Product Reviews
Reviews of wellness products that I have used personally.

Lumen

Oct 2023

Lumen is a device that measures CO2 levels in your breath to provide feedback on what percent of fat you are burning at various times during the day.  The device connects to an app that gives you a score, which approximates whether you are burning more fat or carbohydrates.  The idea is then that you can track how metabolically flexible you are (ability to switch between fat and carb burn) and how this relates to various lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, sleep and stress.  This intrigued me because, at the time, I was curious to know how well I was balancing my blood sugar levels and how long I should fast in the morning to avoid sending my body into stress mode (thereby avoiding cortisol spikes and blood sugar swings), which could play into stress and autoimmunity.  After hearing the inventor of Lumen speak on a podcast, I was pretty impressed by the science that went into creating this device so I decided to give it a try!  I tried the Lumen fairly regularly for about 6 months and did notice some patterns and got some insights.  One thing I noticed was that if I fasted for too long in the morning, my score would jump up, so this biofeedback helped me determine that a long fast overnight was probably stressing my body, and I was able to make adjustments from there.  Another pattern I noticed is that I would often have a high streak for awhile in the morning and then have a low streak for awhile, but often I was not able to correlate these to lifestyle factors.  Eating late at night was hit or miss, in terms of being predictive of morning Lumen scores.  There were probably multiple factors playing in here.  The biggest challenge that I found with Lumen was that the scores are inaccurate if you are in ketosis, so often if I was in ketosis or borderline, I wasn't able to use and/or trust the scores.  This was probably the biggest downside, given my particular diet patterns during this time.  However, if you are not following a ketogenic, then I think there are some valuable insights to be gleaned from experimenting with this device, especially, if you are willing to follow the macros that are recommended (the app recommends macros based on your scores and you can even input your diet into the app).  This, after all, is how the device is designed to be used.  I think that if I have more flexibility in macros at some point in my healing journey, this device would be worthwhile to experiment with again.  And for anyone, like me, who is analytical and likes to see the biofeedback to confirm changes, this could potentially be a fun and a useful device, as long as the monitoring doesn't stress you out.  Here is a link to the company's website.