The Single, Next Big Trend In Biohacking And Self-Quantification.

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Foreign. Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And it's probably no secret if you've been a podcast listener for a while, that one of my favorite ways to pretty much track my body, of all the different things that you could use to self quantify is something called heart rate variability. And I've actually had several podcasts before on heart rate variability where I've talked about this pretty cool health monitoring technique that allows you to tap into how recovered your nervous system is, how ready your body is to train for the day. It even allows you to kind of predict whether you might get sick or you might get injured. And the particular system that I've been using for a pretty long time to track my heart rate variability is called Sweet Beat. And it's basically just this iPhone app and you wear a heart rate monitor or something else that will talk about in the podcast today and you do a simple measurement every day. For me, it's five minutes in the morning when I'm lying in bed before I get out of bed in the morning. Now what I'm going to do in the show notes for this particular podcast is I'm going to link you to other podcasts that I've done on heart rate variability. For example, I have one called the do it yourself guide to using heart rate variability. And I have another one called everything you need to know about heart rate variability testing. And the show notes for this particular podcast you can grab over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com SweetBeatLife that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com SweetbeatLife hopefully that's not too complex for you to remember if you're out running or biking or doing your laundry or something as you listen in. Well, my guest in those other podcasts on heart rate variability was Rhonda from Sweet Beat Life. And Rhonda actually has more than 25 years of experience in technology, product development and developing these really cool leading edge consumer electronic products. And she spent the past several years as an independent scholar researching non invasive health monitoring techniques and really has been at the forefront of developing the type of technology that's used in the Sweet Beat life heart rate variability Tracking technology. So Rhonda is a huge wealth of knowledge. We're privileged to have her on the podcast to tell us how we can get better results out of our tracking and better results out of knowing what's going on inside of our bodies. So, Rhonda, thanks so much for coming on the call today.

Oh, thank you so much for having me, Ben.

Well, you know, the reason that I wanted to have you on Rhonda is that this whole Sweet Beat system I've been using to monitor my own health that a lot of my clients are using now, it's gone through a pretty massive little upgrade in terms of, indeed what it actually monitors. And kind of the tools that can be used to monitor, they kind of go above and beyond just heart rate monitors. And you've got this new thing called the health patch now. So we'll talk about that a little bit later on, I think. But first of all, why'd you do this upgrade? Were you just basically finding customer feedback influenced adding new variables, or has technology progressed or what? Exactly.

Well, so the initial piece of the upgrade, obviously, was to come into the iOS 7, and the new look and feel, that was a very small piece of it. But we're involved with the Qualcomm Live platform ecosystem, and they collect.

What is that?

Qualcomm is the big wireless company that makes chips for all our phones. Okay. And they have a division called Qualcomm Live that is in the medical area and the fitness area, because ultimately they want to sell chips to all of the wireless devices, but they're doing some really cool stuff in terms of collecting information. And so they collect. They basically are a central spot to collect all of your Fitbit Map My Fitness Wythings information. And so we're working with them. We got this idea that, yes, the data is cool, and yes, there's tons of dashboards out there showing you your data, but what is the real sort of meaning behind all that data besides just seeing graphs? So what we did was think, let's do something that has meaning. And so we came up with this correlation feature. Okay. And this is one of the big new features of. Of Sweet Beat Life. And so what we do is we take the things you're already measuring. So if you have a Fitbit, if you're using, say, Map My Fitness, we take some information from that. And we do support the Withings scale and blood pressure cuff.

Yeah, that's like the wythings is. I actually have that skill. It analyzes your body fat.

Yeah.

The CO2 in your home, all sorts.

Of interesting things that was.

So you're now able to bring in the data from these other devices into the Sweetbee app, and then you can correlate your heart rate variability with that data.

Your heart rate variability with that data, your stress with that data. Let me back up a little bit. There's a certain type of metric that we call sort of essential metrics that people should know that is their blood pressure, their weight, their cholesterol, and their heart rate variability. Heart rate variability really? Is that important? It's something that people should know. And so what we do is we have these metrics that you can then correlate all your other metrics to. So, for example, I'll use HRV as one example. You've been measuring your hrv. You've been tracking your wide things and your blood pressure and your calories in and out and all that for a year. Okay. And now you're training for an ironman. And so you want to go back and go, what have I been doing? And tracking that consistently gives me the most recovered nervous system or highest hrv. And then that gives you information so that you can reasonably predictably be at your best HRV place the day of your ironman. Okay. And so this is really powerful data. Another one for some of your other listeners is weight. Okay. Sometimes it's really elusive. I feel like I'm doing the right things to stay at my optimal weight, but I just don't get it. And so what we do is you can select weight as your metric instead of HRV that you care about. And what it will do is tell you what you've been doing and tracking that are bringing you to your optimal weight. Okay. You can also choose blood pressure. What am I doing where my blood pressure is where I want it to be. Okay. And so it's really powerful for bringing actual usable information from data. And I think that's the new term, information versus data.

Okay. So basically, if you're tracking all this data, if you're really into self quantification or, you know, and you're not necessarily even doing really advanced self quantification, like, you know, you're just sticking with some basic variables like weight, blood pressure, stuff like that, you can pretty much automatically feed all that into the app and directly see how it's affecting really what's most important, which is your heart rate variability or your entire nervous system, which.

That's right.

Okay.

That's right. That's right.

So I could theoretically, like, I could theoretically see for example, I'm at 182 pounds right now. Like, that's how much I weigh. But, you know, when I'm. When I'm competing or training hard, a lot of times I'll drop to like 175. I could actually track that and see if my heart rate variability corresponds to my weight, for example.

That's right. That's right.

Interesting.

And you can see what weight you are where your HRV tends to be higher.

Gotcha.

Okay.

I definitely noticed that on the new app. And by the way, for those of you listening in, if you're just like, heart rate variability. Huh? What are they talking about? Definitely go to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com sweetbeatlife because you'll probably want to go back and listen to the other episodes that we did. Just because, frankly, we're not going to go into a big discussion in this podcast on what heart variability is. We're kind of progressing with the idea that you kind of already have your head wrapped around that if you don't go listen to the other two podcasts, consider this to be like, number three in the series. So anyways, Rhonda, you've got this new correlation screen, which is pretty cool because now we can kind of feed all our data into one place, and it's kind of laid out with, like, bubbles.

Right.

And I noticed you can touch these bubbles and it, like, flips them and what. What exactly is going on there?

Yeah. So I'll take this moment to. So your listeners understand we're putting a lot of information on a simple screen. Okay. This. There's so much to convey that it's complicated. So I do advise. Sweet Beat Life has a really great little video. There's this little video button. I do advise to watch that and pay close attention. Okay, so what we have is the.

What do you mean? Like a. It's like a how to video or.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. So it describes everything in detail. And if you just spend a couple of minutes watching that little video, then that whole screen will suddenly have meaning.

Is that on the app, that video?

Huh?

Oh, yeah.

It looks like a little film clip in the corner. Yeah, it looks like actual film. And so if you press that, then. And it's. You have to have done the update.

Okay.

So it started on the last update. It wasn't on the original release.

Okay.

And we had just a lot of confusion. Like I said, you're going to look at that screen and go, okay, what does this mean? But then once you watch the Video and understand it. You're like, oh, wow, look at all this great information I'm seeing.

Okay, gotcha.

So we've got the central bubble on the left, the blue bubble. And that is what we call sort of your important body metric, such as blood pressure, weight, hrv. And those are the ones we support now. Well, it eventually add glucose once we can support that. And those are the kind of things that you really, really care about. Okay. And then all the other things you do, like what kind of activities you're doing, what kind of exercise, how many steps you're taking, how many calories in, calories out, and all that are these bubbles that surround the blue bubble. And so what you have at the top is a. Actually, what you'll see are bubbles. From big bubbles at the top down to small bubbles at the bottom. The big bubbles have a high level of correlation. Okay.

Okay, gotcha.

Yeah. And the small bubble has just. So it goes down in order of levels of correlation. Okay. And then the small bubble has the least amount of correlation.

Gotcha.

Okay, gotcha. And then you'll also see that there's green bubbles and red bubbles. So the green bubble means that it's a positive correlation or a proportional correlation. So for example, if your HRV goes up as your weight goes up. Up, it's a green bubble.

Right. Okay, makes sense.

If your HRV goes up as your weight goes down, it's a red bubble. That means it's inversely correlated.

Or if, like your. If, you know, for example, the withings. Actually, for the average temp, that correlation. Is that your body temp or is that your. Your home temp for that one?

Oh, that's your body temp.

Okay.

So if you're wearing.

We'll talk about the health patch in a second. So if you're. If you're. You could find that as your average body temp goes up, your heart rate variability decreases and that. And then the bubble would be red. So. And by the way, if you're listening in, it may behoove you to press pause, download the app, pull up the screen, and then you could go back and listen to what Rhonda said, because honestly, just hearing her talk about big bubbles and green bubbles and red.

Yeah, yeah.

Seem kind of confusing unless you've actually seen the screen.

That's right.

So anyways, and if you're one of my clients or someone who I coach, you sure as heck better know what she's talking about, because you're supposed to have seen that screen already. So anyways, though, We've got this correlation screen which allows us to then take Withings, fitbit, mapmyfitness, any of these sites that we're using, and feed that into the heart rate variability app so that we can then see how again, what I consider to be the most important metric, heart rate variability, how that's influenced by all these variables.

That's right.

You've also, as part of this new upgrade or as part of kind of how you've progressed with technology, got away to record your heart rate. That goes way above and beyond just recording your heart rate with kind of the old school method of using a heart rate monitor. Like in the past, you put on the heart rate monitor and that sends a signal to the app. And now you've got this new thing called a health patch. Can you tell me a little bit about the health patch?

Oh, we are so excited to have the health patch for so many reasons. The athletes all have heart rate monitors and chest straps and they're good with that, but a lot of people just wear one. Okay. They just refuse. And so what we have is this health patch that looks like a big band aid. Okay. And it measures not only. It's not only an FDA approved single lead ekg, it also measures respiration rate, skin temperature, body posture, number of steps, and let's see, calories burned. Okay. Accurate calories burned. I just want to stress that, you know, don't ever trust a machine at the gym and, you know, really. And also while some of the treadmill.

That tells you that you just burnt 1500 calories walking for 10 minutes. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. And for people trying to lose weight, it's really important that they kind of get how much each workout. You know, if you're on a long term weight loss plan, if you have, you know, 20 or 30 or 40 pounds to lose, if you. If that 200 extra calories a day makes a difference. And so you really want an accurate calorie burn. And so the health patch uses your heart rate and skin temperature to. And a nice algorithm that calculates calories burned.

So that's much more accurate. That's what I really like is that a heart rate monitor is not telling me things like respiration rate and skin temperature. And it also doesn't tell me things like steps and activity. And I gotta be honest, I don't use the health patch every day because I know some people are curious, like if I'm one of those guys who walks around with like the Fitbit on all day and I'M just not like, I feel like a big, I feel like a big robot when I'm constantly gathering data. What I like to do, and this is what I do with the health patch was I wore it for like a week just so I could get some preliminary data and now I'll wear it for a little while every morning. And that's just, that's just the way that I roll. And I do know that there are some people out there who are just total self quantification nerds. More power to you. If you want to wear the health patch all day long, that's great because you're probably going to get more out of it than I even do, you know, in terms of like your steps and your activity. And it could replace your, your Fitbit or anything like that. And it just kind of sticks those three places you can stick it. It's like middle of your chest, below your nipple and then like kind of in the upper part of the pec.

Right, right. That's right. That's right. And yeah, and I think I do want to point out to your listeners that are interested in it. I actually use it like you, Ben. I wear it for certain things to check things out. So I actually. So for certain workouts I do, I want to get an accurate calorie burn. Okay. Because I'm tracking all this for my correlation and I want it to be accurate. So I will wear this on my 8 mile hike and then come back and see how many calories it actually was and then I don't have to wear it on that same hike again. I already know, or on a mountain bike ride or even I've taken it to the elliptical at the gym and compared it to what the elliptical said and it's about 220 calories off the gym said I burned 650 and the patch said 420.

And honestly for me, I personally don't care that much about calories. It's just like because I'm training so much, like calories are moot point. But what I think is cool and folks have asked me before when I've talked about on the podcast, like how the barbell squat, I found that that decreases heart rate variability pretty significantly, which is actually short term a good thing. It puts your body in this huge stress mode and then you get this big bounce back response and it's one of the better exercises you can do at the gym. How I know that is I actually wore the health patch during a workout and for me, knowing things like skin temp during a workout and heart rate variability during a workout. Like I, I think those are, those are really cool variables to be able to measure. So again, you can kind of use it as you see fit, you know, record some of your key workouts that you do regularly to see how they're affecting your body. And that doesn't mean you have to wear the health patch 247 again, even though some, some people will. But yeah, I use it in the same way, Rhonda. It's like, you know, I put it on here and there throughout the day when I actually need it.

Yeah. And I want to point out that to your listeners that my use model is to take the plastic off, put the module in, because the, the patch itself is, has the battery and is disposable after the battery dies. But you have this module that you keep using. So I stick the module in, I wear it for whatever I'm going to do and then I take it. I don't seal the module in. And if you look at it, you can seal it in if you're going to wear it for three days and might get it wet. And then I pull the module out and put the plastic back on the patch. It lasts me a month, you know.

Yep, exactly. Because it keeps on, keeps on sticking to your skin.

Yeah, it does, it does. And if you're just using it, say for your HRV in the morning because it's more convenient, it'll last a couple months.

Yeah.

That way you just wake up and slap the patch on and turn on the app and you don't have to like hook chest strap and get the leads wet or anything. So I find it really a lot more convenient for that. And because the use model people think of, oh, wearing it for three days and they're kind of expensive for that sort of a use model. You can get a couple of months out of a patch for HRV for training if you take the module out and just put the plastic back on and save the battery life. Yeah, it's good.

Yep. Cool. Very, very cool way for non invasive monitoring. And so that's another feature. Another thing I wanted to ask you about is now when I pull open the app, I have three options to select the type of heart rate variability tracking session that I'm going to do. Like when I'm laying in bed in the morning and I want to do that morning measure. One is to monitor stress, one is to monitor heart rate recovery, and one is to monitor HRV for training. There's like three different options. Can you Kind of go through why there's three and which one you'd want to choose.

Okay, well, monitor stress will run a monitor stress session for as long as you want. Okay. You can run that while you're driving to work. You can run it while you're sitting at your desk for hours. Okay. You could actually sleep in it if you want. We have a lot of customers who want to sleep in it. And it will run until you press stop. Okay.

Okay, gotcha.

Yeah, so that's the one that you do.

So that's just for indefinite. You could just have on like during an entire workout or a hike or all night long while you're sleeping, that type of thing.

That's right. That's right. Heart rate recovery was a feature that our customers wanted early on. And so we left it in and people actually really like it because we give some really meaningful feedback. Heart rate recovery, you would press and start while you're still probably towards the end of your workout, or maybe you're running it through the whole workout, but you would choose that if you want to measure heart rate recovery. And so what you do is turn on the session and then when you're done working out and you want to measure your recovery, you just press I'm done. You press stop and then sit down or stand still. And it will measure how quickly your heart starts recovering. And then we'll give you a score based on pretty much industry accepted, how many beats per minute you've recovered. Okay. I think if it's less than 12, then that's really not good. You're sick. Yeah. And then if it's up at 30, 40, then that's pretty good.

Okay, gotcha. So the super fit people who are listening in, because honestly, like a lot of people listening to our podcast are, are pretty freaking far out of couch potato mode. They're probably not going to use the heart rate recovery as much as they're going to use like the stress monitoring.

That's right.

And then the HRV for. What's the HRV for training.

So HRV for training is the. So that's automatically timed. So that's the one when you're laying in bed and you don't want to even use your brain because that will affect your HRV in the morning. You really want to be kind of sleepy and not thinking, not thinking about your day because that can cause stress. And you pull it up and you just hit HRV for training and it will run a three minute session. You don't even have to think. You can Just lay there and then it finishes all by itself. And that's the one where we'll actually go into our HRV for training graph with the reference line. Okay. And so the monitor stress sessions do not go into the HRV for training with the reference line graph.

You mean the ekg heartbeat trace.

No, there's a graph called HRV for training. So it's a summary of your daily HRV for training.

Oh, yeah. Yep.

Okay. And so there's a reference line that's basically adaptive to your hrv. This comes from a clinical research paper. Actually, there's several clinical research papers. And so we just followed that rule. And simplistically, if you're above your reference line, train as usual or increase if you're below your reference line. One day, it's a low exertion day and two days, we recommend a rest day. If you've fallen below that line two days in a row, then probably go ahead and take a rest day.

Yeah. So this is the one for. If you're listening in, this is that quick three minute measurement. Used to be five minutes, I think now it's three.

We took it to three because our customers asked for that. And we did some analysis and learned that things settle down at three.

Yeah.

Anything shorter than three, you're still, it's still. I don't, I don't personally believe it's accurate enough.

So it's pretty much green light, go yellow light, take it easy today, red light, probably not a good idea to go.

Right. That's right.

Or do a high intensity interval session.

Yeah.

So you've got that HRV for training window that pulls up if you do the HRV for training, which would be like the simple morning measurement that you do. Whereas you'd use the monitor stress button to actually monitor a workout or a hike or like a sleep session or something like that. And then you've also got, when you're measuring this EKG heartbeat trace that shows your heartbeat. And you can actually flip that window around, right?

Yes, yes. We've got several windows behind there.

And so can you explain what happens when you flip that window?

Absolutely. So the first window is an animation. However, it is your beat to beat intervals. So that's kind of cool. Then you can flip it around by pressing the little, there's a little button on the lower right hand corner under the ekg and you'll get all of the data coming off of the patch. Or if you're using a chest strap, you will see your raw HRV information. We like to Call it the geek screen. Okay, so this screen will show you your low frequency sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight power numbers. It will show your high frequency or parasympathetic rest and repair power numbers. It'll also show you the ratio of those two. It shows you rmssd. And these are geek terms, but people love it. Which is root, mean square of successive differences. It's a statistical term, sort of like standard deviation.

We actually, I don't know if you remember, we actually went over that stuff in pretty good detail in the last episode. So if people want.

Okay, so I'll just zoom over that. Yeah. But basically it shows you all your hrv, lf, hf, rmssd, HRV heart rate. It also shows you your respiration rate. And all this is in real time. All your RR intervals, your energy burns. So it has calories per hour and total calories. It has your real time skin temperature steps. And activity is in GS actually. So if it tells how hard you're running or high you're jumping and that sort of thing, then you can flip the screen around again and get your actual instantaneous heart rate. Okay. And this is a really powerful screen because you can actually get a visual of your heart rate variability. If it looks like a sort of a steady line around the same heart rate, that. That's sort of your visual for low heart rate. Variab. Right. But if it's sort of moving around like a snake. Yeah, that's good. You want a lot of that. You'll also see, by the way, any ectopic beats. Okay. So if. And a lot of fit people have pvc.

You mean like if you have an arrhythmia or something like that?

Yes, you will see it on the screen.

Really? I didn't know that it did that.

Oh, yeah. So the HRV calculations we put through, it's an industry standard, a medical industry standard filter to remove ectopic beats for the HRV calculations because that will give you a false reading of hrv. So we take them out for that. But for this particular screen, you will see any arrhythmias or ectopic beats. And so it's very powerful for that as well.

To give some reason I hadn't seen that part. I got to go back and look at that now because that's really interesting because I've done. Yeah, I've gone in and done heart rate stress tests just to see what happens to my body and my. My PVCs. Technically you could wear this then at the gym and you could do your own cardiac stress test.

That's right. That's right. You'll see it just looks like a spike in the graph.

Not that we're endorsing taking your medical care into your own hands. Well, I guess we kind of are, huh?

Yeah, we kind of are. And then another thing, for some people that do heart math, go coherent with this. What? You'll be able to see the graph that you're used to seeing on heart math with the sort of the sine wave heart rate rhythm on this graph. Okay. So it's really powerful. It's actually beat to beat instantaneous heart rate, unfiltered.

Okay, gotcha. Very cool. This is so cool. Like, again, if you're listening, like, this is the one thing that if you're gonna do self quantification, this is the one thing that I think gives you the most data all at once. And actually I'm learning a few things. I didn't know that about the heart arrhythmias, so.

Really interesting.

Okay.

And then you can turn into landscape. Can't forget the landscape.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you about. You like flip it and it brings you up a new graph.

Yeah. It's just clockwise, so you can't turn it either way. It's just one way and that's just what it is. But you can see your real time graph of either your real time RR intervals like I just mentioned, in landscape mode so you get a better view, or you can flip, press the RR button and then you can get real time heart rate, hrv, stress, LF and HF all over the graph. And so you can actually see. Sometimes graphs are just easier for the brain to pick up the numbers. And so you can see, especially if you're wearing it at your desk or while you're driving, you'll be able to see if something triggered you. And I just want to. It occurred to me, I don't think I've mentioned this before. For those who know what they're looking at, you can tell when you cross from aerobic to anaerobic by looking at these graphs. Really? And it's like a little. You can. So what'll happen when you're working out with Sweet Beat is that your. Okay, all of your HRV will plummet. Okay. Because your heart rate's going up and your power levels of LF and HF plummet. But generally your sympathetic or LF is dominant. Okay. During the aerobic piece. Okay. And then when you cross that line and correct me if I'M saying it backwards. When you cross the line into anaerobic. Yeah. Your HF will become dominant.

That's the opposite of what I would expect. I would have expected for your sympathetic nervous system to become dominant when you go anaerobic.

No, it's the opposite. And hf, I think it comes in to start mediating the high heart rate.

Oh, okay. So basically, as, as you begin to get that higher heart rate and suck oxygen, your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in to help to, to monitor that and rein it in.

It's almost a safeguard.

So it's pretty much the opposite of what you'd expect.

It is because the LF kicks in because you just started moving. You need blood to the muscles, you need the heart rate to increase. And, and yeah. And so when you see that crossover, suddenly your stress will go from red to yellow or red to even green. That's your crossover point. So it's kind of cool. I use it and I like it. Yeah, very cool.

Okay, awesome. And then you've still got the food sensitivity testing on there?

Yeah, we do, we do. It's a little simpler, it's not as cutesy of an interface. And we did add an ability if you're doing manual or. Yeah, it's manual testing on this one. We did take the camera sensor out, but we added the capability. Now the real coca pulse test, which we use, which we model with our food sensitivity test, is very clear to specify to do your pulse for one full minute. But due to customer requests, we added the capability to select a 15 second reading and then we just multiply it, we multiply it by four to come up with the minute heart rate. So, you know, really following the coca pulse test, we do have, we advise to do it a minute, but you do have the option now to do a 15 second reading.

Now I'm curious, and this kind of relates to that correlation screen too. Like why is it that you just measure heart rate after a meal and not heart rate variability?

Well, so we're following the guidance of Dr. Koca, who did a lot of research on this. He was a renowned immunologist in the 50s, founder of the Journal of Immunology. I mean, he's got quite the resume. And so he wasn't doing heart rate variability, but what he learned was if you eat or are exposed to something that you have a low level sensitivity to, you're not breaking out in hives, you're not having anaphylactic shock, but your body is responding and reacting actually to an offending substance, your heart rate will increase more than 16 beats per minute from its baseline the morning within 90 minutes of being exposed. And it can be that last 30 minutes. That's why we do it. So we take a heart rate, meaning at 30, 60, 90. Now, for those of you who are using the chest strap during this, because it's much more convenient to just put your heart rate monitor on, press, I'm done eating, and go about your day, and it will take your pulse for you. That will give us data to then move into research about what's going on in HRV when an offended food is eaten.

Yeah, yeah. So you technically could still measure this all during the day, get your heart rate variability score, and kind of see how that correlates. As long as you know when you ate breakfast, when you ate lunch, when you ate dinner, you can look at the graph on the screen and kind of know, even though there's not a lot of studies that have actually looked into it, you know, like the cocopolz test.

Well, not for food sensitivities, but you just mentioned something interesting. There is a certain pattern of heart rate variability that should occur in a healthy individual after you eat. And specifically, your LF should go up for a certain amount of time and then come back to normal. If it doesn't, it's an indication of possible insulin resistance.

So if you eat a meal, your lf, your low frequency should go up for a period of time after that meal. Why is that? Because again, the low frequency would technically be activity of your sympathetic nervous system. Right?

That's right. That's right. That's just what the research shows. It's really interesting. It's counterintuitive.

It's totally counterintuitive because you'd expect your rest and digest nervous system, not your fight and flight nervous system.

That's right. And it just goes up for a little while and then the parasympathetic kicks back in.

And if it doesn't go up, what did you say that indicates?

So they learned this by running a heart rate variability on diabetics. Okay. And so what they learned was if it doesn't, it's an indication of insulin resistance.

Very interesting.

It is. There's so much with hrv which is like. It's crazy. I know. Well, the nervous system is like the first thing that gets perturbed before any physical symptoms show up. And that's why it's so important for people to monitor their hrv, you know, at least once a month, even just regular people. So if after Years of monitored, it suddenly it starts being really different and you don't feel it sick yet, but that's a sign to go to your internist and get a full workup.

Yeah. Okay, cool.

Wow.

Well, again, I'm gonna put the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com SweetBeatLife that's just like it sounds. BenGreenfieldFitness.com SweetbeatLife you pretty much need to. You need to download the app. And the app costs money. I forget how much it is. Is like, is it 10 bucks or.

Yeah, it's 10 bucks.

Okay. So, yeah, so you get the app and that's $10, and then you can buy, like, you can use your own heart rate monitor. You can also buy that health patch device. And, you know, that's a little bit more spendy. I think it's. What is it, like, 200 bucks or something like that to get.

Yeah, it's 200 bucks right now.

Yeah.

Yeah, it just got released and so until volumes go up, the price will come down when volumes go up.

Yeah.

But for now, and that's why I recommend really making each pass last a month or two. It's really pretty similar.

Yeah, it's similar. Like a Fitbit or whatever, really, in terms of the cost.

Yeah.

So, yeah, you can either just get the app or if you're really into this stuff and you want to go into total nerd mode, get the app and the health patch and then that's pretty much it. Then you're off to the races and you start to use everything.

Tie in your Fitbit account, your wythings accounts, and all your map my fitness stuff and go to it. So once again, I'm doing this for Sweet Beat, and I'm having to correlate so I can speak intelligence about. But I linked. It's called lose. It is a popular calorie tracking app. And I linked that in with my Fitbit, and so it goes up to the Fitbit cloud and then gets pulled back into the correlation function because I don't like the Fitbit food tracking. So there's a lot of things you can start linking together and then have them ultimately show up in your correlation screen.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Cool. Well, I'm. You're. You're getting even more advanced than I've actually been using it for, but that's. That's pretty cool. So you're. You're correlating quite a bit in terms of the. The websites that you're using. So. And again, like, I know we. We get some complaints from people who are like, oh, it's too much to track. You're taking the enjoyment out of life, whatever. Well, then just like, start by. By doing a three minute measurement in the morning. Honestly, like, that's what I recommend everybody do. I sit down, I journal, I breathe, I take the measurements. Boom, done. And then if you want to go track your workouts and everything else, then more power to you. But honestly, I'm totally not endorsing that you ruin your life by going into full self quant mode and not enjoying what you eat because you're looking at your heart rate app and all that jazz. Ultimately, we're talking about doing what works for you in terms of still being able to enjoy and relish life, but also getting some good data. And three minutes in the morning is pretty simple. Do so well.

That's right. And I just want to once again emphasize it's just like. And not everyone's a tracker. I'm actually not naturally a tracker. I'm doing this, you know, for work, but it's just like, you know, how much you weigh. You have a general idea of your blood pressure and cholesterol. You should know your HRV too. And that's not sort of a burdensome thing if you put it into. Into that context.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right, well, I'll put a link to everything we talked about in the show notes, which is pretty much just the previous two episodes that Rhonda and I have done. I'll link to those. I'll link over to where you can download the Sweet Beat Life phone app in the itunes store and then the Sweet Beat Life website, which pretty much has all the other information that you need. So that's it. Rhonda, thanks so much for coming on the call.

Oh, thank you, Ben. I always enjoy these things. They're fun.

All right, folks, well, this is Ben Greenfield and also Rhonda. Is it Collier or Collier?

Collier.

Collier. I was. Okay, neither. Rhonda Collier from Sweet Beat Live signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com SweetBeatLife have a great day.

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