A blog to help you optimize your full-body and life performance

From product updates to team member achievements and countless medals around the necks of InsideTracker Athletes, 2017 was quite a year for us. Here’s a highlight reel of the top moments of the past year.

HSA, HRA, FSA, CIA, MIA... It seems there's an acronym for everything these days. So when it comes to healthcare, it should come as no surprise that there are acronyms aplenty.

But in particular, when dealing with insurance, health savings accounts, and other types of health benefits, the terminology can be difficult to navigate. So to help, we're going to dive into some of the details.

Why do we care? Because some health savings agreements can help you pay for InsideTracker plans! Here's the nitty gritty of differentiating between these three major types of accounts, and how to use them...

Perform. Recover. Repeat. At InsideTracker, we know that training and optimized performance is more of a journey than a destination, and even then, it’s more of a cycle than a straight line. As we reach short-term goals, new, longer-term goals come into focus, and the journey begins again.

A new study shows that these training cycles have more to tell us than meets the eye: with calculated, purposeful, and timely blood testing, we can maximize an athlete's performance throughout their season to minimize the likelihood of overtraining and injury.

There’s no doubt that we’re living through a technological revolution. And with the internet always at our fingertips, it seems like sheer brainpower is becoming obsolete. But whether we like it or not, our mental capacity follows the law of ‘use it or lose it;’ if we lean too heavily on technology as an external hard drive, we become more vulnerable to age-related cognitive decline.

The good news? It’s never too early to start protecting your brain! And now, there's no need to wonder any longer if those Sunday Paper brain games like Sudoku are imparting real cognitive benefits. Or better yet, if literal “brain food” actually exists. We’ve done all of the research. So without further ado, here’s some truly brain-boosting information you should know.

The word metabolism is thrown around quite a bit. But if we asked you to explain what it is and how it relates to your overall health, could you?

If not, don’t worry; you're not alone. That's why we're sharing the details you need to know about all things metabolism. And with some of our newest recommendations, InsideTracker can help you understand what the word really means, how it ties into your overall wellbeing, and how to optimize it.

At InsideTracker, our work revolves around the concept that no two people are the same. Accordingly, neither is their health. And yet until now, we've all been treated with the same remedies, taught the same health-boosting tips, and followed nearly identical dietary patterns. But do such practices get us closer to optimal health as individuals, or farther away? We think the latter. So we've gone rogue; we track biomarkers, use them as a signpost for where our health is going, and change course – even if it's the path less traveled. 

Sonya Looney is an outdoor adventure athlete from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She's the 2015 24-Hour Racing World Champion, a 4-time US National Champion, a USA Marathon World Championships Team member, a 2-time Breck Epic Stage Race Winner... the list goes on. She's also a plant-based eater. How does she manage to snag these titles (and more) while fueling only with plants? We wanted to know – so we asked!

InsideTracker users are telling us they have big goals. So, they were our inspiration for making some big updates to the InsideTracker platform. We're throwing coaching, A.I., algorithms, and everything we have to help them reach their goals.

Here is a hit list of the improvements, and more importantly, why they matter…

Last week, we shared how the New Year has brought new changes to InsideTracker. This week, we're excited to give you an in-depth look at our shiny new Nutrition Page. Not only does it have a whole new look, it also has even more food choices – plus more recipes to go along with them. In short, we've made it easier than ever before for you to incorporate your InsideTracker recommendations!

Of course, the purpose of the Nutrition Page is to show you the foods that will have the most impact on your biomarkers. Out of our database of nearly 10,000 foods, what you'll see here are the best nutritional "bang-for-your-buck" foods. Our goal is always to help you hit your own goals, which means that you need to be able to make changes with accuracy – and ease. We're pretty confident that the revamped Nutrition Page does just that.

Sometimes, you really are talking to the smartest person in the room. David Sinclair, Ph.D. is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. He’s the co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging and has been a member of our scientific advisory board here at Inside Tracker since the early days of the company. David is a world-class expert on aging; a quick Google search will produce an impressive dossier of additional accomplishments that alone would warrant a separate blog post. David's recent claim to fame is that he was selected by Time Magazine as one of their 100 Most Influential People In The World — along with Beyoncé. Not bad company to be in.

But, as I recently learned in a fascinating Q&A with this brilliant scientist, there are always new discoveries to be made... and sometimes, what we discover is that a simple answer has been sitting right in front of us all along. Such is the case in David's own quest to unlock a younger biological age. His acclaimed scientific studies have proven age reversal is possible, but it's InsideTracker that really turned back his clock.