The InsideGuide

Fuel Your Performance With Food

Written by Gil Blander, PhD | Aug 20, 2013

 

From the recent events of the Biogenesis case to this summer’s IAAF World Championship in Athletics where nearly a dozen athletes were missing due to doping violations, it’s clear the drug problem in sports is still far from being fixed.  Sunday’s night game against the Yankees here in Boston featured another symbol of the problem, when countless Red Sox fans booed Alex Rodriguez’s home run off of Ryan Dempster. 

The fans were not just booing because of the age-old Boston-New York rivalry, they were also booing because Alex Rodriguez has admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs in the past, and evidence surfaced this year from a clinic in Miami that suggests that drugs were not in all probability behind him. Speaking of probability, at the 2012 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, I addressed the use of performance-enhancing drugs with the following statement: 

Athletes are willing to inject their bodies with drugs to get an advantage, why not withdraw information to improve their performance naturally?

With the recent news about doping scandals, I feel it is essential to share my message about natural evidence-based means to improve performance with everyone, not just sports teams. We all face the temptation that we can look and feel better with the help of drugs or crash diets without making an honest effort. Through the Internet, we literally have more information at our fingertips than at any other time in history, but we are not making a connection between this information and our internal chemistry, because sometimes we are looking for the quick fix.

When I founded InsideTracker, my mission was to use nutrition and lifestyle changes to help people achieve their goals in a safe and sustainable way. We know everyone, from the young professional trying to feel better to the elite athlete trying to get on the podium, is looking for a competitive edge. You can get that edge, we at InsideTracker believe, by making the right choices. With objective data from blood analysis, you can see a biochemical mirror of yourself that you must face every day to achieve your goal. You may need to stick with a new food plan, or to know when to back off from training, or decide to go to bed earlier. Honesty starts with each of us being accountable to ourselves before leading others whether it be on a sales team or a professional sports team. Optimizing ourselves is about finding the right balance of interventions, and about seeing our progress over the long haul, not in a shortcut or snapshot in time.

Click here to learn how InsideTracker can use your blood analysis results to optimize your health!

InsideTracker’s product is not just about blood analysis, although that is our way to help measure our health. InsideTracker is about getting education that helps drive real choices in life. Some of those choices are easier than others, but the hard choices are part of the equation. Measuring your body and quantifying change with data is on the leading edge of the digital health revolution, but without leadership and commitment to hard work, all of the numbers are meaningless.

Unfortunately fad diets, false advertising, extreme marketing, and fake experts are giving us a filtered half-truth of what we should do to improve our health. InsideTracker has tackled the hardest challenge by going straight to the problems that are difficult to measure and solve, analyzing our most meaningful internal biomarkers and showing how to improve them with nutrition and lifestyle changes.  With a powerful analytic engine, world-renowned researchers, and one of the best support teams in our area, we have created an alternative option for those looking to improve their lives.

In closing, making a change is about making a decision to be accountable and committed to our own choices in what we do every day. The first step is getting an independent and objective profile of your current health markers so that you have the information you need to make decisions that will put you on the right path to health, fitness and performance.

Try Our Free Demo