Your Health Is Not That Complicated: Part 2
The numbers that matter, what they mean, and what to do when they’re off
In Part 1, I gave you a one-page mental model for how your body works. Four levers control almost all of your health: weight, blood pressure, blood quality, and inflammation.
They connect in a simple cascade:
Keep your weight down → that keeps your blood pressure down → eat clean so your blood doesn’t have problem-causing stuff in it → exercise to move the bad stuff out and keep everything circulating → inflammation stays low.
That’s the mental model. But a mental model without numbers is just theory.
This is the owner’s manual. The specific biomarkers to track for each lever, what the numbers should actually be, and the highest-leverage fix when something’s off. Bookmark this one.
The Problem With “Normal”
You get blood work back and your doctor says “everything looks normal.” That should be reassuring. It’s not.
“Normal” is a reference range built from the general population. The general population is not healthy. Normal cholesterol in America would raise alarms in most of the world. Normal fasting insulin in a country where 40% of adults are pre-diabetic is not a number you want to aim for.
There’s a massive gap between “not currently diagnosed with a disease” and “actually healthy and performing well.” Your doctor is screening for disease. That’s their job. Optimizing for energy, clarity, and longevity? That’s on you, unfortunately.
We’re running 200,000-year-old hardware in a world of processed food, blue light, and desk chairs. Some of these numbers being off is almost the default. The good news is most of them respond to simple interventions once you know where to look.
Here’s where to look.
Lever 1: Weight
Why it matters: Everything works harder when you’re carrying too much. Heart, joints, kidneys, hormones, all of it. This is the lever that moves every other lever, which is why it’s first.
The numbers:
Body weight / BMI should be within 20 pounds of the BMI standard, ideally in the 19-25 range. Yes, people love to hate on BMI and it’s not accurate if you have a lot of muscle. But most people do not have a lot of muscle, and for those who don’t, anything over 30 is obesity and that’s bad across every health metric we can measure.
Fasting glucose should be under 99. Wake up, don’t eat or drink anything but water (at least 12 hours since your last meal), then test your blood sugar. Over 99 means you’re pre-diabetic and your metabolism is already struggling. You can test this at home with a $30 glucose monitor.
What to watch for: Constant fatigue, joint pain, sleep apnea (your partner may notice this before you do), and the frustrating inability to lose weight despite “eating well,” which is almost always a calorie tracking problem, not a willpower problem.
The fix: Track your food in Cronometer for 5 days. Just 5 days. You will be stunned at where the calorie bombs are hiding. One bite of some cakes or desserts takes 30 minutes of cardio to burn off. One bite. Ten bites and you need 5 hours of cardio. That math alone should convince you that diet matters more than exercise for weight loss.
Find your BMR, create a 200-300 calorie per day deficit, lose about a pound a week. That’s sustainable. If you’re obese with blood sugar issues, talk to your doctor about GLP-1 medications (especially Tirzepatide because it helps with blood sugar), they’ve been a game-changer for a lot of people.
Lever 2: Blood Pressure
Why it matters: Your blood vessels are like a garden hose. Too much pressure for too long damages the walls and everything downstream: heart, kidneys, brain, eyes. The kidneys are especially vulnerable because they filter your entire blood supply dozens of times per day, and high pressure slowly destroys the tiny vessels doing the filtering.
The numbers:
Blood pressure should be 120/80 or lower for both numbers. You know this one. A $40 home monitor is one of the best health investments you can make.
Resting heart rate should be 70 or less beats per minute. The less your heart needs to work while you’re at rest, the better your cardiovascular health. People in great shape are often in the 50s. Your blood pressure monitor will show this too.
Heart rate recovery should drop 20+ beats within 1 minute after vigorous exercise. Exercise hard for a few minutes, stop, check your heart rate, then check again after 60 seconds. The more it drops, the healthier your cardiovascular system. This is one of the strongest predictors of cardiac health and almost nobody tracks it.
HRV (Heart Rate Variability) should be 40 or higher (age dependent, higher is better). This measures the variation between heartbeats and is a great indicator of overall health, recovery, and stress load. You’ll need a wearable like the Whoop or similar to track it, but once you start watching it you’ll see exactly how bad sleep, alcohol, and stress show up in your body the next day.
What to watch for: Consistent readings above 130/85, headaches, vision changes, swelling in legs or ankles. If blood pressure is high, get your kidney function checked (that’s part of the CMP panel I’ll mention in Lever 4).
The fix: Lose weight. This fixes blood pressure more than anything else. Exercise regularly. If it’s still high after those two: magnesium, potassium, omega-3s, and CoQ10 are worth trying (with your doctor’s knowledge). Deep breathing exercises can make a surprising difference, this isn’t woo, the Resperate device is FDA-approved for lowering blood pressure through guided breathing. Gold standard medications if needed: telmisartan, amlodipine.
If you fix Lever 1, Lever 2 often fixes itself.
Lever 3: Blood Quality
Why it matters: This is about what’s actually circulating in your blood. Sugar, cholesterol, insulin, nutrients. Remember the mental model from Part 1: processed sugar acts like shards of glass in your blood vessels, cholesterol deploys to patch the damage, and when the patching never stops, it builds up until something blocks. This is also where the master system, energy metabolism, lives. If your blood quality is bad, the raw materials for every hormone, neurotransmitter, and repair process in your body are compromised.
The numbers:
Fasting glucose under 99 (yes, it shows up in Lever 1 too, that’s how foundational it is).
Fasting insulin under 25, ideally under 12 or even 10. This is huge and most doctors don’t test it. High insulin means your cells aren’t using fuel properly, and it can flag metabolic problems years before A1C catches diabetes. Ask for this test specifically.
A1C under 5.7%. This measures your average blood sugar over the past 2-3 months. Over 5.7 is diabetes territory. Unlike fasting glucose, which is a snapshot, this shows the trend.
Cholesterol: Triglycerides/HDL ratio under 2.0. Forget total cholesterol for a moment. If your triglycerides are 100 and your HDL is 50, that’s a 2.0 ratio, fine. Triglycerides at 150 with HDL at 50 is 3.0, that’s bad. This ratio tells you more than the total number.
ApoB under 110, optimally under 70 if other markers are also off. This is emerging as probably the single most important number for predicting heart disease. It measures the particles that actually cause arterial damage. Yet many doctors still don’t order it. Ask for it.
Lpa under 10. This one is mostly genetic. Test it once. If it’s high, you drew a bad hand on artery disease genetics and you need every other number on this list dialed in tight. If it’s low, one less thing to worry about.
Vitamin D at 30 ng/ml or higher, 40-60 is optimal. This is actually more of a hormone than a vitamin and has massive downstream effects on immune function, mood, bone health, and more. Many people are deficient, especially if you don’t get regular sunlight. A 20-year study found that people with the most sun exposure had the lowest risk of dying from any cause, full stop.
What to watch for: Fatigue, brain fog, slow wound healing, frequent infections, and gut issues. That last one is critical. If you have chronic digestive problems like GERD, IBS, or indigestion, your absorption is compromised. Every supplement and nutrient-dense meal you consume is partially wasted because your gut can’t process it properly. Fix the gut first or nothing else sticks. I learned this the hard way, it’s why Part 1 of my supplement series is entirely about gut health.
The fix: Clean up your diet first. Reduce processed sugar and processed foods. Get blood work done, it’s $100-200 for everything above and you can order it yourself online without a doctor’s order (Jason Health is one option, there are many).
For blood sugar issues: lower carb diet, exercise especially after meals, berberine as a supplement, metformin if your doctor recommends it.
For cholesterol issues: diet and exercise first, red yeast rice and plant sterols as supplements. Low-dose rosuvastatin and/or ezetimibe are the gold standard medications with the fewest side effects.
For gut issues: do a real elimination diet for 30 days. Not the “I kind of tried it for a week” version that 9 out of 10 people have actually done when they tell me they “already tried that.” A real 30 days. You will learn more about what your body can and can’t tolerate than years of random Googling.
Lever 4: Inflammation
Why it matters: Inflammation is the body’s alarm system. When you cut your finger, inflammation is what heals it. That’s good. But when the alarm is blaring 24/7 because of excess weight, high blood pressure, and bad diet, it stops being helpful and starts driving damage. Chronic inflammation is now linked to many cancers, autoimmune conditions, neurological decline, and basically every major disease category. The evidence keeps piling up.
The numbers:
CRP (C-Reactive Protein) under 1.0 is good. Between 1 and 3 is average, which really means “common but not great.” Over 3 and something needs attention. Don’t test when you’re sick or just had an illness, it will be elevated and not reflective of your baseline.
CBC/CMP (Complete Blood Count / Complete Metabolic Panel) is the broad screening panel. It checks blood cells, liver, kidneys, electrolytes. It’s cheap, usually done with a cholesterol test, and can catch issues ranging from anemia to early cancer signals. You’ve probably had this done before. Make sure your numbers are actually in range, not just “normal.”
VO2 Max of 41-49 or higher (age dependent). This measures your cardiovascular fitness and lung capacity. It’s one of the strongest predictors of longevity. You can get a rough estimate from some wearables, but a clinic test is more accurate. The more vigorous cardio you can handle, the better.
What to watch for: Chronic pain that won’t resolve, skin issues, autoimmune flares, brain fog that persists after fixing sleep and diet, frequent illness. If the first three levers are in range and CRP is still high, look deeper: gut health, food intolerances, and environmental factors. Get a CO2 monitor for your house and test each room, high CO2 is shockingly common and causes brain fog and fatigue on its own. Check for mold. Eliminate chemicals and allergens from your sleeping area.
The fix: Fix Levers 1-3. Inflammation is almost always downstream of the other three. Exercise is the single best anti-inflammatory activity you can do. If CRP is still elevated after that: omega-3s (high quality fish oil, krill, or algal oil), real elimination diet, environmental audit of your home. Address cortisol and stress directly since constant stress keeps inflammation elevated even when everything else looks fine.
When Everything Checks Out and You Still Don’t Feel Right
If all of the above is in range and you’re still struggling with energy, mood, or unexplained symptoms, the answer is usually in one of three places:
Thyroid. Undiagnosed thyroid issues are far more common than most people realize. You can be hypo or hyper, and both will wreck your energy, weight, and mood. Get the full thyroid panel, not just TSH. Read up on the recommended tests from “Stop the Thyroid Madness” for the most thorough approach.
Hormones. Past age 30, and especially past 40, this becomes critical. For men, testosterone. For women, the full hormone panel, especially approaching menopause. Getting hormones tested and balanced can be absolutely life-changing. I’m not exaggerating. People describe it as getting 10 years of their life back.
Nutrient levels. The final boss. You can eat well, supplement, and do everything right on paper, but very few tests measure what’s actually in your body versus what you’re consuming. A Nutreval or Metabolomix test ($400-800) eliminates the guesswork entirely. Expensive, but if nothing else has worked, it will show you exactly what’s missing. What’s your health worth?
The Cheat Code
Here’s something that would have saved me years: genetic testing combined with AI analysis.
Get your genetics done through 23andMe (Health & Ancestry package) or Ancestry.com. Download your raw genetic file. Run it through GeneticGenie (free) and Nutrahacker ($0-100). Then take those reports and feed them to an AI like ChatGPT with this prompt:
“You are a health and nutrition expert. Analyze the attached genetic or functional test report(s). First, give a plain English summary with the 3-5 most impactful diet, lifestyle, and supplement recommendations. Then provide a deeper dive with explanations of each finding, why it matters, and additional recommendations, clearly flagging high-priority issues separately from optional optimizations.”
This will generate a health plan personally customized to your genetics. Common defects like MTHFR and other mutations completely change how you absorb nutrients, and most people have no idea they have them. A few hundred dollars to potentially skip months of experimentation and guessing. I always ask people the same question: what is your health and energy worth?
Putting It All Together
You now have the mental model from Part 1 and the numbers from Part 2 and it’s enough to take control of your health instead of outsourcing it to a system that spends 10 minutes with you and hopes for the best.
The testing order matters: start at the top (weight, blood pressure, basic blood work) and work down. Most of the basic biomarkers can be measured at home or for $100-200 of blood work. Only go deeper into thyroid, hormones, and nutrient testing if the basics are in range and you still have issues.
One important reminder: add interventions one at a time so you know what’s actually working. The temptation is to change everything at once. Resist it. And give things time. It’s going to take a month or two to undo years of previous behavior. That’s probably modern society’s worst trait, expecting instant results.
The Health Optimizer in Zorga takes everything in this article and Part 1 and turns it into a step-by-step checklist with the testing order, interventions, and tools already organized. It took me years to build this system. Yours doesn’t have to take that long.
If you’re ready to go deeper on supplementation, Part 1 of my supplement series covers why you need to fix your gut before building a stack. Part 2 covers the actual stack across five categories. Start with the gut article if you haven’t read it yet, because supplements on a broken digestive system is pouring water into a bucket with no bottom.
As always, clear any changes to your diet, supplements, or medications with your doctor. I have to put that disclaimer, but I mean it.
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