Your Body Does Not Read the Textbook

There are a lot of rules out there about how to be healthy.

Eat this. Never eat that. Take these three supplements. Follow this protocol. Fix your gut. Balance your hormones. Support this pathway.

And underneath a lot of those recommendations is an assumption we don't talk about very much:

If this works, it should work for you.

Except that isn't how human bodies work.

Each one of us is truly different. Not better than or less than…but unique. That's one of the foundations of GeneKind, and it's worth coming back to because it changes how we approach almost everything else.

We really are different

Genetics gives us a fairly obvious place to see this.

Two people can eat the same food, take the same medication or supplement, live in the same environment, and have very different responses. Their genes may help explain some of that difference.

But genes aren't the whole story either.

There are all the things we can’t reasonably count: where you grew up, what childhood was like, the work you’ve done, sleep and stress, food choices over the years, illnesses and injuries. Even, more simply, the joys and heartaches of life.

All of those things become part of the environment in which your genes are doing their jobs.

So even two people with similar genetics aren't actually starting from the same place.

This is one reason I love genetics. I can get wonderfully nerdy about pathways and variants and enzymes. We'll do some of that around here.

But I don't want genetics to become another set of rules.

Your genetics are one piece of information. Your labs are another. Your story, aka history, is another.

And then there is the piece that sometimes gets pushed surprisingly far down the list:

How do you actually feel?

Medicine has the same problem

One of the old sayings in medicine is that when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

Medical training teaches us what usually happens. We learn the common presentation of a disease, the expected laboratory findings and the treatments most likely to work.

We learn some zebras, too.

And then we go take care of actual humans.

Those actual human bodies have an inconvenient habit of not reading the textbook.

I've seen the same tendency developing in functional and integrative health spaces. Instead of a conventional protocol, we may have a supplement protocol or a dietary protocol.

The vocabulary changes.

The underlying assumption sometimes doesn't.

Here's the protocol for this problem. Follow it.

For some people, it works beautifully. For others, it doesn't. And some people feel considerably worse while trying very hard to do everything "right."

That's where we should lean more into curiosity than I failed or I did it wrong.

What is reasonable?

I worked in state government for about 15 years and had the opportunity to work with quite a few attorneys.

Doctors and attorneys aren't always natural allies, but they taught me something I use all the time now: the idea of reasonable.

Not perfect.

Not absolutely right.

Rational and appropriate.

It gives us a different question to ask: Given what we know right now, what is the most reasonable next step?

And that question leaves room for new information and for the inevitable uncertainty. Most importantly, it leaves room for you.

I think we have entirely too many rules around health.

If you eat this, you're good. If you eat that, you're bad.

Take this much.

Avoid these foods.

Do these five things every morning.

Follow the protocol for six weeks, even if you feel terrible on day four.

We can do something different.

We can make the next best decision based on the information we have, then pay attention to what happens.

Even the supplement bottle isn't the boss of you

Here's a very practical example.

Suppose you've looked at several pieces of your story and decided that trying a particular supplement is a reasonable next step.

The bottle says to take two capsules every day.

For some reason, we tend to turn that into a rule.

It says two a day, so I need to take two a day.

No, you don't.

For many of the sensitive folks I've worked with over the years, two capsules a day might be a terrible place to start.

We might start with one capsule.

We might start with one capsule once a week.

If it's a liquid or powder, we might use a fraction of the suggested serving.

Then stop.

Wait.

Pay attention.

What changed?

What didn't?

Did you notice anything uncomfortable? Or did something unexpectedly get better?

Can we prove that every sensation was caused by the supplement? Usually not. Bodies have too many moving parts for that.

But you've gathered information.

And now you have more information for your next decision than you had before.

The goal isn't to successfully follow the instructions on the bottle.

The goal is to find out whether this particular thing is useful for your body. I love to use the phrase, Does it serve you well? Because that’s what a supplement or medication or plate of food should ultimately do. Serve you well.

A quick but important distinction: I'm talking about supplements here, not prescription medications. Take prescription medications as prescribed. If something doesn't feel right or you're having an unexpected effect, talk with the clinician who prescribed it so you can decide together what needs to change.

Somewhere along the way, we handed over a lot of authority

There was a time when physicians held an enormous amount of authority in the healthcare relationship.

The doctor said jump. The patient asked how high.

I'm glad that has changed.

I want people participating in their own healthcare decisions. I want questions. I want conversation.

But I wonder if sometimes we've simply transferred that authority somewhere else.

Now the authority might be a supplement company.

An influencer.

A practitioner with a protocol.

A book.

A Reddit thread.

A very confident person on Instagram telling you exactly what everyone with your symptoms needs to do.

And if you're someone who is very good at following instructions, you may jump right in and push through even when your body is telling you that something isn't working.

You white-knuckle your way through because the protocol says this is supposed to help.

I don't want that for you.

This is what GeneKind is for

GeneKind is here to give you information and perspective.

We'll talk about food reactions. Genetics. Methylation. Histamine. The nervous system. Labs. Patterns. And whatever other wonderfully nerdy rabbit holes turn out to be useful.

And we'll ask a lot of whys.

But the purpose isn't to give you another collection of rules.

I want you to be able to take what you learn here and lay it next to your own story.

Does this pattern look familiar?

Does it help explain something you've noticed?

Does it change the questions you want to ask?

Does it suggest a reasonable next step?

Over time, I hope you become more confident making those decisions for yourself.

That doesn't mean doing everything yourself. Self-advocacy also means knowing when to ask for help. Hopefully you have a healthcare team you can go to and say, Hey, I need help. I need another set of eyes on this.

That's good judgment, too.

You live in your body every day.

Your physician doesn't.

Your supplement company certainly doesn't.

And the person who wrote the protocol online doesn't know your genetics, your childhood, your exposures, your labs, your Tuesday afternoon headache or what happened when you tried magnesium three years ago.

You know pieces of the story no one else can know unless you tell them.

So we'll keep learning the science here.

We'll keep looking for patterns.

We'll keep asking questions.

And then we'll use what we know to find the next reasonable step for you.

60-Second Self-Care: Question One Rule

Pick one health “rule” you’re following right now.

Maybe it’s a food you avoid, a supplement you take, a certain way you exercise, or something you’ve been told you should do.

For 60 seconds, ask:

Why am I doing this?

What have I actually noticed in my own body?

Is this still a reasonable choice for me?

You don’t have to change anything today.

Just notice whether the rule is serving you, or whether you’re following it because somewhere along the way, somebody said you should.

That's GeneKind.