One morning in February 2024, I reached for my inhaler — and stopped halfway through.
I’d been doing that same thing every morning since I was five years old. Forty-six years of it. And for the first time, my chest said nothing. No tightness. No anticipatory wheeze. Just quiet.
I hadn’t done anything specifically for my lungs. No breathing exercises, no lung supplements, nothing aimed at asthma at all. What I had done — over the previous fourteen months — was change what and when I ate.
I’m Neil. I’ve been tracking my health against NHS blood tests for 13 years, and I’ve been off all six of my prescription medications since February 2024. The statins and the gout medication — I’d seen those coming, I’d tracked them. The asthma? I expected to manage that for the rest of my life.
This is the story of what happened instead, and why the pattern it points to is worth understanding — especially if you’ve noticed something feels off but don’t yet have a diagnosis attached to anything.
The Moment I Realised Something Had Changed
Last summer, I visited a friend with seven cats. Seven.
I hadn’t been inside her house in years. I couldn’t. One cat in a room and I’d be reaching for the inhaler within twenty minutes — eyes streaming, chest tightening, breathing through what felt like a damp flannel. Seven cats was simply not a conversation my airways were prepared to have.
Last summer, I went anyway. On purpose. I stayed for five hours. Stroked a couple of them. Had a cup of tea. Sat in the room.
My breathing was elevated. I noticed it. But I didn’t need the inhaler. Within an hour of leaving, I was completely clear.
I assumed I’d got lucky. Probably the cats were calm that day. Probably I’d just happened to have a good lung day.
Then it happened again. And with a long-haired dachshund I’d always had trouble with. And on a four-hour countryside walk through the kind of greenery that used to send me straight back to the car.
At some point, lucky stops being the explanation.
What the Records Actually Show
WMTWL-EVID-0104 covers the full medication record — the Fostair 100mcg/6mcg prescription, two puffs twice daily, running continuously alongside Salbutamol as the rescue inhaler, right up to October 31st, 2023. That was the day I transferred away from my Isle of Wight practice. The prescription ended with the practice change, not because anyone had reviewed whether I still needed it.
The inhalers themselves go back to childhood. The documented tail end just happens to be the most recent record.
February 2024. That’s the month I woke up and my chest didn’t ask for anything. I’d been half-expecting the tightness to come back. It didn’t.
I kept testing.
April 2024 — a long-haired dachshund stayed with us for a week. I used the Salbutamol once. Once, in a week of living with a dog that had historically had me reaching for it within an afternoon.
Summer 2024 — five hours with seven cats. No inhaler.
Countryside walks — three, four hours through proper footpaths, the overgrown kind that used to mean an immediate retreat. Nothing dramatic. I still notice elevated breathing sometimes. The threshold has shifted, not disappeared. But I can manage it without medication.
I’ve needed the inhaler twice since April 2024. Both times around Alan’s dog. One of those was an overnight stay. I’ve been back since and not needed it.
The Question I Kept Asking the Wrong Way
For months, I was asking the wrong question.
I kept looking at this in terms of my lungs. Had they got stronger? Had I somehow desensitised myself through exposure? Had the asthma gone into remission the way some adults experience it?
Then I went back through my food and fasting logs from the previous fourteen months.
The medication ended October 2023. I started eating properly — less ultra-processed food, more real food — around the same time, with it locking in over a few months. The extended fasts started in earnest in early 2024. The first proper long fast was February 2024. Same month the mornings started feeling different.
The lungs weren’t in those logs. What was in those logs was the food. The fasting. The change in pattern.
And then it clicked. I hadn’t done anything for my breathing. I’d apparently done something about the environment my airways were sitting in.
The Mechanism: What Was Actually Going On
Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg — both psychiatrists, published researchers at Columbia and New York Medical College — have documented that slow, controlled breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system. When that happens, the production of pro-inflammatory signalling compounds drops. The two systems — the one that keeps you ready for a threat, and the one that does the repair work — are genuinely antagonistic. You can’t run both at full volume. When one goes up, the other comes down.
I didn’t do deliberate slow breathing exercises. But what I did do — the fasting, the reduction in ultra-processed food — seems, in my case, to have moved my baseline inflammatory state.
There’s an analogy that made this land for me. Imagine having a cold so mild you never actually notice it. No blocked nose, no fever, no day off work. Just a faint, persistent background hum of not-quite-right — one you’ve had so long you’ve forgotten what normal feels like. You wouldn’t know it was there. But the inflammation would be. Quietly, steadily, day after day, nudging your immune system towards dysfunction, wearing at the lining of things, keeping everything on a slightly elevated footing.
That’s chronic low-grade inflammation. Not the acute kind — the red, hot, swollen response that heals a cut in a week. The slow kind. The kind that doesn’t announce itself. The kind that runs in the background for years while the system stays perpetually primed to overreact.
My airways, for forty-six years, were sitting in that environment. Not ill, not broken — just permanently at a higher state of readiness than they needed to be. And every cat, every dachshund, every patch of Timothy grass was enough to push them over.
What I seem to have done is reduce that baseline. Quietened the background. Moved the threshold.
The cats didn’t change. The dog didn’t change. The grass didn’t change.
I apparently did.
Three Things I’d Do Differently
I want to be honest here. This is N=1 — one person, data going back to 2012, one set of changes. I can’t say what would happen for anyone else. But there are three things I’d do differently if I were starting this process again.
The first: I’d have asked the right question sooner. For forty-six years I managed asthma as a respiratory condition. It lived in my chest, so I thought about it in terms of my chest. What I wish I’d understood earlier is that the chest was the location of the symptom, not the location of the problem. If your body is over-responding in any system — joints, sinuses, skin, airways — the question worth asking is: what’s the background inflammatory load? What’s the environment those systems are sitting in? That question is different from “how do I treat the symptom.” It takes longer to answer. In my case it took fourteen months. But it was the right question.
The second: if you’ve made genuine changes to your food quality, your fasting pattern, your inflammatory load — and you haven’t specifically revisited your symptom picture recently — it might be worth doing that. Not stopping anything without talking to your GP first. But asking the question. My GP wasn’t monitoring this. Nobody was going to piece it together except me.
The third is for anyone earlier in this process, who’s noticing things aren’t quite right but doesn’t yet have a diagnosis attached to anything.
If something has been tagged as a fixed condition — a thing you manage, a thing you’ve been told is just part of how you’re built — it might be worth asking whether the condition is the story, or whether it’s a response. My asthma was a response to an inflammatory environment. The environment changed. The response, apparently, changed with it.
That pattern in my blood tests — the inflammation load shifting over fourteen months of different food and extended fasting — isn’t unique to my lungs. That’s a mechanism. And it tends to start shifting years before anyone calls it anything in particular.
I can’t tell you it would be the same for you. But the question is worth asking.
🎯 Key Takeaways
- Symptoms live in one place; the cause often doesn’t: Asthma sits in the chest — but the inflammatory environment it was responding to came from food, fasting patterns, and baseline metabolic state. I asked the wrong question for 46 years.
- Chronic low-grade inflammation has no obvious announcement: It doesn’t feel like much. It runs in the background. But it keeps systems perpetually primed to overreact to triggers that shouldn’t cross the threshold.
- Changing the environment changed the response: The cats, the dog, and the grass didn’t change. Apparently I did. The threshold shifted over fourteen months of reduced ultra-processed food and extended fasting.
- Nobody was going to piece this together except me: The medication ended with a practice transfer, not a clinical review. If you’re tracking your own changes, you’re the one with the timeline.
- N=1 is still data: One person, blood tests going back to 2012, one documented shift. Not a clinical trial. But the question it raises is worth sitting with.
Want to Start Tracking Your Own Pattern?
If this has made you curious about your own inflammatory baseline — the symptoms you manage, the triggers you work around, the things your GP has labelled as fixed — the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide is a good place to start. It covers the food and fasting fundamentals that underpinned the shift I documented here.
It’s free. No catch.
👉 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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