Good, Better, Best: Are You Managing Your Health or Actually Fixing It

Voltaire said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” I’d like to flip the script: the good is the enemy of the best. The Stoics saw it too — we settle for “adequate” when excellence is within reach. Most people who set out to improve, plateau at “good.” They check the box, pat themselves on the back, and never ask what’s next. Think of the man who quits smoking and then congratulates himself with a milkshake. He’s better than he was  and nowhere near his best. He may be worse off quitting smoking and then gaining twenty pounds.[i] The Good-Better-Best framework isn’t about perfectionism; it’s about refusing to mistake the starting line for the finish line.

Life is growth. As long as we live there is no stopping. Some reptiles continue to grow throughout their lives; the longer they live, the larger they are.[ii] Mammals reach a maximum and stop growing physically, but that is just the beginning of what comes next, maturity. Other areas of growth begin when we reach our full mature height. We have a family, help others to grow, we work, learn, and have experiences that bring understanding, wisdom, and love. We must re-learn everything we thought we knew: how to eat, how to walk, how to play, how to spend our time and money.

There is no end to the things we can learn. Spiritual growth is forever. As we age we are not losing ability, we are gaining different things. Michelangelo was still carving the Rondanini Pieta at eighty-eight, six days before he died.[iii] His physical body was failing while the artist inside was still reaching. Grandma Moses picked up a paintbrush at seventy-eight after arthritis forced her to retire from embroidery, and painted for another twenty-three years.[iv] The body sets a ceiling; the soul does not. We can reach the good, and then continue to reach for better until we find the best.

When we are trying to function at our best, we don’t want what is good to take the place of what is best. Let’s look at some examples of Good-Better-Best in our health:

Food

Good: Eating “healthy” foods. Even some restaurants and packaged foods use high-quality ingredients. In-N-Out builds a whole business on never-frozen beef and real potatoes cut in the store: proof that you can eat out and still eat honestly.

Better: Cooking from scratch with whole ingredients. Cooking good food at home is better than any food at a restaurant. Restaurants need four ingredients to stay in business: sugar, fat, MSG, and salt. Making things at home creates a large difference in these. Michael Pollan put it well: eat anything you want, as long as you cook it yourself. Because almost nobody deep-fries a doughnut or presses their own soda when they have to do the work!

Best: Sourcing from local farms, eating from your own garden, eating seasonally, sprouting, and fermenting your own vegetables. The longest-lived people on earth do exactly this. In the “Blue Zones” — Sardinia, Okinawa, Ikaria — the hundred-year-olds are still tending gardens and eating what they grow and ferment. Thomas Jefferson kept a two-acre vegetable garden at Monticello with over 300 varieties, growing his own food into his eighties.

Nutrition

Good: Take a multivitamin. It’s the bare-minimum admission that your diet isn’t covering the bases, but it’s better than nothing. In 1747 the naval surgeon James Lind proved that sailors dying of scurvy recovered on lime juice, containing vitamin C — the first controlled clinical trial in history.[v] The lesson was written in blood: you cannot cheat nutrition. The sailors on hardtack were dying of scurvy while the ones supplementing vitamin C survived: that’s the floor. A pill might keep you above the floor.

Better: Take targeted supplements based on actual deficiencies. Get labs drawn. Find out what you’re low in — vitamin D, magnesium, B12, ferritin — and supplement specifically, not blindly. Most people are guessing. A blood panel turns guesswork into strategy. This is where Dr. Terry Wahls (The Wahls Protocol)[vi] started. She was in a tilt-recline wheelchair due to progressive MS, and had a team of functional medicine doctors throwing dozens of supplements at her deteriorating mitochondria. It slowed the decline but didn’t stop it.

Best: Get your nutrients from food. Wahls hit the wall with supplements and asked a different question: How do I get this amount of nutrition from food? She built a protocol around nine cups of vegetables per day — leafy greens, sulfur-rich vegetables, deeply colored berries, seaweed, plus organ meats, bone broth, and wild fish. The same nutrients her supplement cabinet was providing but delivered in her diet. Within a year she was out of the wheelchair, doing karate, hiking, riding her bicycle. A supplement may be the same molecule, but food is a better delivery system.

The supplement industry has sold people a seductive lie: that nutrition is a math problem — identify the missing variable, swallow the capsule, problem solved. But food isn’t a collection of isolated nutrients any more than a symphony is a collection of isolated notes. There are thousands of phytonutrients, enzymes, and cofactors in a leaf of kale that don’t appear on any supplement label because we haven’t discovered them yet. You can’t supplement your way out of a garbage diet. The pill is a hedge, not a strategy. The best nutrition doesn’t come in a bottle.

Fasting

Good: No food after 6pm — the body shifts towards anabolic metabolism at night. The empty stomach produces GHRELIN (the hunger hormone), which triggers growth hormone release and turns on this mechanism – but only if the stomach is empty![vii]

Better: Intermittent fasting. Anytime your stomach is empty is beneficial. Longer daily fasting gives the intestines time to repair and reset to digest and absorb nutrients better.[viii]

Best: Fast 72 hours once per month. This 3-day fast has more benefits than any diet:[ix]

• Metabolic repair takes 3 days.
  • Day 1: Your body burns through stored sugar (glycogen). By evening, it starts reaching for fat.
  • Day 2: The switch is underway. Your liver makes some glucose out of other molecules, but most of your body has shifted to burning fat. Ketones start rising.
  • Day 3: The switch is complete. Your brain is now running substantially on ketones, your cells begin deep cleaning (autophagy peaks), growth hormone surges to protect your muscle, and your insulin sensitivity resets. This is the day the real repair work gets done.
• Ketones are made when fat is burned, they are a great fuel for the brain, and allow it to clean the waste products that build up over time.
• Literally “Eating-Self” Yikes! But this is eating the parts you don’t want: plaques, tangles, senescent (sleeping) cells, dead cells, cholesterol deposits, and all the junk that builds up.
• It takes 2 days to begin the cleaning process, and you have one day for all your immune cells to clean up the mess.
• Detoxing removes toxins that have accumulated in fat and other tissues. Fasting allows the liver to work on the internal toxins because it isn’t busy detoxing the food you are eating.
• Prevent diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. Remaining insulin sensitive prevents these metabolic diseases.
• Stimulate stem cells. People spend thousands of dollars to have someone else’s stem cells injected into their body, but they could make their OWN for FREE!

In 2016 Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize for describing autophagy — the process by which a fasting cell uses its own damaged parts for fuel. The Nobel committee confirmed what the prophets practiced: the body cleans house best when the kitchen is closed.

Sleep

Good: Sleep 8 hours per night. It gives rest and allows the body to repair. It is so important for the adrenal glands to make the right amount of cortisol for your circadian rhythm.[x]

Better: Go to bed by 10pm. The deepest, most restorative sleep comes in the hours before midnight, allowing repair of the body daily. [xi]

Best: Monitor your REM and deep sleep, and practice real sleep hygiene: a cool, dark, quiet room; a consistent bedtime and wake time; no screens for an hour before bed; sunlight in the morning. This isn’t fussiness — it’s how elite performers train. Roger Federer slept eleven to twelve hours a day at his peak, and LeBron James is famous for guarding his sleep like a second job. They treat recovery as seriously as the work, because they know the work is wasted without it.[xii]

Protein

Good: Get adequate protein in the diet. Eat meat, fish, eggs and cheese. [xiii]

Better: Assure good protein digestion and absorption, it’s not what you eat, it’s what you assimilate. Your stomach needs to make acid and enzymes. Avoid drugs that shut down acid production. Leave space (5 hours) between meals for your stomach to empty and reset acid and enzyme production.[xiv]

Best: 30 grams of high-quality protein at breakfast. It turns on mTOR to repair protein and build muscle. Grip strength and muscle mass predict how long an older person will live better than almost any other marker. The person who protects their muscle in their forties is buying independence in their eighties. Muscle is the organ of longevity, and you build it one high-protein breakfast at a time. The morning is when cortisol turns on the protein processing mechanisms in the liver and the whole body. At night the kitchen is closed, don’t eat after 6pm.[xv][xvi]

Carbohydrates

Good: Avoid all processed sugar. It’s toxic. And be skeptical of who told you otherwise. In the 1960s the sugar industry quietly paid Harvard scientists to point the finger at dietary fat instead of sugar.[xvii] We spent fifty years afraid of butter while the real culprit sat in the sugar bowl. Now we have hundreds of millions of sugar addicts with metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes: sugar toxicity.

Better: Eat a low-carb diet. This isn’t a fad. In 1863 an overweight London undertaker named William Banting[xviii] cut the bread, sugar, and potatoes, dropped fifty pounds, and wrote his famous “Letter on Corpulence,” the first low-carb bestseller. For a century, “banting” simply meant dieting. The Atkins diet came along much later, but had the same benefits.

Best: Don’t mix carbs and fat. The most fattening foods on earth are the ones that marry the two: French fries, doughnuts, chips, cookies, frosting and ice cream. Fat and sugar taste great together, but fat causes resistance to insulin, when carbs are added it raises insulin levels, causing the body to store more fat.[xix]

Essential Fatty Acids

Good: Take fish oil — but take enough of it. Turn the bottle around. “Fish Oil 1000 mg” usually means about 300 mg of the EPA and DHA that actually do the work. The big VITAL trial gave 26,000 people 1 gram a day and found little;[xx] REDUCE-IT gave high-risk patients 4 grams of purified EPA and cut cardiovascular events by 25%. Same supplement aisle, different universe. Read the back label.[xxi]

Better: Get it from food and get out of the fryer. Eat fatty fish, such as salmon, sardines, mackerel, herring, anchovies, two or three times a week, and cook in butter, ghee, tallow, or olive oil instead of refined seed oils.[xxii] Don’t chase a magic ratio; just stop refined eating oil that’s been heated, and reheated. Heart disease was rare before 1911, the year Crisco taught America to cook with hydrogenated seed oil.

Best: Stop guessing and measure. Order an Omega-3 Index — it reports the EPA and DHA actually sitting in your red blood cell membranes. Below 4% is the risk zone; 8 to 12% is the target; most Americans land near 4 or 5. Then dose to the target, usually two to four grams of EPA+DHA a day, and retest in three or four months. Here’s why this is the best and not merely the better: two people can take the identical dose and end up in completely different places, because genetics and absorption differ. Anyone can swallow a capsule and assume it worked. The best know their number, and they know whether it moved.

Exercise

Good: Any activity is good. In the 1950s Jeremy Morris studied London’s double-decker buses and found that the conductors, climbing the stairs all day, had half the heart attacks of the drivers sitting behind the wheel. Simply moving cuts the risk in half.[xxiii]

Better: Exercise to tolerance, regularly, on a schedule. Consistency beats intensity — the body rewards the appointment you keep.[xxiv]

Best: Plan and implement for improvement. The only way to improve is to increase; if you are not increasing, you are declining. The ancient Greek wrestler Milo of Croton, six-time Olympic champion, is said to have lifted a newborn calf onto his shoulders and carried it every single day. As the calf grew, so did Milo, until he was carrying a full-grown bull — the original progressive overload. The load has to keep rising, or the strength quietly leaves.[xxv]

Blood Pressure

Good: Taking medication as prescribed to bring the numbers into range — better than stroking out.[xxvi]

Better: Lifestyle interventions: losing visceral fat, walking daily, cutting processed foods, and managing sleep apnea if present.[xxvii]

Best: Root-cause investigation and correction — because hypertension is a symptom, not a disease. A blood pressure pill doesn’t fix what’s broken. It forces a downstream number down while the upstream problem keeps chewing through your endothelium. The best approach treats the pill as a bridge, not a permanent address. In one clinical trial, 174 people with hypertension undertook a medically supervised water fast; ninety percent finished with a blood pressure under 140/90, and every one of them who had been on medication was able to stop it. That is what happens when you treat the cause instead of the number.[xxviii]

The root-cause differential for hypertension is surprisingly broad:

• Insulin resistance / metabolic syndrome
• Sleep apnea
• Mineral imbalances, especially low magnesium and potassium
• Chronic stress / sympathetic dominance
• Heavy metal burden
• Kidney issues
• Hormonal problems such as aldosterone, cortisol, and thyroid
• Medication-induced

The tragedy is that the standard of care skips straight past “why is this happening?” to “here’s your lisinopril, see you in six months.” Without knowing the underlying cause of the rise in blood pressure, any treatment is just a shot in the dark, and may do more harm than good.

The Trap of Good — Getting Stuck

Why do people plateau?

• Laziness. Everything seeks the lowest output for the greatest benefit. Entropy is real in every area. It takes a great deal more energy to go from “good” to “better,” and then exponentially more to reach “best,” because that effort is continual and ongoing.
• Social approval. Good gets you nods at parties. Best gets you called extreme, obsessive, or weird. Ask Ignaz Semmelweis, the physician who discovered in 1847 that doctors were killing mothers by not washing their hands. He was mocked, ostracized, and driven from his post for going beyond “good,” and died in an asylum — vindicated only decades later. The social cost of optimization is real. You aren’t doing what everyone else does, and you can’t identify with them. “It’s lonely at the top!”
• The diminishing-returns illusion. The gap from bad-to-good is visible and dramatic. The gap from good-to-best is subtle and slow, but it compounds. When Dave Brailsford took over British cycling, he chased a “1 percent” improvement in everything, from pillows to hand-washing, and turned a losing team into Olympic and Tour de France champions. People mistake low visibility for low value.
• The checklist mentality. Once “I’m doing something” is checked, the brain releases the same dopamine as “I’ve done enough.” This is the enemy.
• Comfort. Good is usually comfortable. Best almost never is.
• Desire. “I want” is the motivation for spending energy. Once satisfying that basic want, there seems to be no more value in a greater effort, which is exactly the moment the best begins to slip away.

Never Give in!

Good is where most people stop, and it is a comfortable place to die. But you were not made to check a box and die; you were made to grow, and growth does not end when the body does. Every domain of your life, your food, your sleep, your work, your family, your walk with God, is an invitation to climb from good to better to best, and the climb is always harder than the plateau. That is the point. The best costs you comfort, costs you the easy approval of the crowd, and pays you back in a life that is actually lived rather than merely maintained. So do not congratulate yourself for quitting the cigarette and then reach for the milkshake. Ask the next question. Carry the calf until it becomes a bull.

The distance between good and best is not talent or luck, it is the willingness to keep reaching after everyone else has sat down, and it is never too late, and you are never too old, to take the next step up. Winston Churchill’s famous address at Harrow School on October 29, 1941 , then in the darkest days of WWII, stood before the boys of his old school and delivered what became one of the most legendary orations in history:

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Then he sat down.

Most often, the “overwhelming might of the enemy” is our own inertia, congratulating ourselves for doing good work, giving in before we have reached our best.

 

[i] Https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.21582?msockid=33db8a7888b265640a4e9d74890464d8

[ii] https://www.britannica.com/animal/reptile/Growth-and-longevity

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondanini_Piet%C3%A0

[iv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandma_Moses

[v] https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Lind

[vi] https://terrywahls.com/the-wahls-protocol/

[vii] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592260/the-circadian-code-by-satchin-panda-phd/

[viii] https://medivara.org/intermittent-fasting-guide-2026/

[ix] https://www.drberg.com/blog/72-hour-fasting-benefits-on-the-immune-system

[x] https://www.healthline.com/health/sleep/sleep-calculator

[xi] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592260/the-circadian-code-by-satchin-panda-phd/

[xii] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/17-tips-to-sleep-better.html

[xiii] https://www.prevention.com/food-nutrition/healthy-eating/g70936587/high-protein-foods-dietitians-recommend/?utm_campaign=mgu_bg_pre_d_bm_prog_org_us_g23065278&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=bing&msclkid=3c9782f72e5512b092f6e8a9dd885f35

[xiv] https://wellnd.com/is-it-okay-to-wait-5-hours-between-meals

[xv] https://scienceinsights.org/is-30-grams-of-protein-too-much-what-science-says/

[xvi] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592260/the-circadian-code-by-satchin-panda-phd/

[xvii] https://avicennamedicalreview.com/the-sugar-industry-scandal-how-harvard-scientists-were-paid-to-downplay-the-harmful-effects-of-sugar-and-what-it-reveals-about-science-manipulation/#:~:text=The%20report%20revealed%20that%20in%20the%201960s%2C%20the,as%20the%20leading%20dietary%20cause%20of%20heart%20disease.

[xviii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Banting

[xix] https://discovertruth.org/blog/high-fat-and-carb-combination-dangers/

[xx] https://prevmed.bwh.harvard.edu/vital/

[xxi] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.119.044440

[xxii] https://americanheartsociety.org/?p=1132

[xxiii] http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/study-synopsis/london-transport-workers-study/

[xxiv] https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/why-you-should-move-even-just-a-little-throughout-the-day

[xxv] https://konquerfitness.com.au/consistency-or-intensity-which-approach-drives-the-ultimate-results/

[xxvi] https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/the-new-blood-pressure-guidelines-what-you-need-to-know

[xxvii] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pressure/in-depth/high-blood-pressure/art-20046974

[xxviii] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-025-01823-4