stays keto on the road!)
To get even more power out of Heads Up, Ben can use our Analyzer feature on the web app to graph and correlate up to SIX health metrics. As a self-described “data person,” Ben, who is now in the midst of a 30-day Carnivore Keto Cut Challenge with the always inspiring Danny Vega, can then monitor how this new lifestyle mod is impacting other health markers, such as fasting glucose and weight. Or even how this new diet may be affecting inflammation markers such as CRP, since it’s easy to correlate with medical records to spot trends over time.
Note: The graph above is an example of our Analyzer in action when one of our team members stacked 30-days of a nose-to-tail carnivore diet with a prolonged fast near the end of January. She wanted to see how these two health self-experiments impacted her fasting glucose, ketones, and weight, her last six months captured in this graph. It’s interesting to see how glucose takes a nose dive and ketones rocket upwards, while weight begins to drop after sandwiching a week-long fast between carnivore-eating.
It’s hard not to be inspired by Ben’s BEFORE and AFTER photos
Interview with Ben Becerra on Transforming His Health
We had a chance to chat with Ben about what he’s been doing to transform his health. Enjoy the interview below! And don’t forget to head on over to his Instagram feed to get inspired in real-time what he’s doing to stay in the game for the long haul.
In your own words, how would you describe your health transformation? What were you facing that led you to take control of your health?
What led me to making my transformation was when I went to get my D.O.T. [Department of Transportation] physical exam and the doctor told me that I was “morbidly obese.” At that point, I realized I had let myself go and decided to do some research on what types of “diets” I could use while being sedentary for a majority of the day driving a commercial vehicle. I came across the ketogenic lifestyle, first hearing about it through my uncle, then from the incredibly inspiring keto community on Instagram, and began to tailor the diet to my new career.
Once I realized that I could maintain this lifestyle while trucking I went in full steam. Now I am at a level of learning to use data points that I gather to manipulate my dietary needs to take me into the best shape of my life. Having the ability to track so I can tailor my journey and intake of nutrition to fit into my trucker lifestyle (e.g., learning how the effects of food and drink, such as a Red Bull, affects my blood sugar). It’s been almost 17 mos since I started my Keto Journey.
My goal is to ultimately be my best both mentally and physically for the remainder of this life I have to share with my daughter.
How are you using Heads Up?
I use Heads Up as my go-to app for all the information I collect from my Keto-mojo meter and fasting tracker. I’m a data person so I enjoy monitoring my data to make the best choices and stay motivated.
What health metrics do you monitor for keto tracking?
Fasting glucose, ketones, GKI, weight, BMI and fasts
Have you connected Heads Up to any devices, apps, wearables, and/or medical records/blood tests?
So far, just with the Keto-Mojo meter. It’s great that it can integrate with so many devices out there allowing me to get healthier on my own. So far, I’ve gotten healthier, it’s hard to believe that all this has been through eating real food.
Advice for others about taking control of your health?
Set a goal and work towards it daily. The 18 months of weight loss was not an overnight success.
But I believe in having “a patience mindset:” #smallgoalsdaily. Also I’ve learned that intermittent fasting is a natural friendship with keto with lots of science and data to back it up.
Your go-to meal to maintain your keto lifestyle?
Bone-in ribeye steak and brussels sprouts (made in my trailer while on the road).
Inside my Trucker Trailer, I eat, cook, and maintain a keto lifestyle using only:
- 1 skillet
- 1 coffee maker
- 1 4×4 cubic refrigerator
Any favorite ___ (ex. podcasts, books, recipes, other) you want to share?
Fasting Mother Nature’s Game Changer, a book by Scott Murray (AKA @TheGoodLifeTheory on Instagram). Via the incredibly supportive and enormous keto community on Instagram, Ben met Scott who inspired and supported Ben’s keto journey. Ben highly recommends Scott’s book!
Take Control of Your Health
With Heads Up, you can track as little or as much as you want. Did you know you can also import your blood tests to correlate how a particular diet or prolonged fast is impacting your A1C or other markers, such as CRP and HDL? You can also keep track of other vital markers such as sleep data and HRV via wearables such as Oura or EliteHRV. You can even see how cryotherapy sessions are impacting your health!
You can read more inspirational stories of transformation like Ben’s, such as 60+ year old Ginny who reversed her prediabetes. A retired long haul driver herself, Ginny didn’t let being on the road stop her from tracking keto and transforming her health.
by Dave Korsunsky | Apr 6, 2019 | Features, Self Tracking, Stories of Transformation
The real power in using Heads Up Health with Keto-Mojo is being able to track and correlate biomarkers you care about, such as the GKI (Glucose Ketone Index) with other major health metrics, like body measurements.
The leader in consumer software for personal health data analytics, Heads Up Health allows you to see your progress over weeks, month, years — all in one place. When used together with Keto-Mojo, the leader in affordable, accurate blood glucose and ketone testing meters, they’re a powerful force for helping you get into ketosis, maintain keto-adaptation, and see the big picture of your metabolic health and body composition.
For example, our Social Media Manager, and avid Heads Up Health user, Lily Chien-Davis, correlated her GKI with her waist circumference measurements, whittling down her waist size while staying keto-adapted.
In the graph above, Lily shares how she used Keto-Mojo to track her glucose and ketones over the past 12 months, uploading those results to Heads Up Health where we automatically calculate the glucose-ketone index (GKI), a powerful biomarker for tracking your metabolic health.
The graph speaks for itself as Lily slashed over five inches off her waist circumference!
Lily first discovered the glucose ketones index as a biomarker when her husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2014. They used a therapeutic ketogenic diet as an adjunct to conventional treatment, consulting with Miriam Kalamian [1] and following the advice of cancer researcher, author [2] and inventor of the GKI, Thomas N Seyfried and his advice to keep the glucose ketone index low, “tracking the ratio of blood glucose to ketones as a single value”, in an effort to blast the tumors near her husband’s aorta. [3]
As they both carefully monitored his glucose ketone index and watched his tumors rapidly shrink, she began eating keto too, surprised, as someone diagnosed with pre-diabetes, to watch her own HbA1c go down, from 5.9% to 5.2%. In 2016, she discovered Heads Up Health while listening to keto podcasts (i.e., Jimmy Moore, Ketovangelist, 2 Keto Dudes). Both she and her husband immediately signed up, excited to track their glucose, ketones, and GKI alongside their medical records and body composition data, such as weight and waist size.
Since then, Lily has never looked back.
Instead of using a scale to track her weight every day, which can be maddening because weight loss is never linear, she tracks her GKI alongside her waist circumference and weight once a month using our measurements feature. In the beginning she also tracked her macros, but now relies solely on eating an intuitive keto-paleo and sometimes carnivore diet, preferring to track her GKI regularly, using the graphing feature in Heads Up Health’s Analyzer to reflect on her progress, helping her stay motivated.
Here’s Lily’s before/after photos and you can see how great she looks. Most importantly, she FEELS awesome, both mentally and physically.
“Tracking with Keto-Mojo and Heads Up Health helped me to stay in ketosis and keto-adapted for over a year, giving me accountability and motivation to keep keto-ing on. Although I’m not completely where I’d like to be just yet, I’m free of all prescription meds, happier and healthier than I’ve ever been. My husband is now almost 4 years in remission and we recently sold our house to move into, travel and worldschool our kid in a RV, a dream we hatched up during long days of chemo infusions. People say keto is restrictive, that it’s a fad diet, but because I’ve used it for mental and physical health, it’s just a way of life for me now. The rest — feeling younger, more energy to actually want to exercise, mental clarity, and better body composition — is just icing on the cake!” – Lily Chien-Davis
It takes a lot of courage to share this information so please give Lily a shout-out on Instagram (@hellbentonbliss). We love you Lily!
Ready to get started? Enter your first set of baseline measurements, get yourself into nutritional ketosis and track your success!
We’ve included a little video tutorial below to help you get started.
Questions? Hit us up!
Keto on!
Dave Korsunsky | Founder
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| VIDEO: Gimme that Mojo! Tracking the GKI and Your Waist Circumference |
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[1] Miriam Kalamian
[2] Cancer as a Metabolic Disease by Thomas N. Seyfried, PhD
[2] The glucose ketone index calculator: a simple tool to monitor therapeutic efficacy for metabolic management of brain cancer
