Client results.

A fifty-year-old founder running a real business. From the outside everything looked dialled in, and he believed it was. The first panel said otherwise. His cholesterol was out of range across every marker, his liver enzymes were elevated in a pattern consistent with fatty liver, he was carrying significant excess weight, his energy was gone, and his focus came and went without any pattern he could name.

Twenty weeks later he was seventeen kilograms lighter, with every flagged marker back in range, his liver indicators resolved, his energy back, and his focus restored. None of it was exotic. It was the right system built across all six blocks and then run, without skipping, for twenty weeks straight.

Fifty-eight years old, fasting intermittently, playing competitive padel three times a week, eating clean, and completely convinced he was operating at his peak. He only came to the program because a friend insisted, not because he thought anything was wrong.

His first panel showed inflammation at thirty times the upper reference, microcytic red cells, and a recent bout of malaria that had never fully resolved. The protocols he was running, intermittent fasting stacked on top of high-intensity padel, are perfectly sensible for a healthy person. He was not a healthy person at that point. So we took the high-intensity load off, rebuilt his nutrition around recovery rather than restriction, and put a strength program around the depleted state he was actually in.

Yes, this is me. I include my own panel because running a health optimization company without being a client of your own program would be a bit awkward. For context: I have been training and optimizing seriously for about seven years, and for the last four to five of those I have been genuinely operating at a top 1% baseline. Good sleep, good nutrition, consistent training, full diagnostics run regularly. This is not a case of someone coming in broken. It is a case of what a 150-marker panel finds even when everything feels right.

The two markers worth explaining are SHBG and free testosterone. Total testosterone is strong. SHBG is elevated, which suppresses free testosterone (the form the body actually uses) to the lower end of the range. This is largely a consequence of a known exposure: eight months of isotretinoin in my teens for severe acne. Isotretinoin puts significant load on the liver, and elevated SHBG is a well-documented downstream effect in some cases. It is not a performance crisis. It is a specific target. The protocol is built around lowering SHBG through zone-2 training, gut support, and sleep consistency, and tracking whether free T follows up over the next panel.

The broader point is this: if a panel run on someone already optimizing seriously still finds actionable targets, imagine what it finds on someone who has never tested at all.

He started at 96 kilograms with elevated insulin and metabolic markers consistent with early insulin resistance. He had never had a baseline panel done, so he genuinely did not know what a healthy operating baseline looked like, because no one had ever measured his properly. The work was not a diet. It was rebuilding an entire operating system from the ground up, with sleep, nutrition, training, habits, and diagnostics all running in parallel from day one.

At six months he was 73 kilograms, down twenty-three, with his insulin markers reversed and his energy finally stable. He is still progressing.

He was building a business, training five days a week, and looked completely fine from the outside. The standard ten-marker checkup agreed with that and called him normal. The 150-marker panel did not. It found three reversible deficiencies and one genetic cardiovascular risk marker, Lipoprotein(a), that most general practitioners never think to test for. That marker does not respond to lifestyle the way the others do, but the risk it carries can be substantially offset by optimizing everything around it, and that is exactly what his protocol was built to do.

The sleep problem he mentioned turned out to be work stress and an inability to switch off, on top of two or three coffees and energy drinks a day. His re-panel is scheduled for week twelve.

Bad mornings, daytime naps just to function, long unmotivated stretches with no obvious cause, and low mood on random days. He was building a business on a processed-food diet, training when he could, and sleeping inconsistently. His own explanation was simply that this was how he felt. His panel had a very different explanation.

The first panel came back with elevated TSH, elevated free T3, free testosterone sitting at the very bottom of the range, a positive H. pylori result, and insufficient vitamin D. Three reversible drivers and one bacterial infection, none of which a standard annual checkup would have caught. We do not write diagnoses here, we address markers, and his re-panel is scheduled for week twelve.