No matter how active you are and how well you eat, getting regular hormone tests is still an invaluable tool for ensuring your own health and wellbeing.
You may feel as though you’re doing everything right, but with so many different and invisible factors at play in your overall health, it’s nearly impossible to know whether or not you’re truly on track if you don’t have access to your body’s data.
The only way to really know how healthy you are is to invest in functional medicine and get tested for your biomarkers – your vitamin levels, hormones, and nutrition panels can give you an invaluable insight into how well you’re actually doing. You usually can’t feel when your hormones take a dip or you’re experiencing a vitamin deficiency until the negative side effects begin, so it can even key you in to areas that can be improved upon before they really start to have a detrimental effect on your health.
Take, for example, the story of a health and wellness professional who understood the value of functional medicine.
As a knowledgeable personal trainer with a reputable fitness career, he understood how important it was to take deep dives into his health below the surface. In addition to yearly blood test analyses, he also made it a point to travel out of town to see a functional medicine practitioner who could give him in-depth advice about his biomarkers, including nutrient and hormone levels, to optimize his own health best.
Unfortunately, the drive was two and a half hours each way, and the sheer inconvenience of having to rearrange his day to make the trek was enough to discourage him from keeping up with these valuable tests.
Eventually, he began to use Base, an at-hormone tests that could give him valuable insights into his health without having to work around his schedule or travel for hours at a time.
He started by taking an initial online quiz to pinpoint which areas of his health he wanted to focus on, and from there was sent a spit test that he could just mail back once he was done.
The results
The results that were sent back to him were very telling – the hormone tests indicated that his testosterone levels were nowhere near optimum. As a fitness professional, he was keenly aware of the role that testosterone played in muscle mass and body composition, and the test results were a major wake-up call; he hadn’t suspected he was low on testosterone at all.
With a milestone birthday coming up, he decided that he would use the initial findings to make a change for the better.
He was able to then consult with Base’s in-house expert via a video chat consultation, who recommended other related nutrient tests to find other deficiencies, including Vitamin D, magnesium, and zinc, and brainstorm together about the different ways that he could improve his levels.
Armed with this invaluable information about his own health and the advice from the expert and app, he was able to create a specific, concrete, and actionable plan to increase this vital hormone by his birthday. Even better, he was now able to keep track of his progress and see the results with each subsequent test without having to drive for hours to get his results!
Measurements drive results.
No matter how healthily you live, you can never really know intuitively whether your health is on the right track or not if you don’t have access to biomarker data. Whether your goals are to maximize your strength, fight off chronic fatigue, get better sleep, or even lose weight, getting regular tests and seeing the results for yourself is key to taking control of your own body.
