Five factors enable someone to live a long life with high quality. They include high energy levels, maintaining muscle mass, strong immunity, stable weight, and sharp cognitive abilities. Metabolic flexibility underpins these factors. It’s about the ability of mitochondria, our cells’ powerhouses, to efficiently switch between fuel sources (carbs and fats), much like a hybrid car alternates between gasoline and electricity.

When fasting, it’s essential to avoid the danger zone of muscle breakdown that can arise from overfasting. Building and maintaining muscle is important to beat the effects of “inflammaging” and metabolic dysfunction. It’s the holy grail for burning more fat at rest and using the carbs you eat for energy instead of storing them as fat. Lumen helps you avoid muscle breakdown from overfasting by finding your fasting sweet spot..

The Lumen Flex Score is a metric that gauges metabolic flexibility. A higher Flex Score signals improved metabolic flexibility, vital for long-term health.

Lumen provides personalized macro recommendations based on your real-time metabolic measurements. Eating a balanced ratio of complex carbs, healthy fats, and quality protein prevents overreliance on carbs for energy. This helps manage blood glucose levels and glycogen — your body’s carb stores. It also ensures you eat enough protein to build and maintain your muscle mass. These factors boost your mitochondrial health and metabolic flexibility, helping you improve your longevity and prevent inflammation and metabolic disorders, which is crucial for longevity.

Poor or irregular sleep can cause you to wake up in carb rather than fat burn because your mitochondria haven’t had time for maintenance, repair, and reproduction to produce the energy you need. For long-term health, the goal is to wake up in fat burn. You can train your body to do so by measuring your metabolism and following Lumen’s personalized metabolic insights and strategies.

Waking up in fat burn is essential and indicates your mitochondria have had enough time to rest and repair. Consistently waking up in fat burn signals healthy mitochondria and balanced habits, crucial for long-term health and metabolic flexibility. Chronic morning carb-burn readings may suggest areas to adjust, from nutrition and sleep hygiene to stress and activity.

Take a Lumen pre-workout breath measurement to determine if you should fuel up before your high-intensity workout. If you’re burning fat, that’s a sign your glycogen stores are low, and you should eat a fast-digesting carbohydrate source like a banana to avoid muscle breakdown.
Lumen’s fasting measurement is also helpful for maintaining muscle. You can find your ideal fasting window by measuring your metabolism throughout your fast. The moment your body shifts from fat burn to carb burn indicates you’ve passed your fasting sweet spot. That’s a sign to end your fast and eat something nutritious to avoid muscle breakdown.
Lumen also provides tailored macro recommendations based on your real-time metabolic measurements, so you get enough protein and carbs to build and maintain your muscles.

Take a Lumen pre-workout breath measurement to determine if you should fuel up before your high-intensity workout. If you’re burning fat, that’s a sign your glycogen stores are low, and you should eat a fast-digesting carb to avoid muscle breakdown. If you plan on doing a low-intensity activity like Zone 2 training and are burning fats, then you don’t need to fuel up with carbs.
To help with post-workout muscle recovery, Lumen also adjusts your macro recommendations based on the exercise activity you input in the Lumen app.