People tell me the outcome was remarkable. I want to argue with that, and not out of modesty. The deflation is the whole point.
Here is what I achieved. I can walk without pain. I am not tired in the afternoon. My liver is a normal liver. I take no medication. Nothing about my body is currently being managed.
There is a word for that condition, and the word is not remarkable. The word is fine. I am fine. Two generations ago a man at seventy-one who was fine would not have been interesting enough to write about.
What the word is actually measuring
“Remarkable” is a statement about a distribution. It means far from the middle. When people apply it to me, they are not reporting something about my body — they are reporting where the middle now sits.
And the middle has moved so far that returning to ordinary function reads as an achievement.
That is the finding. Not my recovery. The fact that my recovery is legible as a recovery at all.
The number
In 2019, Araújo, Cai and Stevens published an analysis of eight years of NHANES data covering 8,721 American adults. They asked a narrow question: how many meet all of the recommended targets simultaneously — waist circumference, fasting glucose and HbA1c, blood pressure, triglycerides, HDL — while taking no medication for any of them.
The answer was 12.2 percent. One in eight. Roughly 27 million people out of a country of well over three hundred million.
The number that should stop you is not that one. It is this: fewer than one in three adults at a normal body weight met the criteria. Among adults classified as obese, the figure was half of one percent.
Read that again with an eye to what it does to your own judgement. You cannot tell by looking. You cannot tell by looking at yourself. Most of the people you would describe as healthy-looking are not metabolically healthy, and the reassurance you draw from comparing yourself to them is worth nothing.
Three machines that hide it
If most people are not well, why does almost nobody feel alarmed? Because the moved baseline has been encoded into the instruments we use to check.
Laboratory reference ranges are population-derived. A “normal range” is typically the central span of values observed in a reference population. When that population drifts toward disease, the range drifts with it. You can be inside normal limits and be sick, and nothing on the report will say so, because the report is comparing you to everyone else rather than to health.
“Normal for your age.” Function is graded against an age curve, which means decline is normal by construction. A seventy-year-old with poor strength, poor glucose control and three prescriptions is unremarkable for seventy. The phrase is technically accurate and practically anaesthetic. It converts a finding into a reassurance.
Social calibration. People assess their health by looking sideways. If everyone at the table is tired, thickening at the middle, and on two medications, you conclude that you are doing about as well as anyone. You are. That is the problem with the method.
Three independent systems, all comparing you to the same sick distribution, all returning the same answer: you are fine. And you are — relative to a reference that has quietly failed.
Average and well have come apart
This is the sentence I would want a reader to take away. Average is no longer a proxy for healthy, and almost all of our language still assumes it is.
Every reassurance on offer is a comparison to the middle. Your labs are normal. That is normal for your age. Everybody is tired. Each of those is true and none of them means what the listener hears. They are statements about the population. The listener hears a statement about their body.
When I say I returned to baseline, I do not mean I returned to an era, or to some ancestral ideal, or to whatever a diet culture is currently selling. I mean something narrower and testable: no medication for conditions caused by damage, laboratory values that are not drifting year over year, and function that is not declining. The criteria in that NHANES paper are a serviceable working definition. They are not aspirational. They are the recommended targets. Twelve percent of us meet them.
Why this matters for the longevity conversation
An entire industry is selling enhancement to a population that needs restoration.
Optimisation assumes you are at baseline and want more. Almost nobody is at baseline. The supplements, the wearables, the protocols, the peak-performance framing — all of it is addressed to a person standing on solid ground who would like to stand higher. Most readers are not on solid ground. They are on a slope, and the offer they are being made is an upgrade rather than a repair.
You cannot optimise upward from below the line. You can only come back to it. And coming back to it is now being marketed as an elite outcome, achievable through effort and expenditure, when it should be the unremarkable condition of an ordinary adult.
Where I would push back on myself
The criteria are strict, and deliberately so. Missing one of six does not make a person ill, and the paper is measuring optimal health rather than the absence of disease. A more permissive definition puts the figure near twenty percent, which is better and still not good.
Some of the drift is genuine. The population is older than it was. Detection has improved, so conditions that once went unrecorded now appear in the data. Not all of the movement is diet, and I would not claim otherwise.
And I am one case. I know what a sample of one is worth. I am not offering my outcome as evidence of frequency — I am offering the reaction to it as evidence of where the middle sits. Those are different claims and only the second one needs my story.
The concern is the correct response
If you read all of this and feel some alarm, the alarm is well calibrated, and it should not be pointed at me.
I would rather my case were boring. The objective was never to become exceptional. It was to become unremarkable — to be a person who is simply fine, in the way that used to require no explanation — and I would like that to be available to everyone rather than to one in eight.
Baseline is the goal. The fact that it reads as an accomplishment is the measurement worth paying attention to.