Not in a lab. Not in some pristine wellness center.
It began in a grocery store parking lot.
I had just finished wandering the aisles like a ghost, tossing whatever cheap, processed food I could afford into the cart, boxed, bagged, packaged things that felt more like filler than food. It wasn’t nourishment. It was survival. Just enough to get by, to dull the hunger and silence the stress.
At the register, I swiped my card. Declined.
Once.
Again.
That sharp, sinking coldness flooded my chest, panic disguised as stillness. My throat locked. People behind me were watching. I stammered out something like, “Oh, must’ve grabbed the wrong card. I’ll be right back.”
But I wasn’t coming back.
I left the cart full of food behind like a dream I couldn’t afford.
I walked out with empty hands and a head full of static.

But the body doesn’t wait for your finances to catch up. I still had to eat. I checked my bank account, half-hoping for a miracle. Instead, I found the brutal truth, numbers so red they bled. Overdrawn. Drowned.

And then it hit me.
This wasn’t just hunger.
This was starvation.

Not the kind where you skip lunch and complain. This was the sharp, hollow ache of having no option. The body asking for something that simply doesn’t exist.

But what stunned me most wasn’t the emptiness in my stomach.
It was the realization that I’d been starving far longer than I knew.

Starving for more than food.
For truth. For clarity. For understanding. For something real, something raw, something that made sense in a world that never had.

I sat there in my car, the silence so loud it hurt. Something inside me snapped, or maybe it finally shifted. Physics calls it an unbalanced force, the kind that knocks an object at rest into motion.
That was me.

Still in the parking lot, still shaken, I grabbed my phone with trembling fingers and typed the first question that came to mind:
“What happens if you don’t eat for three days?”

And with that, the search began.
Not just on Google.
But in myself.

This was before fasting was a trend.
Before it became a hashtag.
Before it was a lifestyle choice curated for clout and comfort.

Back then, it wasn’t cool.
It wasn’t biohacking.
It was survival.

Twenty minutes after I typed that desperate question into Google, I found myself staring at words that felt like another language:
BDNF. Neurogenesis. Neuroplasticity. Intermetabolic Switching.

They looked like spells from a different world. And honestly? I had no idea what any of them meant.
Let’s keep it real, I graduated high school with a 1.7 GPA. I was about as sharp as mashed potatoes. But still… something about those words pulled me in.

They whispered.
They hinted.
Not just at knowledge, but at possibility.

It was like catching the scent of something I didn’t know I’d been starving for.

Here’s the truth:
Rock bottom isn’t the end.
It’s the beginning.

It strips you bare.
Rips away the illusions, the ego, the story you’ve been telling yourself.
And it leaves you with nothing.
Nothing to lose.
And everything to gain.

We’re taught to fear that place.
But in reality, it’s one of the most powerful places you can ever stand.
Because once you have nothing left, you’re finally free to rebuild.
This time, on your own damn terms.

Side note:
If you’re not relentlessly investing in your own growth, books, courses, mentors, late nights spent searching, then the odds of clawing your way out of rock bottom are basically zero.

I know this firsthand.
I was an internalizer.
No matter how many hands reached out to help, I kept mine stuffed in my pockets.
Pride? Fear? I don’t know.
But I couldn’t take help.
Wouldn’t.

I had to bleed my way through the answers.
Had to break before I listened.

And that’s the brutal truth:
Some people don’t just hit rock bottom, they drag themselves across it for years before they finally wake up.

When I got back to the basement I was living in,
nothing outside had changed.
It was still cold.
Still quiet.
Still dim, like the world had forgotten to turn the lights on.

But something inside me had shifted.
A question had sparked.
A tension I couldn’t name.
A whisper I couldn’t ignore.

I didn’t know where it was leading.
I just knew I had to follow it.

So I dove in.

Back then, it was just me.
Sitting in a basement lit by a cheap lamp, hunched over a cracked phone screen, scrolling article after article.

I wasn’t desperate.
I was curious.
And something about it lit me up in a way nothing had in years.

At first, the whole idea sounded ridiculous.
I had spent most mornings of my life shoving fast food into my face within fifteen minutes of waking up,
Sausage biscuits, breakfast burritos, anything greasy enough to silence the noise.

And if I wasn’t eating, I was dry-scooping two servings of pre-workout because I didn’t like coffee and never had time for tea.
Stimulation was my religion.
Consumption was my autopilot.

Skipping food? That felt like blasphemy.

But still, I kept digging.

I wasn’t tracking macros.
Wasn’t logging my meals.
Didn’t have a spreadsheet or a plan.
I just knew I needed something different.

My whole life had been built on noise.
Screens. Sugar. Stimulation.
Endless input.
Never once had I considered giving my body or my mind room to simply exist.
To be, uninterrupted.

(Quick side note: If addiction runs in your family, please tread lightly here. Fasting is powerful, but like any intense tool, it can twist into a coping mechanism. A way to hide. To control. To disappear without actually leaving.)

Back then, my diet was trash.
Junk in, junk out.
No space between the inputs. No pause. No silence.

But when I finally stopped feeding the machine for a little while… something shifted.

My body started to feel different.
And my mind?
It woke up.

It was like I could hear myself think for the first time.
Like new synaptic connections were firing live in real time,
Thoughts weaving together that had never met before.
Ideas leaping across gaps I didn’t even know existed.

It felt like discovering fire after a lifetime in the cold.

I hadn’t realized how numb I’d become,
Not until I finally felt the warmth of real awareness.

And I don’t know if I got addicted to that feeling…
or if I had just finally found a way of living that made me feel alive.

Either way,
it was better than any high I’d ever chased.

Let’s be real though,
The first day of fasting was pure hell.

My stomach felt like it was trying to eat itself alive.
The headache I got? It wasn’t even a headache in the usual sense.
It wasn’t pain.
It was pressure.

Like my brain was shifting, recalibrating.
Like something inside me was being rewired from the ground up.

I didn’t know it then, but my gut microbiome was already starting to change.
The whole internal ecosystem, this microscopic world I’d never paid attention to, was getting shaken awake.

And day two?
Somehow, worse.

I was convinced something was seriously wrong.
My body didn’t feel like my own anymore.
Everything was foreign. Alien.

But then,
something clicked.

Science calls it “intermetabolic switching,” that critical threshold where your body flips from burning sugar to burning fat as its main fuel source.

I didn’t know the term.
I didn’t need to.
I felt it.

A surge.
A snap.
Like someone had flipped a breaker in my mind.

My energy came rushing in like a wave.
My thoughts sharpened.
The fog that had clouded me for years, gone in an instant.

I felt clear.
Focused.
Limitless.

Like I had just stepped into a version of myself I’d never met before.

And once that door opened,
There was no going back.

But here’s the thing,
I had no idea what to do with that feeling.

I’d just caught a glimpse of something powerful.
Something electric, alive, crystalline.

But I was still tethered to the same old mindset.
The same stories.
The same habits and mental loops that had held me down for years.

I was still in that same cold basement.
Still dragging around the weight of a past I hadn’t yet confronted.

But that high?
It wasn’t like anything I’d known before.

It wasn’t the kind of high my family’s history of addiction had warned me about.
It wasn’t blurry or numbing.
It didn’t make reality fade, it made it sharpen.

It cracked something open inside me.
And through that crack, light came in.

It showed me there was another way to feel alive.
Another way to be.

Looking back now, maybe I slipped into a kind of manic psychosis.
A burst of obsessive energy, fueled by hunger,
literally and metaphorically.

But whatever it was…
It jump-started a transformation I couldn’t stop.
I wouldn’t stop.

Let this be a warning:
Fasting can be addicting.
Not just because of what it does to your body,
But because of what it awakens in your mind.

Over the course of a year, I dropped from around 220 pounds to 170. It didn’t happen overnight, but the changes were undeniable. Visible. Drastic. I may have taken it too far. Maybe I pushed harder than I needed to. But when you’ve spent most of your life feeling heavy, physically, mentally, emotionally, suddenly feeling light can become its own addiction. It’s intoxicating, that feeling of weightlessness. Not just in your body, but in your thoughts, in the space between who you were and who you’re becoming.

I used to joke that I traded my biceps for my brain. And in some ways, it was true. When I reconnected with old friends, people who hadn’t seen me in years, some of them asked if I was okay. One even asked if I had cancer. The weight loss had been that extreme. But in the same breath, they couldn’t stop complimenting how young I looked. Like I’d turned back the clock four, five years. That contrast did something to me. It made me realize the transformation wasn’t just skin-deep, it was cellular. It was spiritual.

Dont worry, you wont lose all of your muscle. In the image below you can see a one year difference. Aging in reverse almost.