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Dave Asprey's Favourite Bio Hacks

5 Simple 'Biohacks' That Will Radically Improve Your Life

This article was originally published by AskMen UK. 

Biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that your body and your biology will do what you want it to do. It’s about having control of yourself. It’s very different from a personal growth perspective where you just 'will' it to happen and create good habits. You’re trying to force change into the body. It turns out your body and your mind will change in response to the environment. It’s simple to change the environment; it’s hard to "will" yourself to change. I like the simple approach. And often the simplest way to measure how effective a biohack is is to say, "how do I feel right now?"

RELATED: Dave Asprey's Stress Hacks

I've spent years, and over $300,000 biohacking my own life with some impressive results;  I lost over 7 stone without counting calories or excessive exercise, upgraded my IQ by 20 points,  lowered my biological age and founded the Bulletproof diet.

But here, I've chosen five of my favourite biohacks, ones I've tried and tested over the years, and explained how and why each one could radically change your life. Here they are.

Start from the beginning

Identify the foods you shouldn't eat

Identify the foods you shouldn't eat
Nick Saltmarsh/Flickr

You’ve got to know what foods make you weak. In my Bulletproof book, there are three classes of foods; kryptonite foods (which provide zero benefit to humans, don’t eat them; margarine is a good example), a set of foods that work for almost everyone (the least downsides and the most upsides; lots of nutrients, energy and no inflammation) and then in the middle there are the suspect foods. Suspect foods cause problems for large numbers of people and you don’t know which ones of those are causing problems for you.

For example, potatoes cause issues for me. I’m one of the 1 in 5 people – 20% of the population have this same issue, including here in the UK – whose immune system sees the protective molecules in potatoes (that keep them from being eaten) as a threat. And that generates an immune response. I eat half of a potato and I will have muscular skeletal pain for three days. I had arthritis in my knees when I was 14 because I didn’t know this. I love the taste of cayenne pepper but, for me, I don’t eat it anymore. It causes me food cravings and inflammation. For you, if you’re in the other 80%, it actually has anti-inflammatory effects. It's not a good or a bad food; it is a suspect food because 20% of people are completely screwed up by it.

The long way to find out what foods affect you is to eliminate all the kryptonite foods and then all the suspect foods and then slowly reintroduce them, as you do with the Bulletproof diet. The short ways are through my app The Food Detective (which is free) that looks at your heart rate before and after a meal. It will tell you if something in that meal is one of your guilty suspects, based on predictable changes in your heart rate. The other thing you can do is get a blood test for food allergies – which, arguably, would be much, much easier.