This is not a guide. It is not a meal plan, a system, or a set of instructions designed to tell you how to live. What it is — is a story. My story. And like most real stories, it did not begin with a plan.
It began with pain, a dental chair, and six weeks of soup.
I am not a scientist. I am not a nutritionist or a doctor or anyone with formal credentials to prescribe you a lifestyle. I am someone who became curious. Someone who asked questions, did the research, and decided to test the answers on himself. What I found over the course of eight years changed the way I think, the way I eat, the way I show up for the people I love, and the way I understand my own body. Not because I followed a perfect system. Because I lived an imperfect one — honestly, stubbornly, and with more failures than I originally planned to admit.
Fasting has impacted what I consider the three most important areas of my well-being: my mind, my body, and my spirit. That is not a marketing phrase. By the time you finish this book, I hope you understand exactly what I mean by each one of those things — and why the order matters.
I want to be clear about something before we go any further. My goal is not to convince you to live the way I live. It is not to sell you on intermittent fasting or make you feel like you are doing something wrong if you eat three meals a day. My goal is simply to show you what happened when I walked this path — the discipline and the failure, the clarity and the guilt, the moments where I had to decide who I was going to be and the moments where I chose wrong. All of it. Because the version of this story that only includes the wins would not be worth your time.
I am going to be real with you throughout these pages — not because it is easy, but because that is the only version of this story worth telling. All I ask is that while you read, you are just as honest with yourself.
Something I still struggle with too.