This extra chapter was cut from The Journey Back to keep the book focused. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping. Any $17 PDF-and-audiobook bundle is a separate optional digital add-on, not the price of the paperback.
I knew what the dawn phenomenon was.
I had actually written about it before.
That is one of the strangest parts of this entire story. I was not hearing about sleep, hormones, stress, and morning glucose for the first time after I left the hospital. I already understood the concepts. I had worked in health marketing. I knew how to read studies and nutritional labels. I knew that the body was an interconnected system.
I just did not think any of it applied to Charles.
It applied to everyone else in the world.
It applied to the people reading the material I had helped create. It applied to the customers, patients, and audiences we were trying to educate. It applied to the case studies and the people in the research.
But somehow, in my own mind, I had granted myself an exemption.
My problem was not ignorance.
It was exemption.
Alen had given me an Oura Ring for my birthday a couple of years earlier. It tracked things such as sleep and heart rate, and I wore it constantly. The information was available to me before the diagnosis.
The ring had been telling me a story.
I had not been listening.
Before the hospital, I was not sleeping well. I often woke up at approximately three o’clock in the morning. I would look at the time, think, ‘I guess it is just time to wake up,’ and eventually go back to sleep.
I treated it as one of those peculiar things my body did.
I did not stop and ask what else was happening at three in the morning. I did not connect the interruption to the quality of my sleep, the stress I was carrying, the way I was eating, or what my glucose might be doing before breakfast.
Again, I knew those connections existed.
I simply did not believe they were describing me.
After the hospital, that changed because I began measuring everything I could reach.
The doctor in the hospital had told me that I did not need a home glucose testing kit. That was not an answer I could accept emotionally. I ordered one from Amazon because I needed to see what was happening.
Once the continuous glucose monitor failed and the adhesive gave me a rash, I returned to finger sticks.
I did not return casually.
I became relentless.
I might check my glucose eight or nine times in one day. I tested when I woke up. I tested before breakfast. I tested approximately ninety minutes after breakfast. I tested after exercise. I tested before bed. If I woke up at three in the morning, I would test then too.
If I ate fish, I wanted to know what happened.
If I ate almonds, I wanted to know what happened.
If I ate pickles, I wanted to know what happened.
I wanted a number before the food and a number after the food. Then I wanted another number later so I could see whether the direction had changed.
My fingers became sore because I was testing so often and typing all day. I tried to develop a rotation system. I would use one side of a fingertip, then the other side, then change the position and eventually move to the next finger. I might use four or five locations on a finger before moving on.
Alex watched this entire production.
I joked that I was pricking my fingers so much I looked like a drug addict.
He immediately corrected me.
‘Dad, do not say that. Drug addicts do not prick their fingers.’
I told him, ‘I know. I know. I am just saying.’
That exchange still makes me laugh because he was right, and because humor gave us a way to live inside something that was frightening.
There was a ritual to it. I would load the lancet, brace myself for the sting, squeeze out the blood, put it on the strip, and wait for the meter. Then Alex and I would look at the result with the excitement of two teenage boys who had discovered something they were not supposed to see.
We wrote the number down. We searched for what it might mean. We compared it with my food log. We tried to understand the pattern.
Nothing Held Back Email Coach gave me one of my most consistent checkpoints.
I would often eat at approximately eight in the morning. The coaching call began around eleven and could continue for two and a half or three hours. The moment the Zoom call ended, sometimes around two in the afternoon, the first thing I did was prick my finger.
At that point, I was often seeing readings below 100, sometimes approximately 95 or 92.
I could finish the call, look at the clock, remember what I had eaten, and make a guess before I tested.
Then the meter would tell me how close I was.
That felt like progress because, before the hospital, I had almost no separation between one eating event and the next.
I snacked throughout the day.
I love jalapeño potato chips. I like popcorn. I could tell myself there was nothing wrong with having a snack, then eat the entire bag of chips, feel horrible regret, and repeat the same sequence another day.
Snack, regret, repeat.
Snack, regret, repeat.
There was no clean baseline because food was always entering the system. I could not have told you whether I was hungry, bored, stressed, or simply responding to the fact that something crunchy was nearby.
After the hospital, the spaces between meals became visible. For the first time, I could see a morning meal, a long coaching call, and a reading afterward as a sequence rather than as one continuous day of grazing.
I was still in a daze when I first came home. It probably took a couple of days for the reality to settle into my mind.
Then the engineer in me came back online.
I have an engineering background, and I have spent decades studying marketing, behavior, and measurement. I began treating my health the way I would treat a system that was producing a dangerous output.
What are the inputs?
What are the outputs?
Which factors are variables?
Which factors can be held relatively constant?
What changes when I alter one input?
What happens to my blood pressure if I do this?
What happens to my glucose if I eat that?
What happens after I exercise?
What happens the morning after I sleep poorly?
I stopped seeing a glucose reading only as a verdict about whether I had been good or bad.
The number was also an output.
An output could be studied.
That way of thinking gave me a sense of agency when almost everything else felt out of control. I could not undo the hospital. I could not instantly repair years of habits. I could not bring my mother back. I could not make every stressful business situation disappear.
But I could observe.
I could record.
I could change an input and watch what happened next.
At first, I assumed food would explain most of the variation. That was the obvious input. Carbohydrates went in, and glucose moved. If I found the correct list of foods and followed it with enough discipline, I thought the system should become predictable.
Then I noticed that the same food did not always produce the same result.
I could eat approximately the same meal at approximately the same time on two different days and see different numbers.
That disturbed the engineer in me until I recognized the mistake in my model.
The food might have been the same.
The system was not.
On one day, I might have slept well. On another, I might have awakened at three in the morning and struggled to return to sleep.
On one day, work might have felt manageable. On another, I might have been dealing with a client relationship that had become intensely stressful while I was trying to help that client transition to someone else.
And behind all of it was grief.
My mother had died only two weeks before I went into the hospital.
That was not a footnote.
It was a load my body and mind were carrying while I continued trying to work, solve problems, and behave as if I could overpower every demand through effort.
Sleep, stress, grief, hormones, movement, medication, meal timing, and food were not independent boxes. They interacted.
I had known that intellectually.
The meter made me confront it personally.
The dawn phenomenon became a perfect example. In the early morning, hormonal changes can contribute to a rise in glucose. I knew the term, but knowing the term had allowed me to keep it at a safe distance. Seeing my own three o’clock awakenings and morning readings turned an abstract concept into part of my life.
The lesson was not that every unusual morning number could be blamed on the dawn phenomenon. It was that a morning reading had context. The number did not arrive alone.
I had to ask what time I last ate, how I slept, when I woke up, what medications I had taken, what stress I was experiencing, and what patterns appeared across several days.
One reading could frighten me.
A sequence of readings could teach me.
There was a danger in the way I approached it, too. Testing eight or nine times a day was partly data collection and partly anxiety. I was trying to learn, but I was also trying to make uncertainty disappear by measuring it often enough.
No number could give me that kind of absolute control.
The appropriate testing schedule is something each person should establish with a clinician based on medications, symptoms, risks, and treatment goals. My account is not an instruction for everyone to begin pricking their fingers all day.
It is an honest description of what I did when I came home scared and determined to understand my body.
The value was not in the bruised fingers.
The value was in the pattern.
The biggest pattern involved sleep.
For most of my life, I joked, ‘I will sleep when I am dead.’
I did not mean it as a joke.
I treated sleep as time taken away from work. If there was another email to write, another client problem to solve, or another opportunity to pursue, sleep could be shortened. I assumed discipline meant continuing after my body asked me to stop.
After the hospital, I began treating sleep not as an option, reward, or leftover.
I treated it as a minimum requirement of life.
Now I protect my sleep the way some people protect their coffee.
That means I do not casually bargain it away because work expands. It means that waking at three in the morning is information, not merely an inconvenience. It means my bedtime, evening work, stress, and morning numbers belong in the same conversation.
Protecting sleep did not mean I could control every night or guarantee a particular glucose reading the next morning. It meant I stopped pretending that sleep was irrelevant because I wanted more working hours.
I also began respecting stress as a physical input.
The conflict with the client was real. The death of my mother was real. The shock of the diagnosis was real. None of those experiences could be reduced to a single meter reading, and I would never claim that one stressful day caused one specific number.
But I could no longer pretend that emotional load and metabolic load occupied separate bodies.
They were both happening inside mine.
This changed how I interpreted variation.
If a reading was higher than I expected, I no longer asked only, ‘What did I eat wrong?’
I asked, ‘How did I sleep?’
‘What time did I eat?’
‘Did I move?’
‘What happened at work?’
‘What stress am I carrying?’
‘Am I comparing this with a real pattern or reacting to one isolated result?’
That was a more useful set of questions because it did not turn every number into a moral judgment.
The meter was not telling me whether I was a good person.
It was giving me one imperfect measurement from a complicated living system.
My engineering mind wanted constants. My body taught me that human beings do not live under laboratory conditions.
Meals change. Sleep changes. Grief changes. Stress changes. Movement changes. Even when I tried to repeat the same day, I was not starting from the same internal state.
That did not make measurement useless.
It made context essential.
I had spent years knowing the science without accepting that I belonged inside it.
The hospital took away that exemption.
The finger sticks, food logs, blood-pressure readings, Oura data, and experiments helped me see that my health was not a collection of unrelated failures. It was a system carrying several loads at once.
Food was one load.
Sleep was another.
Stress and grief changed the conditions under which everything else operated.
Once I understood that, I stopped trying to solve the entire problem by finding one perfect food.
I began protecting the system.
I ate deliberately. I monitored with my medical team. I took my medications. I moved more. I stopped working so late. I protected sleep. I paid attention to stress instead of pretending I could outwork it.
I still wanted the numbers to behave like a clean equation.
They did not.
But they no longer felt random.
The same meal could produce a different output because I was not the same system every day.
That realization changed the question.
Instead of asking only, ‘What did I eat?’ I began asking, ‘What load was I carrying when I ate it?’
I had known the dawn phenomenon.
I had known sleep mattered.
I had known stress mattered.
I had known the body was interconnected.
What I had not known was how long a person could understand something professionally while exempting himself personally.
The readings ended that argument.
Everything I knew applied to Charles too.
Want to see how I connected the dots?
I wrote The Journey Back to share my experience and explain the Four Metabolic Loads framework. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping.
→ See The Journey Back Paperback ($12.95)
Educational only, not medical advice. Charles’s experience was alongside physician-supervised care and prescribed medication. Individual results vary. Talk to your doctor.