Last weekend I attended a metabolic health conference in Miami. Researchers, physicians, coaches, entrepreneurs, patients, and health professionals gathered to discuss chronic disease, nutrition, metabolism, cancer, longevity, and performance. There were excellent presentations from Jamie Seeman, Mark Sisson, Thomas Seyfried, and many others. But when I think back on the weekend, it is not any individual lecture that stands out. What I remember are the people.
The weekend really began for me on Friday night, over dinner. I met Augie and his wife completely by chance. They were not part of the conference. They were simply two people trying to make sense of the same questions millions of others are asking. Why is chronic disease everywhere? Why is nutrition so confusing? Why is it so hard to find trustworthy answers about health? Their questions were not unusual. They reflected a theme I would encounter all weekend. People know something is wrong, and they are looking for answers.
By Saturday morning the room was full of people approaching that search from different directions. Some were focused on cancer. Others on obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, longevity, athletic performance, or clinical medicine. The language varied. The methods varied. The proposed solutions varied. Yet beneath all of it was a shared recognition that metabolic dysfunction sits underneath many of the problems modern society is struggling to solve.
Coach Glassman opened by speaking about science, broken science, and the difficulty of finding truth inside systems shaped by incentives, institutions, and competing interests. It was a fitting introduction, because the people in attendance were not gathered around a settled body of knowledge. They were gathered around a problem.
The presentations were strong throughout. Jamie Seeman brought the perspective of a physician, athlete, mother, and patient, and what stood out was the practicality of it. She seemed less interested in defending an ideology than in helping people make better decisions in the real world. Health, she reminded the room, is not a laboratory experiment. It is something people live with every day. Mark Sisson’s view on longevity carried the same grounded quality: look at outcomes, try something, measure the result, keep what works, discard what doesn’t. Practical, honest, and free of dogma. It is also, I realized, a fair description of what a good coach does.
But my favorite part of the weekend was Saturday night. Once the sessions ended, the conversations spilled into restaurants and hotel lobbies. Researchers debated mechanisms. Physicians compared observations. Coaches shared what they had seen in the field. People challenged one another, disagreed, reconsidered, and kept going. It reminded me of how I imagine the Solvay Conferences must have felt. Not because everyone agreed, but because everyone cared enough to engage honestly with hard questions. The smartest people in the room were often the quickest to admit the limits of what they knew.
I saw that clearly during Thomas Seyfried’s session on Sunday. His depth of knowledge on cancer metabolism was obvious, but what stood out was his concern for the people suffering from the disease. He was not pursuing knowledge for its own sake. He was pursuing it because people are suffering and he believes better answers exist. At several points he handed questions to his student Derek Lee, when Derek knew an area more deeply than he did. That small gesture told me more than any slide could. The goal in that room was not to be the smartest person present. The goal was to get closer to the truth.
The weekend ended with dinner among the MetFix team and several affiliates. Oddly enough, it reminded me of the early days of CrossFit. The same mixture of passion, commitment, optimism, and uncertainty. Nobody claimed to have solved the problem. But everyone shared a belief that the work matters, that chronic disease is worth fighting, and that helping people improve their health is a worthy pursuit.
I came home with more questions than answers. All weekend, people discussed biomarkers, blood work, body composition, glucose, ketones, insulin, inflammation, cancer, longevity, and performance. Everyone had a piece of the puzzle. Everyone could point to something measurable. What I did not see was a simple, unified framework that tied those pieces together in a way a coach could actually understand and apply.
That observation stayed with me on the flight home. The challenge is no longer convincing people that metabolic health matters. Most of the people in that room already agree on that. The challenge is creating a practical way to define it, measure it, and improve it. Something that lets a coach look at a person, identify the constraint, and track meaningful progress over time.
Which brought me back to Augie and his wife. They were not in any of those sessions. They will never read the studies or debate the mechanisms. But they are exactly who all of this is for. The experts each hold a piece of the puzzle. People like Augie are the reason the puzzle is worth finishing.
That remains the question I am most interested in answering.
Hollis