Mastering Fasting

Before I was building apps to make sense of things, I wrote a book.

I spent 2018–2021 researching and writing Mastering Fasting. Which is a fairly long way to answer a question about not eating, but the more I looked into it, the less satisfied I was with a simple answer.

Where this came from

My first MS diagnosis sent me into health research with no real background in any of it. I was a film major. I didn't suddenly understand biology because I had a reason to care about it; I had to start learning what I was looking at.

Fasting became one of the subjects I went very deep into. Research, reading, trying things myself, trying to connect what different people were saying. Eventually I wanted to put it into a form someone else could follow without doing all of that work again.

That's where the book came from. I've written much more about the diagnosis and what happened afterwards in the MS piece, but this is one of the things that came out of those years.

Making it understandable

The subtitle is The Hard Way — But Made Simple for Everybody. That was the job: get into the subject properly, then explain it in a way that didn't require the reader to have already spent years thinking about it.

The book goes through the science and practice of fasting, how it fits around food and training, and why different people and circumstances need different approaches. There is a dedicated section for women rather than assuming that whatever worked for one man is automatically a universal protocol.

I'm interested in the reasoning behind a practice. If all someone takes away is a rule about what time they can eat, they haven't really been given much to work with when their circumstances change.

There's also a very different kind of discipline involved in finishing a book. An app can have another feature tomorrow. At some point a book has to be finished enough to print, and all the parts have to make sense together. You don't get to explain the missing bit in the next update.

Read some of it

Rather than asking you to take my word for what the writing is like, here's the opening chapter. It's the personal history behind the book, and it's the same excerpt I included in the MS article.

The important context, reading this now, is that this is a book from 2021. When I wrote it, I believed I had beaten the health problem that started all of this. The relapse in 2026 changed that understanding. I'm leaving the story as it was written, because that's what I thought at the time, but it isn't the end of the story.

That doesn't make the work disappear. It does mean I'm not going to turn it into a neat retrospective where I knew everything all along. I clearly didn't.

You can find the book on Amazon, see reader reviews on Goodreads, or visit the book site.

It's a different kind of thing to put next to the software here, but to me it's the same habit. Get sufficiently absorbed in something, try to understand it, and then make something out of the work so it isn't just stuck in my head.