 There are five basic markers of metabolic health and these are the essential five markers that everyone needs to be looking at. And when you go to your doctor, they need to be able to help you understand these. And the first measure is actually a real simple measure that you can do at home. It's your waist circumference. So just take a tape measure, measure just above the level of your belly button. Best to do this first thing in the morning. And if you are a man, your goal is for that to be less than 40 inches. And if you're a woman, you want it to be less than 35 inches. The next measurement is your blood pressure. And this of course is, you know, you get it checked every time you go to the doctor. You can check it at home. You can check it, you know, at most pharmacy or grocery stores these days. And your goal is for your blood pressure to be less than 130 over 85. And that needs to be without the use of medications. We should understand that high blood pressure is oftentimes one of the earliest signs of poor metabolic health. And yet most doctors don't recognize that. The other three measures are going to involve getting some blood work checked. And, you know, real simple basic blood work. Most doctors do check these as part of routine physicals, but they may not be looking at the test in the right way. So the first test we want to look at is your fasting blood glucose it's called. That is the amount of sugar that's in your blood when you haven't eaten for about eight to 12 hours. And we want this to be less than 100 milligrams per deciliters as the units here in the United States. And again, that needs to be without the use of medication. And then finally we look at the cholesterol panel. And this is probably the biggest place where both doctors and patients get hung up. Because most doctors when they look at a cholesterol panel they're focused on one number, the LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol. And the reality is that that number is not reflective of metabolic health. The other two numbers on that panel, the HDL cholesterol, the so-called good cholesterol, and as the nickname implies, we want more of that, the higher the better. So specifically if you are a man, you want that to be over 40 milligrams per deciliter. If you were a woman, you want it to be over 50 milligrams per deciliter. And finally we look at the triglycerides, which is another number on that cholesterol panel. This one we want lower and we want it less than 150 milligrams per deciliter. So again, everyone figure out where you stand on those five numbers. And if you don't know the numbers, go to your doctor, ask him to do the blood work and see where you stand. Because one of the misconceptions, one of the other myths I talk about in the book, the misconception is that if you are not overweight, then you are healthy. And the reality is that that is not true. I end up doing heart surgery on a lot of people who are not overweight. The statistics around metabolic health in the United States are quite shocking. Cause when you look at those five measures that I just mentioned, only 12% of adults in the United States, and this data was actually as of 2016, only 12% of adults met all five of those measures of optimal metabolic health. So in other words, 88%, almost nine out of 10 of us walking around today are not metabolically healthy. And many of us don't know it. Whoa. Yeah, 12 is a much lower number than I anticipated. I'll be honest. Yeah, it's pretty scary to recognize that. And like I said, it's even more scary that most people don't realize it. Because even when you look at people who are not overweight, when you look in that study at the normal and underweight people, almost half of them are not metabolically healthy. So, yes, being normal weight gives you a much better chance of being metabolically healthy, but in a no way guarantees that you're metabolically healthy. And that's why you need to be looking at these metrics to truly determine if you are metabolically healthy or not.