The Between-Well-and-Sick Checklist
The everyday signals bloodwork doesn’t measure
Download the printable version (PDF)Two pages. Printable, and made to be written on by hand.
This is not a test, and there’s no score at the bottom. It’s a way of writing down what you already know about your own normal — because your own range is narrower than the one printed on a lab report, and you’re the only one keeping track of it.
Before you start
Answer for the last two weeks unless a question says otherwise. Not your best week, and not your worst day.
Date it and keep it. Fill it in again in six weeks, in a different color. That comparison is the thing no single blood draw can give you.
The day
Draw your energy as a line from waking to bedtime. Where does it drop, and when? (The printable version has the grid.)
How long after waking before I feel like myself:
- The afternoon is fine
- Slower than I’d like
- I run out before the day does
Sleep
- I fall asleep within about twenty minutes
- I sleep through, or wake once
- I wake in the night and stay awake
- I wake before I mean to and can’t get back
- Someone has told me I snore, or that I stop breathing
Hours most nights:
The time I most often wake:
If you wake in the night, look at the evening before you look anywhere else. In our experience the small hours answer to how the evening went — something to drink, a late or heavy dinner, a day that ran on sugar — far more often than to anything that needs treating.
Food and drink
- I eat something in the morning besides coffee
- I go long stretches without eating, then eat a great deal
- Most of what I ate yesterday came out of a package
- There’s something green in the house right now, washed and ready
Caffeine — how much, and how late:
Alcohol — how often:
Digestion, and elimination
How food sits, and then how often things move. Nobody enjoys writing the second one down, and it’s one of the most useful lines on the page.
- Bloated after most meals
- Heartburn or reflux
- Uncomfortable in a way I’ve stopped mentioning
- It takes effort
- Never quite finished
How often, most weeks:
This is the line we’d watch first over the next six weeks, because it tends to respond to fiber and water sooner than most things here do — which makes it a good early sign that a change is working.
Movement and daylight
Days in the last week I moved on purpose:
Minutes outdoors before noon, most days:
The month
Skip if it doesn’t apply.
- Still regular
- Changed in the last year or two
- Stopped
This belongs on the page for the same reason the rest of it does: the ordinary tests don’t settle it either, and for a great many women this is the thread everything else is hanging from.
Aches, and the small visible things
- Joints, or a general aching
- Headaches more than occasionally
- Skin drier or duller than it was
- Hair thinner, or coming out more in the brush
- Nails splitting, peeling, or ridged
- Cold when nobody else is cold
Mind and mood
- Foggy — losing words, rereading the same line
- Shorter-fused than I’d like to be
- Flat, or further away from things than usual
- Wound up in the evening and tired in the morning
The year you’ve had
Not symptoms. Just true or not.
- Someone has been depending on me for a long stretch
- I’ve lost someone
- Something changed that I haven’t had time to feel yet
- I can’t remember the last time nothing was pending
Worth saying plainly
Strain is not the absence of a physical cause. Strain is a physical event, working on a body. It belongs here as much as anything else does — and of everything on this page, it’s the one most likely to be underneath the rest.
What’s already been looked at
So the next conversation starts further along than the last one did.
Last bloodwork, roughly when:
What I’m taking — prescriptions, supplements, anything daily:
Three that aren’t on a standard panel and are reasonable to ask about:
- Iron stores (ferritin)
- Vitamin D
- B12
What we’d do with it
Find the line that’s most obviously true. Not the most serious one — the most obvious one. Then change that, and only that, for three weeks. One change you keep is worth more than six you meant to.
And whatever you begin with, begin by adding. Nobody sustains a way of eating they experience as a subtraction, which is why we come back to “Replace Before You Eliminate” more than anything else we teach.
Normal labs narrow what something might be without closing the list — so if this persists, or if anything here changes, that’s a conversation worth having rather than a search worth running.
“O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.”
Psalm 139:1–2
There is no instrument that measures your downsitting and your uprising. You are known far more thoroughly than you are measured — which is worth holding onto on the day the paper says nothing is wrong and you know better.
Blessings,
Paul & Ann
Read next
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One real mechanism behind feeling unwell while every number reads normal — and what it has to do with what’s on your plate.
Read the articleIf you’d rather start by changing something
The Yes List — 25 foods worth adding
Twenty-five foods worth getting onto your plate, and what each one is doing there. One page, made for the refrigerator door.
