👋 Hi all, Chris here! It’s hard to believe that on Sunday it will have been an entire year since I started All the Hacks. I never could have imagined what it’s evolved into when I started it, but I’m all in and plan to keep it going and growing for as long as I can. As a celebration of the one-year mark, I’m going to do a special live recording of the podcast next Monday (5/9) at 12p PT and I’d love you to join. More info later in this email, but in the meantime…

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As for this newsletter, as I mentioned in Health Hacks Part 1, I wanted to gather all the health-related hacks I’ve been learning in one place. Part 1 focused on food and dieting and this email will focus on “body health hacks”. Hope you enjoy!

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by… InsideTracker

The road to a longer, healthier life starts inside, and that’s what InsideTracker is all about. It’s an ultra-personalized performance platform founded by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometric data.

How does it work? First, they use a patented algorithm to analyze your body’s data (e.g. measurements, biomarkers, DNA) and provide you with a clear picture of what's going on inside of you. Then they offer science-backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes. Finally, they give you a concrete action plan and track your progress toward reaching your goals every day, every step of the way.

After first seeing InsideTracker, I reached out to partner with them and was able to get All the Hacks subscribers 20% off the entire site when you sign up at allthehacks.com/insidetracker

🏃 Body Health Hacks

When I say “body health hacks”, I am referring to anything health-related that matters to our physical bodies and movement. In other words, cold therapy, sauna therapy, regular exercise, meditation, and more. Here are a few of the coolest things I’ve learned from my podcast guests in the past year.

🚶‍♂️Circadian Walks

Walking is incredible for your health and Low-Intensity Steady State training (LISS) is actually a great way to burn calories from fat without burning calories from muscle. But choosing the right time for a walk can make a world of difference. Walking with the rising sun (before 10 o’clock in the morning) or winding down on a walk with the setting sun can help your body to reset and follow a healthy daily pattern. Better sleep means better health, and circadian walks, even if they only last ten minutes, can be a huge help.

🏋️‍♂️ Workout Motivation

For most of us, working out is a pain in the ass, but my favorite hack to make it happen is only committing for five minutes. I tell myself that if after five minutes I want to quit, I can, and even though I know I won’t give up, it still makes it easy for me to get started.

In Episode 52, Liz Moody swore by a reward method, in which you save something you really love for your exercise. For her that’s saving her favorite podcasts for the gym so she can make the gym feel like a reward.

🧘 Meditation

Meditation is a perfect example of how sometimes, a tiny dose of a healthy habit can be much better than too much at once or none at all. The key here is to set the bar really low. That way, you’re more easily achieving small goals, giving you more and more reasons to celebrate yourself and your newfound healthy habits. Only 5 minutes of meditation can be enough to gain the benefits of meditation without forcing yourself to carve out an unrealistic chunk of time every day to practice.

Meditation has been shown to dramatically reduce stress, but also improve emotional well-being, such as increasing self-awareness, focusing on the present, reducing negative emotions, and more.

One way to incorporate meditation into your daily life seamlessly is to practice brief moments of mindfulness. My favorite way to meditate is to tap into my senses while I’m walking. I feel the way the ground feels on my feet, the sun and breeze on my face, and the way the air feels entering my lungs. I don’t have to sit in a pretzel every day, but I do walk every day. That way, I can instantly meditate whenever I get a moment.

One listener, Zach, had trouble making meditation stick until he came up with his own hack of doing it during his regular trips to the bathroom. Sounds crazy, but he’s been successfully meditating with these “bowel movement mindful minutes” for the past 6 months.

🧖‍♂️ Sauna Therapy

Many people think of the sauna as little more than a luxury, but it can come with quite a few health benefits too. In fact, research shows that spending regular time in the sauna can actually lower your risk of death by heart disease. Rhonda Patrick has a great page on her FoundMyFitness site all about the benefits of Sauna, which includes one study that found people who regularly use saunas are 22% less likely to die from a sudden cardiac event. It's also quite relaxing and feels great to sweat out all those toxins built up in your body. In fact, I’m constantly looking at Saunas on Amazon like this or this, but don’t know where I’d put one.

🚿 Cold Plunge and Cold Showers

Cold water might not sound like the most pleasant experience, but it comes with countless health benefits. Whether you buy The Cold Plunge, build a DIY version or just take a cold shower, cold water can not only help us to build resiliency by showing us that we can adapt to hard things, but also can support our immune system and give a huge mood boost. It can also improve memory, decrease tension and fatigue, and make your immune system significantly stronger.

In Episode 38, 3-time gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings absolutely swore by the cold plunge. She’s been committed to it for a few years now, and she says that nothing compares to the mental strength or the immune benefits of cold plunging. Her time-honored routine four days out of the week is to sit in the hot sauna for 45 minutes to sweat out any toxins and then plunge for 4 minutes a time.

If you’re looking for a DIY cold plunge, a listener named Justin sent in details on how he made his DIY cold plunge using a chest freezer he purchased on Craigslist for only $180. It’s lasted him five years so far:

You can find his recommended resources here:

• https://sciencebackedhealth.com/chest-freezer-ice-bath/

• https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/article/how-to-make-your-own-cold-tub-setup/

In Episode 52, Liz Moody shared that she just spends the last 60 seconds of every shower moving the water to as cold as it gets. Though the water hitting your face can come as quite a shock, this can have some great benefits ranging from balancing brain chemicals to giving your body the reminder that you can endure discomfort! In fact, studies show that cold showers can give your immune system an upgrade and help you to bounce back from being sick more effectively.

In that same episode I committed to doing cold showers for the month of April and actually really enjoyed it and will probably keep it up this month. Though in full transparency I didn’t do it the 100% of the time I promised, because my daughter was in the shower with me a few times and I didn’t think the benefits would outweigh the reaction of an ice cold two year old.

😶 Taping Your Mouth

Studies show that breathing through the nose is actually healthier than breathing through your mouth, and some of us need a little extra help to do that. In Episode 52, Liz Moody shared that she tapes her mouth shut most nights to make sure she’s breathing through her nose—and it can do a lot for mental clarity and comfort by supporting your immune system and increasing oxygen intake!

😴 Sleep Hacks

Sleep influences how alert we are, how we battle certain diseases, and how we feel on a daily basis. Knowing how to improve your sleep can be a valuable tool that will help you to live a better life. Matt Walker, sleep scientist, author of Why We Sleep and host of the podcast, Sleep Diplomat, is full of tools to sleep better and get the quality sleep that you need.  Personally, my top two sleep hacks are 1) charging my phone overnight in the bathroom and 2) tracking my sleep with an Oura ring (I don’t think I’ve slept without it for the past year).

💉 GLP-1’s for Weight Loss

In Episode 32, Kevin Rose talked about Ozempic (semaglutide), a type of GLP-1 medication originally used to help manage blood sugar levels in people with diabetes. And while Ozempic lowers blood sugar, it turns out it can also help the body lose weight. In fact a recent NEJM study found patients without diabetes achieved 14.9% weight loss after only 68 weeks on the drug. Last year, the FDA approved a different semaglutide for weight loss. Kevin mentioned that Ozempic can cost ~$1,000/mo, but a few startups like Alfie and Calibrate have launched to help navigate the insurance process and bring the cost of the drugs down to ~$25/mo.

While I don’t have any business relationship with Alfie, they did respond to my email and offered me a discount to share with you. If you use SPRING2022, you’ll get an additional 33% off their current discounted price for your first month.

🩸 Check Your Biomarkers

Blood testing is an amazing way to see what’s going on inside your body and an important way to keep track of your overall physical well-being. You can see if something is wrong, or you can see if something is right. And getting tested at routine intervals can allow you to see the way your body changes over time and empower you to make informed decisions about your health.

But getting the results is just half of the story, knowing what to do with those results is what I was really interested in and unfortunately my primary care doctor seemed to only have generic advice. So far the best platform I’ve found is InsideTracker and you can upload your own results or they can order the lab work to be done nearby (I’d tried WellnessFx in the past, but I found their recommendations to be lacking). What’s even better is that I’ve gotten InsideTracker to offer readers a limited time 20% discount on everything on their site.

Full disclosure: After seeing the product, I reached out to InsideTracker and they are now a sponsor of All the Hacks.

🎉 All the Hacks Live Episode

It’s hard to believe it’s almost been year since I launched All the Hacks, and to celebrate I’m going to do a live Q&A/AMA episode of the podcast on Monday at 12p PDT. If you have any questions you want to submit in advance, you can email me or join on Monday and ask in person. You can add the event to your calendar at allthehacks.com/live (this link will also redirect to the livestream on Monday). I’m also going to try and do a cool giveaway, so stay tuned and see you Monday!

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📺 All the Hacks Videos

I’m now releasing videos of the podcast each week on my YouTube channel and I’ll slowly be getting through the entire back catalog as well. Whether you prefer video or just want to see what my guests and I look like during an interview, I’d really appreciate you subscribing on YouTube and commenting or liking the videos. 🙏🏼

All the Hacks on YouTube

🎙 Recent Episodes

#55:  Maximize Your Points: Stacking, Buyers Clubs, Redemption Hacks, and More

Points expert Julia Menez discuss all things points and miles, including points stacking, optimizing rewards, tools to help organize your points and miles and using buying clubs to earn lots of points. Thank you to Vuori, InsideTracker and Fabric for sponsoring this episode!

🎧 Listen to Ep55 w/ Julia Menez

#54: Minimalism and the Things That Matter for a Meaningful Life

Minimalist expert and award-winning author Joshua Becker discusses his top decluttering strategies, the 8 distractions that prevent people from living more meaningfully, and hacks to achieving the benefits of a more satisfying life through owning less. Thanks to Athletic Greens, BetterHelp and Daffy for sponsoring this episode!

🎧 Listen to Ep54 w/ Joshua Becker

#53: Travel Hacks for Planning Your Best Trip Ever

Award-winning travel journalist Brandon Presser shares advice on choosing accommodations, critical factors to consider when planning a trip, his top travel hacks, his top lesser-known travel destinations! Thank you to Riverside, BetterHelp and Daffy for sponsoring this episode!

🎧 Listen to Ep53 w/ Brandon Presser

💭 Parting Thoughts

Thank you so much for reading! How’d you like it?

Loved | Great | Good | Meh | Bad

Your feedback will help make it great, so I’d love to hear your thoughts/suggestions. Please feel free to respond to this email and I promise to read and respond to every one. If there’s a topic you’d love me to dig into in an upcoming issue, please let me know!

Thanks for reading!

Chris

Today, I’m grateful for the support of our partners Vuori, InsideTracker, Athletic Greens, Daffy, Fabric, Riverside and BetterHelp.

Chris Hutchins works at Wealthfront. All opinions expressed by Chris and his guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Wealthfront. This newsletter is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.