You’ve done the sensible things. You’ve seen your GP, maybe more than once. The bloods came back and everything was in range. Get some rest, you were told.
And you’re still exhausted.
A founder in a recent strategy session told us this had happened to him more times than he could count. Every time he felt run down, he got tested, and every time he was told he was healthy and just needed rest. Nothing changed. We’ve kept his details general so he stays private.
What “normal” actually means
A normal range, or reference interval, is most often defined as the values that contain the central 95% of a healthy population (Ekelund, 2018). An in-range result means your number looks like most healthy people’s.
That’s useful. It’s designed to flag results that look unusual next to a healthy population, and it does that job well. Whether that number suits you, under the load you carry and with the genetics you have, is a separate question.
We see this in our own work. One director’s results all read normal. Read against his own genetics, the same numbers pointed somewhere specific, and he left with concrete changes to make. A result can be normal and still matter. You can read more on our results page.
A single test is also only a snapshot. Your own trend over time often says more than any one result. That’s why we ask new clients for their past results, including the ones that came back in range.
The warning lights on the dashboard
Think about a car. One warning light comes on, then another. None of them stops the car, so you keep driving.
Over a few years, he’d picked up small new things that came and went. Allergies worse than he’d ever had them. Odd little symptoms that each got checked on their own and each came back as nothing much.
We don’t diagnose, and anything new or worsening belongs with your doctor first. What a cluster of small signals can tell you is that your system is working harder than it should, and that it’s worth looking at the whole picture rather than one light at a time.
Questions a standard panel isn’t designed to answer
A routine panel is built to rule things out. When you’re exhausted and it’s clear, these are the questions we’d want answered next.
Are you fuelling the load you carry?
He trained early, had a protein shake, and his first real food came late in the morning, on top of very demanding days. Fasting can be a powerful tool, but there’s nuance to it when cognitive load is high and the system is already stressed. Your brain is an expensive organ to run, and an underfed brain under pressure is one reason for the fog to settle in.
How is your stress system running across the day?
Your cortisol awakening response shows the daily curve of your main stress hormone, and whether your engine is running hot or has already gone flat. It isn’t part of a routine blood panel.
What is your gut doing with what you eat?
You can eat well and still not get the benefit, if absorption is poor or the wrong bacteria are taking their share first. A surprisingly large chunk of the small molecules circulating in your blood are made by your gut bacteria, not by you. One review puts it at a quarter to a third (Pizzorno, 2014), and some research suggests it may be higher (Visconti et al., 2019). He’d had gut problems in the past that a practitioner had helped with, and they still flared now and then.
What is your body producing as it runs?
Connect a hose to a car’s exhaust and you can learn a remarkable amount about how the engine is running. Organic acids in urine do something similar for your body. They show the by-products of your cells at work, which helps us work back to what’s happening upstream.
What does your own code say?
Your genetics shape how you respond to stress, food and training. Reading your blood results against your DNA, rather than a population average, is often where an in-range number starts to mean something.
What your wearable is already telling you
If you wear a ring or a strap, you may already hold useful evidence. His heart rate variability had trended down across the same few years he described. His story and his data matched, without him needing to tell us any of it. In the couple of months since he’d started resting more and training regularly again, it had begun to rise.
Data like this doesn’t replace testing. It does tell you whether what you’re changing is working.
What to do next
Start by asking your GP for copies of your past results, normal ones included, so you can see your own trend.
Then notice when you’re worse. For him it was after he was short on sleep, when his eating slipped, and when the pressure was high, more than any particular day of the week. That pattern is useful information.
Hold on to some version of whatever keeps you steady, even a smaller one. Rachel wrote about why that’s so hard in The first thing to go is the thing keeping you steady.
And if you’ve done all that and you’re still flat, get the whole picture read together. The Metabolic Profile looks at glucose and recovery over five to six weeks. The Executive Uplift Program adds your genetics, a full blood and organic acids panel, and your cortisol rhythm. We measure and interpret, and we work alongside your own doctor. And if you’re in a season of life where you’re navigating massive business growth and need a team to help you rise to the occasion, then we might invite you to our private advisory.
Stop guessing
A Health Strategy Session starts with about 15 minutes of questions about your sleep, energy, food, training and stress. One of us reads all of it, writes you a personal report, and talks it through with you on a video call. You’ll know what can’t be known without testing, and which tests would answer it. We’ll also help understand the gap between where you are, and where you want to be and how to close it.