
I trialled the weight loss option, as this is the most popular with Lumen users.

You can choose from ‘Metabolic Health’, which is to improve your general health and metabolic flexibility, ‘Healthy Weight Loss’ and ‘Fitness Performance’ the latter of which is more based on nutrition to improve your work out. Ideally you want a 4 or 5 after meals as it shows that your body is using up the carbs you’ve just eaten.īefore you start your Lumen journey, the app asks you to choose your ‘track’ so it can determine your goals. Lumen says that for optimal health, you want to be measuring 1 or 2 when you wake up - this means your body is good at burning carbs overnight while you’re sleeping and has now turned to burning your fat stores. A marker of ‘1’ means you’re burning fats ‘2’ is ‘mostly’ fats ‘3’ is a mixture of the two macronutrients ‘4’ is ‘mostly’ carbs and 5 is carbs. Lumen works using a five number spectrum. The device works by detecting the levels of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) that you are breathing out - if it’s a high level of CO2, it means you’re burning carbs if it’s low, you’re burning fat. The Lumen itself is a smart tube-shaped breathalyser that collects your breath, then sends the data to an app, which uses your measurement and a number of algorithms to report if you are using fats or carbs for energy. It can be quite complicated to get your head around, but every purchase of a Lumen comes with a 30-minute onboarding video call with a Lumen expert to get you started. This is useful because it helps increase your energy levels, it can improve your quality of sleep and if your goal is weight loss, it can help with this, too, by encouraging your body to tuck into those difficult-to-access fat stores. Lumen is a device that you breathe into to discover if your body is using fats or carbs for energy at that given moment.Īfter measuring several breaths a day, the connected app can devise a nutritional plan to improve your ‘metabolic flexibility ’ – this is your body’s ability to swap between carbs and fats and use the correct energy source at the most effective time. Buy a Lumen with subscription from £249 - here.You can save another £25 by signing up for the newsletter.
DOES LUMIN WORK TRIAL
In that sense the Lumen is good at holding you accountable: it does feel like it knows if you don’t follow the plan! It’s a fresh alternative to calorie-restricted diets, so I would say it’s worth a try, especially as there’s a 30-day free trial on offer. The aim is to wake up each day in a state of fat burn, and you really do have to watch what you eat the day before to make sure that happens. The Lumen promises to teach your body to use fat and carbs at the correct times, which in turn aids fat loss and weight maintenance. The term describes the body’s ability to flit easily between burning fats and carbs, using energy from the best suited macronutrient depending on the body’s needs. This emphasis on improving metabolic flexibility is what Lumen is all about. If you’re willing to follow the plan, which can be tough on low carb days, you will see results, whether that be weight loss, weight maintenance or just understanding and improving your “metabolic flexibility”. It uses this information to devise a nutrition plan each morning, telling you if it’s a low or high carb day. You can also do ad hoc measurements throughout the day if you feel the need you then receive feedback via the connected app as to whether you are burning carbs, fats or a mixture of both.

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 generally just eating less than usual and having my carb-heavy meals earlier in the day.Įssentially, what you use the Lumen device for is measuring your breath first thing in the morning, around every meal, before and after exercise and right before bed. 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.


But I wanted to know for myself: does Lumen work? I tried Lumen for six weeks to see if the breathalyser device and associated app can really deliver on any of these promises…
