Health Is Just Finding the Next Bottleneck
Listen
Health isn't a single goal you finish. It's a sequence of bottlenecks: you find the one thing holding you back, fix it, then move to the next. Six months ago my bottleneck was body composition. I wanted to drop from 20.6% body fat to 16.5% while keeping my muscle. Over six months I lost about ten pounds of fat, held my muscle, and hit the number. Done. The moment that stopped being the constraint, a new one took its place.
That's the whole method. Not doing everything at once. Identifying the current bottleneck, solving it, and moving on.
What's the next bottleneck after body fat?
For me it was bloodwork, and the metric that stood out was LDL cholesterol.
Mine is 107 mg/dL. That's healthy and in range. But "in range" and "optimal" are not the same thing. Once body fat was no longer the limit, cholesterol became the next one worth working on.
While researching how to move it, I learned something useful about fiber. The recommended daily intake is roughly 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men. Most sources round that to 25 to 40 grams a day.
Why does fiber lower LDL cholesterol?
Soluble fiber binds to bile acids in the digestive system. Bile is made from cholesterol, so some of that cholesterol leaves the body instead of being reabsorbed. Over time, that pulls LDL down.
The timing of when you eat the fiber matters less than people think. What matters is hitting enough of it every day, consistently.
How much fiber are people actually getting?
Far less than they assume. Here's the conversation that changed how I thought about it.
My CFO takes a fiber supplement three times a day, two pills each time. Disciplined. Then we read the label: each pill is about 500 mg of fiber.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Per pill | 500 mg |
| Pills per day | 6 |
| Total daily fiber | 3 g |
| Target (men) | 38 g |
| Gap | 35 g short |
Three grams against a target of 25 to 40. The supplement felt like solving the problem. It was covering under 10% of it.
If you eat a burger for lunch and wings for dinner, like most busy people, getting to 25 grams is hard. Getting to 40 is harder. You have to be deliberate about it:
- Oats
- Beans
- Lentils
- Chia seeds
- Vegetables
- Psyllium husk
What's the real lesson here?
It isn't about cholesterol. It's about measurement.
Most people don't know what they're optimizing for. Fewer know their actual numbers. And once you know the numbers, the gap between "I think I'm doing well" and "I'm hitting the target" is usually much larger than expected. The fiber pills looked like progress until someone did the math.
Six months ago my bottleneck was body fat. Today it's cholesterol and fiber. Six months from now it'll be something else. The goal was never perfection. It's finding the next bottleneck and improving it, over and over.
Frequently asked questions
How do you find your current health bottleneck? Measure, then look for the metric that's furthest from optimal and most worth moving. Body composition first, then bloodwork. The bottleneck is whatever gives you the biggest return for the effort right now, not whatever's easiest to track.
Is a fiber supplement enough to hit the daily target? Usually not. A typical pill holds around 500 mg, so even six a day is about 3 grams against a 25 to 40 gram target. Supplements help at the margin. Food (oats, beans, lentils, vegetables, psyllium) does the real work.
Is an LDL of 107 mg/dL a problem? No. It's within the healthy range. The point isn't that it's dangerous, it's that "in range" and "optimal" differ, and once a higher-priority issue is solved it's reasonable to work on the next one.