I am a metabolism scientist. My doctoral work was in molecular genetics and mitochondrial bioenergetics — the machinery that decides what your body does with the energy you feed it — with research at Baylor College of Medicine and UCSF and publications in journals like Cell Metabolism and EMBO Journal. Reading metabolic science carefully is not a hobby I picked up. It is the thing I was trained to do.
And my own bloodwork still surprised me. A pre-diabetic A1c, in a body that hiked on weekends, did yoga most mornings, and ate a plant-forward, home-cooked diet. The advice I got was the advice everyone gets: eat less, move more, come back in a year. It did not fit my life, and it did not explain anything.
So I did what my training equipped me to do. I designed an experiment with myself as the subject: fourteen days of pure observation first — no changes, just data — then fourteen days of changing one variable at a time and watching what my body actually did. Not what a population chart predicted. What my body did. The levers I found were not the ones the generic advice pointed at, and they brought my A1c back into the normal range. The structural changes stayed. The sensor did not — I check in a couple of weeks a quarter, and otherwise I live my life.
What I believe
Metabolic health is a whole-life signal, not a glucose-only metric. Sleep, movement, stress, food, and rhythm all move it, and any framework that reduces it to a single villain — carbs, spikes, seed oils, one bad food — is a marketing strategy, not a scientific one. Post-meal glucose rises are normal physiology, not a crisis. Most of what the wellness industry calls a problem is either your body working as designed or a lifestyle pattern that needs one structural change, not a hack.
That is why Finding Baseline runs on rigor without fear and data without obsession. I will tell you what the evidence says, including where it is thin, and I will say "I do not know" when I do not know. False certainty is a more compelling product; it is also how trust gets broken.
Why this corner of the problem
There is a specific person mainstream advice fails worst: the plant-forward eater who assumed they were safe. A vegetarian plate can quietly be a high-carbohydrate, low-protein plate, and layered on genetic risk — South Asian ancestry carries a well-documented metabolic phenotype — it produces exactly the surprise I lived. I cook and eat inside these food traditions myself, and I refuse the advice that fixing your number means abandoning your grandmother's cooking. Metabolic health works inside every cuisine. The work is learning how, not becoming someone else.
What Finding Baseline is, and is not
It is education — a way of thinking, taught clearly enough that you eventually do not need me. It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis, not a supplement store, and not a personality to follow. Every claim is sourced. The goal is a reader who can look at a health claim, evaluate the evidence, know their own body, and make their own call.