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 first meal I made from those groceries was not gourmet dining.
By almost any standard, it could barely be called dining at all.
It was food assembled by a frightened man who wanted to make absolutely certain he did not make another mistake.
Breakfast began with an English muffin.
I still had American cheese in the apartment. I had already torn open the package and thrown away enough of the wrapping that I could not read the label anymore.
I knew what people called American cheese.
I did not know exactly what was in this particular slice.
That bothered me because labels had suddenly become part of my security system. If I could not see the package, I could not enter the exact information. If I could not enter the information, I could not receive the reassurance I was looking for.
Still, it was what I had.
I split the English muffin and placed it in my toaster oven, which also functioned as an air fryer. I let it cook long enough to give it a little color.
Then I fried an egg.
I placed the American cheese on it and assembled my version of an Egg McMuffin.
There was no butter.
There was no salt.
There may not have been any pepper.
I was afraid of almost everything that could make food taste better.
I was afraid of salt because my blood pressure had been dangerously high. I was afraid of butter because I had been told I had fatty liver and abnormal cholesterol. I was afraid of carbohydrates because I had diabetes. I was afraid of the food I had eaten before the hospital because I believed it had contributed to putting me there.
Fear was the main seasoning.
Alen had introduced me to Carb Manager. I had used food-tracking applications before, but this one became part of how I inspected each meal.
I entered the English muffin.
I entered the egg.
Then I tried to enter the American cheese.
The application gave me a warning or classification indicating that the choice did not fit its keto criteria as well as I expected.
My immediate reaction was frustration.
This was supposed to be the healthy meal.
I had cooked it myself. I had not stopped at McDonald’s. I had not poured syrup over anything or added a pile of breakfast potatoes. I had made an egg, cheese, and whole-wheat English muffin at home.
Yet the application was already questioning one of my choices.
I thought, ‘This is not what I planned.’
My prior work with Dr. Berg had taught me enough about keto to understand that it was fundamentally a very low-carbohydrate approach. I knew lowering carbohydrates gave me a clear direction to explore alongside the medical care and medication I had received.
But knowing the theory was not the same as building breakfast.
I was hungry, so I ate the sandwich.
It was bland.
I tried to use my imagination.
I told myself, ‘Man, this is better than a McDonald’s McMuffin.’
It was not.
It was a far cry from McDonald’s.
The McMuffin in my imagination had salt, fat, texture, familiarity, and years of emotional association behind it. Mine was a dry English muffin holding an egg and a questionable slice of American cheese while an application judged the ingredients.
I had created breakfast as an act of compliance, not pleasure.
I remember thinking that this must be what diabetic food tasted like.
Bland.
Plain.
Something a person endured because the alternative frightened him more.
I did not think I could keep eating that way for very long.
That realization mattered because food had been my easy button.
When I felt stressed, I ate badly.
When I felt overwhelmed, food gave me a quick answer.
When I wanted stimulation, comfort, relief, or a break from work, I could reach for something that required no thought and immediately changed how I felt.
Now I was facing one of the most stressful experiences of my life.
I had been told I had diabetes. I had just experienced a medical crisis. I believed my eating habits had contributed to the metabolic dysfunction reflected in my numbers.
The easy button was the very thing I was trying to remove.
And the replacement tasted like cardboard.
Breakfast did not make me think, ‘I can live this way forever.’
It made me think, ‘This is not going to work for long.’
Lunch was more ambitious.
I took one of the salmon fillets from the bag I had pulled home in the apartment wagon and placed it in the air fryer.
I measured the Old Bay.
I did not shake it over the fish by instinct. I found the listed serving amount and used exactly that quantity.
We were not making mistakes.
That was how I saw it.
Too much seasoning did not feel like a small variation in a recipe. It felt like the kind of uncontrolled decision I had sworn to eliminate.
I cooked the salmon until the outside became a little crisp.
It also smoked up the apartment.
That first attempt was not graceful. I was learning the air fryer, learning the fish, learning how much seasoning to use, and trying to make something edible without allowing myself the ingredients that normally created flavor.
I microwaved a bag of broccoli, probably around twelve ounces.
Then I opened the guacamole.
The guacamole was the dip. The broccoli was the thing I dipped into it.
That combination eventually became something I enjoyed, but the first experience required adjustment.
I had been accustomed to eating a large amount of carbohydrate and highly processed food. Broccoli did not produce the same immediate sensory reward. Salmon had more natural flavor than the breakfast sandwich, but I had prepared it cautiously. The guacamole carried much of the meal because it added richness and made the act of eating vegetables feel more familiar to me.
I was learning that if I could preserve the behavior I enjoyed, dipping, I could change the food participating in it.
Even so, lunch was not a culinary triumph.
The salmon was slightly smoky.
The broccoli was broccoli.
The guacamole was doing nearly all the emotional labor.
I ate it because it matched the plan.
Dinner was simpler still.
Three scrambled eggs and cheese.
Again, no salt.
Again, almost no flavor added.
Again, food selected more for what it did not contain than for the experience it could provide.
By the end of that first day, I had eaten an English-muffin breakfast sandwich, air-fried salmon with a large bag of broccoli and guacamole, and scrambled eggs with cheese.
None of it was terrible enough to be inedible.
None of it made me excited about tomorrow.
It was some of the most tasteless kibble a person could imagine.
I use the word ‘kibble’ because that is what it felt like. It was nutrition assigned to a body, not a meal created for a human being.
The plate communicated survival.
It did not yet communicate life.
Looking back, I had confused safety with absence.
No salt.
No butter.
No surprise.
No indulgence.
No variation.
And, almost accidentally, no pleasure.
The fear made sense. I had just come through an event that shook my trust in my own body and my own choices. Measuring everything helped me feel that I was regaining control.
But control alone could not make the routine sustainable.
A person can force down a bland breakfast because he is terrified.
He can repeat it the next day for the same reason.
Fear can create extraordinary short-term discipline.
It is much harder to build a life around food that feels like punishment.
I had not solved that problem on day one.
What I had done was create the first draft.
The English muffin would eventually leave the plan because it contained more carbohydrate than I wanted.
I would become better at cooking salmon without smoking up the apartment.
I would learn that seasoning could make vegetables and protein taste dramatically different without returning to the old way I ate.
I would stop treating every grain of salt as if it were an emergency and begin thinking about total sodium within the larger context of my health and activity.
I would explore garlic, herbs, acids, texture, searing, sauces, and preparation methods.
I would eventually learn to savor food instead of inhaling it.
The man who later cooked the best steaks Brandy and Jill said I had ever made did not exist in that first breakfast.
That man began here.
He began with a dry homemade McMuffin he had to pretend was better than McDonald’s.
He began with a salmon fillet that filled the apartment with smoke.
He began with broccoli whose most interesting quality was that he could dip it in guacamole.
He began with three scrambled eggs and a fear of seasoning.
The first meals were not good.
They were evidence.
They proved that I could come home with a new list and complete an entire day without returning to the food I had removed from the pantry.
They proved I could prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner deliberately.
They proved that I could be disappointed by a meal without using the disappointment as permission to quit.
That may be the most important part of the day.
I did not enjoy everything.
I did not believe I had discovered the perfect menu.
I did not finish dinner thinking, ‘This is wonderful.’
I simply woke up the next morning and continued.
I had spent years using food as the easy button.
Now I was learning to tolerate the moments before the new food became easy.
The first day was bland because I did not yet understand the difference between removing what had harmed my routine and removing every source of pleasure.
That understanding would come later.
First, I needed proof that I could change the behavior.
Flavor could be rebuilt.
Confidence could be rebuilt.
The meal could be rebuilt.
But on that first day, survival was enough.
I did not need gourmet dining.
I needed to make it to breakfast tomorrow without pressing the old easy button.
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.