Part 3 of a series. Part 1 was about the people around you. Part 2 was the daily protocol. This one is about what happens when the treatment stops.
When I was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the objective was brutally simple.
Survive.
Get through the next appointment. Understand the next scan. Complete the next round. Manage the side effects. Keep eating. Keep moving. Keep believing.
Everything pointed at one finish line: remission.
After six rounds of O-CHOP, I crossed it. Complete metabolic remission. The cancer that had spread through five organs, my bone marrow and my lymphatic system was no longer active.
My family celebrated. My friends celebrated. I celebrated.
But nobody tells you this at the start:
Remission is a finish line. It’s also an invisible one.
There’s no tape to break. No medal. No moment where somebody fires a pistol and officially releases you back into your old life.
One day you’re a cancer patient. The next, people see you as somebody who beat cancer.
Inside, the transition isn’t nearly so quick.
Everyone wants the story to be over
We like stories with clean endings. Diagnosis. Treatment. Remission. Celebration.
That’s reassuring, especially for the people who love you. They’ve travelled through the uncertainty alongside you and they badly want the danger to be gone.
So when treatment ends, life returns to normal. The messages thin out. Conversations move away from blood results and hospital appointments. People stop asking how you are quite so carefully.
Mostly that’s good. You don’t want cancer to be the dominant subject forever.
But your body didn’t get the same memo.
Treatment may have ended. Recovery has only just started. There’s fatigue, brain fog, broken sleep, changed digestion, lost fitness, and a body that doesn’t feel entirely like yours. There’s maintenance treatment and blood tests still punctuating the calendar.
And there’s the uncertainty.
Before cancer, an ache was just an ache.
After cancer, it’s a question.
Is that normal? Was that lymph node there before? Why am I tired today? Is it back?
Most of the time the rational part of your brain answers sensibly. Bodies ache. Energy fluctuates. Not every symptom means something.
But cancer carves a new pathway in your mind, and sometimes your thoughts are halfway down it before you notice.
Nobody warns you that you’ll miss treatment
This one surprised me most.
You spend months willing chemotherapy to end. But while you’re in it, something is being done.
There’s a plan. There are drugs going in. Doctors and nurses watching closely. Blood taken. Progress measured. The next appointment already in the diary.
Treatment is brutal, but it gives the fight a shape.
Then it stops.
You should feel liberated, and part of you does. Another part feels strangely exposed.
During treatment I knew what today’s job was. Turn up. Get through it. Recover. Go again.
Afterwards the questions got less immediate and much bigger. How fast should I be recovering? What do I do now? Can I trust my body again? How do I live without recurrence sitting quietly in every room?
I don’t think you answer those questions. I think you stop letting them run the place.
Rebuilding trust, one repetition at a time
The gym became more than somewhere to get my muscle back.
It became the laboratory.
Every walk, every session, every extra kilo on the bar was another piece of evidence that my body was still mine.
At first the progress was small. Didn’t matter. The point was never to prove I was the man I’d been before cancer. It was to be slightly stronger than last week.
One percent at a time.
Eventually I stopped catching up and started setting personal bests I hadn’t hit in years. At 57, after stage 4 lymphoma and six rounds of chemo, there are days I feel physically better than I did in my thirties.
I’m not claiming exercise protects you from cancer. It doesn’t. And I’m not suggesting everyone coming out of treatment should be under a barbell — recovery is individual, and what you can do depends on your treatment and your team.
I’m saying it gave me something I badly needed. Objective evidence.
Cancer taught me my body could go wrong without asking permission. Training taught me it could also adapt, rebuild, and become capable again.
Every session was a small vote of confidence in my own future.
Recovery doesn’t run in a straight line
When you’re motivated, there’s a temptation to treat recovery as another project. Set the plan. Measure the inputs. Improve weekly.
That’s helped me enormously. It also has limits.
Biology doesn’t respect the spreadsheet.
Some days I feel exceptional. Other days maintenance immunotherapy leaves me flat or aching, and my body reminds me that chemo finished but the journey didn’t.
A bad night’s sleep isn’t a stalled recovery. A hard day doesn’t erase the good ones. Needing to rest isn’t a failure of discipline.
That might be the most useful thing I’ve learned.
The 1% Protocol was never about being perfect every day. It’s about making enough good choices, often enough, that they compound.
Some days your one percent is a heavy session, a long walk and a table full of colour.
Some days it’s getting out of bed, eating something decent, and letting your body rest.
Both count.
There’s a balance to find here. Stay attentive — go to the appointments, report anything that persists. But there’s a point where constant vigilance starts eating the life you fought to keep.
I don’t want to spend the rest of mine looking over my shoulder.
I want to travel. Sail. Train. Laugh with my family. Watch my children build their lives. Eat properly. Take on things that excite me. Occasionally do something for no better reason than it sounds like fun.
None of us has certainty. Cancer just removed my illusion that I ever did.
At first that’s frightening. Eventually it’s liberating.
The aim isn’t to never think about recurrence. It’s to make that thought smaller than the life going on around it.
Fasting, and getting back in the driving seat
Fasting has stayed with me. Every two months, in the months I’m not on maintenance immunotherapy, I do a 72-hour water-only fast.
I started during chemotherapy because the biology genuinely interested me, and the parts that are well established are worth stating plainly.
Fasting improves insulin sensitivity and restores metabolic flexibility — the ability to switch cleanly between burning carbohydrate and burning fat, which most of us have quietly lost. It triggers autophagy, the cell’s own recycling programme, the mechanism that won Yoshinori Ohsumi the Nobel Prize in 2016. And there’s now human trial evidence that fasting alongside chemotherapy improves how well patients tolerate it.
That’s not fringe. That’s mainstream cell biology.
What I won’t tell you is that fasting killed residual cancer cells, prevents my recurrence, or put me into remission. Those things haven’t been shown in humans, and I’d rather be believed on what I can stand behind than doubted on everything because I overreached on one thing.
My treatment put me into remission. Fasting is something I do alongside it.
Its real value to me is broader. It gives my digestive system a pause. It resets my relationship with hunger. And it’s a structured challenge that proves I can tolerate discomfort for something worth having.
Mostly, it gives me back a sense of agency.
Cancer treatment means handing over enormous control. You follow the schedule, take the drugs, turn up, and trust the team. That’s exactly what you should do — and it can still leave you feeling like a passenger in your own body.
Training, food and fasting aren’t substitutes for medicine. They’re the choices that put me back in the driving seat.
The unexpected part has been doing it with other people.
Fasting alone can be isolating. Your body complains, your routine breaks, and everyone around you carries on eating as though nothing is happening — which for them, it isn’t.
In a group it changes completely. You share what you’re feeling, drag each other through the hard hours, and mark the milestones together. First evening. First morning. Twenty-four. Forty-eight. Done.
The group doesn’t make it easier. It makes it shared.
There may be no “back to normal”
People talk about getting back to normal after treatment.
I know what they mean. I’m not sure I want my old normal back.
The man who came out of this isn’t quite the one who went in. My priorities changed. My relationship with time changed. I pay attention to what I eat, how I move, how I feel, and what deserves my energy.
I value ordinary days more than I used to.
That doesn’t mean I’m grateful for cancer. I’d never suggest anyone should be grateful for a disease that threatens their life and hurts everyone who loves them.
But I can acknowledge that something difficult changed me without pretending the difficult thing was a gift.
Cancer took plenty. It doesn’t get to take the meaning I’ve found in surviving it.
The finish line keeps moving
Maybe recovery isn’t one line you cross at all. Maybe it’s a series of small moments.
The first walk where your legs feel strong again.
The first meal you properly enjoy.
The first morning cancer isn’t your first thought.
The first holiday booked without working out where the nearest hospital is.
The first time somebody asks how you are and you say “brilliant” — not to reassure them, but because it’s true.
None of these arrive with a fanfare. You usually only spot them afterwards.
But together they’re the shift from surviving back to living.
Remission was the result I wanted. It gave me the opportunity.
Recovery is what I’m building with it.
The finish line was invisible. The life on the other side of it gets clearer every day.
Not going back to who I was.
Not pretending it never happened.
Just learning to trust my body, my future, and life itself again — one percent at a time.
Come and fast with us — Monday 31 August
Quite a few of you have told me you want in on the next group fast, and I keep forgetting to add you. So consider this the reminder, and your chance to fix it.
Our next community 72-hour water-only fast starts at 2pm on Monday 31 August. We break it together at 2pm on Thursday 3 September.
Eighteen of us are signed up so far. I’ll be doing it too, and hosting a private WhatsApp group where we prepare together, get each other through the ugly hours, and talk through how to break it properly at the end.
No competition. Nothing to prove. Just people doing a hard thing at the same time.
One thing before you jump in. This is peer support from people who fast regularly, not a supervised programme — so if you’re currently in treatment, on medication that assumes you’re eating, diabetic, underweight, or pregnant, talk to your doctor first. A 72-hour fast isn’t right for everyone, and there’s no prize for pushing through something your body is telling you to stop.
2pm, Monday 31 August. See you there.
One hour, one milestone, one percent at a time.