Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

The Origin

It was day thirteen when I finally made the decision that I was going all the way.

I had been fasting for just shy of two weeks; there wasn’t really an end date in mind. Only a loose, slightly unhinged commitment to see what happened when I “turned off the lights”. I was conducting a desperation experiment on the only subject I had authority over: myself.

Inspiration for the 40 day fast

I had written a scripture on my calendar on the first day: Matthew 17:21. It reads, “This kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.” It’s basically saying certain, intense spiritual obstacles require a higher level of faith, spiritual discipline, and reliance on God. I knew this was going to be a massive mountain.

I sat with that text every day, but on this particular day, I stared at it even longer. There was something in the air I can’t even explain if I tried. Later that day, almost as if the Instagram algorithm had been wiretapped into my body, which is honestly a distinct possibility, I scrolled past a post about Marcus Luttrell. He is the Navy SEAL known as the Lone Survivor. He had completed a 40-day fast, and his wife, Melanie, was sharing the first few days of his refeed. I found another post shortly thereafter in which he discussed the experience on a podcast. When the host asked him how the mental attrition of fasting compared to his SEAL training (BUDS), he didn’t hesitate.

whats on the other side

He stated that, mentally, the fast was actually harder.

A Navy SEAL had said the fast was mentally harder than the mental part of his training, and I almost couldn’t believe it. My CrossFit brain went completely quiet for a moment before it lit up like a barbell drop at six in the morning. I had done hard things before. However, if a Navy SEAL said this was the hardest thing he had ever done mentally, I needed to know what that meant. I needed to know what was on the other side of it. Would I be able to attack the toughest thing I have ever attempted as well because it has haunted me for thirty-five fu***** years. I wanted to operate at that level. I had to have answers.

Forty days became my number. Just me and God……I was going to fast, pray, and run this emotional eating experiment until the end. It was something I needed to do, even though I was terribly scared.

before the 40 day fast

To understand why I was thirteen days deep into removing food from the equation and taking advice from scripture and a SEAL instead of eating lunch like a normal human being, you have to understand the wreckage of the last few months.

It started with leg surgery back in September, which I went into feeling genuinely prepared to handle. I had prepped my meals and applied every lesson from the first round of knee surgeries; mapping out my recovery with the same intensity because that is how my brain works; I plan for chaos because I like to build the structure before the storm arrives. I went into that operating room feeling like I had the situation handled.

My discovery? LOL….. that I did NOT have it handled.

When I came out of surgery, I could not have cared less about the meals I had spent so much time preparing. My body did not want the shrimp I had carefully portioned and frozen because it wanted macaroni and cheese. Freezer-burnt shrimp can go directly to hell when you are in pain and exhausted and just want something that feels like comfort. The prepped meals sat in the freezer like a very organized monument to my own optimism.

part of the wreckage

Then came the antibiotics, which lasted for four months as they rotated through my system to get rid of a massive bone infection that could have killed me. My gut was wrecked, and my body hurt in ways I did not have clean language for. There were nights I could not sleep because of the pain, and I will leave it at that because some things are better left to the imagination. What I will say is that four months of massively powerful antibiotics will introduce you to a version of your body that you did not know existed and didn’t want to meet.

I gained weight, more than the eighteen pounds I had when I returned publicly to the space. Sure, it was what was left, but that wasn’t where I started. There was a number I knew only, and it sat heavily, in a way that had nothing to do with the scale and everything to do with what it represented. I had been here before and knew this territory well. I had written the manual on exactly how this happened and why, yet I was living inside it anyway. It is a particular kind of awful that is hard to explain to someone who has not experienced it.

finding a way to rewire the path

In November, someone reached out to me after reading my emotional eating guide. They told me it had given them a way to help their family understand what they were going through. Then they asked me a question I was not ready to answer.

They asked how to cure it, what the fix was, and how to make it go away.

I didn’t have an answer, only the frameworks, analogies, and thirteen years of therapy. There was a whole guide I had written, a seminar I had built, and hundreds of conversations with athletes who were fighting the same battle. I still couldn’t answer that question because I was sitting inside the very thing they were asking me about, and I couldn’t get out of it either.

That question broke something loose in me, so I started digging and researching. I was not going to be satisfied with the medical community telling me to just “get a tougher mindset”…. “try harder” or…. accepting this was just something that would be my reality until I died. Hard no. NO. NO NO. I read everything I could find about neural pathways, metabolic psychiatry, and how the brain rewires itself. There was even a stumble across something Greg Glassman said about ketosis and metabolic flexibility, and my brain started connecting the dots.

here we go…

I wondered what would happen if I starved the pathway entirely. I thought about the dopamine hit that food had been delivering since I was five years old. It was the signal that fired before I could think, before I could pause, and before I could make a different choice. I wondered what would happen if I removed the food completely and forced that wire to sit there with no signal to send? Would it quiet down? What the hell would happen?

I didn’t know, but I was going to find out.

the commitment

So there I was on day thirteen. I was drinking water and sitting with Matthew 17:21 and a Navy SEAL’s testimony when I made my decision. I committed to forty days of prayer and fasting. It would be one long and uncomfortable experiment to see if the thing that had been running since childhood could be interrupted long enough to be rebuilt. Could it be cured? Re-routed? What did I need to do?

I had no idea what was coming, but that is also the point.