Owen Castellan very nearly left the programme in week twenty-two, for the entirely rational reason that it appeared to have stopped working.
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.
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.
A plateau is the body agreeing with you. We tell people to expect one, and they still don’t believe us until it happens.
Illustrative composite
Medication was reviewed twice, and on both occasions the change was a reduction. That is not the usual direction of travel and nobody in the room pretended otherwise.
It moved again in week thirty-one. “Nobody did anything clever,” he says. “They just didn’t panic, and I copied them.”
