Listen to the full episode using the embedded player above if you’d rather hear this conversation in my voice.

“Being ‘normal’ by conventional standards doesn’t always mean your body is thriving,” - Rachel Carta, RN

Your Labs Are “Normal” So Why Do You Still Feel So Off?

There’s a scene so many women know too well.

You finally make the appointment. You carve out the time. You get the blood work done. You wait for the results, hoping that maybe this will be the thing that explains why you’ve been feeling so unlike yourself. You’re exhausted, your mood feels unpredictable, your digestion is off, your brain feels foggy, and you can tell something isn’t right.

Then the doctor walks in and says, “Everything looks normal.”

And you leave feeling confused. Because if everything is normal, why do you feel so terrible?

I wanted to write about this because I hear some version of that story all the time. Women come to me feeling frustrated, discouraged, and honestly a little disconnected from their own bodies. They’ve been told nothing is wrong, but they don’t feel well. And that gap between what they are experiencing and what they are being told can make them start questioning themselves. This is where I think it helps to slow down and look at labs through a different lens.

Labs Can Be Helpful, But They Are Not the Whole Story

I use labs in my practice, and I do think they can be incredibly helpful. They can give us clues about what may be going on inside the body. They can help us see patterns. They can point us toward areas that need more support. But labs are not the full story.

That’s one of the most important things I learned in my functional nutrition training, and it has stayed with me ever since. Labs are a clue. They are one piece of information. They are not the complete explanation for why you feel the way you do.

They don’t tell me what you’ve been carrying emotionally. They don’t tell me what your stress levels have been like over the last six months. They don’t tell me when your symptoms started, what was happening in your life at the time, how your digestion has been functioning, or how long your nervous system has been stuck in overdrive.

They also don’t tell me what happened the night before the blood draw. Maybe you slept terribly. Maybe you were under unusual stress. Maybe you were fighting off something. Maybe your body was having a harder week than usual. Labs are a snapshot in time, and that matters. That’s why looking at labs in isolation can be so misleading.

Why I Don’t Believe in a “Labs First” Approach

This is something I feel strongly about. There are a lot of practitioners right now who lead with lab testing right away. Before they really know the person. Before they understand the full health history. Before they’ve taken time to hear the story. Then the labs come back, a few markers are out of range, and suddenly there’s a supplement list. That approach has never sat right with me. Not because labs don’t matter, but because context matters more.

In my work, labs are never the starting point. The starting point is always the story. I want to know what symptoms you’re having, when they started, what was going on in your life, how you’re sleeping, how you’re digesting your food, what your energy is like, what your moods are doing, and what patterns have been building over time. Once I understand that fuller picture, then the labs become much more meaningful.

Now labs can support the detective work. Now they can help confirm what we’re already seeing. Now they can become part of the conversation instead of pretending to be the whole conversation. That difference really matters.

Why This Topic Matters to Me Personally

This isn’t just something I care about professionally. It feels personal to me too. If you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about my own migraine journey. It’s also been a while since I’ve shared much about my dad and his experience with heart disease, but both of those things deeply shaped the way I think about health.

My dad had his first heart attack when he was 50. He lived until he was 82, which in many ways feels like a gift, but his quality of life in the last ten years of his life was very poor. Watching that changes you. It makes you think differently. It makes you pay closer attention. It makes you want to understand what is really happening in the body, not just react once things have progressed to a certain point.

His birthday was this week, so I’ve been thinking about him a lot. I’ve been thinking about how much his health journey still informs what I do and why I do it. It made me more aware of the choices I make every day. It sparked a deep curiosity in me about what’s happening beneath the surface in the body. And it reminded me, over and over again, that health is not determined by one moment in time.

It’s shaped by patterns. Patterns in how we eat, how we sleep, how we move, how we cope with stress, how our mindset affects our body, and how we support ourselves over the long term. That’s one of the reasons I find functional lab work so interesting. Not because it gives all the answers, but because it can reflect some of those patterns and give us a few more clues to work with.

“Normal” Does Not Always Mean Optimal

This is another part of the conversation that many women have never been told. The lab ranges you usually see on a standard report are based on population averages. In other words, what is considered typical in the general population. But if the general population is tired, inflamed, stressed, undernourished, overwhelmed, and dealing with all kinds of chronic symptoms, then being “normal” by that standard doesn’t necessarily mean you’re thriving.

That’s the part that functional nutrition helped me understand. A person can fall inside a conventional lab range and still have symptoms. They can still feel exhausted. They can still have brain fog, digestive issues, low resilience to stress, mood changes, and that frustrating sense of not feeling like themselves.

From a functional perspective, we’re often looking for earlier imbalances. We’re asking whether the body is showing signs of strain before things become more serious. We’re paying attention to what may be off before it reaches the level of disease. And that matters, because symptoms often show up long before a diagnosis ever does.

The Three Ways I Think About Labs

When I’m looking at labs, there are three principles that really guide me.

The first is functional versus pathological. Pathological ranges are what are often used to diagnose disease. Functional ranges are narrower, and they can help us notice where the body may be struggling before disease develops. That doesn’t mean panic. It means paying attention.

The second is trends versus one snapshot. Since labs are only showing us one moment in time, I don’t want to hang the whole story on one number. I want to look at patterns. I want to see what’s happening over time. I want to understand whether something is a one-time blip or part of a larger picture.

The third is constellation versus a single marker. This one is one of my favorites because it feels like such a clear picture. If you look up at the night sky and only focus on one star, it won’t tell you much. But when you step back and see how the stars connect, a shape begins to appear. That’s how labs work too. One marker by itself rarely tells the whole story. But when you look at multiple markers together, and then you combine that with symptoms, history, stress, digestion, and lived experience, something more meaningful starts to come into view.

What I Keep Seeing Again and Again

At this point, I’ve reviewed close to a hundred sets of lab work from women, and there are some patterns I see over and over. Low ferritin. Low vitamin D. And signs that the body may not be absorbing nutrients efficiently.

That last piece is really important. Sometimes it’s not just about what someone is eating. Sometimes the body isn’t breaking things down, absorbing, and using those nutrients the way it should. That often brings us back to digestion and gut health. And this is where the work gets exciting, because when we support the body in deeper ways, things begin to shift. When we work on digestion, gut health, nutrition, stress regulation, and the whole picture of someone’s health, the labs often improve. But even more importantly, the symptoms improve. Energy starts to come back. Mood becomes more steady. Brain fog begins to lift. And that is always the part I care about most.

Thyroid Testing Is a Good Example of the Bigger Picture

The thyroid is one place where this conversation comes up a lot. Your thyroid influences so much in the body. Energy. Mood. Metabolism. Hormones. And yet many times the only thyroid marker that is tested is TSH. That marker can be helpful, but it doesn’t always give us the full picture of how the thyroid is functioning.

This isn’t about criticizing conventional medicine. It’s about recognizing that sometimes we need a broader lens. When I have clients test thyroid markers, I want to see more than one piece of the puzzle. I want to understand how the system is functioning more fully so we can make sense of symptoms in a grounded, thoughtful way instead of guessing.

The Goal Is to Improve the Terrain

The real goal of looking at labs from a functional perspective is not to diagnose disease. It’s to help the body function better. It’s to support the terrain.

I come back to this idea often because it makes so much sense to me. Think about your body like a garden. We’re getting close to that time of year where the snow starts melting and you can feel the possibility of spring again. I always get excited for my garden this time of year, and it’s such a good reminder that if you want something to grow well, you start with the soil. You don’t ignore the condition of the ground and hope for the best. You pay attention to it. You pull weeds. You loosen things up. You nourish it. You give it what it needs so growth becomes possible.

That’s what we’re doing in functional nutrition. We’re improving the terrain through sleep, nourishment, movement, hydration, stress support, healthy rhythms, and a more whole-person view of what the body needs. When the terrain improves, the body has a better chance to do what it was designed to do. And often, over time, that’s reflected in how you feel and in what your labs begin to show.

If Your Labs Are “Normal” and You Still Feel Off, Please Don’t Ignore That

I wanted to bring this conversation here because I know how many women are living in that space of confusion. They’ve been told everything looks fine, but they know something still feels off. If that’s you, I hope this gives you a little more clarity and a little more relief. There's a reason you feel the way you do. There may be patterns underneath your symptoms that haven’t been fully explored yet.

And no, the answer is not always more supplements, more testing, or more doing. Sometimes the next right step is to slow down, gather the full picture, and start listening more carefully to what your body has been trying to say.

A Next Step If Mood Swings and Anxiety Have Been Part of the Picture

This conversation also connects directly to something I’m very excited about. One of the most common things women come to me with is mood swings and anxiety that seem to come out of nowhere. They feel more emotionally reactive, more overwhelmed, and less steady than they used to. And while hormones absolutely play a role, that’s often not the whole picture either.

There are often deeper root causes involved, things like blood sugar imbalance, gut health issues, inflammation, nutrient depletion, and stress on the nervous system. When we step back and look at the full landscape of someone’s health, those mood shifts often start to make more sense.

That’s exactly what I’m going to be teaching inside Mood Shift Method Live.

We’re going to talk about the real reasons moods can feel so different in midlife and what we can actually do to support the body in a more grounded, root-cause way. I’ll also share more about how tools like labs can sometimes support that detective work, but always as part of the bigger story of your health.

If you’ve been told your labs are normal but you still feel off, or you’re dealing with mood swings, fatigue, anxiety, or brain fog that doesn’t seem to make sense, I’d love for you to join me.

You can learn more at rachelcartarn.com/moodshift.

Your body is always communicating. Sometimes we just need to slow down enough, and look wide enough, to understand what it’s been saying all along.

Lots of love,

Rachel

If you're not ready for the Mood Shift Method Live, but are still struggling with mood swings, download the Mood Swings SOS. This is a free audio that you can listen to anytime your mood feels overwhelming.