I stopped six medications in February 2024. The blood tests backed it up. My GP was happy. The weight had come off. And I was still fighting food every two or three hours like absolutely nothing had changed.
I genuinely thought I was doing something wrong.
If you’ve had results — real, documented results — and you’re still white-knuckling it past the biscuit aisle two years in, this post is for you. Not because I have a fix. Because I think the reason nobody mentions this part is that it doesn’t fit the transformation story we’re all supposed to be telling. I’ve got NHS data going back to 2012 documenting the before, the during, and the messy, unresolved after. And the after is what I want to talk about today.
[Note to Neil: Add YouTube embed once video is published — duration 10:44]
The Promise Underneath Every Transformation Story
There’s a deal most people believe they’re making when they change how they eat. Do the hard work, get the results, and eventually the pull towards the old behaviour eases off. You’ve reprogrammed yourself. The craving quiets down. The reward system catches up with the results.
It makes complete sense. You’ve removed the inputs — the Coke, the biscuits, the bread. So the desire for them should follow, shouldn’t it? The brain rewires. You’ve won.
I believed this. I believed it more, not less, as the results came in. Blood sugar normalising. Medications stopping one by one. Cholesterol heading in the right direction. Surely the mind was next.
There’s a habit researcher called Ben Gardner. He did the study that killed the 21-day habit myth. The real range, it turns out, is 18 to 254 days, with an average of 66. Even that, though, even 254 days, still implies an endpoint. The habit forms and then it’s done. The pull stops.
That’s the deal most people think they’re making. And two years in, I can tell you: nobody mentioned what happens when it doesn’t.
Why the Body and the Brain Are Not Running on the Same Clock
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about my own wiring, and I want to be upfront that this is N=1. One person. Fifty years of specific history that isn’t yours.
A GP put me on Coca-Cola when I was five years old. I know how that sounds. But this was however long ago that was, and they were trying to calm me down. In today’s terms, probably ADHD or something adjacent. Their solution in the 1970s was sugar and caffeine. By sixteen I was on six litres of full-fat Coke per day. That’s not a number I’m rounding up.
I’ve smoked. At one point, living in Tenerife, I was on two hundred cigarettes a day. I’ve had an addictive relationship with pretty much everything that offers a hit.
I’m telling you this not for effect. I’m telling you because the food stuff — the car park visits, the hiding wrappers in the bin before going home, the sweet aisle avoidance that still happens every single supermarket trip two years into this — that’s not a separate problem from the Coke at five years old. It’s the same wiring, expressed differently across fifty years.
The myth I’d been working from was that fixing the metabolic inputs would eventually fix the pull. I had, in good faith, been waiting for that to happen.
Here’s the thing the research suggests is actually going on. The physical timeline and the psychological timeline are running on completely different clocks. The biomarkers can shift in months. The reward pathway — the circuitry that learned over five decades that sugar means relief — takes considerably longer. And “longer” might not have a tidy endpoint.
Think of breaking that kind of ingrained habit like unsubscribing from a marketing email you’ve been getting for thirty years. You click unsubscribe. The emails slow down. But they don’t always stop completely, and occasionally one still gets through months later. Clicking unsubscribe was the right move. It just wasn’t a single action with a clean finish. (ANA-045)
What Happened When I Tried to Logic My Way Through It
I’ve read a lot of books. Listened to a lot of podcasts. Tried to understand what’s going on in my own head.
The closest thing I have to a working example of how this can shift is smoking. I read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Three days later, from a hundred cigarettes a day to zero. Never went back. That book reframed something at a level the willpower approach had never touched.
So naturally, I tried Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Lose Weight. That was not the same experience. On day two I nearly started smoking again. Skimmed it, didn’t finish it, spent the next two weeks fighting harder than before.
Same author. Same format. Different wiring underneath the behaviour.
That’s when I started to understand that the food pull wasn’t going to respond to logic the way the smoking did. The understanding that shifted things — not a date, more of a slow landing — was this: I wasn’t failing the process. The process was taking longer than anyone told me it should. And “longer” might mean indefinitely.
What changed wasn’t the cravings. What changed was stopping the expectation that they’d go away.
What Two Years of Data Actually Looks Like
So what does managing this actually look like in practice, with the numbers behind it?
January to March 2026. I’ve been logging what happens after a sugar event. The pattern is consistent enough now that I can nearly predict it.
The meringues and cream moment: about 400 calories of meringues, 200ml of double cream. Woke up the next morning with my kneecap feeling like something was trying to prise it off. GKI at 43. Ketones at 0.1. The body keeps score even when I’d rather it didn’t.
What’s interesting is the specificity of it. Cream doesn’t seem to trigger it. Fruit doesn’t. But bread, biscuits, crisps, chocolate, baked goods, sweets — the next morning there’s a consistent pattern. Fingers slightly swollen. Joints, particularly knees, fingers, ankles, a bit stiff. Walking downstairs at 53 years old I can normally run up and down them first thing. After a sugar day, I’m more cautious on the way down. There’s a stability thing. Feet feel a bit more splayed. Strange to describe, but I know it immediately.
That data matters because it changed the framing of what I’m doing when I eat sugar. I’m not “treating myself.” I’m writing a cheque that I’ll cash the next morning.
The car park visits are a useful measure. I used to buy something sweet on every supermarket run without fail, eat it in the car park, hide the wrapper in the bin before going home. My mate Richard and I eventually told our wives in 2023. They took the mick something rotten. At the time it felt completely natural. That’s what this looks like from the inside. It doesn’t feel like a problem. It feels like a treat.
I don’t do the car park anymore. I don’t eat in the car. Have I hidden a bag of crisps in my office and eaten them without mentioning it to my wife? Yes. Once a month or so, roughly. I’m not pretending I’m fixed. But once a month is a long way from every trip.
And then there’s this. The other day I had a biscuit. First bite wasn’t what I remembered. Second bite the same. I got to the third and put the rest in the bin. Actually threw them away. That almost never used to happen.
Thirteen months ago, I couldn’t have done that.
What This Means If You’re Earlier in the Journey
There’s something worth naming here before the safety section, because it applies well before you’re two years in.
The gap between when the body changes and when the reward pathway catches up isn’t unique to people who’ve been through a full transformation. It shows up from the first week of changing how you eat.
The pull you feel in month three, when the results are coming in but the sugar craving is still loud, that’s not a sign the approach isn’t working. It’s the normal gap between metabolic change and neural adaptation. The brain learned over years, possibly decades, that certain foods mean relief. Changing the metabolic picture doesn’t immediately update the filing system.
Think of it like the autopilot that used to drive you home from work before you moved house. The new route is logged. But occasionally your hands still start to turn the old way without you deciding to. Not failure. Just a system updating more slowly than you’d like. (ANA-112 pattern — phantom navigation)
Knowing that gap exists before you hit it is more useful than discovering it in the middle of a difficult week. It doesn’t make the difficult week disappear. But it does mean you know what it is.
What I’d Leave You With
None of this means the daily decision doesn’t matter. It does. The fasting window still requires showing up. What I’m pushing back against is the assumption that transformation eventually becomes effortless — that you do enough work and then the fight ends.
For some people that may be true. For someone with fifty years of a particular wiring, probably not.
The shift that actually helped me wasn’t finding more willpower. It was stopping the expectation that willpower was the metric. The question isn’t “why can’t I control this?” The question is “what is this, and what does managing it actually look like over time?” Those are very different questions, and they lead to very different places.
If you’re still in the daily argument two years in, this is not evidence you’re doing it wrong. It may simply be evidence of how deep the original wiring goes.
I’ll leave that with you.
🎯 Key Takeaways
- The biomarkers and the brain are on different timelines: Physical results can shift in months. The reward pathway that drove old behaviour may take considerably longer to update — and that’s not failure, it’s the normal sequence.
- Fifty years of wiring doesn’t reset at the six-month mark: Neil’s food relationship traces directly to being put on Coca-Cola at age five. The timeline of the original input matters when you’re measuring the reset.
- The body keeps score: A consistent post-sugar inflammation pattern in Neil’s data (swollen joints, GKI spike, knee instability next morning) changed the framing from “treating myself” to understanding the actual cost.
- The car park is a useful yardstick: Every trip to once a month is measurable progress, even if it doesn’t feel like transformation. Progress doesn’t always announce itself.
- Stopping the expectation that cravings will disappear is itself a shift: What changed wasn’t the craving. It was the relationship to it. That distinction is the whole lesson.
Ready to Start Your Own Rhythm Reset?
If this post resonated — particularly the gap between the physical results and the psychological catch-up — the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide is the starting point for the physical side of the system. It covers eating windows, what to eat, how to structure your days, and how to build from there without white-knuckling it.
The psychological side is what I document here, as it happens, not in hindsight.
👉 Get the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide (free)
💪 Want ongoing support? Join Rhythm Club for £30/month (includes FREE app access, community, and weekly accountability calls)
⚠️ Important: This is educational content based on evidence and personal experience. It is not medical advice. Speak to your GP before making changes to your fasting pattern, diet, or medication.
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