From Wreck to Recovered: Why I'm Here and What I Want For You

For most of my life I looked healthy. I just didn't feel it.

There's a photo of me somewhere — lycra, mud, a medal around my neck — taken after winning the C-Grade Mountain Biking championship in my state. Around the same period I was touring Tasmania by bicycle, riding from Rockhampton to Brisbane via the inland route, and commuting an hour each way through city traffic on two wheels every single day. From the outside I was the picture of fitness.

On the inside I was running on fumes.

That's where this story starts. And if you've ever looked fine on paper while feeling like you're falling apart on the inside, then you're exactly who I'm writing for.

The Double Life

For somewhere between 30 and 40 years I lived with an exhaustion I couldn't explain.

Some days were fine. Other days my body felt like lead. As time went on, the bad days started winning. I'd come home from work and collapse on the couch, not tired in the way you feel after a good hard day, but genuinely emptied out. Slumping at the dinner table. Taking micro-naps in meetings. Sleeping through every break at work and hunting for opportunities to grab five minutes wherever I could.

The doctors couldn't find anything wrong. Every blood test came back clean. Better than average, they said. Which is a maddening thing to hear when you feel like you're slowly disappearing.

I tried all sorts of supplements. I even tried products from network marketing companies, mainly through friends. The claims were fantastic, and some of them seemed to work for a few weeks but then they stopped. Nothing held.

So I did what I always did... I pushed through.

I lived by the idea, popularised by David Goggins, that when you think you're done you're only at 40% of what your body is actually capable of. I believed that. I applied it. And in many ways it worked. I accomplished things physically that most people wouldn't attempt.

But it was also a way of ignoring the problem. Of mistaking stubbornness for health.

The moment that finally broke through my denial wasn't a blood test or a diagnosis. It was simpler and more painful than that. It was my kids running up to me, pulling on my arm, asking me to come and play, but literally having nothing left to give them. Looking at their faces and knowing I was failing them in a way that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with a body that had stopped cooperating.

That was the thing I couldn't push through.

The Turning Point

A friend mentioned something her husband had been taking that worked wonders for them. I didn't expect it would work for me. I'd been down that road too many times. But I was out of better ideas, so I tried it.

Nine days later something shifted. Not dramatically, and not overnight. I just started feeling more normal. The kind of normal you'd expect to feel if you were a healthy person living a healthy life. It sounds like a small thing. For me it certainly wasn't.

By two weeks I had genuine energy, and true to my nature, I immediately started pushing past midnight because I never felt the total exhaustion that told me to stop. My body eventually reminded me that being 50-something isn't the same as being 25, and I crashed. But it was a different kind of crash. A normal exhaustion. I slept, I recovered, and I was able to keep going. It felt like I was living in a dream.

I could play with my kids. I stopped slumping at the table. I had something left at the end of the day. I even started to smile more.

Almost two years on, those changes have held. That's the part that matters most to me. Anyone can feel good for a month. I've had that before, and it always faded. When something keeps working, you pay attention. I'll cover what that product was in a future post, because the why behind it matters as much as the what.

The Food Experiments

Somewhere in this same period I started reading seriously about health. And I mean seriously... stacking books, cross-referencing ideas, applying things to my own life and watching what happened.

The first book that really shook me was The China Study. If you've encountered it, you know how it makes a compelling case that meat is quietly destroying your health. My wife and I were so convinced that we gave away all our meat the same week and went fully vegan. No exceptions, even when eating out with friends. Weight started dropping and we felt good.

Eight months later, my wife's hair started falling out every time she showered.

That wasn't in the book.

When we stopped the diet her hair returned to normal. It didn't seem like something we could return to on a long-term basis. Our certainty that this was it was shattered.

We went back to our old habits of bread, pasta, rice, sugar, the works, and of course the weight came back with everything else. I told myself it was because I wasn't exercising enough. That's a very convenient story when you'd rather not look at what you're eating. It's not quite true either, and worth exploring in another post.

Eventually I found myself reading about sugar. I discovered that it was not just the obvious kind, but that sugar was hiding in foods I'd always considered healthy. Pasta. Rice. Potatoes. Bread. All of it spiking blood glucose, all of it contributing to weight and inflammation in ways I'd never connected before.

That led me slowly to look at the ketogenic diet, which sounded completely backwards at first. Eat fat to lose fat? But the more I read, and the more I listened to serious researchers and clinicians talking about it, including a book called Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind that methodically dismantles the methodology behind The China Study, the more it made sense.

So my wife and I started keto. The first week was rough. Your body is switching its primary fuel source and it's not subtle about the transition, with fatigue, brain fog, and flu-like symptoms. Week two was easier. Week three we felt so good it stopped feeling like a diet at all, except we didn't stay on it.

Someone gave me a tub of ice cream for my birthday. So I ate the whole thing. Then another one a few weeks later. And another. Even today, as I write this, I have been eating bread and ice cream (not together though). But I'm going back on it again. I feel better when I am on it. More energy, life, clarity. This is just (another) bump in the road.

Here's what I've actually learned from that, beyond the obvious: sticking to a way of eating isn't about never falling off. It's about returning. Every time. Again and again, without making the fall mean more than it does. That's the whole game, and nobody talks about it honestly enough.

What Else I've Been Learning

Food is only part of it. There's been a lot more to unpack.

Sleep turned out to be the linchpin of almost everything else. I used to treat it as what happened when the day was done, as an interruption I needed to suffer. Now I understand it's actually the foundation the next day is built on. Get it right and your food choices, your energy, your mood, and your focus all improve almost automatically. Get it wrong and everything else becomes harder. There's even a concept from Jewish tradition that I find genuinely profound... the idea that the day begins the evening before, because what happens during sleep determines the character of everything that follows. I'll write a full post on sleep. It deserves it.

Movement matters more than most people realise, and in more ways than just burning calories. Walking is wonderful for clearing your head, but it's not enough on its own. At 58 I've started noticing the flexibility I've quietly lost over the years. I watch my mother, who is bedridden, and see how her body has curled inward from years without movement. I can see early signs of the same thing in myself. Especially when my kids ask me if I can do a certain movement that requires suppleness. So it's not just about exercise, it's about keeping the body supple and functional for the decades ahead.

Identity might be the most surprising piece of all. The story you tell yourself about who you are shapes every health decision you make, often without you realising it. This one gets its own post too.

And there are things I'm still working out. Still reading about. Still confused by. That's not a disclaimer, it's the point. I'm not a doctor or a nutritionist or a certified anything. My wife trained as a nurse in Argentina, which brings a useful perspective into our household, but neither of us is here to play expert.

What I am is someone who reads obsessively, applies things to real life, fails regularly, and keeps going. Someone with a family he wants to protect from the confusion and the bad advice and the products that don't work. Someone who ate two litres of ice cream with his kids last week and is still showing up to figure this out.

Why This Exists

The health space is loud. Everyone is certain. Everyone has the one true answer. Vegan. Carnivore. Keto. Fasting. Cold plunges. Seed oils. The noise is genuinely exhausting, and the people who need the help most: families trying to do better, people in their 40s and 50s wondering where their energy went, parents trying to feed their kids something that isn't slowly hurting them, they give up because they don't know who to trust.

I want to be a different kind of voice. Not a guru. Not a brand. Just someone who's in it with you, sharing what he's learning as he learns it, being honest about what works and what doesn't, and filtering out the noise as best he can.

Money is not the goal here, though I understand that value creates income eventually and I'm not pretending otherwise. The goal is simpler than that. I want people to feel what I felt when I finally had enough energy to play with my kids. I want families to understand what they're eating and why it matters. I want people to find ways to improve their health without having to spend crazy amounts of money. I want to give people back something they didn't realise they'd lost.

That's Rob's Path. Come walk it with me.

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