Here at Upward Slopes, my primary focus is to help you take action to better support your metabolic health.
What is metabolic health?
Metabolism is, in a very general sense, a concept that encompasses biochemical reactions. When it comes to the metabolic health of an individual, I am referring to the ability of the human body to carry out the innumerable biochemical processes necessary to keep that individual alive, healthy, and functioning.
Why is it a useful framework for general health?
Think for a moment about all of the complex functions that your body performs to keep you alive, well, and fully functioning. Each cell, tissue, and organ is always hard at work performing diverse functions, including producing proteins, using those proteins to communicate, build structures, and perform other key functions. The body is also constantly sending signals, shipping different materials around, moving itself around, and carrying out so many other activities.
What you don’t need to know is what all of these functions are and how your body does it all.
What is important to understand is this: that to perform any function, each sub-system (e.g., cell, tissue, or organ) needs energy to do the job. Even more, each sub-system needs the proper amount and form of energy at the right time, and it needs to be able to deal with the waste products made in the process.
This all has to do with your body’s metabolism.
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Unfortunately, when it comes to metabolic health, the modern population is in trouble. The norm in our world is that the systems in place to maintain metabolic homeostasis have become dysregulated and dysfunctional.
When this is the case, cells, tissues, and organs throughout the entire body are harmed because they no longer receive this healthy balance of energy that is so important. This leads forward to the arising of serious symptoms, at which point our medical system diagnoses diseases and treats the individual with clinical interventions.
But even before these clinically relevant symptoms arise, the individual experiences a range of debilitating symptoms, including low energy, brain fog, pains, serious weight gain, and more, which reflect underlying pathophysiologic conditions. These include insulin resistance, chronic inflammation, and more.
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My task is never to diagnose nor treat disease. Once clinically relevant symptoms arise, it is important that the individual seeks medical attention and gets the proper care from a licensed physician or other licensed health professional (see full disclaimer).
My job is to help each individual understand how poor health tends to progress towards disease using the framework that is metabolic health.
This framework does not describe every instance of poor health & disease, but it does address the common cases that are prevalent in our modern world.
The task is to understand this framework, including how it ties into lifestyle behaviors so that the individual can take action:
- action that supports metabolic health
- action that avoids energy dysregulation, metabolic dysfunction, and its progression towards a disease diagnosis
For more on metabolic dysfunction at the root of most cases of chronic disease, check out this short video.
