Sleep was the missing variable

Farida Nazari’s daytime readings were reasonable. Her overnight traces looked like someone had drawn them during an earthquake.

Maintenance is its own phase with its own skills, and the team treats it as harder than the losing phase rather than as a victory lap.

What the numbers hid

The programme front-loads almost nothing. The first phase changes two things and no more, which most people find insulting for about three weeks and survivable after that.

We were treating a metabolic problem in someone who was sleeping four and a half hours. That was never going to work.

Dr. Helena Braddock, sleep medicine

Where the plateau came from

There was a plateau from about week twenty. Nothing was going wrong; the body had simply arrived somewhere and wanted to stay there for a while.

“Nobody had asked me about sleep in eight years of appointments,” she says. “It was the first question here.”