Health is based on three pillars: sleep, nutrition and fitness. I chat with some of the most interesting people I know to discover more about their Health Stacks: the behaviors and products they use to stay healthy and fit.
Lorenzo Thione and I recently had an hour-long chat on Zoom. Lorenzo is a managing director at Gaingels, an investing syndicate supporting and representing the LGBTQ+ community in the venture capital ecosystem, which invests in companies embracing of LGBT leadership. He’s also the managing producer at Sing, Louise! Productions, and has produced several Tony-award-winning plays and musicals including Hadestown. In this interview, he shares his wisdom about the power of plant-based diets, longevity, and how he rigorously monitors and optimizes his health.
What matters most to me in health and wellbeing
Throughout my life, health and fitness have always been really important to me. It goes hand in hand with the analytical part of my brain. I like to feel in control of my health, so I’m careful to monitor all of the different aspects of my well being closely to try to catch if anything gets off track.
The things I prioritize to stay healthy
The most important thing that I prioritize is trying to reduce the risk of getting sick, so that I can work, travel, and do the things that I love. I want to avoid getting a cold or the flu, but I also want to minimize all risk of chronic diseases.
The second aspect of health that I focus on is living longer and feeling better. If you enjoy life as I do, you’ll want to live long and be healthy. I think that there’s a qualitative aspect of feeling good, and just having that positive energy makes me feel more motivated throughout the day. Feeling better also means performing better at work, in sports, and in life.
Right after that, I prioritize looking better. I want to look younger and fit as I get older. While that’s always been a consideration for me, with aging, you realize that your physical appearance and youthfulness tends to come more into focus.
The products I use
I am absolutely obsessed with my Whoop band. One of the things that I love the most about it is that you can create your own log of behaviors. If you log your behaviors for a long enough period of time and you have some variability in them, you can start to get great insight into the impact of these actions. For example, when I started drinking more water and focusing more on my hydration, that led to a 20% increase in my recovery, which is massive. As an additional fitness tracker, I do use the Apple Watch but rely mostly on my Whoop.
I also monitor my HRV on the Eight Sleep Pod Pro and have been monitoring my HRV even before that, with my whoop. My HRV really impacts how I make decisions about whether or not I should take a day off from exercising.
In terms of sleep, the Pod Pro has completely changed my life. I love the ability to regulate my sleep temperature, and my preferences change with the seasons. In the middle of the summer, I sleep as cold as -6. Right now, during the fall, I go to bed with a warm bed at +3 and then I immediately go down to -3 and I wake up at -2.
Eight Sleep really got me to think about and value sleep more. Between the Pod Pro and reading Why We Sleep, my mindset around sleep has changed significantly. I used to think that it would be amazing to have a superpower that allowed you to not need sleep, but I now understand the value of sleep for health and longevity. During quarantine, I’ve been sleeping more, and I’m going to continue with that approach even when lockdown ends.
In terms of fitness, I have a Hydrow rower. I don’t like a lot of cardio but rowing is the best compromise between cardio and a full-body strength workout. I also have a Tonal, and I love it. While it’s very much geared towards people who are at an intermediate level and want more of a guided strength workout, like a Peloton for strength training, it’s pretty great even if you’re an advanced athlete and prefer a more flexible self-guided strength workout at home. While there aren’t a ton of preset movements, you can still set up a really wide variety of exercises yourself. As for me, I still workout with my personal trainer at home: I just Zoom him in and follow his directions based on all the equipment I have. I’d really love it if Tonal added something like Strong to configure movements, track progression, amount of sets per side, differences in grip, handles, positioning and so on so that the tracking spot on even with more advanced custom workouts.
I get my nutrition plan through a combination of my trainer, nutrition coach, and myself and I also use Lumen to measure my metabolism. I also use a body-scanner + scale called Naked. It connects to a mirror with a bunch of infrared sensors built in. You step on it and it basically gives you a full body scan and measurement for all your major body parts, as well as body fat composition, and weight. I’ve used it consistently for about three years.
To track my overall health and fitness, I put all of my data from Lumen, Eight Sleep, Naked, and Whoop into a massive spreadsheet. I also log the daily difference between my macro-nutrient targets and what I logged in