The Good Energy Blueprint

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Issue #6: August 18, 2025

🔥 Good Energy, Bad System

What if fatigue, brain fog, and chronic disease all shared a common root cause?

And what if the fix wasn’t in your doctor’s office, but in your cells?

That’s the core message of Good Energy, the book from Dr. Casey Means. And it’s not just another wellness influencer manifesto. Casey’s a Stanford-trained surgeon turned metabolic health crusader.

After leaving the OR to focus on root-cause healing, she co-founded Levels and started spreading a different message: we don’t have a weight problem or a willpower problem, we have a cellular energy problem.

In May 2025, she was nominated to be the next U.S. Surgeon General. She hasn’t been confirmed (yet), but the nomination alone shows that her message is catching fire.

⚡ So…What is “Good Energy”?

Casey defines Good Energy as the body in flow. When your systems work with you, not against you. It’s the difference between thriving and just getting by.

At its core, it’s about metabolic health: how efficiently your cells convert food and oxygen into energy (ATP). When that system’s even slightly off, your body starts waving red flags: fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, poor recovery, mood swings, and inflammation.

You’re not broken. You’re likely just metabolically overwhelmed. 

“Every bite you take is either feeding disease or fighting it.”

And it’s not just food. Chronic stress, poor sleep, environmental toxins, seed oils, and sedentary habits all chip away at your system’s balance.

🧯 Inflammation: The Fire That Won’t Go Out

Inflammation isn’t always the villain. It’s how your body fights infections and heals damage. The issue is when that fire never goes out.

That’s chronic inflammation, and it quietly wears down your cells over time.

Dr. Means points out that anything ending in -itis — arthritis, appendicitis, colitis, tendinitis — is inflammation by definition. Most of us are walking around with some form of it, whether it’s been diagnosed or not.

Why does it stick around?

Because the modern world constantly triggers it:

• Refined sugar and grains

• Industrial seed oils

• Lack of sleep

• Persistent stress

• Gut dysfunction

• Environmental toxins

Your daily choices either fuel the fire or help put it out.

🔬 How to Spot Metabolic Dysfunction

You don’t need a full-body MRI to know something’s off. Your body tells you, just not in English.

“Think of your cells as thirty-seven trillion infants in your care. Like infants, the cells can’t communicate with words, so symptoms are their way of wailing to get your attention to have their needs met.”

Some early warning signs Dr. Means highlights:

• Increasing waist size

• Suboptimal cholesterol levels

• High fasting glucose

• Elevated blood pressure

• Low energy despite “doing everything right”

🥬 This Isn’t About Deprivation

Dr. Means reframes “clean eating.” It’s not just about willpower or macro-counting. It’s about giving your cells what they need to function.

Healthy eating isn’t deprivation. It’s nourishment.

The goal: cut what overwhelms the system (ultra-processed foods, seed oils, toxins) and lean into what builds resilience — quality sleep, omega-3s, daily movement, nature, and food that makes you stronger.

💸 The System Is Sick, Not You

What made Good Energy hit harder than most wellness books is how it calls out the elephant in the room:

“It was increasingly becoming clear to me that although I was surrounded by practitioners who got into medicine to help patients, the reality is that every institution that impacts health — from medical schools to insurance companies to hospitals to pharma companies — makes money on ‘managing’ disease, not curing patients.”

This isn’t about conspiracy. It’s about incentives. And in our current system, those incentives are tragically misaligned.

That’s why so many people are doing “everything right” and still getting sicker.

🚨 Don’t Treat the Smoke. Kill the Fire

Modern medicine manages symptoms. But the real healing comes from addressing the root cause: dysfunctional metabolism.

Heal that, and you heal everything.

Until next week. Stay vital.

-Jordan Slotopolsky

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