You Can’t See Your Own Health Clearly

Last time, I talked about how the visual standard for the human body has changed over time, and how what looks strong or healthy today would have looked unusual just a few decades ago.

But even if you understand that those standards are distorted, there’s a deeper problem: most people still can’t accurately evaluate their own health.

In this episode, I explore why that happens.

The tools people rely on—what they see in the mirror, what the scale shows, how they feel day to day—are constantly changing, which makes the signal unstable. At the same time, the reference point people compare themselves to has shifted, often toward highly curated or unrepresentative examples.

When both the signal and the reference point are unclear, the evaluation never settles.

From there, behavior starts to change. People adjust constantly, respond to short-term feedback, and end up misreading whether what they’re doing is actually working.

The result isn’t a lack of effort or discipline. It’s a measurement problem.

This episode looks at how that problem develops, and why the signals people rely on most are often the least reliable over time.

Uncommonly Remarkable℠ is a health and wellness show focused on understanding how the body works and how everyday choices shape long-term health.

I’m Artis Beatty, a doctor of optometry and Chief Medical Officer at MyEyeDr. While my professional background informs how I think, the perspectives shared here are my own.

Transcript

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Last time, I talked about how the standard for the human body has changed over time, how what would be considered strong or healthy today would have looked unusual only a few decades ago. But there's a second issue underneath all of that. Even when people understand that the visual standard has drifted, most still can't accurately evaluate their own health, and that matters because the way you judge something is the way you decide whether to stay with it. Most people assume they have a reasonable sense of how they're doing, and they expect that if they're getting healthier, it will be obvious, something they can see in the mirror or feel day-to-day. But the tools people rely on for that judgment are not very stable. The mirror shifts with lighting, angle, posture, and expectation, the scale moves with hydration, food intake, and timing, and how you feel varies with sleep, stress, and what the day has already demanded of you. So the signal is always moving, and when the signal is always moving, the judgment moves with it. A second issue is that most people no longer have a reliable reference point. If the environment you're comparing yourself to is already skewed, that's if the bodies you see most often are edited, highly trained, or are drawn from a very small slice of the population, then the baseline you're using is unstable before you even begin. At that point, you're dealing with two problems at once. The signal is unclear and the measurement is inconsistent. And when both are true, the assessment doesn't resolve. What people do next is understandable. They check more often, they look for faster changes, and they adjust what they're doing based on what they see over short periods of time, but that introduces a different kind of error. When something changes slowly and you evaluate it using signals that change quickly, you end up misreading it. You might abandon something that was working because it didn't show up fast enough, or you continue something because it shows up quickly, even if it isn't moving you toward the outcome you actually want. You go a week without seeing a visible change and assume it isn't working, even though nothing meaningful would have changed that quickly anyway. From the outside, that can look like inconsistency, and maybe sometimes it is, but often the signal isn't clear enough to tell what's working, so the behavior keeps changing. There's a subtle layer here that's easy to miss, which is that the signals that actually track long-term health are neither very visible nor very fast. Strength builds gradually, energy shows up across an entire day rather than a single moment, recovery becomes clear across repeated efforts, and consistency only reveals itself when you look across weeks and months. These are slower signals, and because they don't provide immediate confirmation, they're easy to overlook. What follows from that is predictable. People tend to prioritize what they see over what actually tracks, relying on signals that change quickly while underweighting signals that are slower but more reliable, which makes it difficult to tell whether anything is working. Not because it isn't, but because it's being measured in a way that obscures it. If you step back, the pattern becomes clearer. The standard has shifted, the reference point is unstable, the tools we use to measure are inconsistent, and the signals we rely on are the ones that change the fastest rather than the ones that matter most. When all of that is true at the same time, it becomes very easy to feel like you're not making progress, even when you are. Most people aren't struggling because they're doing nothing. They're struggling because they can't clearly see what they're doing is working. And if you can't see clearly, you won't evaluate clearly. And if you can't evaluate clearly, you won't stay with anything long enough to find out. When that happens, people don't stop evaluating themselves. They just shift towards signals that are easier to see, and the signals that are easiest to see are usually the ones that change the fastest. In practice, that means appearance on a given day, a morning scale reading, how a workout felt, or whether the week feels on track. All of which carries some information, but none of which are complete. Because these signals are incomplete, they tend to amplify short-term variation while underrepresenting long-term change. So a small shift in hydration can alter what you see in the mirror, a single meal can move the scale, and a night of poor sleep can change how a workout feels. Once the evaluation is anchored to signals that are highly responsive, the interpretation becomes reactive as well, and it becomes easy to draw conclusions from what happened over the last day or two rather than from what has been happening across weeks or months. That compresses a slow process into a window that is too small to represent it. And when you judge something that changes slowly inside a time frame that is too short, it will tend to look as though it isn't working. Not because it isn't, but because it's being observed at the wrong scale. So the reality is most people don't have a motivation problem. They have a measurement problem. That means they rely on signals that are easy to see but are the least reliable. And they overlook signals that are harder to see but are more stable over time. And when the measurement is off, the effort doesn't feel like it's working, even when it is. This is uncommonly remarkable. Thanks for listening.