The Architecture of Your Life

How your hands can guide you powerfully in life decisions.

Three Life Threads Woven Together

Man is not destroyed by suffering; he is destroyed by suffering without meaning.

Viktor Frankl

As I wrote about Life, I have come to see life woven together from three threads:

• Health

• Wealth

• Meaning

Health sustains us. It is our vehicle into the world.
Wealth drives us. It is the fuel to move throughout the world.
Meaning enlivens our spirit with purpose and inner drive.

Health can be measured by blood tests and exams.
Wealth can be counted in assets and valuations
Meaning resists measurement. It resides deep within you.

Meaning is immeasurable, unbounded and yet its absence is unmistakable.

Without meaning, health is life without a spirit.
Without meaning, wealth just becomes accumulation.
Without meaning, life is meaningless and being swayed by life’s storms.

Meaning is not a thought, it is the energy of your spirit, that must be honed as a discipline.

The Intelligence of the Body

The body is wiser than we are.

D.H. Lawrence

I am writing this at the end of another three-day fast.

When I discovered I had severe plaque in my heart arteries, it was shocking. I knew intuitively right away that I must adapt my diet to stop the progression of my disease. But I also felt that fasting and modifying my exercise would also be highly complementary to my diet. So I have fasted one day weekly and 2-3 days monthly. After doing this for six months, I’ve now decided to move my 3-day fast to quarterly and continue my OMAD (one meal a day) weekly.

The first day of the fast is habit breaking. 

The second day is mentally hard to do but mental clarity starts.

The third day is physical weakness but strong mental clarity for me now.

When glucose is depleted, the body performs an ancient survival strategy. It turns inwards and starts converting fats into ketones, small fat molecules that can power all the healthy cells of the body. The cancerous cells which can only metabolize glucose suffer and the immune system starts to recycle the weakest cells and organelles like defective or old mitochondria. This is called autophagy, which means self-eating but really it is self-repair and optimization to survive a period of starvation. Growth hormone increases to preserve muscle so one can still be active. After five days, stem cells are activated.

The body preserves what is essential and eliminates what is weak and unnecessary. Diseased or weak cells.

The brain and heart uses ketones and the pathways are changed. The energy is efficient. Seizures cease after four days. This is the basis for the ketogenic diet for people with seizures. It is also the basis to weaken cancer cells.

If the body must eliminate to live, what must the soul eliminate to mean?

Forty Days of Elimination

Man shall not live by bread alone.

Matthew 4:4

As Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the law, The Ten Commandments, he fasted for forty days and nights. He did this three times. The second time to receive the new set of Laws written on tablets of stone and also once more to pray on behalf of his nation that had broken one of the laws.

Elijah, one of the prophets also fasted for forty days when the King and Queen sought to kill him. This too at Mount Sinai, also called Horeb.

Jesus also fasted forty days in the wilderness before beginning His ministry.

Gandhi fasted 21 days in protest three times, each time having to stop his fast due to losing too much weight.

I struggle with just three days. And yet on the second and third day, hunger disappears, I no longer feel attached or dependent on food as my mind seeks to survive. Clarity fills me. Ideas, thoughts and emotions surface that were long dormant or buried.

I started to think deeply about my hands, my body, and numbers and I wrote a book in my heart and my mind. Iwould like to actually write it one day. I have a trilogy of books on meaning. I thought of a trilogy of books on health and also on wealth. I wrote out a high level plan of what they were and will start to put my thoughts … in my newsletter.

I hope it helps you in your life. Here goes.

The Anatomy of Power

Anatomy is Destiny.

Sigmund Freud

In 1543, a young anatomist named Andreas Vesalius stood in a candlelit theatre in Padua and began dismantling centuries of anatomical assumption. Until Vesalius, anatomy had been blindly inherited more than observed. Ancient authorities were copied by routine. Diagrams repeated. Hardly questioned as to veracity.

Vesalius questioned.

He dissected the human hand bone by bone. 27 bones. A choreography of tendons. Cables under tension that produced a symphony of coordinated moves of fingers and hands. A structure of astonishing precision. Our marvelous hands’ structure was breathtaking.

He traced two nerves in particular.

The median nerve governs the thumb, index and half of the middle fingers. It si the nerve of precision. It allows opposition, the thumb to touch the finger, a motion that separates us from most mammals. With it, we write, sculpt, draw and perform surgery. It is the architecture of execution. Power exemplified.

The ulnar nerve, running on the inside of your arm governs the ring, pinky and half of the third finger. Subtler. Less dominant. Yet when injured, grip weakens drastically. Power drains quietly. Coordination dissolves. It strengths and stabilizes. Precision and support.

The body is not random. It is paired and it is balanced.

In cardiology, plaque accumulates millimeter by millimeter. An LDL particle slips beneath the endothelial lining. Inflammation follows. Immune cells seek to contain it and start forming fatty streaks that turn into atheroma, which harden over time, atherosclerosis or calcified plaque. I have too much of this. From fried and heated oil foods.

There is no alarm until arteries are blocked 70% or more or when they are fragile and break off to clot the entire artery. Heart attack. Stroke.

Drift is anatomical.

And your conviction and dreams do not collapse overnight. It erodes by degrees like rock withering by the constant waves over a period of time. Discipline does not disappear dramatically. It loosens molecule by molecule.

Meaning dissolves the same way.

The body organizes strength in two hands. Most of us are right-hand dominant. The right hand signs contracts, lifts weights, builds, executes. It is the hand of power.

The left hand rests closer to the heart. Often less dominant. Harder to write and draw with. Yet necessary. When you tie your shoes, zip up. It stabilizes. It balances. It carries the covenant ring.

Power and proximity.

Execution and alignment.

It dawned on me, as I visualized my fingers in the quiet morning, woken up in the heat of a double layer of pajamas, as my hands and feet get cold when I fast, that the body is hidden wisdom and not merely functional but also instructional. A blueprint to use to design our life, our businesses, our products. Our varied organs organized to sustain and grow life.

Ten fingers. Mean Ten principles to live our lives by. By design, rather than by circumstance, blown by the wind.

The right hand demands training. Strength must be cultivated beore it is trusted. Without discipline, power corrodes and becomes toxic. With structure, conviction decays and disappears.

The left hand demands alignment. Integrity must stablize execution. Gratitude must temper ambition. Humility must steady strength.

Power without heart corrupts.

Heart without power is weak and stagnates.

The Right Hand: Power (Execution)

Power must be trained before it is trusted.

Dr. Kevin Ham

The right hand is: Execution. Discipline. Structure.

Thumb: Strength & Opposition
Symbol: Capability
The thumb makes grip possible. Without it, power collapses. It represents foundational strength and the ability to oppose resistance.

My principle here: Observe and seek truth deeply. Slow down enough to see early signals — in my body, business, relationships, and soul. Catch drift while it is still reversible.

Index Finger: Direction
Symbol: Truth and alignment of aim.
The pointing finger sets trajectory. It determines where force is aimed.

Mine: Choose Truth Over Comfort. Do not negotiate with facts — medical, financial, relational, or spiritual. Face reality quickly. Correction early prevents catastrophe later.

Middle Finger: Backbone
Symbol: Discipline — the structural spine of execution.
The tallest and most central. It stabilizes grip and anchors force.

Mine: Practice Discipline as Reverence. Repetition builds strength. Train when I don’t feel like it. Fast when it’s inconvenient. Guard inputs. Small, daily obedience compounds into strength.

Ring Finger: Covenant
Symbol: Stewardship and responsibility.
Traditionally associated with commitment. It reminds us that power must serve something larger than self.

Mine: Steward, Don’t Possess. What you hold is entrusted. My body, influence, money, time, and intellect are entrusted. I am accountable for how I use them, not how I accumulate them.

Pinky: Stabilization
Symbol: Systems and small daily habits that preserve strength.
Small but essential for grip strength. Often unnoticed until weakened.

Mine: Build Systems That Protect Your Future Self. Structure carries me when willpower fades. Install structure while I’m strong, routines, guardrails, calendar discipline, so that fatigue or emotion cannot undo me.

Master these first. The right hand of power. Without power, intention weakens.

The Left Hand: Heart (Alignment)

Alignment protects what power creates.

Dr. Kevin Ham

The left hand is: Alignment. Humility. Wisdom.

Thumb: Integrity
Symbol: Core moral alignment.
Foundation of character. What you oppose defines you.

Mine: Live as If Heaven Is Watching. Hardest one for me. Make decisions as if God sees the motive, not just the outcome. Optimize for integrity, not applause.

Index Finger: Examination
Symbol: Self-audit and humility.
Turns inward before pointing outward.

Mine: Revise Without Ego. Examine myself quarterly. Tighten what drifts. Admit error quickly. Growth requires correction.

Middle Finger: Perspective
Symbol: Gratitude and balance.
Central stabilizer in times of stress.

Mine: Give Thanks in Gain and Crisis. Crisis carries both Danger & Opportunity. The Chinese character for crisis is made of two characters: Danger & Opportunity. When something good happens, give thanks. When something hard happens, look for refinement.

Ring Finger: Commitment to the Vital Few
Symbol: Protecting what truly multiplies.
Long-term bonds and focus.

Mine: Guard the Vital Few. Small inputs compound. The fractal law. Nature repeats patterns at every scale — arteries, trees, oceans. Identify the 20% of habits, relationships, and decisions that shape 80% of my outcomes — and defend them ruthlessly.

Pinky: Dependence
Symbol: Wisdom through reliance beyond self.
Smallest digit. Essential support.

Mine: Ask, Seek, Knock for Wisdom,  With Confidence. Wisdom is pursued. Do not trust intellect alone. Ask for wisdom before acting. Seek clarity before scaling. Dependence sharpens discernment.

Your turn, Your Hands

Providential Serendipity has five fingers to grab a hold of you and me. Just grab her hand and let her lead.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Look at your hands.

On the right, write five principles of power.
On the left, write five principles of heart.
Keep them short. Behavioral. Non-negotiable. Count them weekly.

See the Appendix below for your Ten Fingers Manifesto Worksheet

Master the right hand first. Then rotate to the left.
Power without heart corrodes. Heart without power stagnates.

Ten fingers. Ten decisions. Write yours. And live them. The hand was never merely mechanical.
It blesses. It builds. It heals. It is lifted in surrender.
Ten fingers. Ten daily decisions.

May my right hand build with courage.
May my left hand remain near the heart.
May both hands stay open before God.

I will not merely study the structure. I will live it.

P.S. If you write your ten principles, send them to me. I would genuinely love to see what governs your power and what guards your heart.

Expect and Attempt

Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.

William Carey

In 1792, William Carey stood before a modest gathering and spoke the sentence above that would echo across centuries and reverberate in my soul and spirit.

Expectation is faith. Attempt is stewardship.

Meaning is not contemplation alone, it is construction. The body removes damaged cells to survive. The soul must remove trivial pursuits to live.

Our ten fingers represent ten decisions based on ten principles to live, repeated daily in varying forms to various people and circumstances. Perhaps this is why it is Ten Commandments and not any other number.

You are already living by some set of principles. The question is whether you chose them. 

One day these hands will tremble, weaken and rest. Before that day comes, let’s use them to live life with intention. Train the hand of power. Steady it with the hand of humility. Keep both open before God and man.

The anatomy was not accidental. It was for our instruction. The body teaches survival. The soul must learn to life.

Save the Life of a Loved One and Friends

Forward my newsletter and Youtube channel to your friends and family. 

Based on statistics, you can help save many of your friends and family from today’s Grim Reapers, the top killer diseases.

You’ll find these articles insightful and helpful as well:

• Implementing Your New Year’s Plan

• The Tests and Scans that Show if You have Plaque

Life-Changing Question

What do your ten fingers tell you?

Fill out the worksheet below.

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TEN FINGERS MANIFESTO WORKSHEET 

Write five Power principles on your Right Hand and five Heart principles on your Left Hand. Each principle should be short, behavioral, and non-negotiable. 

RIGHT HAND: POWER (Execution & Discipline) 

1. Thumb (Strength & Awareness):

________________________________ 

2. Index (Direction & Truth):

________________________________

3. Middle (Backbone & Discipline):

________________________________ 

4. Ring (Covenant & Stewardship):

________________________________ 

5. Pinky (Stability & Systems):

________________________________ 

LEFT HAND: HEART (Alignment & Humility) 

6. Thumb (Integrity & Character):

________________________________ 

7. Index (Self-Examination):

________________________________ 

8. Middle (Gratitude & Perspective):

________________________________  

9. Ring (Vital Few & Commitment):

________________________________ 

10. Pinky (Dependence & Wisdom):

________________________________ 

Weekly Practice: Count them weekly. Master the Right Hand first. Then rotate into the Left Hand. 

Annual Practice: Revise without ego

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Next issue:

Reversing High Blood Pressure in a Week

What Most Doctors Don’t Know

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The Power of Asks

How asks can lead to life pivotal moments, all at once.

4 Small Actions

I dreamed a dream of a life where no disease prevailed, where no hearts ached, where life knew no bounds and the only sounds that echoed were the sounds of glory and praise for life forever and ever.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I often ask “Why?” Why did my friend have to die without notice last year, on February 10, 2025, when he was supposed to catch the early morning flight from San Fran to Vancouver and have lunch with me, celebrate life and enjoy one another’s vitality for life and to do more than what was expected or required of us.

Why? I asked God. Why did my new puppy find her way out of our yard and die? Why such seemingly unreasoning injustice?

I have surmised my own answers after pondering these heartbreaking moments that reverberate throughout my life. Its partner, Grief, following like a diminishing shadow but still ever-present, reminding me of moments we dreamed together, thinking we had much more time together, was suddenly and abruptly cut short.

Then I have many more moments when I ask, “Why not…?” to which answers abruptly emerge with reasons: Not enough time, not enough money, not enough talent, not enough resources, not enough knowledge, not enough focus, parade in rapid succession to lead me to another uneventful day, week and month, and the years pass.

Where did my 55 years go? Why could I not dream more, aspire more, be more, do more, of all that arises in my heart? The chasm between my heart and my actions was as far as the earth is from the sun.

Then a ray of light dawns in the crevices of my clogged arteries, to let light in, and I start to wonder and ponder, “What if I do this?” But the dreams in my heart lay paralyzed, until I have the thought to pray for wisdom and ask, “Lord, grant me wisdom and lead my heart and my hands and feet. Let me ask for wisdom, which comes to all those who ask for Her presence and her many gifts, liberally, without reproach.” I consider this like a law of the universe, having discovered its magical powers in the book of James.

Then I ask, dare I ask, in a quiet whisper that moves from my heart to my hands, to my fingers, to my feet, to ask something that has sprouted within my heart.

I have also discovered another law of the universe, espoused by the Carpenter,

“Ask, and you shall receive. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened to you.” People overlook or misunderstand this wise law, believing it to be merely a pleasant aphorism. Yet it is a cascading, powerful set of laws that move from thought to discovery to focused action. 

Baseball is the sports version of Homer’s Odyssey. The first battle is to adventure from home. The last battle is to return home. This epic repeats over 9 innings. For each of your home runs, there are 3 bases and home. If you do not enter home, you are left stranded on one of the bases of life.

1. Ask (1st base) Most people remain waiting after “Asking,” impatient to receive the actions one must do to proceed to the next step. 

2. Seek. (2nd base) Very few find because they grow weary of seeking. 

3. Knock (3rd base) Those who stand at the door, knock timidly a few times then, depart before it opens. The door to their dreams remains closed, growing more downtrodden with each shrinking attempt.

4. Enter (Home base). When the door opens, you must enter prudently but quickly before it shuts.

When you hear stories of success, the preceding battles of unanswered requests, fruitless searches, and endless slammed doors are often told as fleeting footnotes. However, they are the necessary exercises that build resilience and sprout the roots of a determined will, nourished by tears and newfound insights as each ray of light gets hungrily swallowed by rejection and failure.

Then, there comes a time when one receives the precious insight that:

• While one must ask for help, one must embrace Faith.

• While one may seek to find, one must marry Hope.

• While one may incessantly knock on doors, one must embody Love.
  
  
  
  

Oh My Dear Heart

Wisdom has many daughters. I have embraced three of them. Their names are Faith, Hope and Love.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Do the physical plaques obstructing the blood flow in my arteries and physical heart mirror the obstructions in my emotional and spiritual heart?

What is obstructing the love arising in my heart?

My mind calculates and reasons. With much veracity and logic, I consider my next set of actions, having asked, sought and knocked, with doors opening but my mind shutting them suddenly as it doesn’t make financial sense or is too big a commitment to step into that path, or too scary with too many unknowns, too many uncertainties. Excuses flood in to obstruct this sudden marvel at the door finally opening. I grab ahold of the handle and start to shut the door myself, turning my back on opportunity.

How many doors have I shut myself or not stepped through to embrace this new path?

I decided that I will trust. I will step into that room when the door I asked for opens. How many are able to get to this moment? I recollect all the potentially pivotal moments that passed me by. I have had the courage to step through many doors, but many more I was afraid to step through. Had I trusted and obeyed, how different might my life be?

But I have no regrets. These are lessons, and I can start anew. I can start now… again.

The Wisdom of Ants

Four things on earth are small, but they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people not strong, yet they provide their food in the summer.

Proverbs 30:24-25

I decided to be the title sponsor this year for the Nearness of You cancer charity concert fundraiser, in honour of the late Grammy-award-winning saxophonist Michael Brecker. It is produced by Michael’s late wife, Susan Brecker, with proceeds supporting cancer research at Columbia University Medical Center, specifically the work of my dear friends, Dr. Azra Raza and Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. My heart said, “Yes, go for it!” But my mind screamed, “But you have no time, and why not use this for your own dreams?” I battled this great war between my heart and my mind. And, this time, my heart prevailed. I intuited that this path would open the doors of my heart and many other doors… quite quickly.

We booked our flights for a week from February 4th to 11th, and oh, what a journey it was.

We arrived at Azra’s temporary place, the Mamdani’s residence. Azra had just sold her home, and she was “squatting” at her friends’ place. She wanted us to stay with her. The Mamdanis were travelling, and their son, the new mayor of NYC, had moved into his official residence at Gracie Mansion, so I would occupy his room. Wow, that was surreal. As we stepped into the living room, we were introduced to another guest. It was supposed to be just us having dinner with just Azra, but this intriguing guest, who had just flown in from Portland and was supposed to meet Azra an hour before we arrived, had taken a nap that went unheeded, and arrived just 5 minutes before us. Azra asked if he could join us for dinner. Of course, we said yes. 

His name was Ryan, and he was the genius who built the majestic ant colony at the American Museum of Natural History. We had just visited in December. It was amazing to see the leaf-cutter ants carry leaves 20x their weight. Ryan likened it to us carrying a 7-foot plank around for miles on end. He told us about how he brought the queen ant from a farm in Africa all the way to NY to make it her home. He described the many types of ants and their species, including a fascinating story about slave ants.

I had always marvelled at the instructions in Proverbs (6:6 and 30:24) to consider the wisdom and ways of the ants. “Consider her ways and be wise”. When I asked him about these two proverbs, he explained them to me very vividly. I had been asking God for such wisdom. Ryan offered to give us a private tour of the ants at the museum with his friend Matthew. What a privilege it was to receive even more wisdom from them. Serendipity is what Azra and I both remarked—that Ryan slept in and missed his date with Azra, so we could meet.

On our tour, we learned that another fellow ant lover is a famous actress whom Azra would love to meet one day. I believe their shared love of ants and the power of serendipity will one day connect and bind them. Who would have known there were so many ant lovers?!

The Heart Surgeons: Fragile Arteries

Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.

Proverbs 22:29

The day of my flight, Azra asked me to call her. I wonder why? She asked if I would like to meet the head of cardiac surgery, but we would need to leave at 8 am. That would be 5 am PST. I said, “Yes!” Azra’s older brother was also a cardiac surgeon at Columbia University.

When I discovered I had major arterial plaques last year, I asked Azra to ask her brother, “Can plaques be reversed?” A simple “No.” “Has he ever seen any possibility?” Another “No.” But I was convinced otherwise because Dr. Esselstyn was also a cardiac surgeon, and his methods and dietary protocol showed otherwise. He had published studies in major medical journals and had written the book, “Preventing and Reversing Heart Disease.” I wondered why so few present-day doctors knew of him, even though he worked at the esteemed Cleveland Clinic.

A deep bow of respect to all doctors for their sacrifices and their hearts for helping people.

Hearing the history of cardiac surgery, surgical residents answering hard questions reminded me of my days as a resident doctor. When I saw the beating heart and the tiny 1.2-6 mm coronary vessels, it dawned on me how little plaque, just a few mm to half a cm, could end someone’s life suddenly. The fragility of life.

I showed Azra’s brother, the cardiac surgeon, the scans showing that I had reversed the plaque in my carotid arteries in just 3 months. He asked how I did it. Diet. But suddenly Azra beckoned me to follow her, so I got up and left before I had the chance to explain exactly how I did it.

Here I was among the most accomplished cardiac surgeons in America. How did this happen? I wondered.

Providential Serendipity

The Invisible Hand plants my feet along a path that opens new worlds with one step. Step after step is a whole new world.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Providential Serendipity. These were the words that imprinted into my heart during my magical week in NY. I felt a guiding hand, which President Washington referred to as the Invisible Hand, leaving His fingerprints along the path of my feet.

Auction Dinner

Most of our paths cross unnoticed but once a while, lightning strikes to fertilize and electrify our hearts to one another.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Azra wanted us to attend a pre-concert dinner auction. As we arrived, I was introduced as ‘Kevin from Canada.’ After dinner, Azra spoke about her mission to cure cancer and how she was finally on the verge of achieving it with her Stentinel. I wholeheartedly believe in her and her vision, and I invested a significant amount to jump-start her seed round.

Then, we went around the room doing introductions. My turn. I told the group how I met Azra and, upon reading her book, “The First Cell”. I was so moved and inspired by her life mission that I had the thought to ask her if she would like to write a book together on preventing cancer. She said to call her and said we should not only write a book together, but how about doing a documentary together, with Dr. Sid Mukherjee, Susan Brecker, the Nearness of You Concerts and the vision of curing cancer. I stepped through that door. In 2024, I arranged for Chris Froome, 4x Tour de France winner to come to Vancouver to lead a charity bikeathon for Azra. So Chris stayed at my place, and about 80 of us rode together with him. Can you imagine? Chris gave me one of his yellow TDF winning jerseys for my birthday the day after. Wow.

The next person said they were one of Azra’s patients in her book. Donna. For 30 years, Azra has been her oncologist. She spoke about how Azra empowered her to make decisions and that she believes empathy and care for her are what have kept her alive. She has travelled from Chicago to New York every two weeks for blood transfusions for the last 18 years to be treated by Azra. We had briefly spoken while getting our food. We connected even then. But after hearing her story, I fell in love with her spirit. She is 88. Azra had mentioned her a few times. We spoke heart to heart afterwards, and I must have hugged her many times out of joy and care. We instantly became close friends. How quickly hearts connect. We met many other wonderful people. It was an inspiring evening.

Providential serendipity visited us yet again.

The Nearness of You Concert

No longer here, I see you everywhere, feel you everywhere, hear you whisper and shout, telling me to go on and not succumb to Grief but dress her up with Compassion and Purpose.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I had invited 16 guests to join me at the concert, dear friends, some of whom I had not seen in decades. It was held at the magnificent Lincoln Centre. Hugh Jackman would be speaking, and James Taylor would be singing. I was seated next to Hugh. I visualized what words I would speak to him if given the opportunity. 

1. “I so wanted to meet your father after I heard you speak about him on a podcast with Tim Ferriss. He seemed like such a great man and had values that I cherish. A devout faith and an ever-encouraging father.” 

2. “I also admire and honour how you held the first charity event for Azra and Sid in your home 16 years ago.”

3. “I love your movies, especially The Greatest Showman and Les Misérables. Musicals which make my heart sing.”

4. “I was a huge fan of X-Men and Wolverine growing up, especially of X-Men comic book issues #136-142, Days of Future Past.”

But besides me saying, “Hi, I’m Kevin Ham,” I wouldn't get that chance, as he had to leave for an emergency at home. He did say, “Hi Kevin!” And in those 15 minutes sitting beside him listening to the singers, I again thought, “Providential serendipity.”

Hugh Jackman and me :)

James Taylor came up to the stage and sang the theme song of the concert, Nearness of You. I don’t know what happened, but I suddenly felt the wells of my heart proceed out of my eyes. As each chord he struck drew up the buckets of my inner wellspring while he tenderly sang the lyrics for Michael Brecker, the Grammy award-winning jazz musician, who passed away from leukemia two decades prior but still sings to us through his saxophone in these charity concerts for the research of Dr. Azra Raza and Dr. Sid Mukherjee. 

The song, in its raw, powerful authenticity, struck a deep chord in my soul. The echoing question reverberating throughout my entire being was, "Can I do more?" Am I living to my fullest and being bold enough to stand up to such a great monstrous disease, Cancer, yet with the humility to bow the knees of my heart in prayer for wisdom, for strength and courage, not only for myself, but for all those infected by this and for those it lies in wait.

The NY Academy of Science

Providential Serendipity has five fingers to grab a hold of you and me. Just grab her hand and let her lead.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I had invited Nick Dirks, the President and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, to the concert and briefly spoke with him that evening. He has the look of Einstein, but more distinguished. Azra had introduced my daughter and me to her good friend, as we were curious about music schools in NY, since we love Broadway. She invited her husband and their brilliant son, who teaches Paradise Lost, which is our book to read this year. We connected like lightning in those short two hours, talking about Darwin, AI, cycling, education, philosophy, Paradise Lost, health, music, movies, Broadway, and salsa dancing. That first meeting left a lasting impression.

We met Nick for an early dinner, just before our Hamilton show. We had just filmed part of the documentary with Sid, Susan, Azra and me with a sweet, resilient Broadway dancer fighting cancer. Sid dedicated a toast to two enlightened souls. Man is enlightened by virtue of two attributes: his ability to reason and his fight for emancipation (freedom). The highest level of emancipation is from disease, to be free of disease, and the “Emperor of All Maladies” (Sid’s Pulitzer Winning biography on cancer) is cancer, the concert held to raise awareness and solidarity to find the solutions to this devastating disease.

The Manhattan traffic moved like cars with flat tires. We were 30 minutes late. He graciously texted, ‘No hurry.’

We got out two blocks early from the Uber and started running.

We spoke about the concert. I told the story of how I met Azra. He told us his first meetings with Azra and later Sid. He then spoke about his work at the NY Academy of Science. The prizes they awarded in US, UK and Israel to promising aspiring scientists. $250,000 Blavnik Awards. I had not had the pleasure of meeting the Blavniks, though they were at the concert. 

He suggested during our meal that I visit and that I would meet very interesting people and also fascinating projects. I, of course, was interested. He asked if I knew Reid Hoffman. I adored Reid as I often listened to his podcast, Masters of Scale. He founded Paypal and Linkedin. But I loved that he majored in Philosophy. Nick also did. I told Nick I wished I had studied Philosophy as well. Philo = Love. Sophia = Wisdom. The Love of Wisdom. I loved Wisdom, and I ask and seek her daily. I told him I would love to interview Reid one day. He said he would gladly introduce him to me. I was delighted. 

As we finished our meal and took a last-minute photo, he quickly said he would love for me to be part of the Board of Governors of the NY Academy of Sciences. I was focused on capturing a photo of us, and his request only partially registered. As my wife and I sat eating dessert, I asked her if I had heard correctly that Nick was asking me to join the Board of Governors. I quickly looked at who was on the Board of Governors. He had mentioned the former President of Yale. 

I thought I must have heard incorrectly. I texted Azra that I think Nick asked me to be on the Board. She was overjoyed and told me that the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Edison and Einstein were once members. That it would be a momentous opportunity. I texted Nick right before Hamilton started. ‘I thought you were asking if I’d like to be on the Board of Governors, but it didn’t register until later that that was what you were proposing.’

Hamilton had inspired me so much 8 years ago. Just after I had watched it, I told my wife that I would one day make my own inspiring musical. I wrote the first and second drafts years ago, but have been too busy to make the dream a reality. 

I had momentary questions intrude upon the show. “Could it be?” “How?” “Why?” ‘What does this mean?”

I already had so many Providential Serendipities in these few days. I had intuited, when I decided to stay for a week, that many doors would open for me to step through. Each day was expressed in “It was the best of times.” It was the worst [coldest] of times.” It was the coldest Feb in NY. -25 degrees Celsius. But the weather would not freeze our warm, connected hearts and the warm embrace of the Providential Hand.

The next morning, Nick replied, ‘Yes, I was asking you to join the Board of Governors for the New York Academy! It would be a privilege to be able to work with you on exciting projects in areas of interest in science and technology.”

My life reads like a novel. Like a dream. I write to capture the feelings and thoughts of my heart. To remind myself to dream, to be heart, to have Faith, Hope and Love as my guides, following Providential Serendipity. In turn, inspire each of you to dream with Hope, to live with Faith, and to love Love.

Providential Serendipity. Reach out and grab hold of her hand.

• Ask and receive. With Faith.

• Seek and find. With Hope.

• Knock and open. With Love.

My heart is overflowing with these three daughters of Wisdom.

My gratitude and love to: 

• The Mamdani’s, for allowing us to stay in their private residence.

• Ryan, the real Antman, for his love of nature and ever cheerful wisdom.

• Donna, the resilient architect with a heart of joy.

• Dr. Raza, for opening his hands and his heart to me.

• Sid, for enlightening our souls.

• Susan, for her beautiful heart

• Nick, for his endearing heart and visionary soul.

• Azra, for her friendship and love.

The marriage of Providence and Serendipity

Save the Life of a Loved One and Friends

Forward my newsletter and Youtube channel to your friends and family. 

Based on statistics, you can help save many of your friends and family from today’s Grim Reapers, the top killer diseases.

You’ll find these articles insightful and helpful as well:

• The Shock of Death

• The Tests and Scans that Show if You have Plaque

Life-Changing Questions

What is your ask? 

What do you seek? 

What door shall you knock on? 

Who or what shall open unto you?

Just write the first answers that enter your heart.

Grab ahold of Providential Serendipity’s hands and embrace Faith, Hope and Love with all your heart and soul.

Next issue:

Reversing High Blood Pressure in a Week

What Most Doctors Don’t Know

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

Stats Say You Likely Have Heart Plaque

Numbers point you to the truth

Getting to 100 Years

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.

A.A. Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh)

We just celebrated my father’s 90th birthday. He grew up for 22 years in a small town in the countryside of Korea, with a population of just under 1400 people. He dreamed of getting an education and making a decent living, so he went to the nearest big town and became a miner. He won the ‘lottery’ by being exported as a miner to Germany in 1965 and then found his way to Toronto, Canada, with $100 borrowed dollars. He quickly found a place for $5 a month and got a job at Ford in London, Ontario.

How grateful and thankful I am to my father for all his hard work, and to both him and my mother for giving me the opportunity to grow up in Canada, get a proper education, and encourage me to be the best I can be. I can never live up to all the sacrifices they made for our families, so I try my very best to pay it forward to my family, my friends, and my colleagues. I have a strong prayer to be a healer and help others heal and grow into the fullness of their human potential.

May my father continue to grow and improve in his twilight years.

As I started my YouTube channel to reach and help more people. I received many comments saying I was AI or that it was unbelievable, with no proof.

It is unbelievable! So I decided to dedicate the next few newsletters to showing my reversal and why I believe this will also reverse the plaque in my heart arteries.

Critical Insights

Many times we are told but we don’t really understand what is truly being said until we fall or fail.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Human nature does not believe what it cannot see. Only those who believe the unseen can make the unseen a miracle from the impossible.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I gained some very critical insights as I watched my son compete in his power-lifting competition. He’s lifting 446 lbs squat, 342 bench and 535 lbs deadlift. To do that, he keeps track of all his calories and macros (carbs, fat, protein). I realized it was almost like a scientific formula. Nutrition, power, muscles. Powerlifts.

Why wouldn’t the biology and physics of arterial health and plaque be the same? I wondered just how many calories and macros I was eating. I downloaded the food app he used. MacroFactor (I’m sure there are many more), and he taught me how to use it. I had the thought that morning, I was eating too much fat on my ‘10% low fat vegan diet’.

I had been looking up the fat content of the previous day’s meal and was shocked to see that I was consuming 60-90g of fat daily instead of Esselstyn’s diet, which allotted: <18g or 10% of calories as fat.

In my first three months, my meals were simple: 

• Steelcut oatmeal (↓ LDL 10%) with chia seeds and flax seeds (for fibre and omega 3s). Berries. With 2 tbsp of natto (Vit K2 & nattokinase). Spirulina (↓ LDL 10%). (already 28g fat)

• Red grapefruit (↓ LDL 5%). 

• 2 Ancient grain sourdough bread, sliced apple/pear, arugula, balsamic vinegar.

• Green tea tablet.

• 50 ml pomegranate juice

• Salad, beans, veggies. 

• Whole wheat chickpea or lentil pasta, beans, tomato sauce, onions, garlic

• Or whole wheat ancient grain (einkorn crust) pizza, green peppers, mushrooms, olives, pineapple, low-fat tomato sauce, caramelized onions

• About 45g fat, including meals.

But then I started 

• Doubling my chia (16g fat), flaxseed (16g fat), and natto (16g fat).

• Swapped my green tea tablet for 1-2 oat milk matchas (8-16g fat)

• Edamame (8g fat)

• Just this totalled 64g-72g of fat not even including my meals.

No wonder my LDL went from 61, ApoB 45 in Aug 2025 to LDL 79 and ApoB 70 Jan 8, 2026.

Esselstyn only saw major reversal on his diet when LDL and ApoB were less than 50. I had a reversal in my carotids at LDL 61 and ApoB 45. The key here is that my ApoB was less than 50. If I had continued this, I would have made more progress in my heart vessels. At ApoB 70, it is merely the arrest of plaque. But I want a reversal.

I adjusted my diet to target precisely a 10% low fat vegan diet. <18g fat daily. (see the Appendix).

The 4 Grim Reapers:

You think you are safe but each Grim Reaper visits you with stealth, silence, innocence, but hidden and then all of a sudden reveals himself.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I read a study that said that if you eliminate four diseases from your life, your life expectancy and health rise drastically.

• Eliminate heart disease and cancer, and your healthspan improves from ~80 to 89 years.

• Eliminate diabetes and hypertension, and your healthspan increases to 97 years.

Only 2.5% of people in a developed nation reach the age of 100. But the healthspan is much lower than the lifespan in today’s age.

I want to address each of these Grim Reapers this month. I have been helping a few of my close friends rapidly reverse their Grim Reapers and run far from them. It’s quite remarkable how quickly the body remembers what normal is when you restore the right conditions. It then quickly forgets what led to progressive disease.

First, Heart Disease or more specifically, heart attacks and strokes. It is quite shocking to me just how prevalent this is. Dr. William Osler, a prominent physician who passed away in 1919, had never seen a heart attack. Isn’t that unfathomable? He practiced and taught at top hospitals in Toronto, founded Johns Hopkins and taught in London.

The first documented case of heart attacks was published in 1912 by Dr. Herrick. Of course, there were heart attacks, but the point is that they were extremely rare. One of my mentors was a young doctor at the biggest hospital in Seoul, Korea, in 1975, and he saw one or two heart attacks a year. Now heart attacks are the #1 killer worldwide. What happened?

You Likely Have Plaque in Your Arteries

Don’t be like the ostrich which buries its head to any thought of danger. Look inside of you and seek the truth.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Look at the study below. Look at the prevalence of plaque in the coronary (heart) arteries at the different ages. Let’s just look at the higher threshold of 0.5mm of plaque. Remember that the coronary arteries are just 3-7 mm and narrow to 1.2 mm.

• 17% of 13-19 year olds

• 37% of 20-29 year olds

• 60% of 30-39 year olds

• 71% of 40-49 year olds

• 85% of >50 year olds

I cannot unsee this image as I see people all around me. How do I warn them? That they don’t suffer the same fate that my beloved friend Rob did last Feb 10, 2025? 

Recently, my good female friend in her early 70s heeded my advice and got a calcium heart scan, and her score was 100. She thought she was safe, but was shocked by the high amount of calcified plaque in her heart. 

A doctor friend in Germany, a decade younger than me, in his 40s, had a calcium score of 100. 

My brother had a score of 7. Low at 52 years old, but any score >0 means you have calcified plaque in your arteries, which means you also have soft plaque, which has not yet calcified. 

My wife had a score of 0, and I advised her to wait to do a CT angiogram (the scan that shows soft plaque) because her carotid ultrasound was 0.

Your Health:

I’ve just started a YouTube channel to educate others about the first principles of health and our most common diseases.

• How I Reversed My Plaque in 3 Months

• Stop Eating These 3 Foods (Heart Attack Warning)

• Top 3 Foods that Helped Me Clear My Arteries

Subscribe, like and share with your friends and family. I believe that through this, we can save many lives and prevent a lot of suffering through health education.

Why Heart Attacks and Strokes Attack Us

Silent, soft, unseen continuous waves of disease whisper quietly at first but when unheard and unheeded, it announces its presence with a bang. Listen and heed.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Look at my Left Carotid artery. See that plaque inside? It’s about 25% of the artery! This is from August 1, 2024. The ultrasonographer said I had more than usual for my age. I thought, “Yes, I knew I would have plaque.” Concerning. But what could I do? It was because of all the junk food I ate for decades when I was younger. I would just live a healthy life from now on, so it wouldn’t progress. I thought it wouldn’t be a problem until 20-30 years later, and functionally, it didn’t limit me at all. Boy, was I foolish!

We are mistaken when we think that a heart attack or stroke arises suddenly out of the blue, causing death in 25% of first time evidence of plaque in arteries and suffering and disability with ongoing progression for the rest of one’s life.

Silently, stealthily, this plaque has been invading for decades and strikes in the late 40s to 70s. Atherosclerosis is not a sudden ambush, but a continuous infiltration of the vessel wall by the diet and lifestyle we lead. It starts in our early teenage years, or even in childhood, and progresses like the waves that chip away at the rocks. Its onslaught continues unabated, and we don’t see its face until this Grim Reaper decides it's time to reveal himself to you and the world.

As arteries harden, blood vessels have a harder time dilating and expanding. The endothelial cells of blood vessels no longer produce nitric oxide, which expands the blood vessels. This leads to high blood pressure.

More than 50% of Americans have high blood pressure. But this is a relatively easy fix. If you know how.

Reversing My Clogged Neck Arteries

What goes up must come down. What infiltrates us can also be driven out if the natural healing process of the body is enhanced and unimpeded.

Dr. Kevin Ham

This is a cross-section of my left common carotid artery. See the plaque in the middle of the photo? August 1, 2024. A year later, I reversed all this plaque and the thickening in my carotid artery wall, which you can see is marked at L 0.14 cm (1.4 mm), as measured by the Carotid Intima Media Thickness (CIMT) test.

Here is my carotid ultrasound on August 19, 2025. No more plaque! And CIMT is 0.86mm.

• 25% plaque → 0% plaque

• CIMT 1.4mm → 0.86 mm (38% reduction) in 3 months

This is almost miraculous. Why do I say 3 months instead of a year, as the previous ultrasound was a year ago? It’s because I started my reversal protocol on May 9, 2026 (3 months prior to this US), when I discovered I had such a high calcium score.

My doctor friends were very skeptical, and so I repeated my Carotid ultrasound 5 weeks later on September 23, 2025.

• Still no visible plaque in both carotids

• CIMT 0.86mm → 0.84 mm (2.3% reduction) in 1 month

Most drug studies show a 0.04mm change in a year at best, and that’s considered great for heart disease. The food studies I’ve found are astounding in their ability to reverse plaque in the carotids. I talk about them a lot (read this blog post).

Since my CIMT is normal now, my body doesn’t need to repair and heal it as drastically as it did when it was diseased and full of plaque and inflammation.

Here’s what my full report says:

Note that for my age of 55, a CIMT > 0.837mm is abnormal. I went from 1.4mm (worse than an 85 year old) to high normal for my age. I was so happy to be average.

And still no plaque visualized in both carotid vessels!

Reversal Proof

Human nature is to believe on sight but not on first principles. Only the passage of time with visible evidence can turn doubters into believers. Oh how faith requires miracles sight unseen. That is the power of the human spirit, to see what others do not, believe what others cannot and yet do what is seemingly impossible because of belief. It has been thus all throughout the ages.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Figure 1  Coronary angiograms of the distal left anterior descending artery before (left) and after (right) 32 months of a plant-based diet without cholesterol-lowering medication, showing profound improvement.

I don’t understand why all doctors have not read the esteemed Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr.’s book, Preventing and Reversing Heart Disease. Why isn’t he world famous? He has a book, published his findings in medical journals, has spoken at many conferences, is currently in his 90s, and follows his low-fat vegan diet. He has cured many of his worst patients with his protocol, and many others who have followed his advice. It certainly requires 2-3 years of discipline and consistency. 

I wish I had him as my health coach and doctor, but I have the benefit of his documented process and studies as well as his talks, which I have studied extensively. Some things I only start to understand with the passage of time. I learn much of it through my own personal experience and by helping others in their health journey. I feel so fortunate and blessed to have read this book in 2014. I had found it in the sale section of a Bible college bookstore. It was truly an answer to a prayer to God to make me a healer. I was a medical doctor but I didn’t know how to heal today’s killer diseases. But I would forget about this book until the results of my CT Calcium scan revealed I had a lot of calcified heart plaque on May 5, 2025.

One of my goals is to write a book in a few years about my insights and learnings to carry on Dr. Esselstyn’s work. I wish I could speak to him. My good friend Dr. Azra Raza asked me to call her today, as I am flying to NY to attend her charity Jazz concert for cancer. She said she wanted to introduce me to the Head of Surgery and Cardiac Surgery at Columbia University. She wanted to hopefully collaborate with them about my miraculous results and protocols. I am so busy with my AI company, but I’ve learned that health, wealth and meaning are three threads that intertwine in life, and we must advance all three to live our fullest lives. I will let God lead my path and feet.

My Amazing Protocol for my Eye & Heart

Sometimes we have to improvise and pioneer a new path for our own personal journey, as we are each unique special beings travelling our own path.

Dr. Kevin Ham

My recent amazing news is two-fold:

When I first started treatment for macular degeneration, I used to get a shot in each of my eyes every month. Imagine a large needle in both your eyeballs every month! That was me up until three years ago at age 53.

I received my first eye shot in 3 years on Feb 2 and had been thinking, “What if I need only to get eye shots every 3 years from now on...? Or maybe never again?”

While I was waiting for my second eye shot, my eye doctor looked at my eye scans and said I was healing remarkably well and that we should monitor it over the next three months. She asked me what I was doing. I briefly told her my eye protocol. “Ok, see you in 3 months,” she said. What? No eye shot today? She said that I didn’t need it. Wow! I was thrilled. 

The new protocol that I had devised to treat both my heart reversal and eye reversal was radical yet simple. I knew how to do my eye protocol, which is a high-fat diet, and my heart protocol, which is a low-fat diet, but how do I do both? I had an idea and implemented it mid January. It’s premature to talk about it, so maybe in 6 months, when I get my next heart scans and eye scans. Please wish me luck.

1. Reversing Obstructed Heart Blood Flow:

The second great news (see the first one below in the Appendix) for me is that my heart flow past my largest plaque obstruction is now in the normal zone, instead of being risky.

In August 2025, I underwent a CT Heartflow, which uses a contrast dye injected into the veins to visualize my arteries. My FEF (Functional Effective Flow) or FFR was 75%, meaning 75% of the blood flowed past the obstruction. This is quite good considering that the artery is obstructed 77%. It’s why I have no symptoms and can ride up mountains while still placing in the top 10% of 5000 riders in the hilly 122 km Gran Fondo rides I do annually.

I repeated the CT Heartflow on Jan 8, 2026, 4.5 months later, and my FEF increased from 75% to 80% (the yellow vessel, my D1), the lower zone of normal. If I can get 5% more blood flow every 4-5 months, then within a year at 90% blood flow, I will be fantastic.

Anatomical plaque changes in the heart take about 12-18 months and accelerate after 18 months when the body chemistry is right. The carotids are much faster to reverse because they are straighter and larger in diameter.

I imagine it’s like waiting for water to boil. It takes a while to boil, but once it starts, it can boil rapidly. The first year is plaque remodelling. I’ve noticed that most of my calcified plaque is thinner and more spread out, rather than like a big mountain in my previous scans. 

My next CT scan will be at month 14, so I should start seeing anatomical changes. I also believe that since my ApoB and LDL were too high for reversal from months 4 to 8, I didn’t make as much progress as I could have had I been more vigilant and thoughtful in implementing the essentials of the protocol. I had thought that if it was good, it would be better to eat more of that particular food. But I was wrong.

I am still learning what each food does and why, and that, like a recipe, timing, quality and quantity of ingredients matter much. The body is biological and adheres to the scientific laws of chemistry, physics, and mathematics. I seek to discover these basic health laws of the body, and of each organ, in this amazing journey I am blessed to be on.

If you wish to reverse most of your diseases, read Esselstyn’s book. I’ve found ways to enhance and accelerate some parts of healing and reversal. I’ve seen remarkable results with the few friends I'm coaching on my Reversal protocols. In due time, I will write about them as I realize that people need to ‘see the proof’ to believe and even then, it’s hard to believe.

Save the Life of a Loved One and Friends

Forward my newsletter and Youtube channel to your friends and family. 

Based on statistics, you can help save many of your friends and family from today’s Grim Reapers, the top killer diseases.

You’ll find these articles insightful and helpful as well:

• The Shock of Death

• The Healing Power of Nitric Oxide

• Another Shock to the Heart

Life-Changing Question

Are the 4 Grim Reapers Silently Progressing in Me?

Don’t just think about it, take the steps to get a baseline and see if you have these 4 Grim Reapers silently invading you, until it’s too late. That way you can take action early, before it is too late. Prevention and proactive is key to today’s chronic (takes a long time) diseases and killers.

Next issue:

Reversing High Blood Pressure in a Week

What Most Doctors Don’t Know

Appendix

I adjusted my diet to target precisely a 10% low fat vegan diet. <18g fat daily.

• Fat < 18g/day

• Cut chia and flax seed (will only take flax when I have space for my daily fat allotment)

• Revert back to green tea tablets (save 8-16g fat of oat milk lattes)

• Reduce soy drastically (tofu, edamame) - too much fat

• Lower LDL: Added 5g of psyllium husk (10g total) before meals (or after) - lowers LDL 10%

• Nitric Oxide: Primarily salads, greens every meal

• Antioxidant/antiinflammatory: green tea, pomegranate juice 50ml, ginger/tumeric shots daily

• HbA1c 5.0% by March 31 to reduce glycation

• Protein: Lentils, black beans (chickpeas sparingly) for protein 85-100g/day. 

• Fruits: berries, apple and 

• adjust based on Feb labs

• Get my TG 107 back to 47 (norm for me) but I was consuming too much fruit (went overboard)

• Healing:

• 2 meals a day to do Intermittent fasting 18 hours and eat in a 6-7 hour window

• Continue weekly one day fast for autophagy and healing

• Bloodflow: 

• Start weight lifting in addition to pullups on weekdays. Start core exercises: situps, wide pushups and squats.

• Exercise 4-5 times a week with HIIT 3x/week. I reduced exercise in Oct-Dec as was so busy.

Focus on no sleep debt. My sleep requirements are 6h 47m with 1h+ of deep sleep and 1h+ of REM.

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

Implementing Your New Year’s Plan

Something to Live By

I will govern my life, and my thought, as if the whole world were to see the one, and to read the other.

Seneca

I met up with a dear friend, Connie, in San Fran, and she gave me a gift, an old book she had found at the library, which was selling all of their books. She loved it so much that she thought I would love it as well, since she knew I loved old, undiscovered books that felt like lost treasures and filled the soul. They had a second copy for sale!

“Something to Live By” was published in 1945, and my edition is its 18th printing, from October 1963. As I opened up to read the intro and then the ending, it lit up my heart. Dorothy Kopplin had compiled the writings that touched her heart throughout her life, and it appears she had not much longer to live when she wrote this book for her son.

I told my friend it was like discovering Tolstoy’s last book, “A Calendar of Wisdom” also known as “The Path of Life”, which he deemed as his greatest contribution to humanity. He had summited the literary world with War and Peace, yet found no contentment even after he had accomplished his lifelong dreams. He spent the last ten years of his life compiling the wisdom of other wise people throughout history and adding his personal thoughts for each day of the year. Priceless.

As I read “Something to Live By”, it was a book I instantly recognized as Priceless. I read the first chapter, “What is Happiness,” and thought I must write about each chapter in my newsletter. It felt like Emily Dickinson’s sister discovering her collection of poetry after she died, or Mendelssohn reviving Bach 70 years after his death. I’ve used a few quotes from this chapter in this newsletter.

What does ‘something to live by‘ mean for you? And, what is happiness for you? What are the prevailing thoughts, principles, and frameworks in which you view life and your place in it?

I have asked myself these questions for decades and know some things for certain. The pivotal moments, experiences, and decisions that shaped who I am today.

Have you deeply pondered and asked yourself these essential questions, as the busyness of life buzzes all about you?

Your Health:

I’ve just started a Youtube channel to educate others about the first principles of health and our most common diseases.

How I Reversed My Plaque in 3 Months
Stop Eating These 3 Foods (Heart Attack Warning)

Subscribe, like and share with your friends and family. I believe that through this, we can save many lives and prevent a lot of suffering through health education.

Implementing Your New Year’s Plan

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on the dial; we should count time by heart throbs. He most lives who THINKS most, FEELS the noblest, ACTS the best.

Phillip James Bailey, A Country Town

What 3 Values Do you Live by and Aspire to?

1.

2.

3.

Mine are:

1. Love  2. Honour 3. Glorify. 

I truly try to practice and live these three values. I often fall short. If I had to add a 4th, it would be Humility. A 5th would be Gratitude. This would be akin to Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues and how he practiced them.

But as I distilled the practicalities of life, I have focused on 3 Main Pillars:

1. Health

2. Wealth

3. Meaning

And its 4 dimensions of: Physical, Intellectual, Emotional and Spiritual

Some of you wanted to see my New Year’s plan. I hesitate not because I don’t have one, but because the moment I show you my plan, I take on more accountability. It reveals my deep inner heart, although still on the surface. They show what I aspire to, want, fear, what I am fighting for and what I’ve decided is “This is going to me!”

But let me first explain why your plan really matters and why most plans fail.

Why Most Plans Fail

Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz

Your brain’s first priority is to keep you safe, to make you survive today and tomorrow and as long as possible. It isn’t engineered to make you noble. It’s designed to first make you efficient.

Survival instincts to feed hunger, thirst, sleep, arousal, mood, deep in the centre of our brains lies the command centre, the hypothalamus, relentlessly keeping you alive and seeking comfort.

This instinct for efficiency is what sabotages New Year’s resolutions.

A new year, a new start: your higher self, your prefrontal cortex, wants meaning, love, and growth in your soul and spirit, sacrificing any hardships and short-term gratification for long-term, meaningful outcomes. This higher self is not rational. It is profoundly emotional and spiritual.

But your basic self wants you not to suffer, to go through seemingly unnecessary risk and just be comfortable, make it easy, shortcut or hack your way to results and outcomes and to maintain your status quo. Why risk anything?

But to stay the same in an ever-changing world and an ever-changing you is riskier than venturing, growing, and fulfilling the deep-seated ideals of your heart.

So the goal of New Year’s plan is not motivation, but a rewiring from effortful intention to a sense of your true identity.

It is to strive for the process of becoming and not merely the result. This takes ‘work on yourself’ from the inside first. Mindset. Spiritset. And Physicalset.

The hardest is to go from 0 to 1. Whether it be in business, health, wealth, or meaning. Going from 1 to 2 is next. Then 2 to multiplying is much easier. Most of the world is used to this third stage, where systems are already built and determined. Very few as they get into their 30s, 40s and beyond, like going from 0 to 1. When you were younger, going from 0 to 1 was natural. But it got educated out of you as ‘risk’. You learned to walk. Run. Ride a bike, Learn languages. Study new topics. Read many books. Write. Create. How often do you learn a new thing? Set an impossible goal. We called that Daydreaming. How often do you daydream? How often do you try to make that daydream into reality? Compared to when you were much younger?

I am a perpetual daydreamer. But I am now 55 and realize I need to prioritize my dreams for the most meaning. My health and wealth are just ways to fulfill meaning.

Your Meaning: Your Destination

Your Health: Your Vehicle

Your Wealth/Gifts: Your Engine

How to Go from 0 to 1: The Lead Domino

The thought that leads to no action is not thought- it is dreaming.

Eliza Lamb Martyn

Have you ever seen hundreds of dominoes being knocked down, one after another, in spectacular fashion? Well, what if you lined up your New Year’s plan like a system of dominoes and figured out the first domino for you to knock down?

I plan the year in four quarters, just like a business does, but I plan Q1 (1st quarter) in the most detail, as it is where I establish my LEAD DOMINOS.

January is the first domino, the ignition, getting the engine started.

February is knocking that first domino down.

March is hopefully compounding or revising the plan/alignment of dominos, based on real-time feedback.

Once Q1 gains momentum, the rest of the quarters become more defined. It’s no longer a ‘start’ but a continuation of what your ‘new normal’ feels like.

This requires focus, self-discipline, courage, and faith.

You can endure the often painful process of growth and learning if you have a goal worth living for. Sometimes that is a person. Sometimes it’s a deep-seated want and desire from childhood or sometimes it isn’t even for you but for the world.

My Lead Domino

The thoughts which nestle within us, and issue from us in language and in act, determine our moral character. The most exquisite piece of sculpture which Michelangelo or Rodin ever carved, WAS ONCE only a THOUGHT.

Theodore Cuyler

I also think about what will prevent me or constrain me most—my biggest constraint. Right now, it’s my health. I have to take care of my body and my vehicle to get to my destination.

I used to think health was how I felt, even though I knew disease could grow silently, like rust inside a pipe. It can accumulate and present itself when it is almost too big to fail.

So I am not only focused on quality measures of health as to how I feel, but also a scorecard to keep track and process my body chemistry numbers.

My Jan 8, 2026 #s are:

LDL 79 mg/dl (2.0mM), HDL 58 mg/dl (1.5mM), TG 107
HbA1C: 5.3%
Weight 146 lbs

My goal in 3 months for further plaque reversal is

LDL 60, HDL 61, TG 60
HbA1c 5.0%
Weight 132 lbs (I was at this before with my rapid plaque reversal).

I’m currently at 138 lbs near end of Jan.

In 6 months, 

LDL 50, HDL 65, TG, 50, 
HbA1c 4.9%
Weight 132 lbs.

I had done this in my first three months after my high Calcium score from May to August. It’s when I knew I was rapidly reversing plaque.

Most experts say LDL<55, apoB<55 leads to plaque reversal.

I realized as I inputted all my meals, that I was no longer eating <20g of fat per day. I was more like 50-70 g fat per day! I wasn’t measuring things precisely and drifted to how I was feeling.

Oat milk matcha : 8g fat (I sometimes had two a day). Before I was just consuming matcha in tablet form.

Edamame: 8g fat

Chia seeds: 2 tbsp is 8g fat. I started taking 4 tbsp

Flax seeds: 2 tbsp is 8g fat. I started taking 4 tbsp

• Just eating these daily was 48g-60g of fat per day. 

• 2.5-3x more fat than when I had first started.

• Not to mention fat in beans and other foods I started to increase.

• I’m removing oat milk matcha and just matcha tablets I used to eat, very sparingly edamame and no more chia seeds and just 2 tbsp of flax.

• I’m aiming for Esselstyn’s < 20g fat/day

• Intermittent fasting with 6 hour meal time windows with one day of the week one meal a day (OMAD) with enough calories, protein and as needed complex carbs.

Lentils have a 22:1 ratio of protein:fat (15g Protein:0.8g fat)

Black beans 17:1 (15g Protein:1.1g fat)

Chickpeas 4:1. (15g Protein:4g fat)

I am choosing Lentils and Black Beans as my protein source.

Now I am being much more ‘prescriptive’ so I can reverse my heart plaque. I realized the body is like a system, a machine and its cause and effect—input/output. I knew, but I didn’t truly understand it or implement it as concisely. I was ‘eyeballing’ measures and foods. Now I am treating it much more quantitatively, like math.

But my ultimate result is coronary plaque reversal, which typically takes 2.5-5 years.

Dr. Esselstyn noted that only his patients who had LDL<50 reversed their plaque. He’s proven it. I just need to follow it and enhance it for my own anatomy and physiology.

The blood flow in my artery with the biggest blockage (77% blockage) has increased from 75% in late August, which was considered the danger zone, to 80% blood flow, which is low-normal now. I do feel great, but I will repeat these exams in June.

My goal is to reduce my D1 obstruction from 77% to 60-70% by the end of 2026, to 40-50% by the end of 2027, and to 20-30% by the end of 2028. By then, the coronary arteries' remodelling plaque obstruction should be readily noticeable.

Carotid plaque is much easier to reverse, and I did that in 3 months.

I’m focused primarily on my PHYSICAL HEALTH in the health category.

For the rest of my HEALTH SCORECARD:

Intellectual health: Read one great book. I chose Paradise Lost and am reading it with my daughter. 

Emotional Health:  Solo bike rides 3x/week for relaxation, meditation and to get outdoors. Ride and run in nature.

Spiritual Health: memorize the book of Ephesians in the Bible. It has 6 chapters, so memorize a chapter every two months. 

This is just my health section.  If my wealth and meaning plans are of interest, please let me know, and I will consider writing about them as well if you think it will help you see into my mind and life.

Wealth is not just money, which is like fuel, but optionality to drive your vehicle and life where you want. But more importantly, there is your intellectual wealth, emotional wealth and spiritual wealth you must invest in.

Your Challenge (if you are willing)

There are only a few things that really matter in life. The rest is dressings.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Set a timer for 30 minutes.

Sit down with a blank page. Write one thing for each of the 12 dimensions below—one practice that, if it grew this year, would genuinely fill your body with energy, your mind with clarity, and your soul with peace.

Copy this:

HEALTH
Physical: ______________________________
Intellectual: ___________________________
Emotional: _____________________________
Spiritual: ______________________________

WEALTH
Physical: ______________________________
Intellectual: ___________________________
Emotional: _____________________________
Spiritual: ______________________________

MEANING / PURPOSE
Physical: ______________________________
Intellectual: ___________________________
Emotional: _____________________________
Spiritual: ______________________________

Then choose your training mode for January:

• Draw the 12 boxes.

• Write one practice in each.

• Then answer one question:

• What is my lead domino for the next 90 days?

• Write it in ink.

The goal isn’t a perfect year. It's the year you became intentional. A year where the person you become by December feels like a quiet miracle. Built, not wished for.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

You’ll find these articles insightful and helpful as well:

The Power of Your New Year’s Plan

The Power of the Compound Effect

How to Master Anything

Unlocking Your Greatness: Your Magnum Opus

Life-Changing Question

What is your Lead Domino for Q1?

Next issue:

What is Happiness

Something to Live By

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

The Power of Your New Year’s Plan

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)

Happy New Year! It’s been a month, and I’ve enjoyed reflecting upon the setting of 2025 and embracing the rising of 2026. I pondered why I am so motivated to start the new year, filled with hope. Why? And why do so many New Year’s resolutions die on the vine, despite our eagerness? I also got ‘rusty’ from not writing for a month, from using too much AI, which made me lazy in my thinking, but I have been so busy.

Why am I so busy? I asked myself. 2026 was a planned sabbatical year for me, where I could just ‘rest’ and do whatever I wished. I announced this years ago, but now that it is here, I am busier than ever. I am doing what I wish, but I am not ‘resting’ in the way I had imagined it. Just riding my bike, meeting with friends and family, travelling, reading, writing books, poetry, musicals, and movie drafts.

So I am pondering why, in my sabbatical year, I feel like this is my year of great growth. In my health, my entrepreneurial endeavours, and especially my faith. I desire the faith of Caleb, who was one of two out of 600,000 Israelites who came out of Egypt to enter the promised land 40 years later. What gave Caleb this great faith? I wish for a similar faith as Caleb.

Why do I need to grow? In health, wealth and faith or meaning?

The Law of Growth

Man is a growth by law, and not of artifice.

James Allen from “As a Man Thinketh”

He has set eternity in their hearts.

King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

On January 1, the whole world clamours on a new morning—some still imbibed or hungover from the celebrations of New Year’s Eve—to a new day, a new year and a dream of a new beginning. A fresh start from a clean slate.

Gym doors open to new crowds and memberships, which later churn into obsolescence. New calendars are wiped away like an emotional solvent, dissolving the hardships of last year and bringing new hope for a better year.

This is the heart of every person in the world, including you. But it is more than a cultural or time phenomenon. It’s deeply rooted in your biology, in your soul and your being.

If you could observe any living cell, you’d see it busily living: metabolizing, repairing, adapting, renewing, replicating. It seeks to survive. But there comes a time when it must go. It is this battle of life and death in each cell. When it starts to decay, it ceases to grow.

This is what James Allen captures in his profound declaration: Man is a growth by law, and not a creation of artifice. Quietly ponder this statement. You must, by law, grow. Not by means of strategy or cleverness, deception, dishonesty… of artifice. What does it mean for you to grow? In physical stature? Financially? Intellectually? Mentally? Emotionally? Spiritually?

And King Solomon declares it even more wisely, that you have eternity in your heart. This struggle to grab hold of eternity, beyond time, while you live in this physical world in a physical body, there is something unseen that you must see and understand. Even if you obtain all of life’s possessions and comforts, these can not satisfy this longing for eternity in your heart. This is the ultimate growth… in your heart to obtain eternity.

Standing on the Shoulder of Giants

Resolve to perform what you ought; Perform without fail what you resolve.

Benjamin Franklin

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulder of giants.

Isaac Newton

When people think about New Year’s Resolutions, they often think of motivation. I think of the giants who lived such amazing lives. They didn’t merely wish for a better year. They planned for a better mind. A better self. A better way of seeing the world.

Ben Franklin was the epitome of practical, virtuous transformation. Not because he was perfect, but because he was so intentional. He didn’t merely speak about virtues, but he treated them with precision, like a craft to be learned and practiced, measured and improved upon.

His famous list of 13 virtues was his private experiment to focus, measure and repeat. A way to design behaviour. Franklin called it character. James Allen would call it your garden of most dominant thoughts. Franklin practiced each of these 13 virtues, focusing on one per week. With 52 weeks in the year, he would focus on each for 4 weeks of the year in rotation. Wow!

Rather long, I think it would be good for us to ponder each of his 13 virtues:

1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation.

2. Silence: Speak only what benefits others or yourself; avoid trivial talk.

3. Order: Have a place for everything and a time for everything.

4. Resolution: Resolve to do what you ought and perform it without fail.

5. Frugality: Waste nothing; spend only to do good.

6. Industry: Lose no time; be always usefully employed.

7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think and speak justly.

8. Justice: Wrong no one; do your duty to others.

9. Moderation: Avoid extremes; don’t over-resent injuries.

10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.

11. Tranquillity: Be undisturbed by trifles or common accidents.

12. Chasity: Use venery (sexual indulgence) rarely, only for health or offspring.

13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

He lived his life with intentionality and lived quite a remarkable life full of 84 years as one of the founding fathers of America, helped draft the Declaration of Independence, inventor of the lightning rod, bifocals, stove, printer, politician, established America’s first library, hospital and fire department, writer, author and philosopher. Wow!

I wished to also remark upon the thoughts of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein on this, but I do not have enough time, and this newsletter would get rather long.

Finding Your Meaning

Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.

Viktor Frankl

Frankl discovered something of deep insight as he lived through the terrors of the Holocaust. Human beings can survive the utmost suffering if they have meaning. Or they can collapse in comfort if they don’t.

Meaning is our soul and spirit’s oxygen. Meaning doesn’t activate cognitive ease. Ease, comfort, and luxury distract you from meaning. These can give you pleasure and entertainment, but they sedate and anesthetize your soul. You were built for more than mere survival and replication.

Abraham Maslow revealed this through his visual depiction of our hierarchy of needs. Once the basic needs are satisfied, there arise hunger, thirst, shelter, and safety not only for our physical being, but more deeply for our mental and emotional being, and later he discovered our need for transcendence, which I ascribe to the hunger and thirst for our spirit.

This is why people can look great and successful on the outside, rich and famous, but still feel deathly hollow and void inside. They’ve fed the lower basic physical needs abundantly but neglected and starved the more important needs of their souls and spirits.

Deep in our brain, in a part called our hypothalamus, is the ancient circuitry that ensures we fulfill two types of needs: survival and meaning.

For our survival, we seek and fulfill our hunger, sleep, shelter, tribe and sexual mate. It is deeply embedded and our default. It focuses on our physical well-being. It focuses deeply on the short term. It doesn’t care about meaning, fulfillment or legacy. It cares about now. Instant gratification.

But once these basic needs are fulfilled, the higher needs for meaning, purpose, and transcendence are activated. The rest of the brain, then, is alerted to plan, inhibit impulses, delay gratification, learn, reflect, and choose values over cravings. This is the battle between your higher and lower needs.

Who do you become? A person fulfilling the lower needs, and when is enough enough?

Or do you focus and become intentional on fulfilling your higher needs as well?

If you don’t train the “become your higher self” now, then when will you?

When will you look fit enough? When will you have enough money? More cars? More houses? More purses? More shoes? More clothes? More bicycles? More games? More friends? More followers? More …

My New Year Framework

There are only a few things that really matter in life. The rest is dressings.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I thought over the decades about what really matters in my life, and as I read the autobiographies of people I adored, I felt that some things really stood out. Faith, family, friends, finance, fitness, fears, fun, future, and education. As I am now 55, I like simplicity, as Franklin did. I’ve narrowed my own framework down to three main essentials: Health, Wealth and Meaning.

Health: our capacity to live and function to our full potential.
Wealth: our capacity to choose what would fulfill our full potential
Meaning: our capacity to endure despite hardships and setbacks, and to matter

And with each of these pillars, I train in four dimensions:

Physical. Intellectual. Emotional. Spiritual.

This is not just my philosophy, but my operating system.

Health is my energy, resilience, recovery, clarity, and calmness of mind.
Wealth is more than just money; it is my optionality, skills, judgment, and integrity.
Meaning is my responsibility, love, service, and legacy.

So, with health, wealth, and meaning in four dimensions, that gives me 12 dimensions. There are 12 months. 12 is a magical number. Jesus had 12 disciples. If each of them had 12 disciples, that would be 144. Add the original 13, and that makes 157, which is around Dunbar’s number, which is what he determined as the cognitive limit of how many relationships we could maintain. So we have a lot of capacity to do a lot, but 12 is the basic number to start.

I’ve advanced to the point of not only doing these 12 dimensions one pillar at a time.  I’ve started to train like this is endurance training, month after month, year after year.

Sometimes you are running a marathon, one focus: running. One domino. Simpler and doable.

Then you can advance to a biathlon: running and biking, both in parallel. And then the next level is to do a triathlon: run Health, Wealth and Meaning, training at the same time.
The most advanced is the decathlon, a training program for 10 events. Wow!

I like to do the triathlon as I believe in training my whole being, my whole body, my whole mind and my whole spirit. Holistically.

Otherwise, if you only train a specific set of muscles, your body can get lopsided. Same with life. You can build wealth, as I have, but lose health. You can build health and lose meaning. A triathlon approach helps keep me balanced.

But to start, you should focus on your most constrained pillar. Right now, mine is the physical health of the eye and heart vessels. I am getting them to a safe level so I can focus on my next constrained pillar: my spiritual health. Meanwhile, I am still doing my Wealth pillar.

My Challenge to You: Your 30 Min Plan

Set a timer for 30 minutes.

Sit down with a blank page. Write one thing for each of the 12 dimensions below—one practice that, if it grew this year, would genuinely fill your body with energy, your mind with clarity, and your soul with peace.

Copy this:

HEALTH
Physical: ______________________________
Intellectual: ___________________________
Emotional: _____________________________
Spiritual: ______________________________

WEALTH
Physical: ______________________________
Intellectual: ___________________________
Emotional: _____________________________
Spiritual: ______________________________

MEANING / PURPOSE
Physical: ______________________________
Intellectual: ___________________________
Emotional: _____________________________
Spiritual: ______________________________

Then choose your training mode for January:

If life is heavy, run a marathon: pick one dimension and win it for 30 days.
If you’re stable, run a biathlon: two dimensions, simple and consistent.
If you’re ready, run a triathlon: one from Health, one from Wealth, one from Meaning—small reps, daily, compounding.

The goal isn’t a perfect year. It’s a year you became intentional. A year where the person you become by December feels like a quiet miracle. Built, not wished for.

My New Year Plan

And now I’ll end where I always end: with my own plan—my current “training block,” my first dominos, my triathlon set for this year.

Here’s my New Year plan:

Ah, I have to run to a lunch meeting, so I’ll continue this next week, along with my new year plan (not sure how many are interested in seeing my plan and if it might be helpful for you). 

If you think it might, reply and let me know.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

You’ll find these articles insightful and helpful as well:

The Power of the Compound Effect

How to Master Anything

Unlocking Your Greatness: Your Magnum Opus

Life-Changing Question

Who do you wish to become by unlocking your heart’s full potential?

Next issue:

Implementing Your New Year’s Plan

Becoming Yourself as You Dream

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

The Power of Mind (Part IV)

For Success in Health & Wealth

As you go deeper into the power of your mind, you come to realize that this is where alchemy occurs, at the level of thought, where nothing becomes something in an instant. Sometimes we call this an idea, a dream, a vision. Other times it can be a doomsday thought, destructive, a nightmare. The good news is that we can dictate what thoughts to accept and nurture.

I received some feedback from someone about how reflecting on themselves and the power of their mind (if you haven’t already, read part 1, part 2 and part 3 on the power of the mind) has unlocked new understandings of themselves, the people around them, and the world.

I believe we are at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to unlocking the power of our mind. This is the most marvellous news. We have so much untapped potential. Physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

I see this profoundly as I read the Bible each day.

One person said they knew all that I had written in my newsletter. So I asked, what does Earl Nightingale define success as? I really love his definition of success. I caught her by surprise with the question. I realized that although people say they know and understand, I've come to realize that I do not truly understand. It will take me a lifetime to understand the depths of simple truths and principles.

I just helped my 41-year-old friend rapidly reverse their previously undiagnosed and severe diabetes in just 7 days. It’s even miraculous for me to behold. I sent him a prior newsletter I had written on diabetes. He read it a few months ago but said he didn’t really understand it and didn’t feel it was written for him. Now he understands it much better and feels it was written exactly for him. What changed?

Can we truly understand something if we have experienced it, processed it and delved deeply into it? I am learning that the answer is no. I truly do not understand a thing, even though I think I do. Even if I have learned about it, thought about it, written about it, taught it, and seen it. I have a hard time truly understanding insulin, cholesterol, and blood pressure, even though I kind of understand them and have been able to reverse them in some people. I have many more questions than I have answers. Same with business. Same with people. And ironically, the same with me. Who am I?

Earl’s definition of success?

“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.”

Dr. Maxwell Maltz: Self-Image Renaissance

You can never outperform your self-image.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz

Dr. Maltz earned his M.D. from Columbia University in 1923. During his internship, he helped deliver a baby with a hare lip, and in that moment crystallized his decision to pursue plastic surgery. But more than just restoring people’s appearances, he was also interested in helping them improve their psychological self-image regarding their appearance, identity, and recovery.

Imagine a plane on autopilot always self-correcting to its destination. Dr. Maxwell Maltz discovered the psychological mechanism behind true transformation to a person’s ideal. It didn’t happen from the outside, but from the inside out. He was a plastic surgeon who repaired faces, but he quickly realized that his patients were trying to repair their ‘self-image.’

Some patients were transformed physically but had the same self-image impairment. Despite their nose, ears, scars or features, which they believed were holding them back, were perfectly reconstructed through plastic surgery, their confidence didn’t change. Their relationships didn’t improve, and their anxiety and self-esteem issues persisted—the human paradox: fixing the outside didn’t always fix the inside.

Maltz wondered why a physical improvement doesn’t lead to an internal improvement and fix the person’s confidence and self-image.

Others changed their internal self-image even before their surgery fully healed.

Maltz realized that our subconscious mind acts like a cybernetic guidance system, like a thermostat for our identity, our behaviour, our habits and our health.

If your inner self-image doesn’t match your goals, your subconscious ‘corrects’ you back to the level of your subconscious mind’s self-image.

To help people improve their self-image, he wrote the best-selling book Psycho-Cybernetics in 1960, which has since sold over 35 million copies worldwide and has a large fan base, from Salvador Dali to Jane Fonda. And this was touted as one of Bob Proctor’s Top 5 books to learn and understand yourself and the world around you.

Your Self-Image

Your self-image is your ceiling.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz

Your self-image is the cybernetic system that guides you, an internal steering mechanism that consistently keeps you in tune with your self-image. If you see yourself as bad with money or always behind, your behaviours will align with that identity, even if you are consciously striving to do the opposite (be good with money and be on time).

So your willpower, the power of your will, is limited by your internal self-image, which will put the brakes on your will to self-correct it back to your self-image.

Maltz, instead, taught people how to retrain their self-image, and he proposed that the mind responds to vivid mental rehearsal almost as if it were real experience. He called this the “theatre of your mind”. Repeatedly see and feel yourself acting like the person who already belongs at the level you aspire to.

“Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real and vividly imagined experience.”

If you imagine yourself fully healed, your brain acts as if healing is already underway. Bob Proctor took this concept one step further. He explained how the subconscious mind, which was shaped mainly without your permission and control, can be retrained into your conscious mind through Hill’s belief and autosuggestion, which is repetition and practice.

Try Maltz’s Self-Image Reset:

1. Write one sentence: “I am the kind of person who _______.” Make this specific and believable.

2. Close your eyes. Rehearse one scene tomorrow where that identity shows up.

3. End with one action you will do, even if you don’t yet ‘feel ready.’

Like a pro athlete visualizes and practices shots, passes, and scoring the winning touchdown, both in mind and action, you can do the same for anything you set your mind to.

I realized I would do this when I was asked to speak to a large audience. I would rehearse the speech in my mind many different ways and rearrange the sequence until I felt it was good in my heart. I had already done this in my mind many times, so when it was in person, it seemed like I was ready, for I had practiced it in my mind and in front of a mirror many times beforehand.

And when asked on the spot, even though I wasn’t prepared, I would ask for wisdom from above and then think about a few things I would really like to impart on their hearts and focus on that, because I had also done this so many times with so many people beforehand. Now it was just another opportunity to do so. I advise people to speak honestly from their hearts.

When I look back at myself now versus how shy I was in my high school and university years, I wonder how I became so self-assured and confident, with certain values. I also reflect deeply upon my faults and weaknesses, and the feedback I get from those around me. I deeply consider how important it is for me to adapt and integrate this feedback into my being, and to change my thoughts and actions for those around me.

This next person has helped me take critical feedback and yet be at peace with myself … a lot.

James Allen: The Power of Serenity

“They themselves are makers of themselves.” by virtue of the thoughts, which they choose and encourage; that mind is the master-weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance, and that, as they may have hitherto woven in ignorance and pain they may now weave in enlightenment and happiness.

James Allen

Bob Proctor asked me to write Serenity, the last chapter of James Allen’s most popular book, As a Man Thinketh, for 90 days in a row. He said it would change my life.

I doubt that many people in the world would do this. I am one of the few who have. I wrote it out 100 times in 100 days. I memorized it. I had my leadership team and other teams memorize it and recite it at our quarterly meetings.

It changed my life. It changed my thinking. It changed my heart.

But Serenity is just the 7th and final chapter. I also cherish the first chapter, Thought and Character. I had my leadership team memorize this chapter as well. But what about the middle chapters?

1. Thought and Character

2. Effect of Thought on Circumstances

3. Effect of Thought on Health and the Body

4. Thought and Purpose

5. Thought and Achievement

6. Vision and Ideals

7. Serenity

I want to share a few of the powerful quotes from each chapter of As a Man Thinketh for you to think about and ponder as this year of 2025 closes. (Please excuse the male gender in his book, written in 1902.

Chapter 1: Thought and Character

• “A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.”

• “Man is the master of thought, the moulder of character, and the maker and shaper of condition, environment, and destiny.”

• “Such is the conscious master… by discovering within himself the laws of thought…” 

Chapter 2: Effect of Thought on Circumstances

• “Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.”

• “Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.”

• “Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit…”

Chapter 3: Effect of Thought on Health and the Body

• “The body is the servant of the mind.” 

• “Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought.”

• “There is no physician like cheerful thought for dissipating the ills of the body…” 

Chapter 4: Thought and Purpose

• “Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.”

• “A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it.”

• “He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.”

Chapter 5: Thought and Achievement

• “All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.”

• “None but himself can alter his condition.”

• “A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve by lifting up his thoughts.”

Chapter 6: Vision and Ideals

• “The dreamers are the saviours of the world.”

• “He who cherishes a beautiful vision… will one day realize it.”

• “Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.” 

Chapter 7: Serenity

• “Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.”

• “A man becomes calm in the measure that he understands himself as a thought evolved being, for such knowledge necessitates the understanding of others as the result of thought, and as he develops a right understanding, and sees more and more clearly the internal relation of things by the action of cause and effect he ceases to fuss and fume and worry and grieve, and remains poised, steadfast, serene.”

• “Self-control is strength; Right Thought is mastery; Calmness is power.”

I invite you to read the book, but if not, at least read Chapter 3 on the Effect of Thoughts on Health and the Body.

For the business-minded, you should read Chapters 4-6. 

For those going through difficulties, chapters 1, 2, 4, and 7. 

Ultimately, when all is said and done, we will seek chapters 3, 4, 6, 7 and maybe 5 (achievement and mastery).

If you have a chance, take the time to quietly read ‘As a Man Thinketh’ (free online). It’s about an hour’s read.

If you have a chance, listen to Bob recite Serenity. Just 4 minutes.

What a powerful book. And Serenity is worthy of writing out 90 days in a row. It defines serenity as, “that exquisite poise of character, which we call serenity, is the last lesson of culture, the fruitage of the soul. It is as precious as wisdom, more to be desired than gold… How insignificant mere money seeking looks in comparison with a serene life…”

May you have serenity, deep thoughts, as you reflect upon the year of 2025 and enter the new year of 2026, full of dreams, visions, ideals, and see the seed of your strong, healthy, purposeful self-image.

Reflection

We are blessed both by our deep misfortunes and by the height of our loves and joys.

Dr. Kevin Ham

This year, I lost a few loved ones, Rob Thompson, my beloved dear puppy Kona, found out I had clogged arteries, which I am healing and discovered how to heal metabolic disease. I had my first eye shot for my retina in three years.

But I have also been greatly blessed by my grieving, by gratitude, and by the comfort of God, my family, my friends, my peers, and my colleagues, as well as by you who have supported me in my own journey through these writings.

I have not only helped reverse my own diseases, but also the diseases of many close to me in almost miraculous fashion. And my businesses have been greatly blessed by opportunities arising from rapid changes and from God-given gifts.

Thank you, everyone, for your support and love. I wish you good health along with purpose and meaning each day, and to embrace each life opportunity, along with life’s storms, to keep on that narrow path of truth, love and peace.

May God bless you greatly. You are beloved. Know that. You are loved. Love back in your own way, with your own gifts, being, and heart.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

Life-Changing Question

Who am I really and how can I become who I truly wish to be?

May you spend each thought and word and action to become who you truly wish to be.

Have a Merry Christmas and holidays and Happy New Year!

Next issue:

Power of Mind (Part V).

Why Belief is Essential to Success

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

The Power of Mind (Part III)

For Success in Health & Wealth

I’ve been thinking about what has led to all of my successes to date. I started thinking about who I was when I was younger. I was extremely shy; I could not look people in the eye. I could not speak to girls. I was self-conscious and always wondering why life was the way it was. I felt trapped. I felt small.

I felt sad a lot and at times, depressed and suicidal.

I thought of many ways of possibly ending my life when I was in elementary school. I thought of what it would be like to be hit by a car, jump off a building, stab myself… But I was too scared of the unknown, the possible pain and the possible shame, as well as what my parents would think and how they would feel.

So how am I now able to speak in front of hundreds of people without trembling? (I used to shake when I had to speak in front of a classroom or group of people.)

I remember the first moment I had a brilliant thought: Try my best to look people in the eye. Try to hold that look for a second, then a few seconds, then try to hold their gaze as long as possible. To my surprise, they looked down first. I started to gain a little more confidence, and pretty soon, I found almost no one could hold my gaze long enough. Were they as insecure as I was?

Then, in my early 20s, I had the nerve to ask a girl to a movie. She said “Yes”. Wow. I couldn’t believe it. I gained more confidence. And with each gain of confidence, I was able to do more.

But what was it? I was slowly beginning to believe I had something within me. But a big breakthrough came when someone I loved supported and believed in me more than I did myself. I felt almost invincible. I was in love. I didn’t think, I felt, and I felt so alive.

And my biggest breakthrough came when I believed in God because I saw the tremendous love God had for me. As I read the Bible, I saw the belief people of faith had in God and what great things they did for others and for God. I wanted to emulate them. David against Goliath. The heart of a lion while tending and caring for his sheep.

Within this meagre body, the heart of a giant developed. I believed I could do anything God allowed me to do. I prayed for wisdom. I thought deeply. I moved with faith, believing it would come to pass.

Then I also came across other ‘mentors’ who taught this. Here are some who have highly influenced me, in addition to the great mentors and leaders in the Bible.

My life now can be summed up in one word: “Believe!”

Earl Nightingale: The Strangest Secret

We become what we think about.

Earl Nightingale

Born in the Great Depression in the early 1930s, amid scarcity and uncertainty following the roaring 1920s, an age of abundance, he was forced to think for himself after his father abandoned the family. Earl watched people fall into despair and be governed by learned helplessness. People lost hope and gave up on their dreams. But he noticed a tiny proportion of people still dreamed and found success, happiness and growth despite such hard times.

He pondered what made these select few people different.

During his time in the Marines on the USS Arizona, which was bombed while in Pearl Harbour, he gained an appreciation for his life, as he wasn’t on board that tragic morning of the bombing. This gave his days more purpose, allowing him to pursue something worthwhile in life. He became obsessed with understanding why some people succeeded in living their dreams while most gave up and conformed to whatever came their way.

After reading all the great thinkers in philosophy, psychology, theology and economics, he had a secret insight—one which became the cornerstone of all his philosophy, life and teaching:

“We become what we think about.”

This turned into a recording, “The Strangest Secret,” a 1956 recording that sold millions of copies and sparked what we now call the personal growth industry. It was the first, and I think the only first spoken recording to earn a Gold Record!

If you think about growth, you grow.

If you think about failure, you fail.

If you think about problems negatively, you become burdened by your problems.

If you think about problems as opportunities, you see and attract opportunities.

Today’s neuroscience confirms his beliefs.

• Thoughts activate neural networks, which are mimicked in AI neural networks.

• Focus embeds these thoughts into behaviours via dopamine pathways.

• Belief alters outcomes; the stronger it persists, the greater its placebo effect.

What is success? How do you achieve your success?

Earl Nightingale’s three great laws:

1. “We become what we think about.” Your focused thoughts shape and lead to your results.

2. “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” Success is achieving what you believe to be your ideals and your purpose, rather than just mere goals or achievements. I especially love this definition of success.

3. “Your world is a living expression of how you are using your mind.” Your external results are just a delayed results of your internal beliefs, values and reflections.

Your life is a result of your dominant thoughts and beliefs.

Change your thoughts, you change your life.

Change your beliefs, you can change your destiny.

Earl became a mentor to many of the great mentors I have listened to incessantly: Jim Rohn, who took in a ‘fatherless’ Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, the master salesman, who mentored Seth Godin. Seth once told me that without Zig, he would have been lost. He listened to Zig on tape cassettes so much that the tapes eventually wore out. Wow, I asked Seth to introduce me to Zig. “He would have loved you, but he has passed away.” I thought that when Seth said Zig was his mentor, that Zig personally mentored me, but Seth had only met him a few times and really was mentored by his books and tapes.

I later met someone who personally knew Zig and served on his Board of Directors. It was surreal.

And then I discovered a man who had been trained and mentored directly by Earl. He left his multi-million-dollar business to learn from Earl and took a huge pay cut to $18,000 a year. Eventually, he became his head of sales. I wanted so much to speak to this man who had learned directly from Earl. And he lived in Toronto, Canada. Bob Proctor, who was featured in the hit film “The Secret”.

Bob Proctor: The Secret - Paradigm Shift

“It’s the decision that starts the change, not the environment.”

“Discipline is the ability to give yourself a command and follow it.”

“Once you make the decision, you only need to manage the decision.”

Bob Proctor

So I signed up for Bob’s masterclass to speak with him. I had a 35-minute phone call with him. We connected immediately. He asked if I had ever been in Toronto, and I said yes, I had a company based there and a daughter who was going to school there. He said that he would love to host me for lunch when I was in town. I was so honoured. Then he said, “Actually, why don’t you come to my house and have lunch here?” I was floored and honoured. I booked a flight to Toronto the following month on my way to Ireland. Then one day before our meeting, his wife said Bob was not well and if we could postpone. I thought I would see him in January or February.

When Bob was young, he was stuck in life, broke, lost and in debt. He dropped out of school. He had no plan, confidence or self-belief. But he met a mentor who gave him a copy of a book that would change his life.

The book was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. He read and studied, memorized and implemented the 13 principles of success for the next 60 years, leading him to success beyond his dreams. I shared the first six principles in last week’s newsletter.

Bob told me that once a year, he reads the chapter on Persistence every day for a month—30 days straight—to remind himself of this one principle. He did this for 30 years. Imagine, 30 days * 30 years = 900 times he had read this chapter on Persistence. And he continued this practice for all 13 principles. Imagine how well he knew this book. I had the same thought for both this book and As a Man Thinketh, and many chapters of the Bible, and for some of my favourite poetry.

Earl taught Bob one valuable lesson that he tried to impress upon everyone. Earl often had one page of a book in his bookstand. This seemed so strange to Bob. He asked Earl why he did this. Earl explained that most people read but don’t understand, and even if they do, the insight isn't thought through deeply.

Most importantly, most people don’t really think. Only a few percent of people really deeply think. Bob started to do this with the book Think and Grow Rich. Bob wanted to be the world expert on the book. And I believe he was. When people ask me what my favourite books are, I now think very differently about how to answer this question. There are only a few books I want to be an ‘expert’ on, like Bob was on his Top 5 books.

Find the one thing that captures your heart and get a bookstand that holds that one page, and read it every day until you know it inside out. I have book stands all over my house and printed copies of the pages I want to know, memorize, understand, and apply to my life.

Bob explained how each of us gets programmed with a paradigm, a belief system that is embedded into our subconscious when we are young. It runs on autopilot, it’s habitual, and we need to reprogram consciously. This was a big breakthrough for me to understand how our minds work. I had tried to do this myself as I often thought deeply about my thinking over the decades. Sometimes, just one single thought or belief would change the trajectory of my life. It was like a judo move that turned a weakness or problem into a huge life purpose or mission.

Like my disease at age 14 and my current serious diseases, I view them as God-given missions to help me discover my purpose. I am reversing and healing not only my own diseases, but now others. Before my diseases, I didn’t know how to reverse and heal clogged arteries, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and even cancer, which I am slowly discovering the insights and secrets to prevent and attack this malady of maladies.

What is a paradigm?

“A paradigm is a mental program that controls your behavior — and almost everything you do.”

These paradigms program your:

• Self-image

• Identity

• Confidence

• Financial decisions

• Health behaviours

• Work ethics

• Relationships

• Resilience

• Grit

• Emotions

You are limited by the height of your paradigms. Most people have self-limiting paradigms and beliefs,

When I ask people to set a goal of doing one pull-up and explain why this is a great endeavour that 99% of the world cannot do. First, it puts you in the top 1%. Second, it activates all your upper body muscles. It also aligns your spine as you do both pull-ups (palms facing inwards) and chin-ups (palms facing outwards). I grew ½ inch because I do 13-20 pullups daily.

On my call with Bob, he asked me to write out the last chapter of one of his Top 5 books, “As a Man Thinketh.” This chapter is the 7th and final chapter of the book, titled ‘Serenity’. It is the most beautiful chapter. He asked me to write it out 90 days in a row. Wow. I thought that was crazy. He said it would change my life. I challenge each of you to do it. To set aside 30 minutes each day and write it each day by hand in a notebook. Fill the notebook. He said to let him know how it changed my life.

Feb 1, on my father’s 88th birthday, was day 90. I had written it out each day. By day 45, I had memorised most of it just by writing it out. Then I recited it whenever I felt stressed. I had major anger issues. It calmed me greatly. I decided to do it for 10 more days to reach 100 days, then contact Bob.

On Feb 3, I received an email that Bob had passed away. I was shocked. I hadn’t met him yet in person. I had been looking forward to the opportunity to help him with his health, to be mentored by him, and to become great friends. He had been so able. I assumed it was cancer. Then I realised that, when he was not well enough to meet in November, I should have gone to meet him. Perhaps I could have helped extend his life or relieve any suffering he might have had.

Later, my good friends, the Kims, told me they had known Bob for decades, as he visited their glass shop. Wow, I had always believed that there must be someone in my network who could introduce me to anyone I wanted to meet. Had I known ...

Dear Bob, may God bless you for your heart, your thoughts and your mentorship.

Bob’s three laws:

1. “You don’t get what you want. You get what you ARE.” Your identity of who you believe you are precedes the actual results. Results lag behind your paradigm and beliefs.

2. “Thoughts become things.” Thoughts → feelings → actions → habits → destiny.

3. “If you can hold it in your head, you can hold it in your hand.” Your subconscious mind translates your paradigms, your mental images into real-world outcomes.

You must change your inner program (paradigms) before your outer world changes.

You must change your identity before you can change your biology and your life.

His teachings are eternal as they are based on timeless principles.

Change your paradigms and change your life.

Go read, memorise the 13 principles of Think and Grow Rich, and write out Serenity for 90 days.

And let me know how these two change your life in 90 days. I, like Bob, guarantee it will, but as Earl knew, very few people will read this and understand this request and do it.

Think and grow _____. Replace the word ‘rich’ with anything you desire.

• Think and grow healthy.

• Think and grow wealthy.

• Think and grow love.

• Think and grow success.

• Think and grow your musical talent.

• Think and grow your physique.

• Think and grow in Wisdom.

• Think and grow in God.

I wish to write about two others who made me think deeply and grow, but my plane is about to land in San Francisco. I am thinking deeply about raising money for my AI business. I have a goal. We have a goal, a timeline, and a plan. I fully believe that we will not only raise a lot but also continue to build a very valuable business with amazing AI products in the most amazing way.

Bob’s Top 5 Books

1. Think and Grow Rich — Napoleon Hill

• Your thoughts, desires, beliefs, and persistence have the power to create any result you want in life.

2. Psycho-Cybernetics — Dr. Maxwell Maltz

• Your self-image is the internal blueprint that determines every action, behaviour, and outcome in your life — change the image, and you change the result.

3. The Science of Getting Rich — Wallace D. Wattles

• Wealth and success come from thinking and acting in a certain way — aligned with gratitude, creation, and unwavering belief.

4. As a Man Thinketh — James Allen

• Your mind is the master of your character and circumstances — you literally become what you continually think.

5. You Were Born Rich — Bob Proctor

• You already possess infinite potential within you — unlocking it requires changing your paradigms and aligning your mind with abundance.

Reflection

Thought is the engine of your soul.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Your thoughts are in a continual state of flux. Bob Proctor calls this your vibration or frequency of thought. You attract others and things at the frequency you are. Are you at a high frequency or a low frequency? Your thoughts are the frequency that others can immediately tune in if they are also at the same frequency.

What are my subconscious thoughts, the program programmed into my soul and mind since I was young, before I was fully aware and conscious?

What are my paradigms of thought in regards to me, others, health, wealth, and other areas of my life?

This is the age old exploration. Not in far away lands or travels, but into the depth of your own soul, your mind, your past, your dormant spirit, which sleeps heavily, unable to open its eyes and ears to truly see and hear as God intended.

I am grateful to God, for inspiring me to think beyond time, way beyond the limits I have materially, physically, to dream, think and be great in thoughts, plans and actions. 

I am grateful to my wife, kids, parents, family and friends for supporting and believing in me, fueling my own desire to be great for them and for others.

I am so grateful to Rob Thompson, who gave me extra days, even as he perished earlier this year, as I have discovered the Strangest Secret to Health. I am not only reversing my own diseases, but also rapidly reversing the diseases my close friends have. I have prayed for this wisdom. Thank you Lord.

I am grateful to all the people who have taught us to dream, to believe and to hope that there is a greater life ahead of us and beyond this lifetime.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

Life-Changing Question

Who am I right now and what frequency am I vibrating at?

Write it down and let me know. High or low? Fast or slow frequency?

How can you get to 2x, 5x, 10x, 100x higher frequency?

Next week—

Power of Mind (Part IV).

Why Belief is Essential to Success

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

The Power of Mind (Part II)

For Success in Health & Wealth

Alia Crum: The Power of Expectation

Our mindsets are not just in our heads. They are embodied expectations that shape health and behavior.

Dr. William James

At Stanford Mind & Body Lab, Alia studies what happens physically in the body when we change our mindset, particularly our expectations. Her work reveals that the body obeys the story it anticipates.

In her Milkshake study, Crum gave volunteers the same 380-calorie drink two times:

• One time with a label "Indulgent - 620 calories."

• The second drink, labelled "Sensible - 140 calories."

Blood tests revealed a 3x drop in ghrelin, the hunger hormone, only after drinking the 'indulgent' shake, even though it was the exact same drink as the second "sensible" shake.

She followed up this insight to medicine and stress, where her studies showed that those who viewed stress as helping or enhancing them, as a tool for growth rather than as a negative or threat, showed better focus, lower cortisol and improved performance even when stressed and under pressure.

A belief, an expectation or a positive benefit communicated well by the parent or physician amplified itself in the person's biology and outcome.

What this means to you is that every food, pill, fast, or exercise has two essential ingredients;

1. The benefit of the food, pill, fast or exercise

2. The story, belief and expectation you ascribe to it.

The mind is not a mere bystander in health, but rather the mind is the architect and shaper of health. I am discovering this more and more in my own health, in how I conduct myself in business, and in the outcomes I achieve.

I ask myself: "Do I have a health mindset or a disease mindset?"

Sometimes I find myself believing that I will go blind because I have wet macular degeneration. I realize that while I believe that I can slow its progression, I do not fully believe that I can reverse my eye condition. Would I believe it if I knew someone else who had reversed it?

And what of someone with heart disease, diabetes, or high blood pressure?

Will they make the effort to change their lifestyle if they don't believe their disease is reversible or curable?

And what of someone with cancer? Can cancer be cured?

I believe it can, but its stage, state and type are all very important factors.

Expectation has a multiplier effect on my Reversal Protocol. Expect it will work, and the reversal will be more powerful.

If a complete reversal of my disease is the destination, my Reversal Protocol is the vehicle, but expectation is the driver.

Martin Seligman: Positive Psychology

When it comes to our health, there are essentially four things under our control: the decision not to smoke, a commitment to exercise, the quality of our diet, and our level of optimism. And optimism is at least as beneficial as the others.

Dr. Martin Seligman

When fleas are capped in a bottle by a lid, they jump only to the height of the cap over and over again. Eventually, even after the cap is removed, they will not jump higher to escape the bottle, even though they can jump 150 times their height. They "limit themselves" by setting a self-imposed boundary.

This is called learned helplessness. 

In the same way, negative experiences can lead people to self-impose their own limitations, even when many opportunities to jump or grow surround them.

Human trauma, failure and disease can condition people over time to surrender and limit themselves to this learned hopelessness, unable to see possibilities and opportunities.

But Seligman asked himself, "If helplessness can be learned, can hope be learned too?"

This question birthed positive psychology.

His many studies and books show that when people cultivate gratitude, well-being, meaning and optimism, recovery is faster from depression and healing from post-surgery.

Optimists live 10 years longer, have better immune function and experience less inflammation.

He developed the PERMA model used in schools, hospitals and Fortune 500 companies.

• Positive emotion

• Engagement

• Relationships

• Meaning

• Accomplishment

In his model, you build psychological capital — something more valuable than any currency.

How can I turn inward disease into outward purpose and health?

How can 'despair' be transformed into 'hope'?

To make disease reversal possible, I realized that a Reversal Mindset must precede the Reversal Protocol.

Hope is not just wishful thinking; it is a neurochemical fuel that raises serotonin, strengthens immunity, and leads to healing.

"How you think about your problems, including depression itself, will either relieve depression or aggravate it".

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi : Flow

The best moments in life are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. They occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Now try to spell or pronounce his surname.

Mihaly grew up in Europe during WWII. He noticed that some people under bombardment weren't just suffering; some were surprisingly serene. 

"Why do some thrive even amidst chaos?" He wondered.

It was not in peace or ease, but in challenge and purpose that meaningful work that stretches, grows and transforms is necessary to engage us in FLOW.

This FLOW is the biological signature of meaning.

Flow is that timeless state where challenge breeds with capability, leading to optimal performance. You lose yourself in some meaningful work. That work could be cycling, writing, painting, teaching, or parenting. Time seems to cease or pass much faster.

When athletes are in flow, things seem to move in slow motion. They are "in the zone," also known as Flow state.

When entrepreneurs are in flow, they might produce a big idea or discover something groundbreaking.

Mihaly found that in flow, the brain releases dopamine, endorphins and norepinephrine in perfect harmony, and the prefrontal cortex, that inner critic, remains mute, self-consciousness melts away, and you are "fully in the present".

People in sustained flow have lower cortisol levels, enhanced immune modulation and better heart rate variability, giving you more physical capacity.

Napoleon Hill: Blueprint for Success

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill was not a scientist or psychologist, but he understood how the best entrepreneurs of his time became successful. Andrew Carnegie, one of the wealthiest people in history, gave Napoleon an audacious goal in 1908: to leave everything he was doing, interview the most successful people of his time, and discover their secrets.

For 20 years, Hill studied Edison, Ford, Rockefeller, Graham Bell and distilled the 13 principles of success. He published his bestselling book, "Think and Grow Rich," in 1937, a blueprint for wealth. I've studied and read this book many, many times. 

Its first six principles form the basis for success not only in wealth but also in health and in virtually any endeavour of life.

1. Desire: Clearly define what you want.

2. Faith: Believe you can achieve your desire.

3. Autosuggestion: Consciously shape your belief through the repetition of that belief.

4. Specialized Knowledge: Acquire and organize the specialized knowledge needed to achieve what you want.

5. Imagination: Picture your success in great detail.

6. Organized Planning: Create a concrete plan and do it.

In the Bible, Jesus simply says:

1. Ask, and you shall receive.

2. Seek, and you shall find.

3. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

You notice that all of these people pondered and asked essential, pertinent questions. Then they sought answers to find insights. And, finally, they conducted 'experiments' until they unlocked a discovery.

Clarity comes when we know what we ask for or desire. Sometimes it is a clear purpose. 

When we visualize goals in detail, the same brain neurons fire as if we were already achieving them, activating the motor cortex, limbic system and dopaminergic reward pathways. This is the power of dreaming.

Dreams can be wonderful and positive, but some turn into nightmares because of the negative beliefs we hold that sabotage them. 

Autosuggestion is the purposeful repetition of positive thoughts, beliefs and our desires to sculpt our nervous system, a process called neuroplastic affirmation.

Many experiments show that visualizing oneself taking basketball shots from the foul line is almost as effective as practicing foul shots, but visualizing and practicing foul shots is better than doing either alone. But physical practice skills are retained longer over time.

So doing is more important than just thinking and believing.

Faith without works or show your faith by your works.

Autosuggestion reinforces faith.

But faith in the truest sense must be all-in—100%. Even a 1% doubt can lead to uncertainty and fear, but when faith reaches 100%, you 'know' the outcome and uncertainty and fear can't touch you.

So I often wonder how much of my amazing heart disease reversal so far is due to faith vs lifestyle changes. Placebos have shown that even with 'no medicine', people can heal. Believing in a medicine that actually heals is obvious. My strategy is to develop both a Reversal Mindset and a Reversal Protocol to reverse disease fully.

Reflection

Reversal Mindset is as important as the Reversal Protocol.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Replace the word "Reversal" with "Healing", "Success", "Wealth", or "Health".

Without the mindset and belief, no further steps may be taken.

Knowledge and facts are not enough.

Smoking packages explicitly state that smoking causes cancer.
Smokers still smoke.

The mindset must change. We call this a Paradigm Shift.

Belief shapes biology.
Meaning regulates molecules.
Mindset builds empires.

Faith is medicine.
Fear is poison.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

Life-Changing Question

What is your Health Mindset?

Write it down and let me know. I’m very curious. And I will reply … even though busy.

Next week—

Power of Mind (Part III).

Why Belief is Essential to Success

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

The Power of Mind (Part I)

For Success in Health & Wealth

William James: Belief as Biology

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

Dr. William James

William James suffered from depression and nearly ended his life, but in that frail moment, a thought dawned in his mind--to act by will and to believe. It is revealing when we read the state of his mind in dark despair, suddenly seeing a bright ray of light and hope.

"I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had not clung to scripture-texts like 'The eternal God is my refuge,' etc., 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,' etc., 'I am the resurrection and the life,' etc., I think I should have grown really insane."

"...when I have felt like taking a free initiative... suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into. Now I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power."

Something changed in that moment as he used his power of choice to transfer from the path of death to a path of hope. This was the beginning of modern psychology, knighting him as the 'Father of American Psychology.' He established psychology as a formal discipline at Harvard, bridging psychology with philosophy.

"The course of destiny may be altered by individuals.... Again and again, success depends on energy of act, energy again depends on faith that we shall not fail, and that faith in turn [depends] on the faith that we are right — which faith thus verifies itself."

Neuroscience would not catch up to his intuition until a century later, confirming that intention and mindset alter prefrontal activity, dopamine release, and emotional regulation, something he experienced firsthand and taught others. His radical idea that belief or faith is the first medicine underpins every placebo study ever conducted.

What is placebo? It is the power of a positive belief that becomes reality.

But most people believe in a nocebo, the power of a negative belief that becomes their reality.

On May 8, 2025, at 11:00 pm, as I saw the results of my CT Calcium heart scan, a score of 505, my heart stopped. I had severe calcified coronary arteries. I immediately thought, I have to give up biking, which I love so much. I realized I could drop dead with any strenuous exertion. I felt a profound sadness and a sense of relegation in my heart. As I closed my eyes in shock, I prayed. 

Like William, a light dawned in me that the Lord will see me through this, that there is hope. In a moment, several things came to light in my heart. I recalled a book I had read over ten years ago, a book I believe was placed in the Regent College Bookstore for me. A health book in a Bible store? "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure" by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. I decided I would follow the protocol in the book. The next morning, I started a low-fat vegan diet. 30 months was the time it took for Dr. Esselstyn's star patient to fully reverse his 100% blocked coronary artery to 0%. 

In that moment, I believed I was healed. It would just take 30 months or so to see evidence of physical healing, but in my mind, it was already done. The belief that the Lord was with me and would grant me the wisdom to reverse my disease drove my thoughts, words and actions towards healing. Three months later, all the plaque in my neck arteries had completely melted away, almost miraculously. I am sure the same is happening in my heart vessels.

This is the power of belief: rewiring neurons, redirecting inflammatory markers, and the body reversing cholesterol out of my clogged arteries, rewriting my future.

Viktor Frankl: Meaning Overpowers Death

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances

Dr. Viktor Frankl

Dr. Frankl had everything stripped from him: his parents, his wife, his freedom, his dignity and his home. He had nothing left except torture for the unknown future, giving just one small piece of bread for the day, no change of clothes and meaningless work, carrying heavy water aimlessly back and forth with no purpose but to drive despair of life into his very soul. 

But he realized he could choose his attitude. He believed this experience in Auschwitz would define him somehow. He watched fellow prisoners die not purely due to hunger, but because of hopelessness and despair. Those who found meaning, a reason to live, a loved one to return to, a purpose beyond reason, found a way to keep surviving somehow.

His book, Man's Search for Meaning, describes his logotherapy, therapy through meaning, because humans are truly motivated not by mere pleasure or power, but by purpose.

Later studies would prove him right. Purpose reduces mortality. In a study from Rush Alzheimer's Center, people with a strong sense of purpose lived 7-10 years longer and inflammatory biomarkers like Interleukin-6 (IL-6) and C Reactive Protein (CRP) are lower.

Meaning modulates metabolism.

I thought to myself that night, rather than treating my heart condition like a 'death sentence', this could be my life purpose. To become the doctor who heals himself almost miraculously in a way never done before. I would discover the power of foods, fasting regimens, and high-intensity interval exercise at a level beyond what has been deemed possible. This is what I saw in my mind and heart that late night. I knew people would think I'm crazy, but I am used to that. I would become the doctor who fulfilled the proverb, "Physician, heal thyself."

In every reversal, there is a Frankl moment of meaning: when the data and evidence look terminal, but the story you believe in is eternal and filled with deep purpose.

P.S. My hsCRP is 0.2, amazingly low, as is my IL-6. Paired with my targeted low-fat vegan diet, my body chemistry has completely transformed in the past six months. Now, I have less than 24 months to go. My mind and my body don't quite crave all the foods I was 'addicted' to. I don't miss fried foods even one bit anymore! And that I find truly amazing. I still do miss ice cream and popcorn, but even those cravings have diminished 95%.

Ellen Langer: The Psychology of Story and Possibility

Mindsets are not metaphors. They are biological commands.

Ellen Langer

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer invited a group of men in their seventies to live for a week in a monastery recreated to look exactly like it was 1959, with black-and-white TVs and vintage radios. They were told not to pretend it was 1959, but to believe it was 1959.

After a week, the men's posture straightened, their vision sharpened, their memory improved, and their grip strength increased. Their bodies became the age they believed they were.

This study, known as the Counterclockwise Experiment, is a landmark in mind-body research.

She did a follow-up study with hotel maids, who were told that their daily cleaning met "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exercise guidelines. Their weight, blood pressure and fat percentage dropped within four weeks, without changing their workload.

Their belief that they were exercised became a physiological reality.

Perception became performance.

Langer tore down the wall between psychology and biology with such experiments and showed that the stories we believe shape our health outcomes as powerfully as genetics and lifestyle.

"Small changes can make large differences, so we should open ourselves to the impossible and embrace the psychology of possibility. The psychology of possibility first requires that we begin with the assumption that we do not know what we can do or become. Rather than starting from the status quo, it argues for a starting point of what we would like to be. From that beginning, we can ask how we might reach that goal and make progress toward it. It's a subtle change in thinking, although not difficult to make once we realize how stuck we are in culture, language, and modes of thought that limit our potential."

For my own Reversal Protocols, Langer shows me that people don't just need the protocols or medicines, but they need to tell themselves a new narrative.

A person with diabetes must believe they are becoming healthy, not avoiding disease.

A leader must see their company growing, not declining.

The story you tell yourself has a huge impact on your outcome.

What health or wealth story are you telling and repeating to yourself?

Watch and listen to your thoughts and your actions.

Carol Dweck: The Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset

Becoming is better than being.

Dr. Valter Longo

Carol Dweck had a profound insight when she noticed that some students in the classroom said, "I can't do this," while others said, "I can't do this yet."

The keyword, 'yet', while just one small word, made an enormous difference.

This single word, yet, became the lever between potential and being stagnant.

Her research at Stanford revealed that people who believe ability is developable, ie, a "growth mindset," outperform those who believe it's fixed across education, athletics, relationships, and leadership. The growth mindset individuals persist longer, recover faster, and learn more deeply. They keep learning and growing.

In medicine, a growth mindset translates directly into healing. Patients who believe in improvement and full recovery recover faster after surgery and adhere to treatment plans better.

Are you know-it-alls or learn-it-alls? Focus on learning rather than residing in only what you know.

A growth mindset is the single belief that can transform you and heal you, despite any setbacks or obstacles.

Mindset is medicine. Your neurons, cells and companies all obey this law: If you believe you can grow, you already have.

"Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives."

In my own Heart Reversal Protocol, I know my heart will become healthy like that of a 40-year-old, even though I am now 55. I already reversed my neck carotid arteries, which had about 20% plaque, and the arterial wall thickness was older than an 85-year-old. Now it is normal for my age, more than a 30-year reversal and absolutely no plaque visible. It started with belief, and I found the protocol to reverse my plaque faster than any study has ever shown. 

The best studies with drugs (statins and powerful LDL-lowering PCSK9s), at best, decreased plaque by 0.04 mm in a year. My CIMT reduced from 1.8mm to 0.86mm, a 0.94mm reduction, a 54% reduction in 3 months.

The power of my mind to believe it was possible led me to search for the best-suited and most focused Heart Reversal Protocol. My belief and discovery of the Reversal Protocol fuelled each other, resulting in my amazing healing.

Reflection

Why can’t a person live a healthy lifestyle if s/he has disease? What is the big constraint that limits their mind and their actions?

Dr. Kevin Ham

As many people are asking me for my help in reversing their own diseases, I see two types of people with diseases or health issues.

One type is dependent on keeping their lifestyle unchanged and is willing to take a pill to manage their symptoms. This is the vast majority of people. I understand lifestyle changes are hard. Very hard.

The other type is a small minority who are willing, able and have decided to change their lifestyle. It is this type that I am highly motivated to help, for half the battle is one of their own minds. The mind is empowered to make that decision and commit to it for x number of months or years. In my case, I decided to start with a low-fat vegan diet for three years. It was already decided in my mind, and I committed to it.

My sports cardiologist asked me at month 3, "But can you keep on your diet?"

I thought that was a silly question at that time. He told me many of his athletic patients try to make a lifestyle change in diet, but get frustrated after a few months and get the stent and take the medications. I passed my modified (harder) exercise stress test, so he wasn't concerned about me at that time and told me to follow up in a year.

It's now been six months for me, and I have 2.5 years left of my mental commitment to this diet, but it has now become 90% easier for me. I know what to bring with me when I travel. I bring my steel-cut oatmeal, chia and flax seeds and my handful of supplements (Vit D, nattokinase, Vit C, Spirulina). I know how to prepare oatmeal without a stove by soaking the oats overnight in hot or room-temperature water. 

My 65-year-old friend, when asked by another, Why don't you go on Kevin's protocol to reverse your diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol and visceral fat, said, "I can't because I travel too much." While I care for him, I know it is a mindset issue. He already sees the evidence of healing in Fred and me. I reflected deeper, but why? I believe he can't decide and commit because it would mean giving up some of the foods he loves, like yogurt, dairy, cheese, and fats.

He eats for taste and experience. The difference for me is that it is a far secondary issue. I eat to live, and I eat for health. I no longer live to eat for taste like I used to.

Do you eat for health, for taste, or for experience?

This is an age-old question, at the root of all indulgences, starting with Adam and Eve, who ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. "It looked good for food, a delight to the eyes, and to make one wise." These are the three temptations we must reflect upon. John frames it as "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life."

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

Life-Changing Question

Do you eat for health or for taste or for experience?

Ponder this question each time you put something into your mouth. Make the question unforgettable.

Next week—

Power of Mind (Part II).

Why Belief is Essential to Success

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

Power of Fasting to Fight Cancer (Part II)

You must kill cancer before it kills you.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Killing Cancer.

As Jude starts his third round of chemotherapy, he is eating only one meal a day before his chemo and then two meals after his chemo and a regular targeted ketogenic diet thereafter. The chemo has, each time, wiped out his bone marrow, requiring blood and platelet transfusions.

But each of us is always dealing with cells that can become cancerous, and the body's defence mechanisms are continually working to fix or eliminate damaged cells in our bodies before they become a problem.

Two questions for you to ponder deeply:

1. How do we prevent cancer before it can find a home?

2. When cancer exists, how do we kill every last cancer cell before it kills the host?

Cancer 1.0

The traditional strategy has been to target cancer with:

• Chemo (bomb) targets fast-growing cells, both cancerous and healthy, at typically very toxic doses, leading to severe side effects.

• Radiation (burn) targets the site of cancer, but is also a risk factor for future cancer.

• Surgery (slash) removes what is visible.

Cancer 2.0

• Change the immune and metabolic terrain: Support healthy cells and kill the cancer cells more specifically.

• Immune therapy: Targets the cancer cells directly (but it hasn't been the grand slam we were expecting.)

• Metabolic diet and lifestyle: nutrinomics, fasting, and detoxification. Cancer cells rely on glucose and glutamine for energy. It is their Achilles heel. They starve when deprived of both. Fasting, ketogenic diets, and insulin suppression create a metabolic wilderness in which the liver produces fat-derived energy called ketones, which the brain, heart, muscles, and other cells can efficiently use for energy. Normal cells conserve energy, slow down metabolically and prepare themselves for a 'starvation' environment, protecting themselves better than the cancer cells that continue to divide rapidly, but without the full energy supply of glucose and glutamine, leaving them much more vulnerable to the chemo bomb.

• Early detection: prevent cancer from forming or detect and deal with the first cancer cell at Stage 0 (Stage 1 ~ a billion cancer cells = 0.5 cm detectable mass)

Cancer 3.0

I have a high interest in integrating and leveraging Cancer 1.0 with Cancer 2.0:

• Use chemo strategically to kill the mass of cancer.

• Use fasting and detox to make chemo more lethal to cancer but safer for the patient against chemo's toxic side effects, especially bone marrow, the home of the immune system.

• Use nutrition and nutrinomics to synergistically attack the cancer cells while protecting healthy ones.
  
  

Thomas Seyfried - Revival of Warburg

The origin of cancer is not genetic; it is metabolic.

Dr. Thomas Seyfried

Do you recall that last week we learned about Otto Warburg and the Warburg effect? He believed that cancer was a metabolic disease. That cancer started when cells lost their ability to use oxygen efficiently to make energy. Instead of using normal respiration (which occurs in mitochondria), cancer cells switch to a less efficient, more primitive way of generating energy—fermentation—even when oxygen is available.

Almost a century after Warburg, the world had forgotten his metabolic gospel as the answer to cancer. Most of the scientific and medical world shifted its attention to genetics—the idea that cancer is fundamentally a disease caused by mutations in DNA. Warburg's "metabolic" explanation (cancer as an energy-production problem) was mostly forgotten or considered outdated.

But Thomas Seyfried, while studying epilepsy and metabolic disorders, focused on mitochondria and eventually asked, "What if cancer begins, not in the gene, but in the cell's ability to produce energy?"

He poured into the science and philosophy of Warburg, revisiting an ignored and misunderstood truth.

His mission became to recast cancer as a metabolic disease with a primary cause of mitochondrial dysfunction.

"If you can manage the fermentation metabolism, you can manage the disease."

He demonstrated that when:

The nucleus of a cancer cell, where the DNA resides, was put into a healthy cell; its progeny (aka descendants) were healthy cells rather than expected cancer cells.

But when the cytoplasm of a cancer cell was implanted into a healthy cell, its progeny were cancerous. There was something in the cytoplasm that was a 'cause' of cancer.

European Institute of Molecular Medicine.

Then, he demonstrated that mitochondria were the primary cause and that defective mitochondria led to mutations and to an inability to produce energy even in the presence of oxygen. This leads to the dependence of cancer cells on glucose and glutamine, because glutamine can be converted to glucose. These pathways make cancer cells inflexible, fragile, dependent and vulnerable.

"Cancer cells are vulnerable because they lack metabolic flexibility."

Patients suddenly had tools: diet, fasting, oxygen, and ketones, as scientifically grounded therapies that change the body's metabolic terrain, weakening cancer cells and fortifying healthy cells. His experiments provided deeper insight into the Warburg Effect in cancer and turned it into something that was applicable and empowered patients.

Dr. Dominic D’Agostino

The ketogenic diet is not just a diet, it’s a metabolic therapy.

Dr. Dominic D’Agostino

Dr. D'Agostino worked with the US Navy, endeavouring to answer the question: "How do you keep a diver alive under crushing pressure and low oxygen?"

Under extreme pressure and low oxygen, the divers' brains couldn't properly use glucose for energy anymore. Their brains short-circuited, which triggered seizures and could lead to death.

Instead of glucose, he found ketones, which stabilized neuronal networks, reduced oxidative stress and allowed the brain to operate more efficiently. This is why fasting for four days, leading to high ketone levels in kids who had seizures, led to the arrest of convulsions almost miraculously.

And he found that cancer cells could not adapt to the ketone-rich, glucose-restricted environment.

"Nutritional ketosis can shift our physiology in ways that are profoundly therapeutic."

To enhance the effects of ketones, he experimented with hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). This wasn't simply an additive weapon, but a synergistic force multiplier.

Cancer thrives in low-oxygen, high-glucose, acidic, inflamed environments. HBOT floods the body with 10-20x more oxygen than breathing alone. This oxygen, under high pressure, dissolves directly into the plasma, tissues, lymph and interstitial fluid.

Since cancer cells cannot use oxygen for energy, they rely on the fermentation of glucose.

When you add high amounts of oxygen into the cancer's environment:

• Normal cells thrive

  • Supercharges mitochondrial ATP energy production in normal cells.

  • They become stronger.

• Cancer cells get strangled (they thrive on hypoxia--low oxygen)

  • Increases tumour oxygenation.

  • Decreases tumour acidity.

  • Reduces hypoxia-driven resistance.

  • Fermentation becomes less efficient.

  • Reactive oxygen species (ROS) spike inside the tumour, selectively killing cancer cells.

• Repairs tissue damage caused by chemo/radiation to bone marrow (red blood cell and platelet formation), skin, nerves, gut, mouth and blood vessels by:

  • HBOT is FDA-approved for radiation injury.

  • Stem cell mobilization.

  • Angiogenesis (new blood vessels).

  • Tissue oxygenation.

  • Wound healing.

  • Collagen production.

And ketosis deprives cancer of glucose and its sole energy source while fortifying normal cells.

This 1-2 punch, double metabolic trap, sets cancer cells up for the chemotherapy and radiation to annihilate them more effectively,

This is not only targeted therapy but also creating an environment where normal cells can thrive and cancer cells cannot.

Dr. Valter Longo - Architect of Longevity

Longevity is programmed. And fasting is the key to unlocking that program..

Dr. Valter Longo

Valter Longo grew up in southern Italy, among centenarians who lived long not because of medicines, but because of the rhythm and rhyme of life: simple, real food, long walks, fasting days, deep relationships and clean living.

His interest in longevity led him to head to USC in 2000, where he became the world's leading researcher on fasting and longevity. He found a profound biological truth:

• Fasting kills damaged or diseased cells and organelles. This is called autophagy (self-eating).

• Refeeding activates stem cells.

• Longevity is nature, with the body's natural rhythm and dancing to it.

He discovered that cycles of fasting initiate autophagy, reduce inflammation, trigger apoptosis (cell death) in damaged cells, lower IGF-1 (which stimulates cancer growth), and, during refeeding, activate stem cell regeneration.

"When you fast, the body kills off broken cells. When you refeed, stem cells rebuild."

His coined term, "Fast-Mimicking-Diet" (FMD), became the world's scientifically validated protocol for activating regeneration without having to stop eating food with a diet that mimicked fasting, in effect a subtype of a ketogenic diet, with low glucose and low glycine, fully leveraging the Warburg Effect, while feeding patients fighting cancer.

"To live long, you must avoid overfeeding the system."

Longo teaches us to align with biology and nature rather than hack and fight against it.

Dr. Azra Raza, the Fierce Humanitarian

We are losing the war on cancer because we are trying to kill the last cell, not the first.

Dr. Azra Raza

When I read the prologue of her book, The First Cell, my heart was deeply inspired, but my face also flooded with tears for her, for her patients, for her compassionate heart and brilliant mind. Azra's mission is deeply human, deeply spiritual and deeply urgent.

When I look at Azra, I don't see just a doctor, an oncology researcher, but I see a general and a soldier in a war against cancer. A warrior forged in grief. A woman who has given her life to saving others, enduring the suffering that comes with this devastating disease. She not only watched the person she loved most, her husband, Harvey, a fellow oncologist dedicated to fighting cancer, be consumed by the very disease that he fought to cure, but was also, at his request, his doctor, until she laid him to rest with no peace in her heart.

Azra had the mission to cure cancer in her heart since she was young, but entered the arena of oncology through heartbreak. From her initial pediatric patients through caring for her husband, she saw that we are detecting and treating cancer far too late.

Her mission became refined to:

• Find the first malignant cell.

• Intercept and take care of cancer before suffering begins.

• Prevent and ease human suffering.

She has been drawing and storing her patients' blood for over 30 years in her cancer cell tissue repository ("The Cancer Bank"), championing human-centred studies rather than mouse studies, molecular fingerprints, early detection and humane oncology that preserves dignity.

We bonded instantly, both academically and professionally, but also on a spiritual level, with a shared sense of mission to help ease the suffering of our fellow humans. Instead of chemo/radiation/surgery, which she aptly calls bomb/burn/slash, find the first cancer cell, which she has discovered how to do and has developed a device that can both detect and kill this first 'giant' cancer cell, the mother of all cancer cells.

"We must intercept cancer at its earliest, most curable stage."

"Patients deserve better than toxic therapies that come too late."

Azra brought the human soul to medicine, along with the blueprint and method for detecting and preventing cancer at the first cell, to end cancer at its beginning rather than fighting it until the last cell.

"Finding and killing the first cancer cell will change everything."

Together we share a mission bigger than either of us alone:

• To make cancer a solvable problem in our lifetime.

• To build the tools that find the first malignant cell.

• To cure cancer, at the beginning.

I've invested in her startup, and I am also helping her create a documentary to tell our story and proclaim her war on cancer at the first cell.

May God help her and those in this common mission against a disease that arises from its host, causing suffering and death.

Reflection

If disease is only fought by poisons, that becomes the ground in which the seed of the very disease it fights to grow again, should we not change our paradigm and strategy?

Dr. Kevin Ham

I'm a problem-solver, and I love thinking in first principles. If cancer is found early, it is much easier to deal with it. Still, the question we must ponder is, what environment and primary cause led to this cancer in the first place, and how can we ensure the metabolic terrain of our body prevents cancer from ever growing?

When the risk of cancer is 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women, how do we reduce this risk from 33%-50% to near 0%?

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

Life-Changing Question

What can I do today to reduce my cancer risk by altering my body into a cancer-proof environment?

You are armed with the essential knowledge of the primary cause of cancer and its Achilles heel, but knowledge without action is powerless. Only when that knowledge is discerned and applied to your life does that knowledge become power.

Next week—

Power of Belief.

Why Belief is Essential to Success.

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

Power of Nutrition to Fight Cancer (Part I)

Detox and Nutrition to “stress” Cancer

Your greatest wealth is health. You only have one body, one mind and one spirit. Take great care.

Dr. Kevin Ham

A Dream to Cure Cancer

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Voltaire

I lost my good friend Elliot Koo to Ewing's Sarcoma in 2010, after he fought bravely for two years. In 2008, when he was fighting Cancer, I decided to do the Ride to Conquer Cancer and raise money for Cancer research on his behalf. 

My dear mother had just passed away in February 2006 to gall bladder Cancer. Every year, I rode this charity bike ride to remind myself how hard the battle to fight Cancer was, with so many casualties. I rode with my fellow colleagues in cities across Canada, including Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. I planned to make annual pilgrimages on the bike in cities all over the US and eventually in Europe.

In November 2019, I wrote in my journal two prayers:

1. That my coworkers don't have to come into the office five days a week, ideally just on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Many were commuting each way for an hour or two each day (even now, I have not implemented a back-to-office policy, as I want to give back all the time lost to commutes by those who have been so loyal and have worked ten years or more.)

2. I want to help Canadian riders become pro cyclists. I am still unsure where this prayer came from, but little did I know that in the next five years I would become a partner in a pro cycling team, riding around Israel on my bicycle, meeting the President of Israel with fellow cyclists, riding 40% of the Tour de France, up the Alps and the biggest mountains in France and Italy.

This led me to host The Dream to Cure Cancer in 2023, inviting 4x Tour de France champ, Chris Froome, now a great friend, to ride for a charity Cancer ride for my dear friend and mentor Dr. Azra Raza, an oncologist and researcher from Columbia University, right here in my hometown of Vancouver, riding in Belcarra where I dream of helping to build a wellness retreat.

I did not imagine that God would answer my prayers and weave the threads of my heart together in such a way, emergent and so unpredictable and certainly unplannable by me. I am reminded of the verse, "Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work with us, to him be glory…" 

Repeat: Oh No!

The worst health news one may hear is “You have Cancer.” Perhaps even worse is, “Your Cancer has returned.

Kevin Ham

My friend's son, Jude, just 11 years old, had battled the same Ewing's sarcoma two years ago, and looked to be fine, but two weeks after a trip to Disneyland and Universal--a wish granted by the Make-A-Wish Foundation--he started to have shortness of breath.

They found his right lung filled with fluid and Cancer throughout, both small and large masses. My friend called me in despair, and upon hearing this, I thought that such a relapse was like metastatic disease, as his primary Cancer site was the left rib, partially resected two years earlier. He had survived 14 rounds of toxic chemotherapy, enduring vomiting, hair loss and bone marrow suppression, but so had his Cancer, quietly growing and finding its new home over the past two years.

Two years ago, I purposely visited Calgary to advise them to employ a ketogenic diet to "stress" the Cancer. Jude's mom was a nutritionist. But now, I told them my thoughts that this would be a tough battle, much harder than the one they had thought victorious two years ago. I could hear my friend's voice trembling as he asked questions. I told him I was not an expert on Ewing's and would ask my friend Dr. Azra. She just replied, "So sorry to hear."

This broke my heart. I asked if there were any alternative therapies? I received no text back. The silence told me the answer. Just before their all-paid trip to Disney, my friend had expressed that the love of a father was almost unfathomable, as we were talking about the love of God, who sacrificed his only son for us. He said he could not live if his son's Cancer returned. That sentence reverberated in my heart like an earthquake as I spoke to him on the phone.

For each step in the Flywheel, assign it an objective and the desired result or goal. This is called the OKR. O is Objective, and KR is Key Result. This is what the brilliant John Doerr talks to the entrepreneurs he invested in. Doerr was a giant in the Venture Capital world in Silicon Valley, funding Intel and learning this method from the founder and CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, who describes it in his brilliant book "Only the Paranoid Survive." Doerr went on to mentor two young Stanford Ph.D students who dreamed of creating a great company by building a simple search interface. Google implemented the OKR system as it was simple and scalable as the company grew. This concept is described in the book "Measure What Matters" by Doerr, who states, "We must measure what matters most."

Not Me

“1 in 2 men will get Cancer. I know, but I won’t be that one.”

My thoughts as I read the stats … but how can I be sure?

I was battling my own health disease, but fighting Cancer was a whole different ball game. I had watched so many people die when I did palliative medicine. I decided I would prevent such terminal diseases and moved to preventive medicine. I have been studying human physiology, metabolism, nutrition science, and exercise physiology for the past two decades to understand why diseases occur and how to heal them. My heart since 14 was to cure autoimmune disease, which left me temporarily paralyzed and in severe pain. I wanted to ease the suffering of children like me. But I was not very good with kids, so I went into family medicine.

When Cancer claims 10 million lives a year globally and visits 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women in North America, I know I am on the waitlist. Both my parents had Cancer. Recent genetic testing said that my genetic markers show my risk of pancreatic Cancer is 90% above the norm.

When I used to hear stats on disease and death, I had the tendency to think they included me, but as I got older, I felt more confident that it would be those around me, and I would help them. But when my friend died of a sudden heart attack, resulting in me finding out about my own severe heart disease, I realized I have to reconsider the odds of them including me. Heart disease is still the #1 killer, and Cancer will soon overtake that position.

What about you? When you hear the stats, do you feel the urgency to prevent this unrelenting terror that could reside within you? No longer obeying the laws of life, multiplying and spreading, unable to die. It is a very primitive cell, yet very insidious, as it remains unopposed by its victim's immune system.

Cancer’s Achilles Heel

The prime cause of Cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal cells by the fermentation of sugar.

Otto Warburg

In 1924, German biochemist Otto Warburg made a startling discovery as he peered down the microscope. Cancer cells, even in the presence of oxygen, did not utilize it to produce energy through their mitochondria (the power producers in our cells). Instead, it used a primitive method to generate energy by fermenting glucose, much like yeast. We refer to this as anaerobic (oxygen-free) respiration. You engage in anaerobic respiration when you are at your extreme limits, such as during intense running. You know at this point, you can't last too much longer. Sprinters optimize for this. I'm at my best when I have to do this, sprinting on the bike, especially on a slight incline. 

Warburg called this a defect in respiration; the mitochondrion did not utilize oxygen and was thus extremely inefficient. It could only ferment glucose, producing a fraction of the energy.

This became known as the Warburg Effect.

This concept has been of great interest to me. I was trained by the 1992 Barcelona Olympic gold medalist, Mijung Kim, in Judo. She taught me how to leverage the strength and movement of other, much more powerful opponents against them and add my own strength to theirs to knock them off balance to throw them. I call this the Judo Strategy. 

Here was a way to leverage Cancer's weakness against it. Because it could grow indefinitely, it would require a large amount of glucose. This is one of the reasons that when CT scans and MRIs can't detect early Cancer, they will use a more sensitive PET scan with glucose and see Cancer cells that take up this glucose.

Warburg went on to win the 1931 Nobel Prize for discovering how cells use oxygen, and yet his greatest discovery — that Cancer is a metabolic disease — remains cocooned.

He survived Nazi Germany, despite being both Jewish and homosexual. Hitler deemed Warburg's research too valuable to lose and allowed it to continue, as well as his own life. Hitler's own mother had died from Cancer, and his mortal fear of the disease led him to ban smoking and also to issue a quest for his scientists to find a cure for Cancer.

As science and technology advanced, the discovery of DNA led to new hope in unravelling the mysteries of Cancer, primarily believed to be genetic. Genetics became the hot new interest, and metabolics became old news. The mitochondria gave way to DNA.

In 1966, when the world had turned away from his insights, intoxicated by the allure of DNA, he lamented, "Nobody today can say that one does not know what Cancer and its prime cause is. On the contrary, there is no disease whose prime cause is better known."

Still, Warburg whispers to me even now:

"If the respiration of the cells is disturbed, Cancer will inevitably flow."

"Cancer, above all diseases, has countless secondary causes. But there is only one prime cause: the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal cells by the fermentation of sugar."

So how do we ensure our cells' respiration is not disturbed? This cellular respiration is disturbed when our mitochondria become dysfunctional.

The world did not see the poetry hidden in his science. Cancer was a cell that could no longer breathe. It regresses to simple anaerobic respiration, even in the presence of oxygen.

Healing the Hopeless - Dr. Max Gerson

The power to heal lies within every human being.

Dr. Max Gerson

While Warburg was protected in Germany, another Jewish doctor, Dr. Max Gerson, had to flee the Nazi regime, taking his insights into Cancer to America. Born in 1881, Gerson was a physician who was crippled by migraines. When drugs did not work, he did what true scientists do when trapped between pain and ignorance: he experimented on himself to find a cure. He started modifying his diet, eliminating animal fats and salts and eating primarily vegetables and fruits. Within weeks, his tormenting headaches vanished. 

As he started treating others with his diet, one of his earliest patients had a very difficult case of skin tuberculosis. He applied his diet therapy, and her ulcers healed and her disease improved. Soon, word spread across Germany that he could reverse 'incurable' diseases with food and detoxification alone.

He published his theories with observational rigour and gained the attention of a renowned surgeon, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, who adopted and refined his approach for tuberculosis of the bone. This gave Dr. Gerson credibility. Sauerbruch said, "Where medicine fails, Gerson's diet often succeeds."

Dr. Gerson was invited to conduct his diet at the Munich University Hospital. Out of 450 "incurable" tuberculosis patients, 446 showed remarkable recovery. Their skin lesions closed, and x-rays confirmed improvement. The secret? Gerson restored their cellular potassium levels and drained excess sodium from their tissues, reversing edema and inflammation.

One of his patients, Helene, the wife of the famous Dr. Albert Schweitzer, was cured of her lung tuberculosis after nine months. Later, Dr. Schweitzer himself came to him at age 75 with severe Diabetes, on high insulin and in just a few weeks was completely off his insulin and lived another 15 years to run his hospital in Africa. Dr. Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his health philanthropy. Another patient recovered completely from their advanced stomach Cancer. 

By the late 1920s, people with incurable diseases came to Dr. Gerson; people with end-stage incurable Cancer left as the walking dead. He refused on the grounds that advanced Cancer would be too difficult for his diet therapy and detoxification protocol, but they insisted that there was no other alternative. His first three Cancer patients all dramatically improved. But his next six advanced Cancer patients all failed. This led him to even greater scientific and observational rigour, resulting in much greater success in prolonging and, in some cases, reversing advanced Cancers.

He recognized the work of his contemporary Otto Warburg, who wrote "The Metabolism of Tumors," in 1930.

"Otto Warburg was the first who found the metabolic deviations of malignant tissue from normal tissue and formulated it:

Anaerobic glycolysis ÷ cell respiration

• In normal tissue, it is 0.

• In embryonic tissue, it is 0.1.

• In benign tumours,  it is 0.45 - 1.45.

• In malignant Cancer, it is up to 12.”

The malignancies in human beings continuously fall back deeper and deeper into fermentation, and so his Cancer therapy was rooted in the goal of restoring the function of the oxidizing systems in the entire body by: 

1. Detoxifying the whole body

2. Providing ample potassium and decreasing sodium to restore the chemical gradient in the cells and

3. Adding oxidizing enzymes (from vegetables and supplements).

Gerson concluded, "All degenerative disease begins when normal metabolism is replaced by retention, sodium, water, toxins, and the tissues can no longer excrete."

He emphasized that removing a tumour surgically did not restore health, unless the metabolic terrain was cleansed and restored, much like the soil of our farms today.

"Our hospitals cut out the fruit of disease but never touch the soil."

He banned all salt, including sea salt, soy sauce and baking soda, even for cooking and added potassium to his therapy for Cancer patients. 

We now know that the sodium-potassium pump (Na/K) requires ATP to exchange sodium from the outside of the cell to the inside and potassium from the inside to the outside, thereby maintaining the cell's voltage potential. High sodium levels impair this pump, leading to oxidative stress, mitochondrial damage, and inflammation. Low-sodium, high-potassium diets improve mitochondrial biogenesis and autophagy, enhancing the body's natural healing processes. So cells detoxify faster, tissues oxygenate better, and inflammation subsides.

This is seen in people with high blood pressure and heart failure. Could it apply to Cancer cells as he hypothesized? His results speak for themselves.

As medical drugs came to the forefront in the battle against Cancer, Gerson was stripped of his medical license and ordered to no longer treat any Cancer patients. Late in his life, abandoned and unable to practise, he published his magnum opus in 1958, "A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty cases and The Cure of Advanced Cancer by Diet Therapy. A Summary of 30 Years of Clinical Experimentation." Just three of the amazing cases in the book.

1. Metastatic Melanoma – lymph-node and bone lesions that reportedly regressed after 18 months on the regimen.

2. Advanced Lung Cancer – X-rays that he claimed cleared within nine months.

3. Pancreatic Carcinoma – a physician-patient who lived more than five years beyond a six-month prognosis.

Gerson died a year later in 1959 of pneumonia at age 77. His theories and practices helped many 'hopeless' patients as he planted the seeds for modern integrative medicine, using the language of terrain, detoxification, and nutritional healing.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer eulogized Gerson, "I see in him one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine. Many of his basic ideas have been adopted without having his name connected with them. Yet, he has achieved more than seemed possible under adverse conditions. He leaves a legacy which commands attention and which will assure him his due place. Those whom he has cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas."

"One day they will see that I was not an enemy of medicine, but its conscience."

One of his last notes in March 1959, "Too much opposition. Too few helpers. Yet, the body still heals, even as men lose faith."

I had always been curious about Gerson's Therapy with its vegetable juices and coffee enemas. As I recently read his book, exploring the history of Cancer therapy, I felt his heart pierce mine with his passion to help the suffering who had no other alternative, when there was no promising medical chemotherapy yet. Tears streamed from my heart for the heart of this man, who was stripped of honour and yet had done so much. I would award him a Nobel Peace Prize, just as his friend, Dr. Schweitzer, whom Gerson cured of Diabetes, had received and for whom he bestowed the utmost praise.

Many people Gerson cured, who had had no hope, eventually outlived him and attested to his compassion, dedication and scientific mind. His daughter Charlotte carried on his work, establishing a clinic in Mexico and curing many hundreds of advanced Cancers. She passed away at the age of 95. 

"The physician's highest calling is to awaken the will to heal."

His last journal entry, "Let future doctors learn from nature, not against her."

Gerson's call to heal has become mine.

Atomic Age of Cancer Therapy

The first chemotherapies were born from World War II, when physicians noticed that soldiers exposed to mustard-gas bombs had very low white blood cell counts. Perhaps this could also destroy the Cancerous cells as well?

In 1947, a great breakthrough in initial Leukemia remissions was achieved using chemical warfare poisons. From this moment on, we fought the disease of death with toxic chemicals. Lives were prolonged, but the side effects of chemotherapy also took their toll, with hair loss, nausea, bone marrow suppression and immune collapse. This has been the standard of care for most Cancers, even 80 years later.

This is also Jude's only hope: two very toxic chemotherapy drugs. When I asked his doctor, "What is his prognosis?" there was a long pause. "We will have to see how his first chemo round is and whether the fluid in his lungs resolves so he can breathe easier. We will reassess then."

I have been advising his parents that the things they can control are his diet, exercise and comfort, and to focus his diet and exercise on three goals:

1. Foods that weaken the Cancer cells.

2. Foods that boost the immune system.

3. Foods that protect his healthy cells.

Jude’s stomach is his biggest constraint, so everything that goes into his mouth must be targeted to do one or more of the above three goals.

Jude just finished his third chemotherapy, and although he has lost a lot of hair, feels a loss of appetite and his bone marrow is suppressed, it is very hard to tell he is undergoing chemotherapy.

In the next issue, I will outline the basis of his strategy. As his chemotherapy is limited to 14 rounds, leveraging the toxic nature of these chemodrugs in addition to diet, exercise and adjuvant and supplementary therapies is of vital importance.

Not even one Cancer cell can remain. Otherwise, a relapse resulting in a 3rd recurrence will be much more difficult than his first fight two years ago and this one now, which once appeared hopeless, but now shines a ray of hope in his heart and his parents' hearts. And I, too, see that sliver of hope dawn, but I am still very weary of this Cancer's stealth actions.

I am still learning, and wish I knew the things I do now, sooner, having learned from my own heart reversal protocol and applying similar principles to a much harder and graver disease in Cancer. I could have helped Elliot more back then. I ask God to give us more wisdom, the gift of healing and understanding.

Reflection

We must pause and ponder when our own body turns against us, greedy for energy, for power, for space, even at the expense of its own life.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Cancer is becoming a pandemic and yet there are no visible ways to stop its progressive march to its growth causing pain and death within more than 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women as it relentlessly assails us. Remove as many of the primary causes and be very diligent in your lifestyle, so that you don’t even have to fight this battle.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

Life-Changing Question

What can I do today to reduce my risk of not being the 1 in 2 men or 1 in 3 women who get Cancer.

Please give it serious consideration.

Next week—

The Immunity Revolution.

How a Doctor I know is beating Stage 4 Colon Cancer.

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

Strategy of Breakthrough for Health and Wealth

Just 5 Principles for Remarkable Growth and Renewal

I was having dinner with my daughters' friends, eager in their 20s to find their way in the world. Some are applying for jobs, have just started a job, or are thinking about starting a new business. I asked them what business, and they started explaining it with excitement and hope. I asked them when they were going to start—a long pause. "I am working on a 20-page document detailing how I would do it."

I told them that because I was doing a medical residency and had very little time, I had to build my first business very simply. That was a very great blessing. My time and skills were very constrained and limited. I had never taken a business course in my life, nor any technology or computer science courses. I quit the arts in Grade 8, so I wasn't very creative.

My business plan was just half a page. It was so simple that I could execute it in little time and hyper focus on it.

I envisioned the internet equivalent of the Yellow Pages —a book listing all the types of businesses in a city. I would have to start with just one page of the Yellow Pages to make it easy for me to build. I chose Web Hosting companies because I imagined the large number of companies that would need one to host their online businesses.

I didn't have time to build an app, so I decided to find an existing application I could modify and add to. I found one, Links SQL, and decided to learn the computer language it was written in, as I couldn't afford a programmer. During my time on call as a medical resident, I learned the basics of PERL and started coding a review and rating module for the program. I thought that many other people who bought the app would want this review module. I would offer it for free and, in turn, ask them to add their web hosting company and review it. This is how I would garner hundreds to thousands of reviews, and other people would come to read them. It was a very early version of Yelp (which is an abbreviation of Yellow Pages).

It worked. I got thousands of visitors and eventually advertisers. I then added the next business category: Domain Name Companies. I was generating $25,000 to $30,000 USD per month as a medical resident on a meagre salary of $45,000, with on-call duties twice a week. (I still have a bit of PTSD from my pager, which beeped every time there was an emergency call. I don't check my voicemail and don't like responding quickly to texts and emails as a result.)

I had seen a domain sell for $7.5 million: Business.com in 1999. I thought to myself that my goal was to make enough money so I wouldn't need to practice medicine for financial gain. One domain like that, and it would be more than I could dream of. This was a new type of real estate: virtual real estate of the burgeoning Internet.

This led me down the path of discovering the secret of how domain names became available when they weren't renewed. I discovered a precious way of acquiring valuable domains for as little as $8 in 2000, during the dot-com crash. To achieve this, I stopped working on my first business and focused exclusively on domains. It took a while to figure out the domain name system, but that barrier to entry limited the number of competitors in the race to acquire and register these domain names. An opportunity of a lifetime, for which I put my medical dreams to cure disease on hold... Until now. Thank God. And I am so grateful for each disease I have and for those who are determined to cure their own with my guidance.

I realized that building a business was essentially a process of experimentation guided by a handful of principles and uncovering insights that others had yet to discover.

I had used the scientific method (hypothesis, assumptions, design experiment to test assumptions, gather data, analyze data, conclusion of results to affirm or deny assumptions and hypothesis). It was the only thing that I knew and made sense. I had a specific goal with a specific time frame. I would ponder how to accelerate this goal and its results by constraining time, money, and processes. How can I accomplish this in one day, rather than one month or one year? How can I accomplish this on my own with limited technical skills?

This forced me to be creative and plan 2-3 experiments. I drew out my business model in 3 steps, which I call the Flywheel now.

The book "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries describes this scientific method for building a business beautifully and simply. He advises to "Start small, start now, learn fast."

As I explained how to design their business simply, I thought a newsletter that showcases the five simple principles and the books that describe them would be very powerful for entrepreneurs looking to start a business. 

So here it is.

1. Flywheel of Breakthroughs

From Growing Wealth to Health Renewal

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.

Jim Collins

When you get it right, the wheel turns itself.

Jeff Bezos

When Jeff Bezos drove across America from New York in 1994, leaving his cushy Wall Street job, he did not really know which city he would arrive at. Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Why? He had a great vision of an online marketplace that sold everything. But that vision was too large to begin with. So he chose to start with one category first. He constrained his vision to just one thing, but also thought about how he could expand it category by category. First, he would need to choose the one that had the most promise and could scale the fastest and easiest.

He chose to start with building the world's largest bookstore. Bookstores were limited by their physical stores; they had to have multiple locations and hold a large amount of inventory. How could he strategically leverage these weaknesses using the Internet?

He found the biggest distributor of books in Portland. But there weren't many programmers there. Programmers were plentiful in San Francisco (Silicon Valley) and Seattle, largely due to Microsoft. Seattle was just a short 3 hour truck drive away. He decided Seattle would be home to his new business Cadabra.com, like magic. But people thought the name sounded too much like Cadaver so he thought switched to Relentless.com and registered the domain that still points to the name of what we know as Amazon.com. Named as a metaphor for the great Amazon jungle and river, and also because, like Steve Jobs, he liked that it started with the letter 'A', which would list it at the top of the page, in business directories like the Yellow Pages.

He sketched his business model on a napkin, after hearing a talk by Jim Collins, who wrote a book called 'Good to Great' describing the Flywheel Principle as the relentless growth of a business due to consistent small pushes in one direction that pushed each step like a gear and with each rotation of the Flywheel, would grow larger and larger.

He later added Prime membership (more convenience, faster checkout)

He thought about the question: "What three things will never change?" as the Internet changes almost everything. This question becomes even more pertinent in the age of AI, a more exponential force.

The power of the Flywheel is in its power of increasing momentum, linking cause and effect into a virtuous loop.

This not only applies to business, but to almost everything that you wish to improve or grow. It may be the most powerful concept you can train yourself to think and apply to what you do.

I’ve applied this Flywheel concept to health, as the CAST Flywheel, in honour of the cast that protects the body to allow it to heal itself.

For each step in the Flywheel, assign it an objective and the desired result or goal. This is called the OKR. O is Objective, and KR is Key Result. This is what the brilliant John Doerr talks to the entrepreneurs he invested in. Doerr was a giant in the Venture Capital world in Silicon Valley, funding Intel and learning this method from the founder and CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, who describes it in his brilliant book "Only the Paranoid Survive." Doerr went on to mentor two young Stanford Ph.D students who dreamed of creating a great company by building a simple search interface. Google implemented the OKR system as it was simple and scalable as the company grew. This concept is described in the book "Measure What Matters" by Doerr, who states, "We must measure what matters most."

2. 80/20 Principle

The Fractal Law of Leverage

The aim of sociology, as of every science, is to discover laws of phenomena and apply them to practical problems.

Vilfredo Pareto

Few things really matter — but those that do matter enormously.

Richard Koch

80/20 isn’t just a rule. It’s the law of cause and effect in everything you do.

Perry Marshall

In 1896, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed something unique: 20% of the pea pods in his garden produced 80% of the peas. He found this same pattern in wealth: 20% of people held 80% of the land.

Richard Koch then expanded on this in his book, "The 80/20 Principle," a brilliant application of the 80/20 principle.

80/20 Truth:

20% inputs or cause gives you 80% outputs / effect:

• 20% of 100 tasks account for 80% of the results.

• Focus on the 20% and neglect the 80% that yield only 20% of the results.

Perry Marshall then described, in his simple yet remarkably insightful book, "80/20 Sales & Marketing," how there is an 80/20 principle within each 80/20 principle. This is known as a fractal pattern. 80/20 was fractal! A breakthrough insight that could powerfully leverage the 80/20 Principle.

Fractal Truth:

• 80/20 repeats forever

• 20% of 20% (4%) creates 64% of the results.

• 20% of 4% (0.8%) creates 51% of the impact.

Key Learning:

A few inputs always drive most of the output — and the pattern keeps repeating.

Your job is to identify the high-leverage nodes and amplify their impact.

Business Example:

• 20% of your products create 80% of the profit.

• 20% of your clients generate 80% of your referrals.

• Focus on those and build your Flywheel around them.

Health Example:

• Approximately 20% of your lifestyle habits account for 80% of your overall vitality.

• Diet is the core 20% giving you 80% health. Remove obstacles and friction here — your health accelerates quickly.

• The remaining 20% of your health comes from sleep, fasting (rest from eating), movement, and gratitude.
  

3. The Golden Domino

The Tipping Point of Transformation

What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.

Gary Keller

The Tipping Point of Transformation                 

At Domino Day 2009 in the Netherlands, the first domino toppled 4,491,863 other dominos. The key was alignment; each domino was perfectly spaced to transmit its falling momentum, creating a chain reaction.

In business, this "Golden Domino" is the one domino that triggers all the rest. The Golden Domino is the one thing that a 20% domino gives you 80% results.

For Amazon, it was cash flow velocity that resulted from receiving payments from its customers 45 days before it had to pay its book publishers, creating a large cash float that it could use to grow its business.

Gary Keller, in his book 'The One Thing', illustrates a masterful concept that builds upon the Domino effect, where the first domino knocks down a second domino that is 50% taller, creating even more momentum.

If you start with just a 2-inch domino, how many dominoes do you need to knock down to reach the height of the Eiffel Tower, or Mount Everest or even to the Moon?

Any guesses?

Eiffel tower - just 23 dominos
Mount Everest - just 27 dominos
The Moon - just 31 domino

This is the power of compounding, exponential growth.

The One Thing book is asking you to focus on this one Golden Domino that can knock down a series of larger dominos that you determine.

In health, my one thing looks like this: 

• My Golden Domino was to stabilize and stop plaque growth. Accomplished.

• My 2nd domino was to reverse plaques and regress them back to nothing. I already reversed plaques in my neck carotid arteries in 3 months. I hope to accomplish this within 18 to 30 months.

• My 3rd domino was to accelerate this reversal by adding strategic fasting and HIIT exercise. I am hoping 12 months to 24 months.

• My 4th domino is to figure out how to reverse calcified plaque, which is deemed impossible. May the Lord give me wisdom to do so, amaze the world, and help a lot of people. I am researching decalcification and reverse cholesterol transport.

• My 5th domino - which I deem much easier than Domino 4 - is to adopt a whole food diet, eating the foods I love (seafood, pizza, ice cream, burgers, hot dogs) that nourish my blood vessels and eyes and help prevent disease. I've researched this extensively in the past. It works well when there is no disease, but with my specific conditions, I need to target my diet to reverse the disease. Once reversed, I can maintain my wholesome health.

4. The Theory of Constraints

The Bottleneck Determines the Speed

The goal is not to make money. The goal is to increase throughput while simultaneously reducing inventory and operating expense.

Eliyahu Goldratt

In the 1980s, an Israeli, descended from a long lineage of Rabbis, decided to apply the principles of physics to business. Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt wrote The Goal, a business novel that described how a group of young Boy Scouts, tied together, was constrained by the slowest one, and how this one constraint slowed productivity in the factories. He later showed that this also applied to organizations. In fact, it applies to anything that involves a process.

Goldratt taught that every system has one primary constraint — the slowest step that limits the entire process.

Improve that one bottleneck, and the whole system flows faster.

Then, remove the biggest constraint, as a faster flow reveals the next constraint. Think about and conceptualize each constraint in succession, and design a plan to remove each of these constraints, optimizing for global system constraints, rather than local optimization.

Examples:

• In a manufacturing plant, the bottleneck might be a single slow machine.

• In a business, it might be cash flow, decision-making, or the founder's time.

• In terms of your health, it may be due to inflammation, insulin resistance, or sleep disturbances.

Key Learning:

You don't need to fix everything.

You need to fix the one thing that is the biggest constraint and limits the flow of everything else.

Application:

In the body, the constraint is usually due to metabolic bottlenecks, such as impaired circulation or mitochondrial fatigue. Remove it through fasting, nitric oxide foods, and oxygenation, and the system accelerates.

Just as Amazon freed cash flow by getting paid before paying vendors, your body can free energy flow by burning stored fat before refueling.

Of the many books written by Eli Goldratt, the one I really enjoyed and put in my Top 5 books is "The Choice." He wrote it in the last months as he was dying from cancer. It's his swan song to the world, but because his first book, "The Goal," is a Top 150 bestseller of the modern era, The Choice has fallen into the shadows.

5. Time & Money Constraint Exercise

The Catalyst of Innovation

When you have no money and no time, you cannot help but be creative and innovate.

Dr. Kevin Ham

In 1957, Walt Disney faced bankruptcy while trying to finish Sleeping Beauty, a project upon which he had bet his entire company. So he imposed extreme time limits, forcing creative breakthroughs. This extreme time constraint became creativity.

In Business:

When Bezos needed cash flow early, he couldn't wait 90 days for supplier payments.

He made a rule: receive cash from customers immediately, pay suppliers 40 days later.

That time constraint turned into Amazon's cash flow flywheel.

Elon Musk applies this exercise by devising a 5-step algorithm, which is essentially a combination of the 80/20 principle and constraints.

1. Question all requirements and remove the ones that don't make sense. Base it on first principles, rather than tradition or habit.

2. Delete what's unnecessary: Remove the steps, processes, people or tasks until you are required to add 10% back (cheaper)

3. Simplify & Optimize: Improve the quality (better)

4. Accelerate cycle time: Speed it up (faster)

5. Automate it (easier)

In Health:

Time constraints force the body to innovate too — it's called fasting.

When deprived of calories, your body turns on autophagy, recycling damaged cells and regenerating new ones.

Key Learning:

When you compress time, inefficiencies are revealed.

When you compress assumptions, you discover the truth.

Ask yourself:

"If I had to achieve this in 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, what would I do differently?"

Try to plan and design an experiment that takes longer than 3 months. The smaller the time constraint, the better, as you will learn a lot before you make big mistakes.

Do this for each constraint (time, money, resources), starting with the extreme time constraint: If I had to achieve this in 1 day, what would I do?

Now do the same with money, even if you have enough money.

Now do the same with resources, even if you already have enough.

If I had to do it myself, how would I do it?

If I only had one other person, how would we do it?

Think of all the innovations by small teams, like the Wright Brothers, Einstein.

Larger teams often spend more money, take longer, and have poorer results.

The Flywheel of 5 Principles

What if you made these five key principles a flywheel in every essential facet of your life?

Dr. Kevin Ham

This is what nature does: it flywheels every aspect of itself to grow wild —bacteria, viruses, plants, and creatures all flywheel life. Humans, in their drive for growth, can wreak havoc on the Flywheel of life, instead turning a virtuous flywheel of life into a vicious cycle of death.

As we transform the nature of light, air, water, food, and rest into things that are convenient, cheap, and fast. Using these very principles, we create systemic disease within ourselves and the natural world around us. Who will win? Mankind has set in motion the Flywheel of disease and destruction.

But we can reverse disease and destruction if we turn back to nature and the powers that lie dormant and hidden in nature and in us. This is the deep, hidden mystery that lies locked within us. Unlock it and leverage it and let the first golden domino within you start to create and innovate.

Reflection

Just a handful of powerful principles set up as dominos can change the world.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Above is the Flywheel of Flywheel Principles. This is the power of principles. They span industries across business and life. Just as there are only 12 notes for all music, 3 primary colours that make up all colours, and just a handful of principles for you to practice and apply to every facet of your life, starting from thought to plan to action, leveraging your mind can result in great outcomes. At first, it is hardly visible as you knock down the first golden two-inch domino, but as each larger domino falls, flywheeling stronger and larger and gaining momentum, it becomes self-propelling.

This is the power of momentum and the power of life.

These invisible principles power all of life.

Newton discovered its simple formulas. F=ma describes the formula for all Forces.

Einstein discovered the power of energy. e=mc2, describing energy proportional to mass and the speed of light, a constant 3 with 8 zeros m/s. 

What simple formula will you unlock in your mind as you think, plan and execute your thought experiments in health and wealth?

The same laws that built Amazon can rebuild a body.

The same constraints that stall a company can stall cancer cells.

And the same 80/20 fractals that create wealth can rejuvenate health.

Your job is to design your flywheel, remove the bottleneck, and tip the golden domino.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

Life-Changing Question

What flywheel can you design for your health or wealth in one day?

It should fit on one sheet of paper, preferably on half the paper.

And how can you start executing it in one day?

Appendix:

Books That Power the Flywheel of Breakthroughs

Next week—

The Power of Fasting (Part III)

Fasting to stress cancer

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

Another Shock to the Heart

Life is precious and each day is a blessing to consider

What would you do if you suddenly found death knocking on your door?

This is a story of my friend, just 48 years old, who experienced this last week.

Sudden Death

Death is inevitable but when Death visits you suddenly, what shall you do?

Dr. Kevin Ham

“Give me a heart of wisdom to know the number of my days,” Moses implores the Lord in the beautiful Psalm 90 attributed to him. I pondered this thought a lot in my life, but it’s tough for me to fathom the exact number of my days. I used to think I could reach 100 years old — the equivalent of 36,500 days. I’ve lived for 55 years, so if I reach 100, I have just over 16,400 days. I’ve lived just over 20,000 days now. 

I heard a song that moved me deeply. “Our lives are like the sands of an hourglass.” When the last grain of sand passes to the bottom, our life ends. How many grains of sand number my days? And how many of those days will be in health, without suffering? We call this our health span —the span of days during which we are healthy.

During a recent conference, a good friend said he had been sent my newsletter, The Shock of Death, describing my shock at finding out my coronary arteries were clogged 77% etc. He said his brother had done many of the recommendations at the end of this article.

A few days later, he had back pain, which resolved when he rested. This is a telltale sign of angina, a warning sign of an impending heart attack. The next day, he felt uncomfortable in his chest and back when he exerted himself. He went to sleep at 10:30, but the pain did not relent even when lying down this time. He was having persistent angina, in other words, a heart attack. Luckily, my friend, a doctor working in the ICU in Germany, could assess him that night. He called an ambulance and found out his left anterior descending artery, aptly named the ‘widow maker,’ was clogged 95%! He had a stent put in. Just slightly high LDL cholesterol and blood pressure before this. Nothing too alarming. But his blood pressure was over 250 that morning! I was once again shocked at how fragile life can be, so suddenly. If he had gone to sleep, he might never have woken up.

25% of heart attacks present for the first time as sudden death. My friend had narrowly avoided that fate. Just 48 years old with children. I thanked God for my friend. 7 years younger than me. I had considered myself so fortunate for finding out I had clogged arteries. I had seriously contemplated also getting a stent and going on meds, as my condition was very severe as well. But I chose a different path, relying on God for wisdom, thanking God for my medical education and training to discern how I could navigate my health predicament. 

Do I Matter?

Each moment is precious but oftentimes it passes by like the wind, unaccounted with no trace. Oh how I wish to capture it.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I often wonder whether I should spend time writing my newsletter. I look at the analytics and see that such a low % opens and reads it. But I remind myself that, through my writings, I may not only help or save a life now, but also in the future. Just how precious even one life is. It’s not merely about numbers but about the preciousness of even just one life. 

I find both my results and Fred’s so miraculous. Are our rapid reversals merely a fluke? I know many people are praying and searching for a protocol like the ones I am developing. I wish to write case studies about Fred and me and submit them to medical journals once we’ve completely reversed our diseases. The more case studies I can add, the more powerful. Then, later, conduct studies on larger cohorts of people. I also long to teach these hidden insights to medical students, the doctors of the future.

I wish we had more lives like in a video game, but we have one shot in this life. A lot of the things I thought were important now seem non-essential. “What would it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?” echoes in my heart as I live each day. I am so grateful for the little moments in nature, the time spent with my loved ones and friends, colleagues and friends of God. 

“Does the work I do matter much?” I ask myself. I became a doctor to help save others from suffering, as I suffered from a disease since I was 14. I pray to God to guide my path

To Live or Die? That is the Question

Each thing we put in our mouth determines the number of our days, whether we prolong it or diminish it. Choose wisely.

Dr. Kevin Ham

In the story of Adam and Eve, they ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Though they could eat freely of every other tree, they were commanded not to eat of that tree. As a result, sin and death entered them through that disobedience.

Beside the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the tree of life. If they had eaten from the tree of life, they would have lived forever. I think of the metaphor of these two trees and am reminded of the power of food and fruit. In other parts of the Bible, the books of Ezekiel and Revelation speak of the leaves being for the healing of the nations. These leaves can also include the vegetables we eat.

I prayed and contemplated asking my friend not to get a second stent, which he was scheduled for a couple of days later, and instead follow my protocol. But did I want to be accountable for his life? A stent was simpler than modifying one’s lifestyle. I decided just to give him a call and see how he was doing, and to suggest that, despite him having stents, he should still highly consider my heart reversal protocol so that his stents wouldn’t clog and that he should reduce his risk for the future, as he was still relatively young. 

I told him it likely took his heart disease about 30 years to clog 95%, but applying my heart reversal protocol, he could potentially reverse that 30 years of disease in under 3 years, but it would need to be very targeted and committed for that duration—extreme focus and commitment. 

Life and well-being or death and suffering? That is the question I ask myself each time I consider putting something in my mouth. 

Will this food or drink heal me or damage me? I often want to eat that sugary cookie or drink. That savoury, fat-filled food. That meat. The seafood I love so much. But I refrain when I remind myself of this question.

So far in the past 5 months, I’ve been very disciplined and thought about how I can accelerate my healing, faster than the 32 months case study I’ve read about, a young surgeon who at age 44 had 100% clog in the LAD coronary artery and in 32 months, reversed it to 100% normalcy, documented in Dr. Esselstyn’s study and book “Preventing and Reversing Heart Disease.” It’s quite remarkable. Yet I aim to accelerate this healing. While I am not 100% certain, with God, I believe all things are possible. 

Once I reverse my disease, I want to eat a healthier diet and slowly add seafood, then birds and eggs, then creeping things, then occasional grass-fed animals and dairy. This is the order of life in the six days of Creation. First light, then air, water, plants, fruits, sea creatures, birds of the air, creeping things, animals and humans, then rest.

I’ve helped rapidly reverse Fred’s high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes, and he’s lost 20 pounds in 6 weeks, off 4 of 6 medications. In another 6 weeks, he’ll be at a normal BMI and off his remaining two medications.

Now, I pray that I can coach my other friend to reverse his clogged arteries. I’ve learned much from my health ordeal and also from Fred’s. Each person is very unique, but we all have many things in common.

A Second Chance

Prayer is the heart speaking directly to God. Answers come in unexpected ways at times.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I wished my friend a safe recovery, half-wishing I had the courage to ask him to postpone his second stent. 

Many hours later, I asked him how he was feeling. He replied, “I really have to do your diet now. I didn’t get the stent.”

“What?” I asked, surprisingly. What happened?

He was on the operating table, and the cardiac surgeon said that it was not as severe an obstruction as they had thought and that he had time to manage it medically. My friend said he had prayed hard about whether to get the stent, but in the end just let things proceed. “He (God) had determined the outcome,” he texted.

Wow, I was thrilled. One less foreign body in his body sounded wonderful, as well as the fact that his 75% obstruction wasn’t as bad as it had appeared five days earlier.

I’ve shone the spotlight on my health journey, then on Fred. And while I am uncertain exactly how I should travel this path that God has set before me, I have a committed friend who will require my guidance. My miraculous reversal, as well as Fred’s, shows people what is possible when you fully 100% commit. 

Instead of the sufferings that come with eventual disease, we are enduring such temptations and trials as we try to reverse the many decades of disease that have culminated in our present disease: cause and effect. We pay for the choices we make each day for years and decades. Can we learn the lesson and choose more wisely each day now?

A Life of No Regrets

Did I do my best? That is all I can ask of myself and of God, given what is placed in my heart.

Dr. Kevin Ham

My friend regretfully said many times that he should have known better when he was told his cholesterol was a little high, when his blood pressure seemed to creep higher, and his doctor told him to manage his diet and exercise more. It didn’t seem urgent. But the disease grew ever so slowly and insidiously with time until it showed itself abruptly.

This was the exact same thought I had when I discovered my disease. Why wasn’t I more aware and diligent in preventing the #1 cause of death, heart disease? I even believed, since med school, that I had clogged arteries then.

I thought the same about my eye disease. Many optometrists told me that my retina was thin due to my myopia. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I knew I had a high risk of retinal detachment, so I didn’t look into it more. If I had been more proactive, I could have delayed or even prevented the likelihood of my becoming blind or having a heart attack. Now I believe that I can be even better off than those who have mild heart disease. A full reversal is possible for my heart. But for my eyes …

I realized in 2020 that it was not really a question of whether I would become blind, but of when. That became a very sobering thought. I would one day be blind. So I read and thought more about people who were blind and lived remarkable lives. Helen Keller touches my heart deeply. What a remarkable heart and mind. Her writings move me so deeply. Fanny Crosby and her 90 years of blindness, writing so many hymns of praise and memorizing so much of the Bible, including most of the New Testament, Psalms and Torah. Wow, what life could be like, even blind. They became my hope and inspiration.

Reversal Goals

His stent has a risk of thrombosis or getting obstructed in 5 to 10 years. He can also get new plaques in other arteries.

Immediately after stenting, three major goals:

1. Prevent clot formation on the new stent (thrombosis)

2. Prevent new plaque rupture elsewhere (secondary prevention)

3. Reduce shear stress and inflammation in arteries

To prevent the above, he will be on meds that thin his blood, likely statins and high BP meds. 

If he does not change his lifestyle (diet, exercise, rest, stress), his plaques could grow by 5-12% on average each year. His 75% obstruction could progress to full obstruction in as little as 2 to 5 years.

Following my Heart Reversal Protocol, he could reverse his plaque in ~3 years or less. Since he is 7 years younger than I am, I believe he can reverse it faster than I can, if he adheres to it like I have, 100% fully committed, as he will also have the power of medications along with targeted foods, fasting and exercise.

Mechanisms of Plaque Regression:

• Lowering LDL <55 mg/dL (1.4 mmol/L) I’m 61 mg/dL

• Lowering inflammation (CRP <1.0) I’m at 0.2

• Normalizing insulin, fasting glucose: HbA1c <5.4%  I’m at 5.3%

• Triglycerides <100 mg/dL (1.1 mM)  I’m at 61

• BP < 115/75 mmHg  I’m 105/65

• Increasing nitric oxide (endothelial repair) - I’m very diligent about this.

• Fasting and autophagy (foam cell clearance) - I’m doing 16:8 fasts with weekly 24-36h fasts. I’m planning to try a 19:5 fast with weekly 24-36h fasts to accelerate healing.

Reflection

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

Helen Keller

It seemed intended by the blessed providence of God that I should be blind all my life, and I thank him for the dispensation. If perfect earthly sight were offered me tomorrow I would not accept it. Because when I get to heaven, the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior.

Fanny Crosby

I have lived a full life, and I am prepared to go, but I asked the Lord to allow me to live so I can see my family grow and mature in the Lord. That is my personal prayer, for my children to know the Lord God intimately and to live their lives fully for Him, glorifying and praising Him. 

My personal faith, when I discovered the love of God through Christ who died for me, changed my life forever at the age of 15 years in 1986. God has blessed me so tremendously beyond all that I can think or ask. 

I ponder that moment when Count Zinzendorf in Germany looked upon a painting called Ecce Homo, which depicted Christ with a caption that read, ‘Ego pro te haec passus sum; Tu vero quid fecisti pro me’— “This have I suffered for you; now what will you do for me?” At age 17, the Count realized he had done little for Christ and decided to dedicate his life to him.

I ponder that question now and wish longingly to do what the count did.

Ecce Homo by Domenico Feti.

May you ponder the number of your days and ask for a heart of wisdom to know their number and become wiser and more grateful as each grain of sand in your hourglass passes each day.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up. 

I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.

Life-Changing Question

What have you been procrastinating about that you should start today for your health, especially your lifestyle of diet, exercise, stress, relationships or rest?

Mine is better sleep. I have averaged less than six hours the past four months and last week averaged just over four hours, which was what I averaged in my 20s and 30s and likely a key factor in my eyesight and heart problems.

I decided that I am going to do my best to go to bed by 11 pm and be in the dark until 6:30 am so my eyes get 7.5 hours of rest and hopefully at least 6.5 hours of sleep. I will start researching and developing a protocol for better sleep for the next several months. May God give me wisdom and sweet rest.

Next week—

The Strategy of Breakthrough for Health and Wealth

Just 5 Principles for Remarkable Growth and Renewal.

Recommended Tests

If you are 35 years+, get these test to establish a baseline and risk assessment for heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

• Calcium CT heart scan

• Assess how much calcium in the heart arteries to assess risk of heart attack

• Score >100 = moderate risk. 

• Score of >400 = severe with likelihood of heart attack in 2-5 years.

• My calcium score was 505!

• If your score is >100, consider getting a CT Angiogram Cleerly to map out your coronary arterial plaque obstructions.

• US costs $100-$200 and low dose radiation

• Carotid CIMT ultrasound

• Assess risk of plaque in the neck arteries to assess risk of stroke. Plaque can rupture and lodge in the cerebral brain arteries

• It is also a way to screen for heart disease, as a low cost, with no radiation

• I had plaque (~25% blockage with CIMT of 1.8mm) which I reversed in 3 months to 0.84mm and no plaque. Almost miraculous.

• Cost ~ $150 USD

• Lipid blood tests 

• HDL, LDL

• If LDL is high, then get 

• Oxidized LDL. This will assess risk as oxidized LDL is what causes damage and plaques in your arteries

• Fractionated lipid profile (NMR) so that you can see size and number of your lipoproteins

• Triglycerides

• Apolipoprotein B (a better measure of risk for heart disease than just LDL)

• Lipoprotein a (special type of LDL that is more genetic based and much harder to modify by lifestyle)

• Insulin Resistance & Diabetes Risk

• HbA1C (to assess risk of diabetes, prediabetes)

• Fasting insulin and glucose (assess insulin resistance)

• Inflammation

• CRP

• Homocysteine and 

• Omega 6: Omega 3 fat ratio

• Heavy metals (Iron, Ferritin, Arsenic, lead, mercury)

• Hormones

• TSH (assess thyroid)

• Cortisol (assess stress)

• Vitamins & Minerals

• Vitamin D (usually low)

• Vitamin B12

• Magnesium etc

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

The Power of Fasting (Part II)

Mimicking Fasting - the Ketogenic Diet.

Reverse Disease’s One Way Road

If you’re going the wrong way down a one-way road, it's obvious what you must do. Reverse. So why don’t we do that with our modern ailments?

Dr. Kevin Ham

The fasts I spoke about last week, which resulted in rapid reversals, were almost miraculous. But nowadays, pills and supplements have replaced fasts.

As doctors, we seek to cure, but we often seem to just manage chronic disease, using 'Band-Aids' to improve symptoms and numbers without truly reversing or helping change the lifestyle that led to the disease.

Let me take you down history's lost archives of miraculous remedies and how they are being reimagined for today's prevalent diseases. 

As I research and look for cures for my diseases (wet macular degeneration and heart disease) and for those who suffer around me, I am so humbled. I seek no more than the joy of seeing others feel more life and purpose. How many and who will benefit from my writings?

And I am so grateful to all the people mentioned in my writings. I wish I could read all their biographies and writings. They should be awarded Nobel prizes. So, chapeau to the many scientists, doctors, and dietitians who dedicated their lives so that we may benefit for many decades or centuries later.

These Eureka protocols that give remarkable results are drowned out in a sea of much 'noise', making it hard to separate the true signals of cures and rapid reversals. I feel as if God has given me a mission to find these one by one and make them known for those who may be searching for such a remedy for themselves or a loved one.

Curing Seizures Fast

When food is withdrawn, the storm in the brain is stilled.

Dr. Guillaume Guelpa

Many people have heard of the famous Frenchman Louis Pasteur's germ theory, published in 1861, which fueled the medical renaissance. But, in 1911, two other Frenchmen, Dr. Guillaume Guelpa and Dr. Auguste Marie, a couple of quiet neurologists, discovered something extraordinary in the wards of Bicetre Hospital, which were filled with incurable epileptic patients.

These were not just mere cases of minor epilepsy, but severe, uncontrollable and debilitating seizures. The treatments back then were crude or disappointing: bromide salts, prayer, rest cures, which did little to quell the storms shaking both brain and body. Bromide intoxication made patients like zombies, and they were often restrained during seizures. Patients who refused food due to the severity of their symptoms sometimes stopped seizing altogether. Marie proposed testing the fasting patients for several days, using laxatives to cleanse the intestines and then refeeding with a modest vegetarian diet.

The results were astonishing. By the third day, the convulsions ceased. When they ate, the seizures returned.

They tested 21 patients during their four-day fast. 100% improvement! They concluded modestly:

“L’abstinence alimentaire semble modérer les accès d’épilepsie.”

(Food abstinence appears to moderate epileptic attacks.)

They presented a paper in 1911, which was largely dismissed. How could such a severe, incurable disease like epilepsy be cured by not eating? Their breakthrough discovery languished like a seed buried deep, without water or sunlight, just as their names faded into the quiet recesses of history.

The Preacher-Doctor of Battle Creek

In stillness and emptiness, life reorders itself.

Dr. Hugh Conklin

Across the waters, also in 1911, Dr. Hugh Conklin, born in rural Michigan when faith healers, homeopaths and scientific physicians fought to be the trusted experts, was a teacher and lay pastor before he became a doctor. He moved to Battle Creek, home to the burgeoning Kellogg Sanitarium, run by Dr. John Kellogg, who preached widely in America that vegetarianism, hydrotherapy, and fasting were forms of spiritual purification. 

Conklin had the same ethos, but applied it specifically to seizures, believing they were caused by autointoxication, a popular theory at that time, which postulated that undigested food fermenting in the colon released toxins that 'short-circuited' the brain. If the intestines were cleared and at rest, the body and brain could cleanse themselves.

His radical remedy?

Supervised water-only fasts for 18 to 25 days, with gentle enemas and prayer.

He treated 1200 patients. 90% of children improved. 50% of adults became seizure-free. But they resumed their seizures when they ate again.

When he passed away quietly in 1933, one physician took notice of his remarkable case studies.

Bridging Faith and Chemistry

We need not starve the patient; we can feed them differently

Dr. Russel Wilder

Wilder had just graduated from the University of Chicago in 1910 and joined the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He was an empiricist, analytical and fascinated by metabolism. He had collaborated with Dr. Banting, who had discovered insulin in Toronto and had a deep interest in diabetes.

He had read Conklin's reports and Guelpa & Marie's forgotten paper. Surely there must be some biochemical mediator occurring in the brain. He recruited volunteers to fast and to have their blood and urine tested. What he discovered astonished him. As glucose levels dropped, levels of B-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) and acetoacetate rose. Instead of using glucose for energy, the body began producing ketones derived from fatty acids, which could cross the blood-brain barrier.

His eureka moment: The ketones that arose during fasting could be mimicked by a diet that emulated the fasted state to maintain ketones in the blood (ketosis).

He coined the term "the ketogenic diet" in 1921, claiming it "reproduces the physiological effects of fasting."

He started clinical trials at Mayo. The protocol:

• 80% fat

• 15% protein

• 5% carbohydrates

• Calorie-restricted to maintain ketosis.

The results were dramatic. Children became seizure-free within days. It was reported in the newspapers as the 'miracle diet'. Wilder wasn't fazed by the popularity. He was dogmatic about precision, data, and medical supervision to achieve ketosis and cure seizures. He collaborated with dieticians.

He wondered if ketosis could influence other diseases of metabolism like diabetes, obesity and even schizophrenia?

Ketogenic Medicine

The spoon can sometimes do what the syringe cannot.

Lydia Pauli

Wilder's work on the ketogenic diet reached the ears of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and Dr. Samuel Livingston eagerly adopted it together with Lydia Pauli, a Swiss-trained dietitian, who designed the meal plans that were both therapeutic and tasty. "Food is the most intimate form of medicine," was her maxim.

Their work at Hopkins inspired dozens of hospitals, and by 1930, America was 60% seizure-free and 90% improved. The ketogenic diet became the standard treatment for pediatric epilepsy.

But in 1938, phenytoin, the first true anti-seizure drug, was discovered. By the 1940s, this drug rapidly replaced the ketogenic diet. When Livingston retired in 1950, he wrote a single line in his final lecture:

“It is regrettable that in medicine, what is forgotten is often what is most needed.”

Resurrecting the Lost Cure

Sometimes the cure is already in the archives.

Jim Abrahams

Like a washed-out and forgotten actor, decades passed, burying the ketogenic diet. In the 1990s, Jim Abrahams, a celebrated movie director and producer of hits like Airplane! and the Naked Gun, was desperate.

His two-year-old son, Charlie, was suffering from relentless drug-resistant epilepsy, seizing hundreds of times a week. They tried every drug and treatment, but nothing worked. The doctors told him there was nothing further they could do and that he should prepare for the worst.

But Abrahams could not sit idly by and watch his son succumb to this debilitating disease.

"If we can invent flying machines and atomic bombs, then there must be a cure for seizures somewhere."

Then, in his frantic search for any miracle, he came across the Ketogenic diet while reading an obscure 1930 neurology piece about its miraculous results. He contacted Johns Hopkins, where Dr. John Freeman was still practicing this therapy. Charlie's seizures ceased completely—a miracle.

Abrahams, determined to help other children, formed the Charlie Foundation in 1994 and then produced a film starring Meryl Streep, First Do No Harm, after the Hippocratic Oath that all physicians take. Over 100 hospitals re-established the ketogenic diet. The Charlie Foundation still advocates the ketogenic diet for epilepsy, autism and cancer.

Regenerating Neurons in the Brain

Every cell has a clock; fasting winds it back to zero.

Dr. Mark Mattson

Growing up with a fascination with nature in the backdrop of Minnesota, exploring forests and rivers, and observing how the cycles of nature —its hunger, hibernation, migration, and feasting —led him to remark, “Everything that lives thrives not on constancy, but on rhythm.”

Earning a Ph.D.  While studying neurodegeneration, he joined the National Institute on Aging and became its Chief of Neurosciences. He combined molecular and evolutionary biology to ask, “Why does the brain benefit when we fast?”

His landmark experiments in rodents discovered that when food was restricted on alternate days, neurons increased the production of a molecule that promotes neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity. In other words, their brains became sharper, more exploratory and resistant to stress. 

Mattson’s eureka moment came when he examined these neurons under the microscope. The fasting group had dense dendritic neural networks. Hunger wasn’t neurotoxic; it was neurotropic, facilitating neural growth and connections. The brain grew stronger in the face of intermittent stress.

He realized that fasting activates an internal survival circuit. When food is scarce, the brain adapts to enhance focus and memory to aid hunting. When food is plentiful, the brain atrophies. Modern overeating is not just a metabolic problem; it’s slow neurological decay.

Fasting improved mitochondrial efficiency —the powerhouses of the cell —reduced oxidative stress, and induced autophagy —the cellular self-cleaning process. He postulated that fasting would help to protect the neurons in diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and depression. He often fasts for 8 hours daily, sometimes eating just a single plant-based meal in the evening so he can keep his mind clear.

He later joined Johns Hopkins and sparked the modern intermittent fasting movement, inspiring millions to adopt a 16:8-hour (16-hour fasts, eating in an 8-hour window) or a 5:2-day (eat for five days and fast for two days) intermittent fasting (IF) regimen.

He remarks the hidden obvious now:

“The body was never designed for constant feeding. Health is found in the spaces between. The body knows how to heal, our job is to stop interrupting it.”

Time-Restricted Eating’s Marvel

It’s not just what you eat, it’s when you eat.

Dr. Stachin Panda

In a building at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, designed by the spiritual architect Louis Kahn, whose hallways captured the path of the sun, Panda investigated the genes that control the circadian clock, the internal rhythm of the body that synchronizes metabolism, sleep, and hormones. He deleted the core clock genes called Cry1 and Cry2 in mice and watched feeding, temperature and glucose cycles become chaotic. The mice grew obese and diabetic, even without eating more food.

One of his students mistakenly left a group of normal mice with limited access to food to only ten hours each night. Despite identical calorie intake, these mice stayed lean, slept better, and lived longer than those fed liberally.

Panda’s eureka moment came instantly as he saw that “It’s not just what you eat, it’s when you eat!” This time-restricted eating (TRE) could reset circadian rhythm and restore metabolic health. He published his studies, restricting feeding to an 8-10 hour window to avoid fatty liver disease and improve glucose tolerance.

In human trials, he observed much the same effects. Reduced weight, improved sleep quality, and sharper focus. Panda associated this with the oscillation of thousands of genes that switch on or off depending on feeding time. This is called epigenetics, where the expression of genes are altered on or off based on environment. When eating is liberal, those genes lose coherence and metabolism drifts out of rhythm, much like an orchestra without a conductor.

He laments, “Modern life is a 24-hour buffet. Our clocks are starving for darkness.” Fasting is not merely abstaining from food, but about rediscovering time as therapy.

Reflection

The rhythm of life
Sets with darkness and light
Disobey and it cuts like a knife
Adhere and you master time’s bite
When dusk descends, let hunger rest
For rest heals the body best

Dr. Kevin Ham

Without context, I did not really understand why or how the ketogenic diet mimics the powerful benefits of fasting. The low carbs reduce glucose levels and, therefore, insulin levels, so the body needs to produce fat energy in the form of ketones, mimicking fasting ketosis. Since the diet is high in fat, you will need to focus on healthy fats (non-processed and little or no heated oils).

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

What is the big bottleneck of Diabetes? Glucose or Fat?

Dr. Kevin Ham

If you have friends or family, please forward my newsletter to them and ask them to sign up. I’d like to help a lot of people reverse and heal their disease.

Life-Changing Question

Can you eat the same meals but in a shorter time frame?

Try for an 8-hour restricted-time feeding period, giving you a daily 16-hour fast, as Mattson has popularized. As you get better at producing ketones, try moving to a 6-hour feeding period. The resting or fasting interval between eating is almost as important as the foods you eat.

Next week—

The Power of Fasting (Part III)

Fasting to stress cancer

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

The Power of Fasting (Part I)

Many times not doing is the most powerful thing you can do.

Fasting Reverses Disease Fast

Is it possible that modern abundance carries its own disease?

Dr. Haakon Strøm, during WWII’s insights

We live with ‘too much’ abundance, but not of a good kind.
Rest would do us much good.

Dr. Kevin Ham

We live in an age of overabundance. During WW2, when food became scarce due to forced food rations and the people of Norway had to eat a modest meal of vegetables, whole grains, fish and some fruit but no meat or dairy, incidence and prevalence of heart disease and stroke plummeted 30%. Many cancer rates also declined significantly. Upon freedom, with an abundance of food, the diseases skyrocketed back to previous highs.

What if we simply stopped overeating or skipped just one meal a day? Almost all of our modern day diseases would cease and disappear like Houdini.

A 382 Day Fast

I just stopped eating, and waited for my body to remember what it was.

Angus Barbieri

In 1965, in the coastal town of Tayport, Scotland, 27-year-old Angus Barbieri was at wits’ end. Weighing 456 pounds and 6 feet tall, his BMI exceeded 65, what is defined as ‘gross morbid obesity.’ Always short of breath, ankles swollen, barely able to stand and walk, he checked himself into Maryfield Hospital in Dundee in June 1965, in despair. Doctors planned a short 2-week fast to kick-start some weight loss. 

But after a fortnight, his hunger disappeared, his mood lifted, and his blood tests were improving. He asked his physician, Dr. William Stewart, if he could keep going until he reached his proper weight.

That continued for months until it became the longest recorded therapeutic fast in medical history: 382 days!

Protocol Summary

The Slow Reversal of Disease

The slow, methodical, steadfast pace of the human spirit always wins more than the fast, yet brief pace of the rabbit.

Dr. Kevin Ham

The Weight and Lab Results

His doctors noted no muscle wasting beyond expected norms, likely because his enormous fat reserves provided steady energy and protein sparing through ketosis.

The case stunned the medical community.

The Postgraduate Medical Journal (1973; 49: 203–205) became one of the most cited fasting papers of the century. It proved the human body could sustain itself on stored energy far longer than anyone believed. It inspired later studies in very-low-calorie diets, fasting-mimicking protocols, and modern therapeutic fasting clinics.

Yet the authors added a caution:

“Prolonged fasting should not be attempted without close medical supervision. Nevertheless, this case shows the remarkable adaptability of human metabolism.”

Rapid Decline for Freedom

It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.

Bobby Sands

In the spring of 1981 in Northern Ireland, inside the cells of the Maze Prison, a small group of men decided to protest their being designated as criminals and demanded they be treated as political prisoners. As a protest, they stopped eating.

Bobby Sands, a 27-year-old thoughtful, red-haired poet and community organizer before his arrest for being part of the Irish Republican Army, stopped eating in protest on March 1, 1981. 66 days without food, he died on May 5, 1981.

The Biology of Starvation

Medical teams monitoring from a distance (the prisoners refused medical intervention) recorded the grim timeline of starvation:

• Days 1–10: Glycogen gone, liver begins converting fat to ketones.

• Days 10–30: Fat reserves deplete; muscle breakdown begins.

• Days 40–60: Organ tissue catabolized; heart, kidneys, and lungs weaken; eyesight fails; hallucinations begin. By Day 40, Sands weighed less than 100 pounds. He could no longer stand.

• After Day 60: Multi-organ failure, cardiac arrest, death. By Day 60, his heartbeat was faint; he drifted in and out of consciousness, reciting prayers and writing fragments of poems.

His last entry in his diary read:

“I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul. 

Royal Road to Healing: The 21 Day Fast

When the digestive fire rests, the spirit rises.

Otto Buchinger Sr.

Desperate for relief, Buchinger heard about a doctor in Freiburg, Dr. Gusta Riedlin, who treated incurable patients by supervising them by withholding food. Dr. Riedlin greeted him with his customary, “For three weeks, you will eat nothing. Only water, broth and rest. Trust nature.”

On his Freiburg clinic door was his signature phrase, which is still printed in naturopathy textbooks today: “Fasting is an operation without a knife.”

Riedlin told his students that to fast was to practice bravery in small doses. It was the daily rehearsal of death and rebirth, a sacred interruption of appetite, ego, and habit. “In hunger,” he said, “we meet both our weakness and our will.”

The first week was torture. In extreme pain from his disease and layered with hunger and silence, but by the 12th day, the pain in his joints began to ease. By the 18th day, he could walk unaided. On day 19, he began to eat some fruit, then vegetables and then carbs to break his fast. On the 21st, he wrote in his journal, “A miracle born of emptiness.’

He returned home whole and began to measure fasting’s effects with the precision of a naval logbook with blood pressure, pulse, uric acid, and joint swelling. He performed miraculous cures for his patients, including curing pain, high blood pressure, high triglycerides and arthritis. He added structured refeeding after the 3-week-long fast, herbal teas, meditation, and long walks by the lake. Fasting, he declared, must be holistic with whole body, mind and moral renewal.

His clinic on Lake Constance in 1920 expanded as his “Buchinger Method’ became Europe’s most respected therapeutic fast, treating arthritis, hypertension, diabetes, and chronic fatigue. He called it the “royal road to healing.” He lived a healthy life until 88, and his legacy continues to this day.

Autophagy

We live by constant destruction and rebuilding. Life is maintenance. If we forget that, we age not just in body, but in mind.

Dr. Yoshinari Ohsumi

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi. 

In the quiet basement of the University of Tokyo in 1990, peering through a microscope observed starving yeast, and the formation of odd bubbles forming inside them, eventually consuming fragments of the cell, it looked like cellular destruction, but on more careful observation, the cell was dismantling its damaged parts to recycle the amino acids for survival. This was repair through digestion. 

He coined the term autophagy from the Greek auto, self, and phagein, to eat.

By 1992, Ohsumi discovered the genes that, when disabled, stopped the self-eating recycling mechanism and named these genes ATG1 to ATG15, the autophagy-related genes, and mapped the cell’s recycling plant —the process by which we renew ourselves at the cellular level.

When insulin and nutrients fall, mTOR, the molecule that commands growth, steps back and allows AMPK, the energy sensor, to step into command.

The cell removes malfunctioning mitochondria, misfolded proteins, and precancerous DNA. 

• In the liver, autophagy clears fat droplets.

• In the brain, it dissolves amyloid tangles.

• In the heart, it rejuvenates mitochondria.

• In the immune system, it prunes old senescent cells.

Without autophagy, disease accumulates like fat and rust.

With autophagy, the body becomes antifragile, reversing disease, and becoming cleaner, smarter, and younger.

Animal studies show that stimulating autophagy can extend lifespan by 30-40%. Humans with high autophagy markers have lower cancer and neurodegeneration risk. 

Long fasts of 48-72 hours can amplify autophagy by 8-10x, initiating stem-cell regeneration and immune renewal.

Even time-restricted feeding (TMF) of 16-18 hours daily activates a mild 1.5- 2x increase in autophagy, enough to clear the day’s cellular clutter before it turns into disease.

Ohsumi gives the quiet but stern warning that modern society, with its constant eating and over stimulation, “denies the cell its natural fasting state. Without emptiness, we drown in our own abundance.”

Renewal does not occur by adding but by subtracting. The body heals not by gaining but by letting go. When Ohsumi was asked for his advice on longevity, it was simply,

“Eat less, move more, and give your cells time to clean their rooms.”

11 Day Fasts - Dr. Alan Goldhamer

If you stop doing the things that cause disease, the body will heal itself.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer

Over in America, in Santa Rosa, California, in 1990, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, trained as a chiropractor, didn’t want to manage disease but instead remove its cause. Goldhamer had studied the early fasting physicians —Tanner with his public 40-day fast in New York and Buchinger with his 21-day fasts —and wanted to test their anecdotes with medical data. 

His idea was simple, yet radical: create an inpatient facility for medically supervised water-only fasting. Just water and rest, monitored by physicians, nurses and charts.

The body’s response of over 20,000 who checked themselves in was astonishing!

A hypertensive who entered at 180/110 mmHg left two weeks later at 118/72.

His studies show 174 hypertensive patients who fasted for about 11 days, then refed 6-7 days on a plant diet, saw blood pressure fall 37 mmHg systolic and 13mmHg diastolic. 

Severe high blood pressures dropped 60 mmHg systolic and all patients stopped medications.

A second study of 68 people with “borderline” hypertension found a 20/7 mm Hg drop, with 82 percent reaching 120/80 or lower.

Inflammatory markers, such as C-reactive protein (CRP) and TNF-alpha, declined sharply. Cholesterol normalized. Insulin sensitivity improved.

Goldhamer’s TrueNorth became the largest fasting database in the world, 20,000 water-only fasts over thirty years. 

The cure is simple, the results are simply profound. Goldhamer modestly says,

“We let nature do the work, we just stay out of the way.”

Alternating 24 or 36 Hour Fasts - Dr. Jason Fung

The most powerful medicine for diabetes is not a pill but a fast.

Dr. Kevin Ham

A few decades later in 2018, a brilliant doctor in Toronto Canada, Dr. Jason Fung, put three men who had long-standing severe diabetes on a supervised, alternating 24 to 36-hour fasting protocol with whole-food meals in between. 

For half a century, diabetes was considered chronic. Medications were added over the years until insulin was a mainstay, with possible blindness, kidney dialysis or leg amputations.

But these patients proved that all was false.

Patient A: 5 Days to Normal

• Age / Profile: 52-year-old, 5-year history of type 2 diabetes; injecting 70 units of insulin daily plus metformin.

• Fasting protocol: 24-hour fasts, three times per week, alternating with low-carb whole-food days.

• Day 1–3: insulin doses halved; glucose dropped steadily from 14 mmol/L (252 mg/dL) → 7 mmol/L (126 mg/dL).

• Day 5: insulin discontinued entirely. No hypoglycemia.

• Month 1: fasting blood glucose stable between 5–6 mmol/L (90–108 mg/dL).

• Month 3: HbA1c ↓ from 12.0 → 7.5 %; weight ↓ 10 kg (22 lb); waist ↓ 13 cm.

• Month 6: off all diabetic meds; energy “better than in twenty years.”

Patient B: 9 Days to Normal

• Age / Profile: 60, diabetic for 10 years, on insulin + two oral agents.

• Fasting protocol: 36-hour fasts on Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

• Week 1: insulin tapered from 60 → 20 units/day; fasting glucose fell from 11 → 6 mmol/L.

• Day 9: last insulin injection; continued oral metformin briefly.

• Month 2: HbA1c 7.2 → 6.0 %; weight ↓ 11 kg (24 lb); waist ↓ 13 cm.

• Month 6: all medication stopped; fasting glucose consistently < 6 mmol/L (108 mg/dL).

Patient C: 18 days to Normal

• Age / Profile: 67, 15-year diabetic, on multiple daily injections + statin + ACE inhibitor.

• Fasting protocol: 24-hour fasts three times weekly, later extended to 36 hours.

• Week 3: insulin stopped after 18 days; oral meds halved.

• Month 2: HbA1c 6.8 → 6.2 %; weight ↓ 9 kg (20 lb); waist ↓ 13 cm.

• Month 10: still off insulin; blood pressure normalized; HDL ↑ 10 %, triglycerides ↓ 25 %.

Reflection

Empty your heart
Abstain from food and wine
Let the abundance depart
To restore your original design

Dr. Kevin Ham

Life is simple and profound. Reflect upon how the emptiness of the vessel is the most useful part of the vessel. Inside your body is a filling and emptiness. To be full, you must empty.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

What is the big bottleneck of Diabetes? Glucose or Fat?

Dr. Kevin Ham

If you have friends or family, please forward my newsletter to them and ask them to sign up. I’d like to help many people reverse and heal their disease.

Life-Changing Question

What can you subtract in your diet or your life for 30 days to be whole and full again?

Within the law of multiplication hides the fact that you must subtract to multiply. Not just subtract one thing, but 80% of the things you do, you think, you eat to find the 20% that give you the bulk of your results, the 80%. This is the 80/20 principle and it resides in all facets of life and nature.

Next week—

The Power of Fasting (Part II)

Many times not doing is the most powerful thing you can do.

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

The Diabetes Reversal Flywheel

Emptying the liver to live fully

Low Carb Diets Work But Not the 1st Choice

Sometimes the villain hides in plain sight while we focus on red herrings.

Dr. Kevin Ham

It makes sense to reduce carbs, i.e., glucose, to reverse Diabetes, as high glucose levels lead to high insulin, which then stores the excess glucose as energy (glycogen & fat) in the liver, pancreas, muscles, and adipose (fat) cells.

But where is the biggest bottleneck in Diabetes?

The Biggest Constraint in Diabetes

Unlocking the stored fat in the liver, pancreas, muscles and blood vessels allows the flow of energy in days to weeks.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Let's say that the rain (like refined sugars) is the cause of an accident on the highway. That accident initiates an initial block to traffic flow (stored fat in the liver), and the continued rain leads to more crashes, resulting in even more blocks.

The rain continues, but the many accidents have now blocked the highway to a standstill.

Which is the big bottleneck? The rain or the accidents?

When Diabetes is longstanding, there is multi-organ dysfunction in the liver, pancreas, muscles, and the endothelial cells of the blood vessels in the heart, brain, and legs.

Removing the blockages, ie, the accidents, will allow traffic to flow despite the continued rain. 

In the case of Diabetes, we want to first focus on removing the big bottlenecks of fat in the liver, pancreas, muscles and adipose tissue, as well as the potential plaques in the blood vessels (as this can result in life-threatening heart attacks or strokes).

Make sense?

Rapid Reversal of Diabetes

Almost unbelievable reversal in just two weeks is a testament to the healing powers of the body when you let it heal.

Dr. Kevin Ham

That's why Fred had such a profound effect when we focused on removing the visceral fat in the arteries and theorgans. In just 2 weeks, his high blood pressure normalized without need for his two bp meds, his fasting glucose was under 6 mM (108 mg/dL) and insulin sensitivity was great at 16. His LDL cholesterol decreased from 107 mg/dL (2.83 mM) to a remarkably low level of just 34 mg/dL (0.88 mM), which is lower than his HDL at 38. He is now in plaque and fat removal mode. With exercise, he can further lower his LDL while increasing his HDL and rapidly reverse plaque.

Keeping Health vs Reversing Disease

Keeping health is very different from restoring health. It requires a change in your mind and in your lifestyle.

Dr. Kevin Ham

When you are healthy, it is like being wealthy. The first rule, then, is to retain health and retain wealth. You don't have to do anything drastic when you are healthy or wealthy. Maintain a low-risk, low-reward lifestyle. 

However, when disease develops, you need to seriously consider changing your lifestyle habits and consult a doctor about medicines or surgery when indicated. Now, the risks are higher, so you must reduce them significantly and seek higher rewards. Regaining lost wealth is far more challenging than maintaining it. This is a key rule for Warren Buffet: Rule #1. Don't lose money (wealth/health).

Rule #2. Don't forget Rule #1. Simple right?

Does diet matter when you are healthy? 

As long as the foods are natural and whole, cultures with low disease prevalence have shown that macronutrients don't seem to matter much, whether high or low in carbs, fats, or protein.

But when disease comes, it's cause and effect. The effect is disease. What is the cause? You need to stop what is causing your disease and then allow your body to heal itself. Sometimes you need medicines to help when the disease is more advanced. 

I considered a stent, statins and baby aspirin as my coronary artery was blocked 77%. My CT heart flow showed that despite that high degree of blockage, I have a remarkably effective blood flow of 75% and my HIIT exercises must have enabled my blocked arteries to dilate enough as well as form collateral vessels (natural bypasses). I believe that I can reduce this blockage by 50% and possibly even eliminate it completely. We shall see, and by the grace of God, what happens over the next 2-3 years. And my LDL cholesterol reduced by 50% in 5 weeks and by 64% in 3 months, so there was no need for a statin. Additionally, my plaques were all stable (not low-attenuated on CT), and therefore, there was no need for a baby aspirin.

Throughout history, many cultures thrived on high-carb, fruit-rich diets without Diabetes:

• Okinawans (Japan): 70% calories from sweet potatoes, fruits, vegetables → slim, long-lived, no diabetes until Western food arrived. Long life and healthspan of 85 years and most centenarians (100 year olds)

• Kitavans (Papua New Guinea): diet of starchy tubers, fruits (bananas, papaya, mango), coconuts → no obesity, Diabetes, or heart disease.

• Tarahumara (Mexico): corn, beans, squash, fruits → virtually no diabetes until refined foods arrived.

• Hadza (Tanzania): half their calories in the rainy season from fruit & honey → still no diabetes thanks to fiber, activity, and absence of processed oils.

• Traditional Pacific Islanders: breadfruit, papaya, banana, yam → no diabetes before sugar/flour/oils were introduced.

Once processed foods entered these cultures, they began to develop the diseases prevalent today. Carbs are not the true villain. It's the types of carbs (refined), fats (heated, processed, with a high omega-6 ratio) that lead to metabolic dysfunction. Whole-food carbs (fruit, beans, grains, roots) are healthy.

Reversal Flywheel

Turning a vicious cycle into a virtuous cycle is the eighth wonder of life, reversing worsening disease into improving health.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Fasting: Empties overflowing fat stores in the liver and visceral fat, providing 'clean energy' for healthy cells, and induces autophagy (the process of cleaning up cancerous and diseased cells) to recycle and eliminate metabolic waste throughout the body. The low-fat, low-calorie diet accelerates this liver fat reversal.

Healing Foods: Targeted foods that both clean up metabolic overload (LDL, glucose, fatty acids) as well as heal damaged cells, organs, systems, and restore proper hormonal balance. These healing foods replace the damaging foods you once ate, and the reversal becomes remarkable.

Exercise: Helps clear glucose into muscles and empty stored fat, allowing the body to work and run more efficiently.  This allows insulin to do its job when it needs to and return to its resting state most of the time, rather than working all the time without effect (insulin resistance leading to higher glucose and insulin levels all the time = diabetes). More vigorous exercise utilizes glucose more quickly, thereby reducing insulin requirements. This is a key for post-meal exercises.

This creates a powerful, synergistic flywheel that makes you leaner, healthier and fitter. You will feel better, clearer and stronger with each rotation of the flywheel.

3 Month Goal: Reverse Diabetes Completely

Blood vessels start healing right away, just like a cut heals. You put a bandaid on cuts to allow it to heal, so why not put a bandaid on your liver, pancreas and blood vessels.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I believe the metabolic dysfunction that leads to Diabetes can be reversed in as little as a week, but the method to do so is very hard, as it means not eating for a week to unlock and reset your body's metabolism. If you are on drugs, there are dangers of hypoglycemia and too much fat and toxins released from the stored fat into the blood all of a sudden, which can have potential issues.

In a study of end-stage diabetics who needed amputations, a 7-day supervised water fast saved them from amputations ~half the time—quite drastic measures for a drastic consequence of Diabetes.

Another study showed that in just 2 to 7 days, liver fat can decrease by 34%, restore hepatic insulin sensitivity, and reduce fasting insulin levels by 40-60%, resulting in normal liver fat by ~8 weeks. These people were on a low-calorie, low-carb diet. (Kirk et al., Gastroenterology 2009; Taylor 2013, 2019 - "Newcastle Counterpoint program"; Luukkonen et al., PNAS 2020).

For Fred, I proposed a Reversal Protocol that I felt was 'doable'. Before he started, he said he didn't have the willpower or motivation to change anything at all. But when I sat down with him for an hour to explain what we were going to do and why it would work, he decided to try his best for three months and see. As you saw in my last newsletter, he has had remarkable results in just two weeks. 

I know this will work for the majority of people because the principles follow the metabolic principles of the body. To date, you've been putting too much of the wrong type of gas (ie: wrong types of foods) into an already full, overflowing gas tank. The excess gas is leaking out and overflowing in your blood and organs. 

Core Goals:

• Reverse insulin resistance at its root by sequentially depleting fat in those organs and restoring metabolic flexibility.

• First, the liver (1st week) - decrease fasting glucose, insulin, liver enzymes.

• Then pancreas (1st month) - decrease post-meal glucose

• Then muscle (2nd month) - increase insulin sensitivity (HOMA-IR < 1.5)

Core Goal in 1 week:

Rapidly empty liver fat stores and restore liver insulin sensitivity, so that the liver stops over-producing glucose, allowing fasting glucose and fasting insulin to normalize. Need to monitor glucose and medications if hypoglycemia.

Expected 1-week outcomes:

• Liver fat: ↓ 25-35%

• Fasting glucose: ↓ 15-30 mg/dL (1-2 mM)

• Fasting insulin: ↓ 40-50%

• Triglycerides: ↓ 10-20%

• ALT/AST (liver enzymes): 10-30%

• Weight: ↓ 2-3 kg (mostly glycogen, water and some fat)

Month 1 Goals:

• ↓ 10-20 pounds

• Fasting glucose < 6.5 mM; Post meal < 11 mM

• HbA1c ↓ 0.5-1%+

• LDL ↓ 30%+

• TG ↓ 30%+

• Meds reduced (Fred had to discontinue 4 of 6 medications due to too low blood pressure)

• Reduce Metformin to once per day if fasting glucose < 100 mg/dL. Discontinue if fasting glucose 80-95 mg/dl.

2-week results for Fred:

• ↓ 11 pound

• Fasting glucose < 6.0mM; Post meal < 11 mM

• Fasting insulin 7 microIU/ml (great)

• Insulin resistance score 16 (<33 is insulin sensitive)

• LDL ↓ 107 mg/dL to 34 mg/dL. (decreased 68% in 2 weeks) Wow!!!

• 4 of 6 meds discontinued (due to too low blood pressure)

• Plan to remain on rosuvastatin (may reduce dosage) for cholesterol to keep LDL low for plaque reversal as found visible plaque on carotid artery ultrasound

• Plan to remain on metformin for 3 mo until HbA1c is normal (~3 months)

Month 2 Goals:

• ↓ 15-25 pounds

• Fasting glucose < 6 mM; Post meal < 10 mM

• HbA1c ↓ 1.5%+

• LDL ↓ 40%+

• TG ↓ 40%+

Month 3 Goals:

• ↓ 20-30 pounds+

• HbA1c ↓ 2-3% (remission range)

• Fasting glucose < 6 mM; Post meal < 9 mM

• LDL ↓ 50%+

• TG ↓ 50%+

• HDL ↑ 10%+

• Stop metformin end of month
  
  

Reflection

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I just love this poem so much that I shall imprint it into my heart. My heart aches at all the disease in me and in people around me. Heal our bodies, our minds and our spirits, O Lord.

Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones

What is the big bottleneck of Diabetes? Glucose or Fat?

Dr. Kevin Ham

If you have friends or family, please forward my newsletter to them and ask them to sign up. I want to help a lot of people reverse and heal their disease.

Life-Changing Question

What one ‘bad’ habit that is leading you to disease or remain in disease can you cast away starting today?

Sometimes the best thing you can do in life is to stop something that is causing or will cause you harm.

Examine yourself, your heart, to ponder and discover what the best thing for you to stop is. Sometimes you already know. Sometimes it is as simple as making a decision for yourself to cast it away, like you put waste into the garbage.

Next week—

The Power of Fasting

Many times not doing is the most powerful thing you can do.

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

Reversing Diabetes in a Month!

How I reversed a 71-year-old diabetes so quickly

Diabetes was Unknown

Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is power. But health is freedom.
Unshackle yourself and truly live.

Dr. Kevin Ham

A century ago, type 2 diabetes was almost unknown. Today, it's one of the fastest-growing diseases in history.

The Numbers Today (2024)

Diabetes affects more than 11% of adults worldwide,  589 million aged 20-79.

• In 1900, fewer than 1 in 100 Americans had Diabetes.

• Now, ~40% adults in the U.S. have insulin resistance.

• 36% adults in the U.S. have prediabetes, ~98 million people, but 80% don't know it!

• 14.7% of adults in the U.S. have Diabetes, ~38 million people but 20% don't know it! 

• Diabetes is the #1 cause of blindness, kidney failure, non-traumatic amputations, and a major cause of heart attacks, stroke, and increased risk for cancer and dementia.

• The average age of onset of Type 2 Diabetes is 45.

• Diabetes is the 7th leading cause of death in the U.S.

How did this happen? 

Our lifestyles: what we eat, how we eat and move, and live.

Lifestyle changes can reduce diabetes risk by up to 70% and can also help reverse it.

Reversing Heart Disease. Seeing is Believing.

Most people and doctors do not know that coronary plaque can be fully reversed. It’s just like a fractured artery healing if you set the right conditions: the CAST, the nutrients and the time to heal in a few months. No different than a fractured leg with a cast and crutches. You don’t walk on a broken leg, you protect the fracture and let the body do its magic and heal quickly.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I just turned 55, and I am so grateful to know that I have clogged arteries. Imagine if I didn't know? I would not make any changes to my lifestyle and likely have a heart attack in the next 2-5 years, perhaps fatal while riding up a hill. Now I've reversed plaque in my neck arteries in 3 months and am confident by the grace of God that I will reverse all the plaque in heart vessels within 3 years.

See the plaque in my left carotid artery. The carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) is 0.14 cm or 1.4mm. This CIMT is worse than that of an 85-year-old. Now look below after three months of my reversal protocol and no more plaque at all in both my carotid arteries, and the CIMT is only 0.82mm, which is now normal for my age of 55. I did this CIMT last month as well and repeated it to verify my astounding results. My CIMT had reduced by another 0.2mm in just a month! That's ~0.6mm reduction and no plaque. The best studies I have found show only a 0.04mm reduction in a year. So I had a 15x reduction in 25% of the time. It's what I call 80/20, which is 4x, based on the 80/20 principle: 20% effort but 80% results. Almost miraculous.

I just gave health lectures at the Selkirk Tea Festival. I felt very blessed to tell the stories of how my father overcame a major stroke with total right-sided paralysis for 30 days, how Fred reversed his high blood pressure in two weeks and no meds and on his way to reverse his Diabetes and obesity in a month or two. I also shared my story of a remarkable reversal of plaque and a 64% reduction in LDL cholesterol in 3 months through diet, fasting, and exercise.

I met many people who were highly motivated to do what I did, what Fred did, and what my father did. They were on insulin or cholesterol medication, but getting progressively worse. They had tried so many things or asked for their doctor's help, but felt 'alone' and somewhat flustered—so much information and trying this and that, but only having slight glimmers of hope. Motivation was not lacking at all. I felt such compassion for them. I know I can help them greatly because I also walk in their shoes as a 'patient' full of disease. But I was also trained as a physician. 

Before I discovered my disease, I knew the theory and many facts about disease. But now that I am directly dealing with heart disease and my father's high blood pressure, trying this and that and experimenting while also researching to find proven things that can help cure my heart disease and my father's hypertension and now Fred's Diabetes, hypertension and obesity, I have a greater appreciation of the healing power of the body and nature with its foods, packed with healing nutrients. A perfect symbiosis between us and nature. Wow. I am amazed at how wonderfully and fearfully I am made, and in this haven of nature, which can heal every disease of the body and mind.

Physician Heal Thyself

Can I heal myself? God gave me the wisdom and the strength to go against conventional wisdom. I let my body heal itself by removing what harmed me and replacing it with foods that accelerate healing.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Jesus quoted this proverb, "Physician heal thyself." This was a challenge from the religious leaders to Jesus, who claimed He was the Son of God and had come as prophesied in the writings of the prophets.

Many people told me that they don't understand how I, a doctor, could have such severe heart disease. What they do not consider is that I desired to become a doctor to help people like me because I thought I might be dying when I was 14, from an autoimmune disease, unable to move or eat in a hospital bed. I didn't know or understand what was happening to me. I decided that if I lived, I would make it my life purpose to help those who were sick to know and understand what was happening to them and perhaps why as well. I started an Internet business during my medical residency to make enough money so I could practice health freely.

I believe health is not just the health of the body, but more importantly, the health of one's mind and even more importantly, the health of one's spirit. Most people are unaware that they have a spirit. This longing for a true home, lasting peace, justice, rest, and unconditional, perfect love, and eternity are matters of the spirit. However, our bodies are important as our vessel to move us through this world. It is our house, and our minds are the mediator between our spirit (some say heart) and our bodies in the external world.

Now I understand better how our common-day diseases, especially metabolic diseases, arise.

What causes metabolic diseases like high cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, high glucose, insulin resistance, prediabetes, Diabetes, macular degeneration, dementia, autoimmune disease, and cancers? These were relatively rare a century ago. It is unbelievable to consider how rare they were.

Jesus said that the healthy do not need a physician, but the sick. So He went to the lepers, the blind, the deaf, the mute, the sick and the orphans and widows. And that is where my heart lies. To those who are sick, like I am. To those who are unaware of their disease, even their spiritual disease. Health is not merely the absence of disease but also the well-being of the body, mind and spirit.

Be a Shifa

Grant me the gift of healing. Bestow upon me the wisdom of healing.

Dr. Kevin Ham

My dear and good friend, Dr. Azra Raza, whose life mission is to cure cancer, told me that Al-Shifa was a healer and a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, known for her wisdom and medical knowledge. Azra is a healer of the heart. Although she is my elder and mentor, she is also a kindred spirit. Ever since her early 20s, her mission was set. She is an oncologist (cancer specialist) and researcher, and I believe her lifelong mission of detecting cancer early and preventing it will be fruitful. I just invested in her company to cure cancer. May God bless her greatly with long life and wisdom.

Shifa means “healing”, “cure” or “remedy”. I prayed to God to make me a healer. To grant me heavenly wisdom to heal and understand disease and health. Little did I know that wisdom would be granted by revealing my own disease. As I write, tears swell from my heart to my eyes. They say that tears borne out of suffering are healing. The two most powerful words in the Bible to me are "Jesus wept." Oh, those heavenly tears shed out of compassion for the sick, the dead and diseased. If only I had such compassion as He did. My greatest role model is Dr. David Livingstone, who left his home to venture into the Congo and help the people there with their physical diseases, as well as their spiritual needs. I longed to have his heart. My next great role model is King David. I love reading his writings. My role models seem to start with"D" (Davinci, Disney, Dickinson (Emily), John Davison Rockefeller).

Tears also fall because God has now granted me this wisdom to be a Shifa, a healer. I believe I can help heal a lot ofpeople. But not I, but God who has granted this wisdom.

Why Metabolic Disease Comes

Disease comes like the waves, each bite, each elevator or car ride, each meal filled with look-alike food, and our systems get clogged and worn down by the relentless waves of habit and comfort. Then the sudden discomforts of disease bring suffering and death.

Dr. Kevin Ham

What is Metabolism? I asked the audience. Some knew, but most did not venture to answer.

What exactly is metabolism, and how does metabolic dysfunction happen and eventually develop into a metabolic disease? And when multiple dysfunctions are present, we refer to it as metabolic syndrome. The brain and the pituitary gland regulate the hormones that govern metabolism. The thyroid, adrenal glands, and pancreas are all instrumental in regulating your metabolism.

The simple definition of metabolism is the bodily processes for life:

1. Processing the inputs (breath, liquids, foods) into energy

2. Excess inputs are stored as energy or processed as outputs

3. Maintain and grow life

4. Convert stored energy into usable energy

When metabolism is dysfunctional in the digestive system, this can lead to Diabetes.

When it's in the blood vessels, this can lead to heart disease and high blood pressure.

When in the brain, this can lead to brain diseases like dementia and Parkinson's disease.

When in the immune system, this can lead to autoimmune diseases.

When in an organ and the immune system, this can lead to tumours and cancers.

When in the thyroid, this can lead to thyroid disease.

Some metabolic dysfunction is caused by micronutritional deficiencies, like too low or high iodine in the thyroid.

Others are caused by toxins that cause inflammation, like heated oils (oxidation), high spiking glucose (glycation), smoking (reduction), alcohol or viruses, leading to 'itis' such as vasculitis (inflammation of the blood vessels), hepatitis (inflammation of the liver).

What Causes Diabetes?

Is it too much glucose (carbs) from food or too much fat in the body?

Dr. Kevin Ham

Most people would say insulin resistance or high blood glucose or not enough insulin.

The simple answer is… Too much food and not enough movement.

The Root Problem: 

It's a storage and overflow problem.

Flywheel of Diabetes

Too many of the wrong foods overfill your storage tanks (liver, fat, pancreas, muscle).

The wrong foods are:

• Refined carbs

• Added sugars

• Processed oils like canola oil, Crisco, shortening, sunflower oil, safflower oil, etc, and even worse when they are heated

  • Avoid grilled and fried foods cooked with oils, including heated olive oil, sesame oil, and coconut oil.

• Animal fats from animals that do not eat natural, whole foods.

  • Cows not pasture-raised, eating grass (instead fed with corn and soy feed)

  • Chickens not pasture-raised (instead caged with no sunlight)

  • Fish that are not wild (instead, farmed and fed antibiotics in enclosed sea farms)

Overflow causes

• Glucose in the blood -> high blood sugar, which rapidly increases insulin, which stores this glucose and lowers blood glucose too much (hypoglycemia), leading to a vicious cycle of hunger and overeating in the next meal

• Fat in the blood > high triglycerides & LDL cholesterol, which leads to eventual fatty liver and visceral fat (fat around the organs)

• Fatty liver & visceral fat lock stored energy (glycogen and fats) from being converted into glucose and fat energy for use.

• High insulin tries to force storage of glucose & fatty acids, but only:

  • Keeps fat locked in organs and fat cells

  • Raises blood pressure

  • Triggers hunger & cravings after glucose spikes

• Without adequate movement, muscles don't use stored and incoming glucose and fat.

• Oxidized fats from heated oils and excess glucose attach and oxidize fat and proteins in the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels, as well as other cells in the organs (liver, heart, pancreas, heart etc)

• This causes inflammation, causing the immune system to try and repair the damage, leading to plaque, further increase in blood pressure, insulin resistance and higher glucose and insulin spikes.

It's a vicious cycle that is like water hitting the rock continually to eventually result in prediabetes and then Diabetes, fatty liver, obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, leading to heart attacks, strokes, liver failure and increasing risks of all types of cancers.

Diabetes and a high glycemic index increase the risk of cancer.

For example, White rice consumption in Korean women increases breast cancer risk by 19% per 100g/day, whereas brown rice or wild rice consumption decreases cancer risk by 24% per 100g/day.

Timeline of Diabetes

Bad things take time. But when you stop the bad things, the body can heal remarkably well, like a miracle of life.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Type 2 Diabetes develops silently, like a thief robbing one of health and unabated, it affects every organ, leading to blindness, kidney failure, leg amputations, heart attacks, strokes, dementia and cancers.

Fix Glucose or Fat Storage First?

What is the big bottleneck of Diabetes? Glucose or Fat?

Dr. Kevin Ham

Type 2 diabetes isn't a problem of too little insulin. It's a problem of too much insulin in a body that is already full.

• Liver, muscles, fat cells, pancreas = storage tanks

• Wrong foods (sugar, white flour, fried oils, excess fats) = tanks fill to the brim.

• Nutrients overflow into the blood:

  • Glucose → high blood sugar

  • Fat → high triglycerides & LDL cholesterol

• The pancreas pumps even more insulin. But insulin just locks fat away and blocks fat burning.

The result: high glucose, high insulin, and rising weight — the metabolic storm of Diabetes.

Medicines target lowering glucose by either preventing the liver from making glucose, excreting glucose via the kidneys, or increasing insulin to try to store excess blood glucose in the liver, muscles, and fat (tanks).

Diets aim to reduce carbs to lower blood glucose levels.

Exercise targets the removal of stored fats and glucose.

Which is the best to target?

1. Remove high-glycemic index foods, but allow low-glycemic carbs.

2. Focus on emptying the liver, muscles, pancreas and fat of their excess fat stores. This is called visceral fat. Thisempties the 'fuel tanks' to allow for the new fuel (glucose, fat) from eating low-glycemic carbs and fat to be stored, rather than overflowing in the blood and causing high glucose and high fat, which increase the risk of heart disease and Diabetes.

3. Targeted timely exercise to use the unlocked stored fuel from the 'tanks'.

I hypothesize and believe the biggest constraint is the 'fuel tanks' of our bodies being full of stored fat. 

1. Remove these, and the flow of food traffic can flow. 

2. Paired with movement at the right time, food traffic flows well and then 

3. Adding the healing foods repairs the potholes and crashes of your former lifestyle habits.

Reflection

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Dr. Kevin Ham

How many people can I help heal and reverse from suffering and death?

Just one or two, including myself would be worthwhile. A life is priceless.
I’ve always aspired to heal millions. Just a dream since age 14. And to help cure autoimmune disease and cancer.

Help Your Family & Friends

If you have a friend or family member, please forward my newsletter to them and ask them to sign up. I’d like to help a lot of people reverse and heal their disease.

Life-Changing Question

Can you be healthier than you have ever been and either reverse your disease or bullet proof yourself from the deadly diseases?

When you take on debt, you eventually have to pay it back with interest. This is financial debt. 

When you build a technology product, and you take short cuts to build it, we call that technical debt, that later requires rewriting the code.

When you do not eat, move, live and sleep properly, you will incur health debt, that you will have to pay back 7 fold, sometimes even with your life.

Rob Thompson, my friend, who died so fit, active and strong, at 58 has woken me up from my diseased state to live each day fully, with intention, with purpose and with meaning.

Do not take on any more health debt. You cannot afford it. The cost is too high to bear later on. It may cost you your life and with that, a lot of suffering.

May God open your heart to take a good look at yourself from the inside out and treat your body like a temple, put in the right fuel, use your God-given vehicle to go along the path to your purposed destination, enjoying each passing moment, each view and each person in your vehicle along life’s journey until you reach your final destination.

I hope to see you there, whole, full and prospering.

Next week—

The Diabetes Reversal Flywheel

Turning the vicious cycle of disease into a virtuous cycle of health is the 8th wonder of life.

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

Reversing High Blood Pressure in 2 Weeks!

How I reversed a 71-year-old diabetic’s high blood pressure so quickly

Hypertension affects more than 30% of adults worldwide, 1.28 billion aged 30-79.

Nearly 50% of adults in the U.S. have high blood pressure, ~116 million people. 

46% of adults with hypertension are unaware they have it.
Only 42% are diagnosed and treated. 

High blood pressure is a major cause of premature death worldwide.

My Birthday, the Gift of Life

I just turned 55 today!

When I was hospitalized at 14 and unable to move due to an autoimmune disease, I thought that if I lived to 40, that would be a long time. I am grateful for the many years I've spent on this amazing planet with so many amazing people, and for a lifetime of both deeply hard trials and heavenly joys.

Since I discovered that my heart arteries were clogged with plaques, the greatest being a 77% blockage, I feel blessed to know this fact. Otherwise, I would have assumed I was healthy. Since then, I've radically changed my lifestyle to heal my disease. I've had the great blessing of gaining some medical knowledge, being educated and trained as a medical doctor, and for the past two decades, learning about food and nutrition, exercise physiology, and health.

I thank the Lord for all, my family and friends, my work colleagues and all those I have had the great pleasure of crossing paths with in this vast universe. And to all of you who may be reading my thoughts right now — thank you so much.

Once I understood how to reverse my own clogged arteries, having seen evidence in a short span of three months, I started to think of who else I could help that would also be in jeopardy of a heart attack.

Rapid Reversal of Disease Is Possible

If a bone fracture can heal in a few months, why can’t most diseases, which are just fractures of a bodily system?

Dr. Kevin Ham

How long do you think it would take to reverse diabetes?

How about high blood pressure?

High cholesterol?

Obesity?

Compared to reversing clogged heart arteries, I thought the above were 'easy' and 'theoretically' possible within a month, knowing full well that it typically takes years to decades to develop.

But each of these diseases and symptoms is quite common nowadays. A century ago, they were rare. Dr. William Osler, a prominent physician who practiced in Toronto, Washington and London, had not seen a heart attack during his lifetime. The first published case of a heart attack in the US was reported by Dr. James Herrick in 1912.

I thought of many people. Fred was top of mind. He is a family church friend I have known for over 50 years, and I knew he had diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and was overweight. He also had the risk factor of age, being 71 years old. I had seen so many friends have heart attacks in their 60s and 70s, and some perished as a result. I felt a strong responsibility to see if I could help Fred. He had a high likelihood of a heart attack or major health event within the next three to five years, imho.

So I asked him if he was willing to try to reverse his diabetes. In theory, I believed I could help him reverse his diabetes as quickly as one week if I went to the theorized extreme, but natural measures. I felt very confident that with a simpler reverse protocol for diabetes, his disease would reverse within two months and certainly under three months.

I had already had my own personal experience of reducing my high LDL cholesterol by 50% in just five weeks. So reducing his cholesterol, I figured, was a given.

What I was uncertain about was how long it would take to reduce his blood pressure.

A Decade of Disease Gone in 2 Weeks?

A miracle is when life returns. A greater miracle is when it happens suddenly.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Fred has had diabetes, associated high blood pressure and high cholesterol for over six years. His diseases progressed, and what started as one medication has grown to six medications:

• 2 for diabetes

• 2 for high blood pressure

• 1 for high LDL cholesterol

I wanted to ensure that Fred's mindset was ready to undergo a lifestyle change involving a targeted diet and exercise. Simple in principle, but unless his mindset was determined, it would not work in execution. It's not that we don't know what we should do; it's more that we don't act on what we know deep inside. We often avoid, ignore, or even run away from what our body is telling us.

I told him that the first week would be the hardest and that the rest of the first month would get easier, but would still be challenging. Reversing his diseases would require targeted therapy. I gave him an example of a very tough disease to treat: cancer. We take that very seriously, and people undergo chemotherapy that sometimes makes hair fall out, and the treatment itself can be quite toxic. We do surgery and Radiation, which is a significant risk factor itself for cancer. But we want to eradicate every last cancer cell, so we go to extremes. In comparison, the reversal protocol would be much easier and faster, but still needed to be very targeted to eliminate the root causes of his diseases.

I said that the hardest thing would be his mindset and his decision to become healthy.

Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity are when one's metabolism has been backed up like a traffic jam on a highway, which eventually starts overflowing into the smaller side streets. The traffic continues to pile up without proper outlets. The organs get overloaded with stored energy in the form of glycogen and fat.

Once the jams or blockages are cleared, then traffic can start moving and repairing the downstream effects of the clog. I like to refer to these as the CONSTRAINTS. You might call it the biggest Bottlenecks, where flow is blocked and backs up everything else.

The question for each of these conditions is:

What is the Constraint or Big Bottleneck that must be cleared?

The Bottleneck (Constraint) in High Blood Pressure

The highways of life twist and turn to deliver life and take away the waste.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I didn't want to tackle Fred's blood pressure first. I wanted to tackle possible clogged arteries, which would be a risk factor for heart attack and stroke. Diabetes and high blood pressure are significant risk factors for this, but since I knew how to lower his risk of heart attack and high LDL cholesterol, I thought we should tackle that first before turning to his diabetes and high blood pressure.

I already knew the answer for diabetes because many doctors have shown that even severe diabetes can be reversed in as little as a week, sometimes a month or two and certainly within six months.

With high blood pressure, I was seeing firsthand how difficult it was for my 90-year-old father to come down from a crazy high 220/120 bp. He got as low as 165/80 naturally, but then started adding salt to his water after watching a YouTube video that said it would make him healthier.

Researching my last newsletter on Nitric Oxide—the gas that expands blood vessels to relax—I began to understand that this chemical compound was so fundamental to the health of blood vessels and would naturally help alleviate the problem of high blood pressure.

That resolved one of the constraints. The other was the calcified plaque in the walls of the vessels, which makes it harder for the blood vessels to dilate fully. I already knew how to do this with my reversing plaque protocol. But I figured it would take 3-6 months for Fred.

Since we already know how to revive the endothelial cells of our blood vessels so that they can once again produce a lot of nitric oxide and also support it by chewing leafy greens, I knew it would just be a matter of time for Fred's blood pressure to decline, but what I was astonished by is just how fast this worked. So fast in fact, that I was caught off guard when Fred's blood pressure crashed to a dangerous low level on day 10 of my reversal protocol.

Since we were monitoring blood glucose with a continuous glucose monitor and I assumed it would take 3 months to correct his high blood pressure, I only found out about his low blood pressure on day 12, when he said he was feeling dizzy and light-headed for two days. He said his bp was low. I asked how low. 

72/45 yesterday and today.

Are you sure? That is too low. There must be something wrong with your bp machine. Let's go check. He showed me his daily bp readings.

Could it be? This was a potential emergency. His low BP could cause a heart attack if he had significant blockages, like me, since it was too sudden a drop. 

I told him to:

• Hold and stop his two blood pressure medications.

• Drink double the amount of water and 

• Add a pinch of mineral salt to it to raise his blood volume.

I called him the next morning. His bp was still too low. 73/43!

I told him to add more salt to his water. By 4:30 p.m., his blood pressure had risen. 87/52. Better.

I then told him to stop taking his combo bp/diabetes medication until his bp got up to 100/70.

Despite being off all of his bp meds, his bp is still too low.

How is this possible, I thought? 

What is happening in his body that it's normalized so quickly? I had not been taught that this was possible.

Just like my doctor friends said, it was impossible to reverse coronary plaque.

Could years of high blood pressure reverse in just ten days and 3 bp meds be discontinued and instead of high bp, be too low?

This was so interesting and amazing and I started to think about what was happening.

His diabetic medication that stimulated his pancreas to release insulin, regardless of glucose level, could be preventing a major strategy of the reverse protocol.

Normally, when glucose levels rise in the blood, the pancreas releases insulin to store the glucose as glycogen or fat in the liver, pancreas, muscles, and tissues.

When glucose levels are high, insulin levels also increase. This prevents stored glycogen or fat from breaking down and being used by your body, even when glucose levels are low.

So, this diabetic medication that stimulates the pancreas to release insulin twice a day is like a traffic cop that stops the cars from moving, even if the highway is clear.

While this diabetic drug can lower glucose, I thought from first principles that the benefit from breaking down stored glycogen and stored fat would be so much greater than just trying to lower glucose levels in the blood.

By lowering insulin, it opened the floodgates for the body's normal metabolism to start healing rapidly. As insulin decreased, it allowed the body to function properly, and the other blood pressure medications were now too strong, as the 'traffic cop' that held up insulin, which blocked the metabolism of stored fat and energy, was removed. Sodium was now flowing more freely out of the kidneys, and fat and glycogen were being broken down, further lowering insulin levels, which were then utilized for energy.

3 Meals a Day: Two are with Targeted Foods

Do we live to eat or eat to live? is a profound question we must ponder every time we put something in our mouth.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I had told Fred that he would eat three meals a day within an eight-hour period. That left 16 hours for his body to rest metabolically, storing energy, and then use the excess energy it had stored.

Two of his meals were going to be foods that were targeted to healing his endothelium, reversing cholesterol out of his tissues back to his liver, which can make all the cholesterol his body and cells need independent of dietary cholesterol, and to restore his metabolic hormones like insulin, glucagon etc and the organs that produce and store fat and energy like his liver and pancreas.

His third meal was going to be his fat: the fat stored in his liver, his pancreas, and his adipose tissues. The organ fat, also known as visceral fat, causes the most harm, as it prevents the organs from functioning properly. A fatty liver. A fatty pancreas. A fatty abdomen. The fat that is visible on the outside is also part of that third meal. Our goal is to reduce visceral fat so that the metabolic organs can function healthily.

Do you know how much energy this fat contains? I asked him.

When I ride my bike from Vancouver to Whistler, 122 km (70 miles) up hills and mountains (2000m), I burn 3000 kilocalories. A pound of fat has about 3500 kcal of energy. Therefore, a person with 30 pounds of fat has approximately 100,000 kcal of stored energy. Think of it like atomic energy in one atom.

And the energy from fat produces 2-3x more energy than glucose. I like to think of fat as electric energy and glucose as gas energy. Our bodies are like a hybrid engine but most people only use glucose for energy.

I asked Fred, "Are you willing to do this for the next month and even for the next 3 months? After healing and reversal, I have a sustained diet that is easier than the reversal diet." A cancer patient isn't given chemotherapy, surgery and Radiation after a cure. But they should eat well to prevent the conditions that gave rise to that first cancer cell and make their immune system strong to prevent and kill any future cancer cells.

Healing Blood Vessels

Fred's blood pressure, off 2.5 blood pressure medications and off 1.5 diabetic medications (one of these meds treats both diabetes and blood pressure), is still low at 114/61, even with increased hydration.

It demonstrates that the body has remarkable resilience and healing power when the major bottlenecks are removed.

Like a fractured leg that is walked on doesn't heal, blood vessels, damaged livers, and pancreas do not heal properly if you continue eating the foods that harm them. You must cast them off to allow the body to heal.

Then, like a fractured leg that heals in 6 to 10 weeks, your fractured blood vessels and organs can heal.

It's that simple. The body rejuvenates. We know this as every cell rejuvenates and recycles. Your health can be restored as it does. And when your body is damaged, your entire body tries to heal that damage. However, if the bottleneck worsens and the traffic continues to back up, the body has a tough time keeping up with the damage and cannot repair it.

We call this damage' inflammation' or 'oxidative damage'. This creates metabolic dysfunction, meaning that food cannot be converted into energy efficiently and hormones become imbalanced. Blood vessels are no longer dilating and expanding to accommodate increased blood flow. So more pressure is needed to push blood through the tighter openings of the arteries. And the damage is typically greatest where there are intersections, which are where the arteries branch and divide. These are called bifurcations. This is where many of my heart blockages are, especially my 77% blockage, right at the opening of the first diagonal branch of my left coronary artery.

Reversal Protocol for Blood Pressure

Just like you need to enter the numbers on a doorpad in the right order to unlock, you need to do right things in the right order to reverse disease.

Dr. Kevin Ham

The overlap between my heart plaque reversal protocol and the blood pressure management protocol is significant because they share very similar root causes.

So my reversal protocol for high blood pressure is straightforward because it is simply just three things.

1. Cast the damaged area from anything that can damage it further.

   1. Protect the damaged area from all foods, toxins, and inflammation.

      1. Foods made with oils, especially heated oils

      2. Foods with high glycemic index and load

2. Give your body (specifically, your blood) the targeted nutrients it needs to deliver these essential nutrients, helping to heal your damaged areas more effectively and efficiently.

   1. Repair endothelial cells and increase nitric oxide.

3. Focus on multiple pathways to achieve this, such as targeted combination therapy, especially those focused on relieving the most significant bottlenecks. My reverse protocol focuses on the top three:

   1. Diet #1 (I believe this to be the biggest factor--up to 80%)

      1. Food targeted at healing the blood vessel endothelium

   2. Exercise #2 (I believe this to be ~10%)

   3. Rest #3 - For metabolic diseases like diabetes, rest means abstaining from eating, also known as fasting. I believe this to be 15%.

   4. Sleep #4 - Some might consider this a subset of rest. I am weak in this area, and I am thinking the first principles of sleep as my fourth strategy for healing.

   5. Genetics #5 - It's challenging to make significant changes to genetics. Still, since epigenetics is the expression of the genetic code, which is influenced by mindset and environment, there are some minor gains to be had through lifestyle.
      

Drugs vs Lifestyle

Let’s compare how drugs treat blood pressure and how well it lowers blood pressure vs foods, exercise and rest.

Blood Pressure Reversal Principles

General principles for blood pressure.

1. Lower insulin which means lower glucose levels. 

1. Cut back on refined sugars. 

1. This is sugar, 

2. White flour, any desserts, pasta, breads made with white flour. 

3. White rice (most don’t know this is refined sugars). 

4. Foods that have high glycemic index should be eaten with caution and if you must eat them, to be at the end of your meal.

2. I believe 100% whole grain, especially fermented or soaked whole grain like sourdough bread and pasta is ok. Fred eats lots of whole grains still. 

1. If I was focused on healing his diabetes faster, I would reduce some of his whole grains, but macros are not the driving bottleneck for metabolic disease. It’s more the quality of the foods and how it is eaten. Eg. chewed vs duration of feeding period vs lack of certain micronutrients, which is the problem of processed foods, where you eventually become deficient in some or many macro nutrients which are essential for metabolism.

2. Heal the inner lining of your blood vessels (endothelium) so they can expand

1. Increase nitric oxide by chewing leafy greens in all your meals. 

2. Eat fruit and foods that protect your endothelial cells from damage. Eg. pomegranate, beets, berries (all types - organic), natto, all kinds of beans, apples

3. Get more blood flowing through all your blood vessels = exercise. Get your heart rate up to 80% of your max heart rate. Eg. 220 - your age. For Fred, that is 220-71 = 149 beats per minute. Walking up a hill will get you there. Highly advise 20-30 minute post meal exercise.

4. Let your glucose metabolism rest by limiting food to a smaller window.

1. This is called intermittent fasting. Eg. eat meals in 8 hour window leaves 16 hour rest or fast

2. If you have some or too many fat stores, then consider one of your meals to be your own body fat, and allow your body to break down this stored glycogen and fat into ‘fat energy’ called ketones. This will happen more if you have a longer intermittent fasting window.

Reflection

Just like you need to enter the numbers on a doorpad in the right order to unlock, you need to do right things in the right order to reverse disease.

Dr. Kevin Ham

How much suffering and disease can be cured and prevented so simply, so profoundly and so amazingly!

I am shocked, delighted and hopeful for so many who suffer from disease.

Life-Changing Question

Do you eat to live or live to eat?

I used to eat to live. Taste and experience were very important to me. While I still love tasty food, I now live to eat and eat for health.

I wanted to do a newsletter on Reversing Diabetes but I think I wish to speak about the Power of the Mind next.

Next week—

The Power of the Mind

How placebo and nocebo are very real in health and in business.

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

Grief & Love

Love empties and fills your heart

Grief

Grief is to the measure of the love you have in your heart.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Kona, our adorable, loving puppy, looked longingly at me for a pet on the head. It was one of the highlights of my day to pet her on the head. That evening, it was just her and me. I pet her a little longer before I prepared to head to a church meeting last Wednesday.

When I arrived at church, I saw a text on my phone from my daughter. “I’m so sorry everyone. Kona was hit by a car. She didn’t make it. I’m so sorry.” My heart stopped. What? Stunned, I called my daughter. She was too upset to talk, just tears.

Then, photos of Kona were shared by the kids.

O My Heart

Oh this ache in my heart, inexpressible and irremovable!

Dr. Kevin Ham

When I saw Enoki, our older dog, the next morning, I could not help the tears bottled up in my heart to rush out as I held him tight, saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Enoki.” When I let the two dogs out of their room, Kona would immediately be kissing and playing with Enoki and eagerly awaiting our morning walk.

That morning walk was very different. When I saw Kona’s leash at the door, tears welled up again. When Enoki pooped, I thought, I would give anything to be able to pick up Kona’s poop again. I had vowed that when we first got Enoki, I would never walk him and especially never pick up his poop. And here I was … wishing I could pick up poop. When I got home, I had to write the inexpressible feelings in my heart, and so while I was planning to write about Reversing Diabetes this week, I decided to write about what is in my heart to help my heart heal from the sudden loss and void left by our puppy. 

How can a puppy fill a part of our hearts so much? This is what amazed me most.

Pride

The swell of pride is the invisible water that floods our hearts and spills over into our lives, as we feel that we have risen high above the world and others.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Right before I left the house, I looked at all that I have been blessed with and felt such overwhelming gratitude to God for such wonderful blessings. I looked to the heavens and prayed silently, “God, all that I have has come from You, and all that I have is for You. Thank you. Let me honour You and praise You for the days You give me on this amazing Earth.”

Reflecting on the past week, I realized that at that moment, the above prayer was in my heart. I had felt like I had reached a great pinnacle in my life: my heart was open, full of joy, love, and peace, open to whatever God would send my way. I have pondered, if while I felt I was at my humblest moment in life, when I prayed to God at that time, when God looked into my heart, did He see selfish pride? I had been reading and studying how even the good Kings of Judah lifted their hearts in pride before both men and God and fell deep into sin, disease, war or death. I wondered how a king so blessed could suddenly fall.

Before destruction a man's heart is haughty,
But humility comes before honor.

Proverbs 18:12

Right after I read the text, my first response was a curse word, which I hardly ever say, and my fists slamming against the countertop, asking, “Why?” Part denial and disbelief, part shock, and part anger. Grief had started to pierce my heart. Was I proud and haughty in my heart or was I humble? What does it mean to be humble?

Love

Without love, the world stops spinning and my heart stops beating.

Dr. Kevin Ham

The greatest humility is the heart that is in love. For love, what would you do for someone you love? What would you not do? Paul writes of this perfect love. It is often recited at weddings. 

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

Love never ends. But the things and people we love … they will come to an end someday. The love never ends, but the object of our love can and will. In that moment of loss of love, an emptiness, a hole that feels like a black hole, draws in every emotion of your humanity into that void.

Filling that void is the wound from the piercing revelation of the sword that the thing you loved or the person you have been so accustomed to in your life is now gone.

There is sage advice to live each day like it’s your last day. YOLO (You Only Live Once). I’ve also heard that you should treat each person as if it's the last time you might see them again. Just imagine if we were able to live with this heart.

I reflected on my grief. For instance, when I lose material things I love, or when I lose large sums of money, versus when I lose people I love, like my mother, my relatives, my friends. The closer and deeper the love is, the more the grief. To remind ourselves of our loved ones, we set up memorials and images. And if we are fearful, we bury everything so that we are not reminded of the deep loves of our lives.

Express Your Heart

While the feelings of the heart are inexpressible, they still need to be pumped out as they wallow around in your heart.

Dr. Kevin Ham

I like to process my feelings and my thoughts by writing. And so I wrote that next morning with tears streaming down my face. I’d like to share it with you.

Grief & Love

To Kona, our beloved puppy, whose love and joy were boundless.

Love is boundless, yet it lives within the many fragmented chambers of our hearts.

When we see the wholesome and limitless love of God reflected in people, pets, and nature, our hearts cannot help but open wide to receive it endlessly.

Grief is always in proportion to love. Its depth only matches the depth of the love that carved it into our hearts.

The measure of grief, when turned inside out, becomes gratitude — for the time we shared with those we loved, for the memories that remain, and for the wish that we had more time together. Such love fuels our hearts for the rest of our days.

Grief arrives in stages: shock and disbelief, anger and regret, sadness and loss. Then it turns outward into affection for those still around us, followed by gratitude for what we once had — and what we still hold now.

In grief, we feel powerless. Loss robs us of control, leaving us overwhelmed. Memories return in waves — sometimes we hold them tighter, other times they slip beyond our reach.

We search for reason, purpose, and meaning. Sometimes answers stay hidden. Sometimes they spark new life, birthing new purpose from pain.

One must let the heart grieve and express. That is why we hold ceremonies — not only for closure, but also to honour love and to release grief.

In this life, loss is inevitable. It is what makes each moment so precious. Every day is a gift — even a day of sorrow, for only hearts that truly know grief can fully see and embrace joy.

As Proverbs reminds us:

“Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.” 

Mercy is love. Mercy is compassion.

A dear friend, Dr. Azra Raza, told me that in Islam, the death of a beloved animal spares its owner from a greater misfortune. My neighbour Tamara said the same; in Russia and Ukraine, the death of one’s animal means she spared us from some bad event.

I thought of the animal sacrificed to clothe Adam and Eve with garments of skin to spare them from death, and of the lambs that died for the sake of people’s sins. And then, with tears streaming down my face, I thought of the greatest sacrifice of all:

“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” — John 1:29

In this short time we have on earth, grief itself becomes the vessel that holds our deepest love, dreams, and compassion. When we reflect, we find this reservoir of love is boundless. It is with this heart that we must continue each day — with gratitude, with love, with joy.

For it is truly better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

We will forever miss you, Kona. We will forever love you and remember you. Each day, we will carry the love you gave us, and we will love others as you loved us.

In much love is much grief.

In much grief is much wisdom.

In much wisdom is much life.

From your beloved Ham Family

Reflection

Grief allows you to pour out your heart in love and gratitude, after the inflamed wounds of disbelief, anger, and regrets calm down in your heart.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Losing Kona so young has broken my heart — not only for me, but for my children who lost their special joy. Kona was not just a pet. She was family.

I even saw tears streaming down my 90-year-old father’s face. Kona had also touched his heart deeply. She was so small, but her heart and energy were boundless.

I kept remembering what Azra and Tamara told me. Then, the shortest verse in the Bible struck me anew:

“Jesus wept.”

The Son of God moved with compassion at the death of Lazarus and the grief of his family. Compassion for the poor, the sick, the blind, the widows, and the outcast. Compassion even for Jerusalem itself, which would reject him and have him nailed to the cross:

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Including mine.

As I think of Kona, I remember how she loved to chase cars. We always held her back on her leash, but that day she was free. A white Range Rover sped past, and she ran in front of it…

Was she sparing us from some greater harm? Perhaps. The thought brings a little comfort. In that moment, I also realized how often I, too, have rushed headlong toward danger.

Just days earlier, on September 6, I had foolishly ridden the Whistler Gran Fondo — 122 km with 2,000m of elevation — through wildfire smoke measuring 73 ppm. Advisories warned against even light outdoor activity, yet I rode on, knowing my heart vessel is 77% blocked, my heart beating and circulating this smoky air for just over four hours. I told myself I was being careful, holding back, but in truth, I was being reckless.

I was humbled. What I thought was a strength was actually a weakness. What I thought was wisdom was actually folly.

And so I resolve to walk by faith, not by sight.

“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten before God. Even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

If God does not forget the sparrows, He surely knows how much Kona meant to us. And though we may not understand why now, there must be a greater purpose we do not yet see.

Kona has left a void in our hearts. It will take time to grieve and heal. I pray God will fill that space with His own joy, wisdom and love, uniting us as one heart, one mind, one body — and drawing us closer to Him.

God, have mercy on her soul. And have mercy on ours, too.

Ceremonies

Ceremonies allow you to move to the next phase of your life either as a foundation, a step, or to allow you to move on and reflect upon and honour what you are leaving behind, without being held back.

Dr. Kevin Ham

Ceremony to process grief and love is also important. It is the reason why we have engagements, weddings, graduations and funerals. Think about the ceremonies you have in your life. With each ceremony, you leave something behind while entering a new phase of your life. That gap is the wilderness that you must traverse to the next journey of your life.

We will have a memorial so that our family can express the grief and love in our hearts this Saturday.

Life-Changing Question

Who should you be grateful for today and each coming day?

Let them know by a hug, a phone call, a text, an email today.

Next week—

Reversing Diabetes in 3 months

Diabetes is even easier to reverse than heart disease.

Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.

The Healing Power of Food: Nitric Oxide

Reversal: How I Reversed My Clogged Arteries in 3 Months

You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

Genesis 2:15

But the woman looked upon its fruit and saw that it was 

1. Good for food 

2. A delight to the eyes and

3. To be desired to make one wise.

In our world today, so many of our so-called foods are processed, genetically modified and polluted with herbicides and pesticides. These foods eventually cause disease as they are toxic to our bodies. These foods are decorated and marketed to be a delight to our eyes, they look like delicious foods and give one enjoyment, status and belonging. They are convenient, cheap, accessible and fast. But also right beside this tree of knowledge of good and evil that brought death was the tree of life.

I asked my 71 year old church friend, “Fred, what caused your diabetes?” He looked a little perplexed. I said, “The answer is quite simple.” He then clued in and replied, “Oh, sugary foods.” What kind of sugary foods? White rice, white flour - processed of its bran covering (fibre), oils and many vitamins. Added refined sugars as well as sweeteners. Also, most desserts, fried foods, heated oils, and sugary drinks. The simple answer: Food caused his diabetes.

We face the same choice that Adam and Eve faced in Eden daily and the cells in our bodies record these decisions over decades and manifest as disease.

Nitric Oxide: The Spark of Life

Oxygen is life-giving. Nitric oxide rejuvenates.

Maimonides

In the 1970s, vascular scientists noticed that when the endothelium, the one-cell lining of the blood vessels, was intact, the arteries relaxed. Remove or damage the endothelium, and the vessels hardened in spasm. Something invisible was being released by the endothelial cells. They named this unidentified compound, EDRF - endothelium-derived relaxing factor.

Ferid Murad — 1977: Showed that nitrovasodilators (e.g., nitroglycerin) release nitric oxide, activating guanylate cyclase and relaxing smooth muscle, relieving chest pain. NobelPrize.org

Robert F. Furchgott — 1980: Discovered a mysterious substance which he named endothelium-derived relaxing factor (EDRF) was made by endothelial cells.

Louis J. Ignarro — 1986: Deduced that EDRF is nitric oxide, at that time considered a toxic gas that came from car exhausts, a smog pollutant, and an unstable chemical that lasted only seconds. 

In 1998, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to these three: Murad, Furchgott, and Ignarro, for the discovery of nitric oxide as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system.

Nitric oxide relaxes arteries, lowers blood pressure, prevents clotting, calms inflammation and signals endothelial repair. It’s your own body’s spark of life. It is produced in the blood vessels, brain cells and the skin.

When someone has chest pain from a blocked artery, they can spray nitroglycerin under their tongue and get relief as it turns into nitric oxide in the heart and expands the vessels. Ironically, Alfred Nobel made a fortune with the nitroglycerin used to make dynamite. However, dynamite was not only used for his original intent for mining and railroads, but also in war and destruction. He became known as the merchant of death. 

Lauder Brunton, a distinguished British physician, had found in 1867 that nitrates were effective in relieving pains in angina pectoris. When Nobel’s physicians recommended nitroglycerine as a remedy for his heart pain (angina) in 1890, he declined it, most likely as he believed the industrial nitroglycerin he was working with was causing his headaches.. 

In order to leave a good legacy, he bequeathed his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes in 1895 and one of those prizes was to be in Physiology or Medicine. He passed away a year later from a hemorrhagic stroke at age 63.

Nitric Oxide: The Fork in the Road

The body has its miracle gas but the fork can supply it with a dietary backup system.

Dr. Kevin Ham

This nitric oxide is produced in the body but it also has its backup supply from the diet. The power of nitric oxide is its ability to do many things but in particular to widen the highways and roads to deliver the life-giving blood you have, which consists of not only red blood cells but also your white blood cells which make up your immune system as well as platelets, nutrients and hormones. If the highways are constricted like a traffic jam, the delivery trucks, emergency services cannot get to every cell in your body. Only one cell or one organ needs to be compromised to affect one’s health.

1. The Internal Pathway

The body converts the amino acid, L-arginine into nitric oxide through an enzyme in the endothelial cells, eNOS (endothelial nitric oxide synthase).

This enzyme is stimulated by:

1. Shear stress from exercise: High intensity interval training (HIIT), and deep nasal breathing

2. Antioxidants called polyphenols: Found in berries, cocoa, green tea, red wine

3. L-citrulline and L-arginine.  Watermelon, legumes (beans) and nuts

4. Omega 3s. Fish, algae

5. Sleep. Nighttime nitric oxide pulses

eNOS is inhibited by:

1. Smoking

2. Diabetes

3. Oils and Lipid Peroxidation. Heated and processed oils (fried foods) oxidize lipids, which damage endothelial membranes, consume NO and destabilize eNOS

4. Glycation (from high sugar). High glucose glycosylates proteins to create advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), which damage endothelial cells and create oxidative stress

5. Oxidative stress. Free radicals, processed meats, excess fat especially visceral fat around the organs, heavy metals, high blood pressure, make eNOS produce superoxide instead of nitric oxide, causing further damage. This is called eNOS uncoupling. eNOS under oxidative stress becomes harmful rather than helpful.

6. Aging. eNOS activity declines with age

7. Inflammation

When your body is in a state of inflammation, (measured by such blood markers as hsCRP, homocysteine and in the heart, myeloperoxidase and Lp-PLA2), instead of making nitric oxide, eNOS makes super oxide which creates a vicious cycle of endothelial damage. 

So first thing is to focus on getting your inflammatory markers down by eliminating the foods and environment that cause the above lipid peroxidation, glycation, oxidative stress and inflammation and replace them with foods, exercise and rest (including sleep) that can restore an anti-inflammatory body chemistry that can heal the endothelial cells.

So largely lifestyle habits in diet, exercise and sleep regulate good nitric oxide production that allows blood vessels to expand and allow your life-giving blood to flow with its delivery trucks of oxygen and nutrients and garbage trucks to take away your metabolic waste products.

2. The Diet Pathway

The diet pathway bypasses damaged endothelium. It’s like a jumpstart charge to a battery (eNOS) that is low in energy. It’s especially important in diabetes and cardiovascular disease when eNOS is impaired. It’s a 5 step process.

Step 1: Eating Foods Rich in Nitrates (NO₃⁻)

• Where from? Leafy greens (spinach, arugula, lettuce), beets, celery, and other vegetables.

• How much? 300 mg of nitrate in one meal seems to be the threshold to create enough nitric oxide effect (see below for list of nitrate-rich foods)

• What happens? Dietary nitrate is absorbed from the gut into the bloodstream → plasma nitrate levels rise.

• Inhibitors: Low-vegetable diets, high processed foods, and cooking/boiling (can leach out nitrates).

I try to eat salad greens in every meal, even putting arugula toppings on my sourdough bread, and my steel-cut oatmeal as nitric oxide is provided for about 90 minutes after chewing these leaves thoroughly.

Step 2: Concentration in Salivary Glands

• About 25% of circulating nitrate is actively taken up by the salivary glands.

• Salivary glands concentrate nitrate 10× higher than plasma in blood.

• Inhibitors: Dehydration (reduces saliva flow), certain drugs (e.g., proton pump inhibitors may alter salivary nitrate handling).

This highly concentrated nitrate is slowly released by the salivary glands into your saliva for the next 90 minutes. Just consider the steady stream of nitric oxide coursing from mouth to blood to cells. This is the difference between chewing your veggies and just blending them and drinking it without mixing with your saliva. Also by chewing you increase the blood flow to your head and brain.

Step 3: Reduction to Nitrite (NO₂⁻) by Oral Bacteria

• In the mouth, commensal anaerobic bacteria (on tongue and in crypts) reduce nitrate → nitrite.

• This is essential: humans don’t have the enzyme for this conversion — we rely on bacteria.

• Inhibitors:

• Antibacterial mouthwash (kills bacteria that perform this step).

• Chlorinated water (tap water) can reduce bacterial activity.

• Poor oral microbiome health (antibiotics, lack of diversity).

• Some toothpastes alter the oral bacteria

Again chewing here allows the bacteria to break down the nitrates in your veggies into nitrites which can then be turned into nitric oxide in the stomach below.

Step 4: Swallowing Nitrite & Stomach Conversion

• Saliva rich in nitrite is swallowed.

• In the acidic stomach, nitrite → nitric oxide (NO) + other reactive nitrogen species.

• This NO diffuses locally (helping with gut defense) and into circulation.

• Inhibitors:

• Low stomach acid (hypochlorhydria, PPIs) → less conversion to NO.

• Alkaline antacids.

• Proton pump inhibitor drugs for ulcers

Step 5: Circulation and Tissue Conversion

• Remaining plasma nitrite can be converted to NO in tissues, especially low-oxygen environments (like exercising muscle, ischemic heart tissue).

• This provides a “backup system” for NO when oxygen or eNOS is limited.

• Inhibitors: Oxidative stress rapidly degrades NO, smoking (scavenges NO), high-fat processed diets (increase superoxide).

Exercise enhances nitrite conversion to nitric oxide in tissues due to lower oxygenation as you exercise, which then expands your blood vessels for more blood and oxygen as you breathe faster and blood circulates more thoroughly in the muscles that require oxygen and nutrients to produce energy.

Highest Nitrate Foods

Foods targeted for heart health must be chewed and digested as nature intended.

Dr. Kevin Ham

How Long Dietary Nitrate Powers NO

• 15–30 minutes after eating a nitrate-rich meal (e.g., beet juice or leafy greens), plasma nitrate levels start rising.

• Within ~1–3 hours, plasma nitrates and nitrites peak significantly. In one beet juice study, nitrates rose about 6-fold; nitrites 4-fold.

• The half-life of elevated plasma nitrates is 5–10 hours, meaning enhanced NO availability persists over several hours. MDPI

Approximately 25% of plasma nitrate is recycled via the salivary glands, becoming up to 10× concentrated in saliva versus plasma. Oral bacteria then reduce it to nitrite, which converts to NO in the stomach.

Food as Medicine

Food is not merely pleasure, hobby or calories.
Food is chemistry. Food is pharmacology. Food is medicine.

So not only blood vessel rejuvenation but also a symphony of foods work together to lower all the various offenders that produce disease. Reminder from last week’s Reversing heart disease protocol.

• Pomegranate juice: reduced carotid IMT by 30% in one year

• Garlic (aged extract): lowered coronary plaque volume by 8% in diabetics over 12 months

• Oats & flaxseed: soluble fiber binding cholesterol, lowering LDL, calming inflammation

• Berries: antioxidants halting LDL oxidation

• Natto & vitamin K2: pulling calcium out of arteries and back into bone

• Leafy greens & beets: nitrate reservoirs for nitric oxide

Each food targets a different mechanism.
Together, they form a multi-targeted cocktail without side effects.

Drugs vs Foods

We mold clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes it useful.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching 11

Drugs

• Statins: LDL ↓50%, plaque regression ~1% after 2 yrs (ASTEROID).

• PCSK9 inhibitors + statins: LDL ↓60%, plaque regression ~1% in 18 mo (GLAGOV).

Foods

• Lifestyle (Ornish): LDL ↓37%, angiographic regression in 1 yr, sustained for 5 yrs.

• Esselstyn: LDL <80 mg/dL (↓60-70%), total cholesterol <150 mg/dL, disease arrested or reversed, 95% no recurrent events.

Triple Therapy Reversal (Food, Exercise, Fasting)

• My results: LDL ↓ 64% in 12 weeks (168 → 61); CIMT reversal 1.8mm to 0.86mm (full reversal in carotids in 3 months)

Drugs change numbers. Food, exercise, and fasting heal the system.

The Stomach Constraint

Every system has a bottleneck. In business, it’s production capacity. In the body, it’s the size of the stomach and the amount of blood to supply nutrients and remove metabolic waste.

You can only eat so much. Every bite displaces another.
Why fill the stomach with endothelial toxins — refined oils, sugary desserts — when the same constraint could be used for healing foods?

The stomach becomes the site of choice. The constraint forces a decision: the Tree of Life or the toxic fruit.

Do We Eat for Taste or for Health?

We’ve been conditioned to desire to eat food that is marketed as delicious, for taste. To try food as an experience by visiting top reviewed restaurants, with Michelin stars or rave reviews by food critics. To enjoy the convenience of simple, fast, cheap crunchy, sugary delight in fast foods.

It is perhaps only our parents who emphasize that we should eat for health, but for the most part this sage advice is ignored but their words may echo in our hearts when we receive the diagnosis of a disease.

What do you eat for?

For taste and pleasure or perhaps status and experience?

Or for life and health?

If both could be true, even better.
I am working with artisans and food companies to create wholesome, healthy, tasty, pleasure-filled experiences. Check out 123dough.com and 123dough.ca  (but we have yet a long way to go to reach our ideal vision).

Reflection

The whole is a symphony of parts that all work together in a rhythm that is marvelous and profound.

Dr. Kevin Ham

How can such simple foods with no ingredient labels cure our number one disease killers, if we replace the foods that industry promotes by enticing marketing, accessibility, speed and cost but very low quality?

Life-Changing Question

What nitrate rich foods can you add daily to each meal and replace with foods that causes inflammation?

Literally can be life-saving in a matter of years.

Next week—

Reversing Diabetes in 3 months

Diabetes is even easier to reverse than heart disease.

Appendix

Foods that have high nitrates.

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