I want to tell you about a woman whose bloodwork came back beautifully normal while her body was quietly being damaged underneath it, because her story is the cleanest example I have ever come across of the exact thing that is happening to you, and once you can see it in her, you will not be able to unsee it in yourself.
She has a genetic condition called hemochromatosis, which is a fancy way of saying that her body soaks up iron from her food and then simply refuses to let any of it go, hoarding it away year after year in the places you least want it, like her liver and her heart. And iron that piles up like that is not some harmless little vitamin sitting quietly in the corner. It does slow, steady damage over years, all while a woman walks around tired and achy and foggy and gets told, over and over, that she looks great and her labs are fine. The value that tracks all of this is called ferritin, which is basically a readout of how much iron your body has tucked into storage, and hers came back on the higher end of the range but still inside it, still technically normal, which for the average person walking through that clinic would be a complete non-event. Nobody would blink.
The trouble is that she is not the average person, and that same in-range number that would mean “all good” for a room full of strangers meant something very different sitting inside her particular body. But the lab has no idea who she is. It cannot know her diagnosis, or her history, or the fact that her normal is slowly hurting her, because all a lab actually does is take her number, hold it up against a big pile of other people’s numbers, and print out where she landed. That is the whole job.
And she knew all of this. She was not confused, and she was not being dramatic, and she was not diagnosing herself with something exotic at midnight on the internet. She knew her condition, she knew exactly what that number meant inside of her, and she also knew that the treatment is almost comically simple and has been around approximately forever, which is that you remove some blood and the excess iron leaves right along with it. It is not fringe and it is not experimental. It is the standard of care, and it works. So she did the sensible thing and asked her doctor for it, and what she got back was silence. Her number was in range, so as far as the system was concerned there was nothing to do here, and her doctor never followed up with her at all.
So do you know what she did? She went and gave her blood away at the Red Cross. Sit with that one for a second, because it is genuinely something. A woman managing a real, documented genetic condition, who could not get her own medical system to lift a finger, ended up standing in line at a blood drive so she could bleed the excess iron out of her own body, then walked out with a juice box and a little sticker and had to wait another fifty-six days before she was allowed to do it again. And I need to be really clear that this was not some failure of advocacy on her part, because she advocated brilliantly. She knew her condition, she knew her number, she knew the treatment, and she asked for it by name. The system simply did not have a slot for a woman whose normal was quietly harming her, so the door stayed shut.
I did not tell you that to worry you that you have hemochromatosis, because you almost certainly do not. I told it to you because it makes one thing impossible to ignore, which is that a number can be sitting comfortably inside the normal range and still be completely wrong for you. Your body can be struggling while your paperwork looks fantastic, and if the only question anyone ever bothers to ask is whether you landed in range, then nobody is ever going to go looking for what is actually going on.
This is the whole reason I keep saying that normal is not optimal, and I mean something very specific by it. Normal is just where most people land, and optimal is where your particular body runs well, and those two things are not the same address, and honestly they are not even in the same neighborhood.
There is also a piece of how those normal ranges get built that nobody ever says out loud, so I will. They get assembled from the people who actually go and get the test done, and if you stop and picture who that usually is, it is not a room full of glowing, well-rested humans doing cartwheels. It is people who are tired and stressed and inflamed and worried enough to end up at the lab in the first place. So when someone tells you your results are perfectly normal, what they are really telling you is that you look about like everybody else, and everybody else is exhausted too.
Which brings us to the part that actually matters, because from here there are really only two ways to go about your health. You can guess, or you can look. Guessing is the influencer with the miracle protocol, and the neighbor swearing her that supplement changed everything, and one more cleanse or challenge that you start.
And guessing is not just expensive in the way your supplement graveyard can attest to, because the real cost was never the money. The real cost is that every guess that doesn’t pan out quietly takes another bite out of your belief that anything ever will, until you have spent down your hope right along with your paycheck.
So my answer to all of it is simple. Test, don’t guess. Not because a single number is going to ride in and rescue you, but because a number gives you a real place to start, and you have been trying to build an entire plan without one, in the dark, with your hands tied behind your back. But I have to be honest with you about the other half of it, because a stack of labs on its own is not enough, as we know from the story above. You can walk out of an appointment holding the most gorgeous set of results and still have no earthly idea what is happening to you, because numbers only start to mean something once someone sets them down next to your actual life.
And this is where it finally clicks into place, because symptoms leave clues, and your body is not being dramatic when it hands them to you, it is being specific. A symptom is almost never a standalone event, because symptoms connect to systems, and they tend to travel in packs.
So when you come to me worn out and gaining weight around your middle and foggy and wide awake at three in the morning and snapping at the people you love and finding more of your hair in the shower drain than you’d like, most people would hear six separate problems that need six separate appointments. I don’t hear six problems. I hear a pattern, because every one of those things is in constant conversation with the others, your sleep talking to your blood sugar, which is talking to your hormones, which are talking to your thyroid, with your stress standing in the middle of the whole thing holding a bullhorn. You have one body, not eight separate departments, and yet the system you have been living in takes your handful of symptoms and scatters them across a handful of specialists, each of whom peers into their own little corner, decides their part looks fine, and waves you along, and not one of them ever steps back to take in the whole picture. That stepping back is the actual job. It is the entire job.
So when I look at a woman, I am looking at all of it at once. I am looking at her labs and asking what the data is really saying about her, specifically, rather than about the statistical average of everyone who happened to get poked that year, but I am also looking at everything sitting around those labs, because that is where most of the answers are quietly hiding. What are you eating, and when, and are you running on coffee and good intentions until two in the afternoon and then wondering why you’re standing over the sink at night eating crackers? How much are you truly sleeping, as opposed to how many hours you are just lying there in the bed? What have you been carrying, and for how long, and what has all that quiet stress been doing to you underneath the whole time?
And then the piece almost nobody ever bothers with, which is how you are actually built. Not your body type, but how you’re wired, where your energy comes from and where it leaks out, whether you’re a woman who thrives inside a rigid structure or one who needs room to move at her own rhythm, because handing a rigid plan to a woman who needs flexibility is a guaranteed disaster. You can print out the most perfect plan on the planet, and if it was built for how somebody else operates, she is not going to stick with it, and then she is going to turn right around and blame herself all over again. That was never a discipline problem. It was a design problem.
That, all of it together, the labs and the life and the woman on a single page and actually connected, is the thing that has never once been done for you, and I want you to feel that even though it stings a little, because it is simply the truth. You have had a lab glanced at. You have had a symptom glanced at. You have had a scale looked at, usually out in a hallway, in your shoes, moments before your appointment even started. You have never had all of it laid out and connected, with someone standing over the whole spread going, well would you look at how this one talks to that one. You are not broken. You were just never looked at whole, and it is genuinely impossible to fix a picture that nobody has ever bothered to look at.
And here is what shifts when you finally start working this way, and it is not the thing you would guess. The first thing to change isn’t the number on the scale, and it isn’t even your energy, though both of those do come in time. The very first thing that changes is the question you are asking. Right now, when something goes sideways, you ask what is wrong with me, and that question has no answer, because it is a trapdoor that drops you straight into shame and leaves you sitting on the floor in the dark with a bag of chips.
But once you learn to read your own clues, you start asking something else entirely, which is, what is my body actually trying to tell me, and you get curious instead of critical, and that matters far more than it sounds, because criticism slams you shut while curiosity opens you up, and only one of those two has ever led a single person to an answer.
Here is what that looks like on an ordinary bad week. Say the whole thing falls apart and you don’t do one thing you meant to. The old version of you says, well, I blew it, I clearly have no willpower, I’ll just start over on Monday, which is of course where every good plan quietly goes to die. But the curious version of you says, hang on, what actually happened here, and then takes an honest look and notices that you slept four hours a night for three nights straight, skipped lunch a couple of days, and had your mother-in-law in town the entire time.
That is not a moral failing. That is a little pile of data points. Because there is no such thing as failure here, there is only feedback, and every single thing that hasn’t worked has been telling you something true about your body this whole time. You were just never told you were allowed to read it that way. None of it was wasted. It was all information, and you simply never had anybody helping you gather it up.
And the last piece is honestly the one I care about most, because none of this actually works unless it ends with you being able to do it on your own. I am not remotely interested in you needing me forever. If you walk away from all of this dependent on me, then I have failed you, plain and simple.
What I want is for you to be able to look at your own numbers and understand what you’re seeing, to notice a symptom and think, okay, what is that connected to, what changed, what do I want to look at a little more closely, and to sit in that exam room one day and calmly say, I understand that this is in range, but here is what I’m still living with, so what else could be going on. Not fighting, not being difficult, not being that patient, just informed and steady and completely unwilling to leave without a real answer. Because a woman who understands her own body is a whole lot harder to dismiss, and a woman like that doesn’t need rescuing. She just needs the language that nobody ever handed her.
So think back to that woman and her ferritin one last time. She was in range, she was technically normal, and she was quietly being harmed the entire time, and the only reason she ever caught it is that she knew her own body well enough to understand what that number meant inside of her, and then she flatly refused to let normal be the end of the sentence.
That is the whole of what I’m asking you to do. Stop letting normal be the end of the sentence.
You were always the expert of your own body.
