MY work as a nutrition coach and personal trainer means I like to keep up to date with all things diet and fitness, and I’m passionate about health and exercise. The recent growth in popularity of fitness devices like Lumen is an exciting development and has added a whole new dimension to the concept of healthy living, enabling users to track their metabolic health and adjust what they eat accordingly. Simply breath into the tracker – so you exhale into the device – and Lumen will tell you if you’re using carbohydrates for energy, or if your body is in fat-burning mode at any given time.
Using this information it will then devise an eating plan for you for that day. There are lots of case studies showing how well Lumen works, but I wanted to see for myself what the hype was all about and whether the device and associated app could deliver on its promises. I tried Lumen for six weeks and followed its recommendations – read on for my thoughts.
Lumen metabolic tracking device, £199 including one-month's free subscription (then £19 per month) In short, I mostly enjoyed using the Lumen and found the insights provided by the connected app to be very interesting, particularly the ones concerning whether or not I needed to eat before training. The answer was often ‘no’, so I found myself fasting for longer periods after waking up and despite not always following the daily nutrition plan (and going over the recommended amount of carbs) I noticed some weight loss due to.
