Feel off? Not sure where to start? Start here.

If you don't know what's wrong or you're overwhelmed and don't know where to start.

I did a post the other day asking what the biggest roadblocks were preventing people from fixing their health issues.

Two most popular responses?

• Don’t know what’s causing symptoms

• Not sure what to do or overwhelmed

I wasn’t super surprised to see this. It’s always been the most common responses whenever talking to people dealing with health issues.

But it’s also not super surprising why so many people struggle with them. They don’t know what they’re eating, they don’t know when symptoms show up or any of the patterns with them. They have zero real data to work with, they just know something is off.

Very difficult to get anywhere with this limited info. You cannot fix what you don’t know.

So if you want to stop wasting months or years guessing and trying random supplements, here’s what I’d focus on tracking and how to actually use it.

What to track around food

Most people think “tracking” just means tracking what foods they eat. Helpful, but just the tip of the iceberg.

I’d track:

• The specific foods you’re eating

• Amounts: calories, macros and micros

• Tolerances: does something make you feel off? Log it.

• Fluids: water, coffee, juices, everything

• Supplements you’re taking

• Meal timing

99% of people are not going to have a solid grasp on this beyond the first point. We’re all busy and have a million things going on in our heads. It’s hard to know what’s going on from memory alone.

You can maybe do a decent job of tracking your calories and macronutrients just by paying attention to labels. But again, few people are paying that close attention or have the time to.

Use a meal tracking app like Cronometer or MyFitnessPal. I’m pretty sure MyFitnessPal lets you just take pictures of food to track that way. Couldn’t be easier.

This isn’t something you need to do forever and be constantly worried about.

It’s not super time consuming and if you want to really get to the bottom of things and actually fix your issues, this is often important to know at the beginning.

Do it for a week, get a good understanding of where things stand and maintain the same framework from there.

Why does this matter? The issues you’re dealing with, blood type, metabolic health, gender, body size, existing nutrient levels, activity levels and many other factors go into determining where these levels should be.

Not having things structured properly can get in the way of resolving issues.

Symptoms and how you feel

Keep track of what matters:

• Specific symptoms: bloating, gas, constipation, pain, etc.

• When do the symptoms appear? Are they around meals or just random?

• How long do symptoms last for?

• Stool (use the bristol stool chart and just note the number)

  • Frequency

  • Consistency

  • Color

  • Smell

  • Mucus, blood or anything else abnormal?

• Note energy levels, mental focus, stress, skin appearance, any pains throughout the body aside from gut.

• Other miscellaneous notes of how things are going

Log it daily. Yes, it’s a bit of work. So is being sick for years.

Testing

For most people trying to get clarity, running these panels is a good place to start:

• CBC (Complete Blood Count)

• CMP (Comprehensive Metabolic Panel

• Lipids

• Thyroid (TSH, free T3, free T4)

• Liver panel

• Hormones (Testosterone, Estrogen, Progesterone, Cortisol)

• CRP (inflammation marker)

• Iron panel

• Uric acid

If dealing with acute digestive issues, looking into these may make sense

• Microbiome composition

• Inflammation

• Minerals / metals

• Toxins

• Mitochondrial function

• MTHFR

If you’re interested in a more in-depth discussion on testing, check out the post I did recently going deeper into this.

Other miscellaneous things that can be helpful to track

• Sunlight exposure

• Exercise / activity levels

• Sleep timing and quality

• Stress levels

What to do with the data:

Don’t jump to conclusions immediately based on a thread you saw somewhere saying that if you have X symptom it means you have Y issue. It’s rarely that simple.

Review all of the logs, testing, etc. together.

• What patterns repeat?

• Are certain foods or actions consistently leading to symptoms?

• Do certain combinations cause issues?

• What issues are clustering together? Are there patterns?

• What connections are there between the different symptoms impacting different areas of your health?

• What issues from the testing could explain the symptoms you’re experiencing?

This is where the lightbulb can start going off. This is when you can start to get an idea of what’s going on, what the how things are connected and what next steps make sense.

Trying to come to these conclusions without any of this info will frequently lead you down the wrong paths towards wasted time and money.

You don’t need to become a biohacking monk. You need more data and awareness.

Track > test > analyze > act on it

Simple. Not easy. But it works.