I rebuilt myself first. Then I learned to do it with precision.
I'm Chris Zant. I've spent three decades engineering complex health systems for a living — and the last fifteen years rebuilding my own. Same protocols, same labs, same hard calls I now ask of the people I coach.
For most of my adult life, optimization was a professional skill, not a personal one. I'm a senior principal at one of the Big 4, where I've spent more than three decades helping pharma companies, providers, regulators, and payors move complex, high-stakes systems to market. I could engineer outcomes for everyone but myself.
That caught up with me. By my late 30s I was 230 pounds with a 40-inch waist and a weightlifter's back that had failed me — a herniated L4-L5 in my early 30s, with real nerve damage. It handed me a choice: surgery, or a long conservative rebuild. I chose the harder path — five years of patient rehabilitation and a lifetime of maintenance — and slowly rebuilt a body that could ride across an entire country.
The honest reckoning
The bike is where it clicked. By 2022 I was 168 pounds at roughly 8% body fat, riding a 1,000-mile Ride Across Britain — and I'd had to admit the thing that makes this whole site what it is: no amount of training compensates for poor sleep, poor nutrition, and too much alcohol. So I stopped optimizing one thing at a time and rebuilt the whole system. I didn't read the philosophy on this site. I lived my way into it.
The missing layer
Coming off that peak, I found Jay Campbell's work and recognized the layer I'd been missing — the hormonal and metabolic science underneath serious optimization. Three years of disciplined immersion followed: hormones, therapeutic peptides, metabolic flexibility, insulin-controlled living, and the full feedback loop of labs and monitoring that keeps it honest. I earned my stripes under Jay's mentorship, and today I'm his Lead Performance Optimization Coach and chief author of his forthcoming coaching certification.
I coach the way I'd want to be coached: evidence-grounded, unapologetically direct, and built around your biology — never a template. Every protocol is a hypothesis; when the data contradicts the belief, the belief changes. Risk isn't avoided — it's calculated, monitored, and reversible. And every molecule has to keep earning its place.
Performance and longevity aren't competing priorities — they're the same priority, expressed at different timeframes.
The human behind the data
Off the clock, I'm in Las Vegas with Catherine, my wife of 30 years, our two young adult children are in various stages of "launching". I'm prepping for my first masters bodybuilding stage at 55, still log the occasional long-course centuries on the bike, and you'll otherwise find me on alpine skis, under water, or in the left seat of a small plane. I track all of it — quarterly labs, annual imaging, continuous glucose, the works — because I won't ask a client to do anything I don't measure on myself first.
A life worth optimizing for.
The point of holding the floors is everything that happens off the spreadsheet — the start lines, the summits, the passes, the deep blue, and the people. This is where the work actually goes.
Same person. Twenty years of holding the floors.
Master optimization specialist
Hormone optimization, therapeutic peptides, and metabolic flexibility — run on myself first, alongside my physicians.
Endurance athlete & competitor
Two 1,000-mile Ride Across Britain crossings, the Colorado Triple Bypass, and a first masters bodybuilding stage at 55.
Big 4 senior principal
More than three decades advising pharma, providers, regulators, and payors on complex digital-health systems — the analytical spine of how I coach.
Lead Performance Optimization Coach
On Jay Campbell’s team, and chief author of his forthcoming Performance Optimization Coaching Certification.
No pillar comes first. I advance the whole human.
Balance isn't a soft idea — it's the engineering. Meals, Movement, Mind, and Molecules are one system. Hold your floors, choose your flex, and stay honest about the evidence.
Balance isn't the finish line — it's the center you operate from. Green sits at the middle of the spectrum; the still, neutral center is where you stop reacting and start ascending. Build there first.
See the four pillars →Want to work the whole system?
Start free with the app, read the writing, or book a consult with me through Jay's platform.