Dr. Casey Means’ book, “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health” is a roadmap to better health. Through an engaging synthesis of principles for improving health, Means offers a range of areas to focus on, adding tools to the reader’s toolkit, if you will, for the individualized health challenges and obstacles that present themselves.
Written with her brother, Calley Means, the book is described as a manual for taking charge of your health. Unlike other functional medicine “doctors” in the marketplace, Casey Means is by training a medical doctor (not a chiropractor!), having trained as an ear, nose, and throat surgeon.
After becoming disillusioned with the mainstream medical model, Means started a functional medicine practice in which she focused on fine-tuning patients’ diet, working with them to adjust lifestyle factors like stress and sleep, and meeting with them in an office full of plants. The office full of plants can seem like a superfluous feature, but it embodies the attention to details that matter in pursuing health. So many medical offices and hospitals are windowless, bare, and depressing. Could it be that small choices like adding plants, getting better quality sleep, and decreasing blood sugar volatility might lead to improved mood and health? “Good Energy” makes a compelling argument that it does.
Means later was the cofounder of Levels, a company that offers continuous glucose monitoring. It was in this capacity that I first heard of Means through an interview she did on the podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss. Glucose monitors, indeed “wearables” of all kinds, have become so much more common in the years since that it is hard to remember when this was revolutionary.
Means focused on stabilizing blood sugar to improve health. The continuous glucose monitor, a needle patched into the muscle of your upper arm for weeks at a time, sends real-time readings to your smartphone, letting you observe how different foods, exercise, stress, and sleep patterns affect your blood sugar.
The emphasis on diet causes many people to roll their eyes and assume that Means is pushing some kind of pseudoscience. She has a lot of numbers and studies to back up her claims if you’re into that kind of thing. Personally, I’m compelled by undeniable results. You can claim that what you eat is irrelevant to health, and yet experience for most people will show it is a huge factor in how you feel and how your body functions, your mood, how well you can think.
When I remarked on the lack of nutritional instruction in the course of medical education for doctors, an old school physician dismissed me saying that is the work of dietitians, because doctors are too busy “treating illness” to worry about what people are eating. Yet, it has become an unavoidable fact that what we are eating is making us sick. It’s not the only factor, surely, but what we eat is tied to how we live. The cumulative effects of lifestyle—what we eat, when, and in what manner—the relationships we sustain in our day-to-day lives, and the experience of stress and lack of rest, have profound effects on our ability to function.
Many friends were tempted by Accutane as teens or plagued by pregnancy complications in their 20s and 30s. The ones who were motivated to keep digging after the simplistic pharmaceutical option was ruled out or ineffective all found the same thing: what you eat makes a difference. Slather on all the soaps and creams, take the high-dose immunosuppressant, but, in the end, your acne clears up when you stop living off of chips, candy, and pizza. Debilitating nausea sometimes (not always, but sometimes!) finds marked improvement with nothing more than dietary changes.
Like Means, many health-minded people have presented the challenge: if you eat primarily vegetables and some meat for a few weeks or months, see how you feel. For many people, mood will improve, sleep will become more restorative, aches and pains dissipate, pesky, recurrent sinus infections, tinnitus, and varicose veins improve. Maybe for you, nothing will happen, but you have to commit and follow through to find out.
Once you see what Means is observing, you can’t unsee it. The underlying argument of her book is obvious and yet somehow unexpected: dysfunction in any part of the body or the body’s systems is ultimately the result of cellular dysfunction. Health improvement interventions are effective because they address the physiological needs of individual cells in the body. It’s a surprising and elegant argument in the context of how we think about health and the body in our current age.
Hers is not merely an argument, though, but also a personal story. Means and her brother decided to write the book after their mother’s death at the age of 71 from pancreatic cancer. Means argues that there were clear signals of metabolic dysfunction throughout her mother’s adult life, the same metabolic dysfunction behind the leading causes of deaths for so many in the developed world. After what she had learned through her own experiences and from treating patients in her practice, Means came to view her mother’s death as preventable with lifestyle interventions that promote what she calls “good energy,” healthy cellular functioning leading to overall health.
Means offers many different ways of healing our cells and improving their functioning: getting more and better sleep, eating food with fewer additives, exercising, and doing mushrooms. OK, she doesn’t actually suggest you go trip on ‘shrooms in the desert, but she does share with great favorability her experience of doing this. She skews a bit neo-pagan earth worshipper for my taste, but her reverence for the “good energy,” the life force contained in our bodies and in the food we eat, is convicting. How many of us unthinkingly reach for the nearest available calories without a thought to the processes and energy that went into them?
There is, ultimately and necessarily, something spiritual about health. In the face of our powerlessness to control our next breath, we should find awe. The subtitle of Means’s book, “The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health,” points to the spiritual horizon: “limitless.” To be without limits is to be in eternity. People often downplay the effects of eating nutritious food and exercising, getting a good night’s sleep or having a heart-to-heart with a dear friend on a sunny day. But those experiences can truly make you feel eternal, capable of basking in that glow forever.
No one is truly without limits. He who does not respect his own limits for an extended period of time pays a high price. But, as Means writes persuasively, when we find our limits and reach just beyond them, we unlock powerful healing, health, and happiness. When we overstep our boundaries, our cells falter and disease spreads. When we put just enough stress—through modalities like exercise and fasting—the symphony of life flows through us in ways that are a marvel to behold.
When friends ask me where to begin in trying to feel healthy again, by which they seem to mean feel fully alive, present in themselves, full of zest for life, this is the book I hand them. Be forewarned though: you will want to pitch all your plastic containers and stop buying Eggo waffles. You will scorn the food dye-saturated sweet treats and shun the ice cream aisle. One father, when I mentioned “Good Energy,” erupted in laughter and explained that Means is persona non grata in his house. Whenever his wife serves up a new vegetable or swaps another beloved snack food his young daughters ask knowingly, “Is this because of that book?” With any luck, they will learn to thank their mother one day for trying to bring more good energy into the home.
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