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.
The Brixx experiment was vital because failure is knowledge.
That is true for me as an engineer, and it is true for me as a marketer.
If a test does not produce the result I expected, I have learned something that worked less well than I believed. Now I can ask why. I can remove a variable, add one, change the sequence, or test the same idea in another situation.
A failed test is not empty.
It gives me the next question.
The Brixx pizza forced me to admit that my record was incomplete.
I had been documenting food and glucose aggressively. I could tell you what I ate. I could tell you what the meter showed. I could often tell you when I tested.
But I had not always documented the state of the entire system with the same discipline.
After that, the checklist expanded.
What medication was I taking?
What was the prescribed dose?
What time did I actually take it?
What was my blood pressure?
How long did I sleep?
How well did I sleep?
How much stress was I carrying?
What had I eaten earlier?
How much did I eat this time?
What movement happened before and after the meal?
When did I start eating?
When did I finish?
When did I test?
Those details changed an anecdote into something closer to a usable personal record.
Medication timing was one of the most obvious examples.
Saying, ‘I took metformin in the morning,’ sounds specific until I ask one more question.
What did morning mean?
Did I take it at seven o’clock?
Did I take it at nine?
Did I take it with food, if that was how it had been prescribed?
Did the meal and glucose test happen at the same interval afterward?
A two-hour difference in medication timing meant I was not comparing identical days.
That did not allow me to calculate the effect of one metformin dose from one home reading. Metformin does not become a simple stopwatch experiment in which one tablet produces one isolated number. The medication was part of the treatment context established by my medical team.
But if I ignored when I took it, I was leaving a known variable out of the record.
The same principle applied to my other prescribed medications.
Name.
Dose.
Time.
Taken as prescribed or missed.
I could not casually move those details around and still call two observations equivalent.
Blood pressure was another measurement I tracked religiously.
I already had a cuff at the apartment when I returned from the hospital. I measured several times a day and wrote the readings down. I watched the numbers change as I took prescribed medication and changed the way I ate, slept, moved, and worked.
That record mattered because blood pressure itself can vary with posture, recent activity, talking, stress, cuff placement, time of day, and whether I had rested before checking it.
If I wanted a comparison, I needed more than the top and bottom numbers.
I needed the conditions around the measurement.
Had I just climbed the stairs?
Had I been sitting quietly?
Was I talking?
Was I upset about a deadline?
Was the cuff positioned the same way?
Was it the same time of day?
Again, one number was not the whole experiment.
The variable I had underestimated most was sleep quality.
I understood that sleep duration mattered. I could compare going to bed at eleven and waking at six with going to bed at eleven and waking at eight.
But two people can spend the same number of hours in bed and receive very different sleep.
Even the same person can record the same bedtime and wake time on two nights while the quality between those times is completely different.
One night can be relatively continuous.
Another can be fragmented by repeated awakenings, breathing problems, discomfort, stress, or other disturbances.
The clock can say seven hours.
The body can experience something far less restorative.
This became personal because I had already been diagnosed with sleep apnea years earlier by an ear, nose, and throat physician whose name I remember as Dr. Williams.
I did what many people do with an inconvenient diagnosis.
I put off dealing with it.
I struggled with the CPAP mask. I did not like wearing it, and I decided it was not something I was willing to continue using.
That decision did not make the sleep apnea disappear.
Later, I could look at my Oura Ring and see breathing-related irregularity or disturbances that made me wonder whether I had stopped breathing several times during the night.
I need to be precise here too.
The Oura Ring did not diagnose individual apnea events for me. I cannot look at a consumer wellness score and state as a medical fact that I stopped breathing four or five times.
The clinical diagnosis came from the medical evaluation performed years earlier.
The ring gave me a reason to stop pretending the issue had no place in my present-day data.
That is a crucial distinction.
The wearable suggested a trend worth paying attention to.
The prior clinical diagnosis established that sleep apnea was not an imaginary variable.
My difficulty tolerating CPAP established that the treatment problem had not been resolved simply because equipment had once been prescribed.
The responsible response is not to ignore the diagnosis or declare that a wearable has measured it perfectly. It is to take the unresolved problem back to a qualified sleep clinician and discuss mask fit, settings, adherence barriers, and other clinically appropriate options.
My personal history includes avoiding that step.
Once I understood how strongly sleep could affect the rest of the system, the old diagnosis looked different.
Sleep apnea was not only a problem that made me tired.
It could be part of the Regulatory Load I had failed to account for.
A night of fragmented sleep could affect the state in which I entered breakfast, lunch, a stressful meeting, or a pizza experiment.
It could also influence hunger, decision-making, energy, and the desire to reach for something fast and easy.
That last part mattered because stress and sleep did not affect only the meter.
They affected what I put on the plate.
I am a stress eater.
If I skipped a prescribed medication dose, slept badly, and spent the day under pressure, the problem was not limited to a hidden physiological response.
Those conditions also made me more likely to eat something I had not planned, choose the quickest option, or consume a larger portion.
The Loads could compound one another.
Poor sleep could leave me tired.
Stress could increase the desire for relief.
Exhaustion could reduce my willingness to prepare food.
The convenient food could contain more carbohydrate or sodium.
The larger portion could create a different glucose response.
Then I might blame the final number entirely on the last food I ate.
That is how a system hides inside what looks like one decision.
Alen has described the evening as the battle between five and nine.
He has a point.
For me, those hours are when the day begins collecting its debts.
If I slept badly, worked too long, carried deadline stress, and failed to prepare a meal, five o’clock did not arrive as a neutral moment.
I was tired.
I wanted something quick.
I wanted something easy.
I was more vulnerable to eating a food that did not fit the structure I had built or eating more than I had intended.
The decision at seven in the evening might have been shaped by a poor night that began almost twenty-four hours earlier.
If I documented only dinner, I missed the chain.
That insight expanded the purpose of tracking.
I was no longer recording data only to explain the number after it happened.
I could use the record to see when the conditions for a difficult evening were assembling.
Poor sleep.
High stress.
Missed preparation.
Late work.
No planned meal.
A strong desire for something quick.
That sequence gave me an opportunity to intervene before I was standing in front of food negotiating with myself.
The answer might be to stop working earlier.
It might be to eat the meal I had already prepared.
It might be to choose one of the dependable foods I kept available.
It might be to acknowledge that I was tired instead of calling the feeling hunger.
The tracking became useful when it moved from autopsy to early warning.
Food quality also became more complicated than the labels ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy.’
Take a meal I ate today.
I prepared approximately two cups of cauliflower rice and two cups of stir-fry vegetables. I did not use the sauce that came with the vegetables. Instead, I made my own combination using sesame oil, low-sodium Kikkoman soy sauce, and some fish sauce.
It tasted great.
Most people would look at cauliflower rice and vegetables and immediately classify the meal as healthy.
Compared with many meals I had eaten before the hospital, it certainly looked like a much more intentional choice.
But ‘healthy’ did not end the analysis.
How many total carbohydrates were in two cups of cauliflower rice plus two cups of mixed vegetables?
Which vegetables were included?
Was there corn, peas, carrots, or another ingredient with more carbohydrate than the broccoli I usually ate?
How much sesame oil did I use?
How much soy sauce?
How much fish sauce?
What was the sodium in the combined serving?
Was there added sugar in any product?
What protein accompanied the meal, if any?
How did that portion compare with eight ounces of broccoli and eight ounces of salmon, or with three eggs and salmon?
The vegetable meal could still contain more carbohydrate than one of my usual meals.
The homemade sauce could still contribute meaningful sodium.
The sesame oil could add substantial calories depending on the quantity.
The fact that I assembled the meal myself did not make those numbers disappear.
This did not turn the meal into a bad choice.
It meant healthfulness existed on more than one dimension.
A meal could contain vegetables and fiber while also containing more carbohydrate than my usual baseline.
A sauce could contain less sodium than the packet I discarded while still containing enough sodium to matter in the context of my blood pressure history.
A meal could produce a relatively level glucose reading while lacking enough protein or leaving me hungry later.
Another meal could create a larger glucose rise while still containing nutrients that matter in the broader diet.
The question was not merely, ‘Is this healthy?’
The question was, ‘Healthy in what way, compared with what, in what amount, and for which part of my health picture?’
That is the sliding scale I began seeing.
The word healthy can hide portion size.
It can hide sauces.
It can hide sodium.
It can hide carbohydrate differences between vegetables.
It can hide calories.
It can hide the fact that the same person responds differently under different conditions.
It can also hide something positive.
A meal does not need to be perfect to be meaningfully better than the choice it replaced.
If my alternative was an entire bag of jalapeño potato chips, four cups of vegetables prepared with a measured sauce represented a very different decision.
But I still wanted to know what was in it.
That is where the marketer and engineer in me meet.
The marketer understands that the word healthy can sell an idea before the evidence is examined.
The engineer turns the package around, checks the inputs, measures the portion, and asks what the system actually did.
Neither perspective is enough alone.
The marketer reminds me that a plan must feel desirable enough to follow.
The engineer reminds me that a desirable story is not the same thing as a repeatable result.
After Brixx, my checklist was not perfect.
I did not capture every variable with clinical precision every day.
Some portions were estimated.
Some testing intervals need to be reconstructed.
Some stress levels were obvious to me but not assigned a formal score.
Hydration was relevant, but I did not always measure it in a consistent way.
The wearables did not agree exactly about sleep.
The point is not that I created a flawless laboratory in my apartment.
The point is that I learned which missing variables could make a confident conclusion unreliable.
I learned to distinguish the information I had from the information I wished I had.
Food and portion were usually visible.
Glucose and blood pressure were directly measured with home devices.
Medication dose and time could be recorded.
Movement could be timed or captured by a wearable.
Sleep duration could be estimated.
Sleep quality required both wearable trends and honest attention to how the night actually went.
Stress was real even when it did not arrive as a clean number.
Sleep apnea required clinical care, not interpretation from a ring.
Fullness, cravings, and the five-to-nine struggle had to be documented as experiences, not laboratory values.
Each type of information had a different level of certainty.
That became part of the method too.
A measurement is not automatically accurate because it appears on a screen.
An experience is not automatically irrelevant because it cannot be measured to two decimal places.
A prescription time is not close enough merely because both seven and nine happen before noon.
A seven-hour window in bed is not automatically seven hours of restorative sleep.
A vegetable meal is not automatically low in every nutrient a person may be monitoring.
A glucose reading is not automatically explained by the final food that entered the mouth.
The checklist gave me a way to hold those truths together.
What did I eat?
How much?
When?
What did the meter show, and when did it show it?
What medication did I take, at what dose and time?
What was my blood pressure under comparable conditions?
How long and how well did I sleep?
What stress was present?
What movement occurred?
How hungry was I before the meal?
How satisfied was I afterward?
Did the result repeat?
What did I fail to record?
That final question may be the most valuable.
What did I fail to record?
It prevents the data I have from pretending to be the complete picture.
The Brixx experiment did not fail because it produced the wrong number.
It succeeded at revealing the weaknesses in my model.
It showed me that the dose matters.
The medication time matters.
The measurement conditions matter.
The quantity matters.
The sauce matters.
The night before matters.
The pressure of the day matters.
The battle between five and nine matters.
And the variables I forgot to record may matter as much as the ones I wrote down.
That is what failure gave me.
Not proof that the system was unknowable.
A more honest map of what I still needed to learn.
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.