1st Optimal + Davey Maher: A Medical-Backed Partnership for Real Hormone and Gut Health Results

Most people don’t fail because they lack discipline. They fail because they’re chasing symptoms with guesswork.

You can train hard, eat “clean,” and still deal with stubborn fat, low energy, gut issues, poor sleep, low libido, brain fog, and a body that won’t cooperate. That’s usually not a motivation problem. It’s a biology problem.

That’s why we’re excited to announce a new partnership: 1st Optimal + Davey Maher Fitness.

Davey Maher has built a reputation for straight-talk, hormone-first coaching and helping women (especially 40+) break free from the dieting cycle using data, strategy, and accountability. His approach emphasizes hormones, gut health, and root cause work, not generic “eat less, move more” advice.

Now, with 1st Optimal’s medical team, functional testing, and clinical oversight, Davey’s clients can access advanced labs, hormone panels, gut testing (GI-MAP), and medically guided protocols when appropriate, all inside a streamlined system that respects scope of practice and prioritizes safety.

If you’re a client, this partnership means clearer answers and a tighter plan. If you’re a coach, it’s a blueprint for how modern coaching evolves: lifestyle meets lab work meets medical oversight.

Table of Contents

What This Partnership Actually Solves (The Stuff Most Programs Miss)

Here’s the reality: a basic annual physical is not built for performance, body composition, or midlife hormone shifts. It’s built to rule out emergencies.

What gets missed?

Suboptimal (but “normal”) hormone patterns
Insulin resistance trends before diabetes shows up
Thyroid issues that don’t fit a simple checkbox
Chronic inflammation markers that quietly block progress
Nutrient deficiencies that impact energy, sleep, and recovery
Gut infections/imbalances that affect mood, cravings, and metabolism
Stress and cortisol patterns that keep the body stuck

Davey’s messaging hits this head-on: many people have tried dieting, training, even seeing a doctor, but nobody looked deeply at hormones or gut root causes.

1st Optimal brings the missing clinical layer: lab ordering workflows, medical review, and evidence-based treatment options (when indicated) through a telehealth-first model.

This partnership is built to do one thing: turn “I feel off” into measurable data and an actionable plan.

Who This Partnership Is For

Women 35–55 dealing with “midlife metabolism” problems

If you’re in your late 30s, 40s, or early 50s and noticing:

Stubborn belly fat that didn’t used to be there
Sleep changes (waking at 2–4 a.m.)
Mood shifts, anxiety, lower stress tolerance
Lower libido and weaker recovery
Brain fog and fatigue that no supplement fixes
Training results flattening despite consistency

That often overlaps with perimenopause and menopause hormone changes. Hormone therapy is widely recognized as the most effective treatment for vasomotor symptoms (like hot flashes), and individualized risk/benefit depends on age, timing, and health status.

This partnership supports women by combining:

Men 35–55 who feel “slower” than they should

Men often normalize symptoms until they can’t:

Low motivation and drive
Lower strength and poorer recovery
Sleep disruption
Mood changes
Increased belly fat
Libido drop

A smart next step is not guessing. It’s testing and building a plan around what your data says.

Coaches who want to deliver better outcomes without crossing lines

If you’re a coach reading this: you already know the frustration of seeing a client do “everything right” and still stall.

A medical-backed partnership is designed for exactly that. 1st Optimal describes this model as a collaboration where the coach stays the coach, while a licensed medical team handles testing, clinical interpretation, and treatments that fall outside a coach’s legal scope.

What’s Included: Medical Team + Functional Testing + Coaching Integration

This partnership is not “labs for the sake of labs.”

It’s a system:

1) Advanced blood work and cardiometabolic markers

1st Optimal’s testing approach goes beyond basics and is built to replace guessing with measurable baselines and trends.

Depending on goals and history, this can include categories like:

Sex hormones (context-specific to men/women)
Thyroid markers (more than one number)
Metabolic markers (glucose regulation, insulin patterns)
Inflammation markers
Nutrient status
Cardiometabolic risk indicators

2) Hormone testing with medical interpretation

For women: this can support perimenopause/menopause strategy and symptom mapping, and when appropriate, discussion of therapy options through a licensed medical team.

For men: this can clarify whether symptoms align with hormone trends, recovery issues, sleep disruption, or other metabolic drivers.

3) GI-MAP gut testing (plus gut healing protocols)

Davey specifically references providing GI-MAP testing for clients with severe gut issues, including stool testing delivered to the home and reviewed with a clinician on his team.

The GI-MAP (GI Microbial Assay Plus) is a qPCR-based stool test designed to detect DNA of specific microbes, including bacteria, parasites, H. pylori, fungi, and more.

Important nuance (because adults deserve honest information): independent evaluation of the GI-MAP assay in a published study found sensitivity around 80% and low specificity due to false positives in that test setting, meaning results require careful interpretation and clinical context.

That’s exactly why pairing testing with medical oversight matters.

4) Medical-led protocols when indicated

This is where outcomes change: you’re not left with a confusing lab report and a Google spiral.

A licensed team reviews results and can guide evidence-based interventions, which may include:

Personalized nutrition and supplement protocols
Gut correction strategies
Weight loss options (including medically guided approaches when appropriate)Hormone therapy discussions based on risk/benefit and patient profile
Monitoring and follow-up testing plans

5) A workflow that integrates with coaching

1st Optimal’s partnership model lays out a simple flow: onboarding, client enrollment and testing logistics, medical review and plan creation, and ongoing monitoring while the coach stays the primary relationship.

In other words: your coach doesn’t turn into your doctor, and your doctor doesn’t try to become your coach. Everyone stays in their lane, and you win.

Why “Test, Don’t Guess” Matters More in Midlife

Midlife is where generic advice breaks.

Two people can have the same scale weight and the same macros and wildly different physiology:

One is insulin resistant
One has thyroid dysfunction trends
One is under-recovered with poor sleep and high stress load
One has gut dysbiosis patterns and chronic inflammation markers

Without testing, most plans become trial-and-error.

With testing, you can answer:

What’s actually driving symptoms?
Which interventions are likely to move the needle?
What should be monitored, adjusted, or ruled out?

This is the backbone of Davey’s “root cause” framing and 1st Optimal’s data-driven testing approach.

Women’s Health Spotlight: Perimenopause, Menopause, and “Stubborn Belly Fat”

Let’s talk about the sentence women hear constantly:

“Welcome to getting older.”

It’s lazy advice disguised as wisdom.

Hormone shifts in perimenopause and menopause can influence:

body composition
sleep quality
stress tolerance
appetite signaling
recovery capacity
mood and cognition

Hormone therapy has a real evidence base for symptom relief, and major medical guidance emphasizes individualized decision-making based on age, time since menopause, route, dose, and risk profile.

What this partnership does is practical:

Confirms what’s happening with data
Builds a targeted plan around training, nutrition, sleep, stress, and gut health
Adds medical options only when appropriate, under clinician oversight

And because Davey’s audience skews women over 40, the integration is especially relevant.

Men’s Health Spotlight: Energy, Recovery, Libido, and Performance

Men often walk around with symptoms they’d never tolerate in their business life.

But health is treated like a side project.

A medical-backed testing strategy can help clarify:

whether fatigue is hormone-related, sleep-related, nutrient-related, or metabolic
whether training stress is outpacing recovery capacity
whether weight gain is primarily lifestyle-driven or physiology-driven (often both)

The goal is not to “biohack.” The goal is to build a body that performs well, reliably, for decades.

Gut Health: The Quiet Driver of Hormones, Mood, and Metabolism

Davey explicitly ties gut inflammation and thyroid sluggishness to hormone function in his content.

Here’s why gut work shows up so often in “stubborn” cases:

Gut issues can affect nutrient absorption
Dysbiosis patterns can influence inflammation signaling
Chronic GI stress can impact sleep, cravings, and consistency
Some infections or imbalances require targeted protocols, not generic probiotics

The GI-MAP test is one tool that can help map microbes and certain markers, but as noted, results require clinical context to avoid overreacting to noise or false positives.

This partnership builds guardrails:

test appropriately
interpret responsibly
treat based on risk, symptoms, and medical judgment

What “White Label” Services Mean (And Why Coaches Care)

White-label services in a medical-backed partnership usually mean the coach can offer a higher level of support under a partnered clinical umbrella, without pretending to be a clinic.

Practically, this can look like:

Clients get access to lab ordering and medical review
The coach integrates insights into training and nutrition
The medical team handles medical decision-making and prescriptions (when indicated)
The client experience stays seamless, not fragmented across five platforms

1st Optimal’s partnership education content emphasizes that coaches often can’t legally order labs or prescribe treatments, even if they understand the concepts, and that a medical partnership solves that gap.

This matters because it keeps everyone compliant and protects clients.

The Client Experience: How It Works Step-by-Step

Here’s what most clients want: a simple process that doesn’t waste time.

A typical flow in this partnership looks like:

Step 1: Assess symptoms and goals

You and Davey’s team clarify what you want:

fat loss and body recomposition
energy and performance
perimenopause/menopause support
gut symptom relief
sleep and recovery improvements

Step 2: Run targeted testing

Testing may include:

Step 3: Medical review and plan creation

A licensed team interprets labs and builds a protocol aligned with your goals.

Step 4: Coaching integration

Davey’s coaching turns the plan into action:

training
nutrition structure
habit execution
accountability

Step 5: Monitor and adjust

This is the difference between a “program” and actual care:

follow-up testing when appropriate
adjustments based on trends and outcomes

Why This Partnership Is Different From Standard Telehealth “Quick Fixes”

A lot of telehealth today is basically:

a short intake
a prescription
minimal follow-up
no root cause work

That’s not the play here.

1st Optimal emphasizes evidence-based clinical policies, safety, and personalized evaluation, not protocols built for aesthetics-only use.

Davey’s positioning emphasizes root-cause strategy and building plans around data, not app-based guesswork.

Put together, it’s a full-stack system:

lifestyle execution + clinical insight + real monitoring

Key Benefits for Clients (Women and Men)

Clarity: stop guessing what’s wrong
Precision: target the highest-leverage problems first
Safety: clinical interpretation and oversight
Efficiency: fewer wasted months spinning your wheels
Confidence: you know why you’re doing what you’re doing
Sustainability: changes guided by data, not trends

Key Benefits for Coaches (If You’re a Fitness or Nutrition Pro Reading This)

If you’re a coach, you already know the pitch is changing.

Clients want:

proof
personalization
and professional support that goes beyond templates

A medical-backed partnership gives you:

a clinical team extension
testing and interpretation infrastructure
higher perceived value and retention upside
a safer way to expand what you can offer without stepping outside your scope

FAQs:

Is this only for women over 40?

No. Davey’s audience skews women 40+, but the testing and medical oversight can benefit both women and men depending on symptoms and goals.

Do I have to do hormone therapy to be in the program?

No. Testing is about clarity. Treatment options depend on your profile, goals, and medical appropriateness.

What is GI-MAP testing?

GI-MAP is a qPCR-based stool test intended to detect DNA from specific microbes and markers (bacteria, parasites, H. pylori, fungi, and more). Results need proper interpretation.

Can my coach order my labs?

Usually, no. That’s a scope-of-practice issue. A medical-backed partnership allows lab ordering and medical interpretation through a licensed team while the coach focuses on coaching.

How fast do people see results?

Some people feel changes quickly (sleep, energy, cravings), but sustainable body composition and hormone shifts typically require consistent execution and follow-up monitoring. Your timeline depends on baseline issues, adherence, and what testing reveals.

Interested in a Health Optimization Partnership?

Elevate your coaching business and transform client outcomes by joining the 1st Optimal Partnership Program, the industry-leading medical-backed collaboration that equips wellness and health coach professionals with advanced lab diagnostics, personalized treatment protocols, and expert clinical support to deliver measurable health results.

Health Coaches, Trainers, Gym Operators, Nutrition Coaches, Fitness Professionals, and performance-focused wellness leaders can now stand out in a crowded market by integrating data-driven health optimization, hormone testing, GI-MAP analysis, and ongoing medical oversight into their service offerings, boosting client retention, revenue, and credibility. Partner with 1st Optimal today for fitness business growth and medical-back coaching at https://1stoptimal.com/partnership-program/ to access turnkey onboarding, flexible partnership options, co-branded marketing support, and the competitive edge your business needs to help clients optimize longevity, performance, and wellness.

Final Takeaway

If you’re tired of generic advice and you want a plan built around your real biology, this partnership was built for you.

Learn about Davey’s coaching and root-cause approach: Davey Maher Fitness
Explore the partnership model and services: 1st Optimal Partnership Program

About Us

1st Optimal is a functional medicine and performance health clinic dedicated to helping high-achieving adults optimize hormone health, weight, energy, and longevity. Follow 1st Optimal on Instagram

Founders:

Joe Miller – Expert in functional medicine, hormone optimization, and health coaching. Follow Joe on Instagram
Amber Miller – Operational leader specializing in patient experience, clinic growth, and holistic health. Follow Amber on Instagram

At 1st Optimal, we combine advanced diagnostics, personalized protocols, and coaching partnerships to deliver sustainable health results for midlife adults.