How Good Can This Get? Leadership, Health, and Loving Her Body Better Than a Doctor Would

There's a question I hear from men all the time. Some version of it comes up over and over: how do I lead? What am I supposed to take charge of? When you try to picture leading in a relationship, the frame is usually too narrow. You imagine making a decision about money, or planning a date, or having some hard conversation. Those are real. But leadership shows up in places most men never think to look, and one of the biggest for us has been our health.

This episode is the story of how that happened. It starts with a routine idea and turns into something that may add decades to our lives, and it's also a live demonstration of what polarity actually looks like when you stop talking about it and start living it. A man leading. A woman receiving. And both people better for it.

You can listen to the full episode here.

It started with a number: seven

At the beginning of 2026, we decided to get full blood work done. Nothing was wrong. We weren't in crisis. We just live on the road in an RV, we don't have a regular doctor's office, and honestly we don't want one. It occurred to me that it would be smart to actually look under the hood and see what was going on inside our bodies while we still felt good.

Dawn went first, in January. And that very first panel taught us something that reframed how she'd been feeling for what may have been her entire life. Her ferritin was at seven.

If that number means nothing to you, here's why it matters. Most people, when they go to the doctor, get their iron tested. What that usually measures is circulating iron, the iron moving through your blood right now. Ferritin is different. Ferritin is your iron storage, the reserve your body keeps in the tank. You can have circulating numbers that look a little low but still technically fine, while your actual reserves are nearly empty. That was Dawn. If a standard test had only looked at hemoglobin and circulating iron, she'd have looked like she was on the low side of okay. Test the ferritin, and the real picture shows up: whatever was circulating was getting pulled out of storage that had almost nothing left in it.

The optimal range for a menstruating woman is roughly 70 to 100, because she's losing some every month as part of her cycle. Dawn was at seven. And ferritin had never once been tested in her life.

Iron is part of how your blood carries oxygen through your body. When it's that depleted, it touches everything, energy chief among it. And here's the trap: how would you even know your energy could be different? If you decline slowly over years, or if you've been this way your whole life, low is just your normal. You have nothing to compare it to.

There's a detail that makes this almost eerie in hindsight. Dawn tried to donate blood in high school, the very first time she ever attempted it, and they turned her away because her hemoglobin was too low. That was thirty years ago. Which means some version of this may have been with her the whole time, quietly shaping what she thought was simply her baseline.

The awakening: this was ours to take responsibility for

Two things landed for me when that panel came back.

The first was practical: the iron was a real problem, and it needed fixing. We found vitamin infusion places and got Dawn some infusions. We started her on supplements. Over the following months we fine-tuned the whole protocol, because it turns out there's a real process to how your body absorbs iron and what helps or blocks that absorption. That alone was a revelation.

The second thing was bigger, and it's the actual subject of this episode. If we operate mostly outside the traditional medical system, then the responsibility to look at our overall health falls to us. Nobody is going to knock my knee with a hammer, confirm the reflex still works, and call it a checkup. If we want to know what's really going on, and if we want to do something about it before it becomes a crisis, that's on us. On me, specifically, as the one choosing to lead it.

And this is the part worth sitting with. It wasn't a negotiation. I didn't sit Dawn down and ask permission to make health more of a priority. I didn't look for a vote. I decided it was going to become a much bigger focus, and then I moved. We already took our health seriously. We work out, we eat well, we take care of ourselves. But there was this entire interior world, the stuff you can only see in your blood, that had gone completely unlooked at. Leading meant deciding to look.

Then it was my turn, and the thyroid surprise

After Dawn's first panel, I signed myself up for Function Health and did my own blood work. And my results are exactly why I preach about this so much.

My thyroid numbers were excellent. Every standard marker came back great. But Function tested something a normal yearly checkup wouldn't: thyroid antibodies. And I have both of the antibodies that indicate early Hashimoto's, an autoimmune disease that attacks the thyroid over time.

Sit with what that means. Every visible thyroid marker looked perfect. If you only tested the usual things, you'd conclude I was completely fine. But underneath the good numbers, an autoimmune process was already underway. Because I know now, there are things I can do. There are supplements, and there are anti-inflammatory changes that may help. I may not be able to stop Hashimoto's from eventually arriving, but I have the chance to influence its course instead of getting blindsided ten or twenty years down the road when my thyroid has quietly been destroyed and suddenly everything feels wrong. The thyroid affects everything, so finding out early is the whole game.

That single discovery made the whole thing worth it. And it came from a test almost no one gets.

If you want to look this deeply at your own body, here's the link we use. More on how the referral works at the bottom of this post.

Where leadership meets curiosity: turning data into a system

Now both of us had rich, specific information about our own bodies. This is where my love of understanding things really took over, and where "let's get some blood work" became "how good can this get?"

I started feeding the blood work data into an AI tool to learn more about what was actually going on in each of us. One important caveat I want to be clear about: I do not take the AI's output at face value. It's an imperfect system. It gives me ideas and things to investigate, not answers to accept blindly. Used that way, as a thinking partner rather than an oracle, it's been the single most beneficial thing about AI in our lives. It has helped more in the last several months than forty-six years of living in this body did before it.

From there it grew into a system. I asked a simple question: what affects blood work? Supplements, for one. So I typed up everything we were each taking. Some of those supplements we'd started because you're "supposed to," like vitamin D. Others we'd added because they seemed like they'd help with something specific, with no real way to know whether they actually were. I put the supplement lists in alongside the blood work, and the idea came back to build a spreadsheet: one for each of us, blood work on one tab, supplements on another, so that over time we could track how the supplements were actually moving the numbers.

And it kept growing. Every week now, I export the data our Apple Watches collect: heart rate, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep, workouts. It all flows into the spreadsheet alongside the blood work and supplements. I've told the tool what our goals are, so it's not just storing data, it's looking for what's working, what's contradicting itself, and what's quietly working against us.

The little discoveries keep coming. Just this week, the tool noticed that on the nights my overnight body temperature runs lowest, measured right off my wrist, I sleep best. In an RV, where the wall between your head and the outside air is thin and the insulation is bad, that's genuinely actionable. So now the system pulls in the overnight low temperature and the air quality index for each date, which lets us see how things like wildfire smoke affect sleep and workout quality. Every time we move to a new location, I log it, and the spreadsheet reads the elevation (we've camped everywhere from below sea level to nine thousand feet), the sun angle based on latitude, and from that an estimate of how much vitamin D we're getting from actual sunlight day to day.

Dawn's follow-up: when "healthy" supplements become the problem

We signed Dawn up for Function about six months after her first full panel and ran her first set of Function tests a couple of weeks ago. The results made the case for individualized data better than anything we could argue.

Her vitamin D was too high. Her zinc was too high. Both above range. And she was taking a daily zinc supplement and a fairly high-dose daily vitamin D. She hadn't hit toxic levels yet. But if we hadn't known, and we'd just kept dutifully taking those supplements every day because they're "good for you," she would eventually have ended up with real problems. Meanwhile the omega-3 she thought might be too low was fine, and it was actually a recently added supplement she needed to cut back on.

This is the whole point. "Healthy" is not a fixed rule you apply to every body. Without data, even your well-intentioned choices are guesses.

The cholesterol lesson: your body is different than mine

This is the discovery that changed the most for us, and it's the clearest illustration of why individualized data matters.

For years, Dawn had programmed herself with rule after rule about eating "right." Low carb. Gluten free. Whole grain over everything. She tracked her food and always chose the "better" option, which at one point meant eating around seventy grams of fiber a day and feeling terrible, then discovering the abdominal pain was from the very fiber she thought was virtuous. Perfectionism ran the whole show. Every food sorted into good or bad, and she lived inside that filter constantly.

Then we learned about lipoprotein A.

Lipoprotein A, or Lp(a), is something a normal blood test essentially never checks. It's genetically inherited. You either have it or you don't, and you can't change whether you have it or how much your body makes. What it does is bind to certain types of cholesterol and make you far more likely to develop arterial calcification and plaque buildup. Dawn has it. I don't.

Here's why that matters so much. Cholesterol used to get treated as simply bad, then the "good and bad cholesterol" framing came along, which is still a massive oversimplification. Looked at through a more individualized lens, our two bodies handle the same food very differently. Certain saturated fats going into Dawn's body are far more potentially destructive than the same fats going into mine. My cholesterol could run higher than hers without doing the same damage, because I don't carry that one specific inherited marker.

Without Function, we would never have known this until maybe twenty or thirty years down the road, when it shows up as a sudden, massive problem. Sometimes people don't find out about this kind of thing until a heart attack in someone who looked perfectly healthy. Anyone looking at Dawn would assume she's the picture of health, and by nearly every marker she is. This is exactly the sort of thing that hides behind a clean-looking checkup.

It matters personally, too. Dawn's grandfather had a heart attack and died in his early forties, younger than she is now. So knowing this carries real weight.

The changes it points to are refreshingly simple. It means choosing leaner cuts. Fewer ribeyes, more filets. Pork tenderloin over fattier cuts. Paying attention to which fats we cook with. As the doctor we talked with put it, Lp(a) is like a gun, and the specific cholesterol it binds to is the bullets. You can't get rid of the gun. But if you lower that cholesterol, you take the bullets out, and a gun with no bullets can't do damage. You give it less ammunition.

In two weeks we're driving a couple of hours each way to a little town in northern Wisconsin where you can get a CT scan of your heart for about a hundred dollars, to check whether there's any arterial calcification already happening. Every other marker in Dawn's blood work looks excellent, so we don't expect to find much. But for a hundred dollars, it turns an unknown into peace of mind. And if it comes back looking off, that's when we go straight to a cardiologist. Getting the information ourselves first doesn't replace real medicine. It puts us in a position to use it well.

The part that's easy to skip: the fear is real, and surrender is the answer

I want to be honest about something, because this isn't about installing fear in anyone. Learning this kind of information can just as easily feed overthinking as relieve it, especially when perfectionism has been your operating system.

The night before we recorded, Dawn felt that fear creep in, the big unknowns, the heart scan she hasn't had yet. So instead of spiraling into research alone, she came to me with her questions and asked for a grounded place to stand. I walked her through the actual changes: some things, like butter and coconut oil in baking, aren't disappearing. For beef, it just means more filets. For pork, the tenderloin we already eat. Two or three sentences, and the swarming cloud of "what does all this mean" settled into a few concrete, manageable choices.

That's the thing about fear of the physical world. It doesn't need to run your life. The heart scan is in a couple of weeks. It'll give us information, and then we'll make future decisions based on what we actually learn instead of jumping out into an imagined future and living in a chaotic state over risks that are only possible. None of this says anything about Dawn's current state. So the move is to breathe it out, stay in the moment, and not let fear take the wheel.

Trust your body: eat the chip

There's a lighter side to all of this that's just as important. As Dawn has tuned into her own body's signals this year, food has gotten simpler, not more complicated.

Her sodium came back low. And suddenly her lifelong love of chips made perfect sense. We were already supplementing salt, and her body still wanted more. So the guidance from me was refreshingly direct: eat the chips. She did, and the brain fog lifted almost immediately, like she could think again. All the mental gymnastics around whether chips were "allowed" dissolved into something her body had been asking for the whole time.

That's leadership too. Sometimes leading means handing someone permission to trust themselves.

How this actually lives in a marriage

Here's a quiet truth about long relationships. You do so many things the same simply because you're together. You eat the same meals. You share the same popcorn. For us, more than most couples, because neither of us leaves for a job and we cook nearly all our meals at home. I've made our breakfast the same way for years.

But our bodies are different. Lp(a) is just one vivid example. So the individualizing work, learning where we differ and treating our bodies accordingly, is exactly the kind of thing a man looking for a place to lead can take hold of. I still make our breakfast together. I just use an oil that doesn't harm Dawn's body instead of one that does. Same eggs, different fat, no drama.

Donating blood is another perfect illustration. Anyone who can give blood should, because it saves lives. I've donated regularly for years, going back within a week or two of every time I became eligible. But my recent panels show my own iron and ferritin creeping down from depleting myself so consistently. Dawn, given her history, shouldn't be donating at all. Same act, opposite guidance, and only the data tells you which is which. Because I now test twice a year, I know when to take a break so I can keep giving for decades rather than quietly damaging myself. If you destroy the donor, you help far fewer people over a lifetime.

"Isn't it your body? Why isn't it your responsibility?"

I can already hear this objection, so let's meet it directly. If it's your body, shouldn't you be the one managing it?

On one level, yes. But me taking leadership here doesn't mean shutting Dawn out, keeping her in the dark, or bossing her around. I'm not standing guard over every pat of butter. It's not that she's incapable of doing this herself. It's that leadership, done well, means I can stand between her and the thing that would otherwise generate fear, and hand her back something clearer and calmer.

The feminine tends toward more caution and protectiveness in the physical world. That's not a flaw, it's polarity in real life. So when I can do the deep research, absorb the complexity, and translate it into "here's what we're changing and why," Dawn still knows exactly what's going on with her body. She's just no longer running every grocery-store decision through an anxious filter of is this okay, is this good or bad. We take some of the ammunition out of the fear.

And crucially, this is Dawn's choice. She is consciously choosing to let me in this far. She could go to a doctor and gather all of this herself. But a doctor doesn't know her extensive history and doesn't love her the way I do. So the person who will care about her even more than a doctor is her husband. This isn't something being done to her. She is choosing to receive my intelligence and direction, not at her expense, but in service of her own health. When something genuinely calls for a specialist, we go. The leadership doesn't replace real medicine. It decides when and how to reach for it.

What this all points to

Somewhere in the middle of all this, sitting at the breakfast table, Dawn started crying. I took her hand. Nothing needed to be said. What she was feeling was simple and enormous: this man cares about her more than anyone in her life, sometimes more than she's cared about herself. And that care is showing up not as words but as blood panels read, supplements adjusted, fears absorbed and handed back as calm.

This is polarity teaching made real. A man leads. He gives. A woman receives. And the awe and affection that flow back toward him aren't something he negotiated for or talked her into. They're the natural response to a life made measurably better. There isn't a man alive who wouldn't want to feel his wife look at him that way, and the path to it isn't manipulation. It's taking something like this and running with it until her life is genuinely better and the gratitude arrives on its own.

The through-line is a question we come back to constantly: how good can this get? Not just how long can we live, but how long can we live well. We're doing pretty well in our mid-forties. The point is to still be thriving in our seventies because of small, specific, informed choices we're making right now, for a few dollars and a little attention. That's advocacy for our own lives that doesn't wait on anyone else's permission.

If you take one thing from this episode, let it be that. Look under the hood. Learn how your body is different. And if you're a man wondering where to lead, this might be the place.

Listen to the full episode here, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.

A note on Function Health: We are not affiliated with Function Health in any way. We simply love what it's done for us and want to share it. They have a referral program that gives anyone who signs up an extra $25 discount and gives us a $25 credit in return. If you'd like to use it, here's our link. And if you sign up and learn something great about yourself, come tell us. We'd love to hear it.