What can AI do for your metabolic health
Bonus: We just released the first of its kind AI metabolic health coach
This week I want to take a look at how people have been using AI to improve their metabolic health.
Whether artificial intelligence is intelligent or not is not to be discussed in this post.
From the outset, the idea of being able to discuss your personal situation with what should be an entity that understands all of the public knowledge of the world sounds like a no brainer.
But what if part of the problem was that all of the public knowledge of the world was tied up in hypocrisy.
The majority of people still believe that it's all about calories in, calories out and nothing else matters.
It then shouldn't come as a surprise that if you go and talk to any generic AI model about your metabolic health issues, it will most likely just try and put you in a basic calorie deficit.
The funny thing is that for many people, even though it does that, they find meaningful outcomes.
My take on this is that going cold to a large language model and prompting it about your metabolic health is basically like talking to the most educated personal trainer on the planet.
As opposed to talking to the average personal trainer or nutritionist who, let's be honest, will not communicate with you in an intelligent conversation and will likely spit out a plan that is generic and full of holes.
Where AI can excel is that it can pull together knowledge from niche sources, random Reddit conversations and X threads, and digest this information and then put it back to you. Also, unlike a personal trainer, it probably enjoys in some ways when you have follow-up questions and try to question its logic.
What we built
We have played with and seen several claims at an AI personal trainer or an AI coach, and the challenge is that everybody just seems to skin an AI model with the prompt of "you're a metabolic coach or an AI coach," and then it still gives you the same generic output.
The real power in using large language models, is setting them up to follow a very specific philosophy that is trying to gather as much critical context about you or your situation. And then using that context and a scientifically backed model to give you insights and reports.
Our end goal is to create the most advanced, functional medicine-inspired metabolic health coach ever to have existed. This coach will know everything about you as a person, including all the context and your history, and be able to guide you day by day on what is critically going wrong in your body that we want to correct.
We're not there yet though.
However, I am happy to announce that the first version of our AI Metabolic Health Coach was released yesterday and is totally available for anybody to use.
(If you find anything insightful, please tell me!)
Early signs have been super promising
What we didn’t build
What we built has very specific fine-tuning context processing and a distinct end goal that wants to drive you to.
But when we scoured the internet, we found that most people are just using generic ChatGPT to try and get health outcomes. So I wanted to talk through some of those success cases here.
Concentrated Trading (@concenTRADER1)
Used AI to determine calorie burn, combined with fasting and activity, reached 195 lbs post-COVID without drugs.
Key actions:
Estimated TDEE
Upped protein
500kcal deficit
Calorie tracking
Thoughts:
Really excited that this guy found the path to a lower weight for him. Immediately I would imagine if the exercise he thinks he's doing is adding to his TDEE, then he doesn't have a history of dieting or metabolic suppression. Nothing really novel was suggested here. It sounds like the models he used gathered basically zero context on his life or history. Sadly, it wouldn't surprise me if he joined the statistic of 97% of people who regained the weight.
Kevin Henrikson (@KevinHenrikson)
Lost 50 pounds in 12 months using AI and data, no extreme diets, while running companies.
Key actions:
Going low carb, high protein
Using AI when travelling to tell him what to eat on a menu
Used AI to analyse multiple data points after eating to cut out “bad foods”
Thoughts:
The actual process of him living 50 pounds was a little AI light. And the claim to have the AI analyze multiple data points seemed a bit vague to be real. Good for you, Kevin. 50 pounds is meaningful weight loss, and that really will have changed your long-term health outcomes. I hope you don't join the 97%.
It’s Ma’am, PhDelightful 🇺🇸 (@ItsGoneAwry)
Lost almost 10 pounds since April using ChatGPT for food logging, meals, workouts, and daily walking.
Key actions:
Logs food with ChatGPT
Uses AI to suggest meals
Has AI design workouts to maintain interest
Increased daily walking
Thoughts:
What's curious to me here is that none of this is groundbreaking or even really using the advantages of AI. I do wonder if it is simply just lowering the friction because you don't have to navigate a new app and you can do everything through a text interface.
Jordan Thibodeau (@JWthib)
Lost 12 pounds in 1.5 months using ChatGPT for daily check-ins and food tracking.
Key actions:
Brain dumped context on past weight loss struggles
Used AI to track food via uploading photos
Used AI to suggest healthier swaps on a cheat day
Used AI to track water consumption so that hunger and thirst aren’t confused
Thoughts:
I can start to see the allure of this one using A.I. as an in-the-pocket buddy that all you have to do is talk to through chat and pictures and will basically keep you on track. Ultimately still looks like weight loss through generic calorie restriction. And we all know how that ends.
Marouane Lamharzi Alaoui (@marouane53)
Used AI to lose 10 kg in 7 weeks after grief-induced weight gain, personalized plans.
Key actions:
Added favorite recipes, restaurant menus and premade meals to the context window along with nutritional information
Then had it guide her through a food plan so she could still eat her favorite foods.
Thoughts:
There are two parts to this:
The weight gain that she was trying to reverse seemed to be temporary after a period of grief. So, actually restricting calories to get back to your normal weight seems reasonable.
Using AI to get you to eat your favourite foods, but just less of them, is kind of genius.
SMB Attorney (@SMB_Attorney)
Lost 10 pounds in 1.5 weeks by asking AI what to eat for every meal, followed advice.
Key actions:
Has AI research every restaurant before he visits and has it make an order suggestion
Used AI to coach him when he went off plan and binged
Used AI to make portion adjustments to home cook meals
Thoughts:
His plan included cutting out alcohol and generally lowering inflammation and sodium usage, so 10 pounds in 10 days is obviously not totally correct. Given the length of time and not much material update, part of me thinks that this is just a gimmick for X credit. Either way, I commend everybody when they lose any weight because it's not easy and we've seriously messed ourselves up.
Final thoughts
One of the funniest things I've seen in technology over the past two years with this large language model technology is that everybody can grasp how powerful it is, but fundamentally, no one knows what it can do until we've made it do that thing.
For over a year, I dealt with execs at America's most well-known brands, asking me "what can it do?" And I would have to say, "Well, it can kind of do anything if we can figure out what we can do for you."
I think if you're using a conversational AI model to help you count calories, reduce those calories by 500 calories and stick to some generic diet, it's wholly uninspired and really a waste.
And that's why I'm genuinely so unbelievably excited about what we are building at Patchwork.
A model that knows how to talk through all of the niche symptoms that might be affecting you and pull out that you could have a gut bug, or you're not absorbing minerals, or you have low stomach acid, or maybe you have mold toxicity, or you're insulin resistant.
So if you haven't already tried it, please do make sure you try out Patchwork's new AI Metabolic Coach. It's unlike anything on the internet.
Want help?
At Patchwork we help people avoid diet & supplementation mistakes to achieve an optimal metabolism with personalized insights based on your DNA.
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I found your publication while searching for "metabolic health". Interesting stuff with AI! I've leaned into ChatGPT as my health and wellness research assistant, and it has been wildly helpful. Next up: taking a closer look at your tool.
I had a fun time playing with this just now. It's super useful because the more context you give it, the better it can triangulate advice for you. I just pasted in a bunch of blood work data, as well as several of my substack posts on diet experimentation. It seemed to have really helped it. I also was able to ask it some "burning questions" I've had while consuming various information sources, and it was quite adept. Overall, this product looks promising!