Part 2 of a series. Part 1 is here — about what cancer does to the people around you. This one is about what I actually did every day, and why.
I promised this post would be practical. So let’s start with the honest version.
There is no single thing in the 1% Protocol that beat stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Chemotherapy did the heavy lifting. I’m not here to tell you otherwise.
What I can tell you is that I refused to spend a year as a passenger.
So alongside the treatment plan I built a daily structure — fasting, HBOT, diet, supplements, resistance training, cardio, meditation, lymphatic drainage, cold water, sauna. And I wanted to understand why each piece was there, not just collect wellness habits because they sounded good on a podcast.
Before I go further, the line in the sand: this is my experience and my reading of the science, not medical advice. I’m an engineer and an ex-rugby player, not an oncologist. If you’re in treatment, your team goes first. Always.
The fact that changed how I approached all of it
Early on I went looking for how my treatment actually worked. Not the leaflet version. The mechanism.
My regime was O-CHOP. The “O” is an antibody, and I assumed — as I think most people would — that it was a drug that killed cancer.
It isn’t.
The antibody doesn’t kill anything. It’s a targeting system. It finds a marker on the surface of the B-cells and coats them, like painting a target on a roof.
The killing is done by my cells. Natural killer cells — that really is what they’re called — recognise the painted target, dock onto it, and destroy it.
Read that again, because it took me a while to sit with it.
The drug aims. My immune system pulls the trigger.
And then I found the detail that properly stopped me.
That antibody was engineered. Somebody in a lab removed a single sugar from its tail for one reason: to make it grip the natural killer cell harder. Not to attack the cancer more aggressively — to hold onto my immune cells more tightly. The entire design philosophy was to recruit the patient more effectively.
As an engineer, I found that genuinely moving. A team of people had spent years refining a component whose only job was to work with whatever I brought to the table.
Which raises an obvious question.
What was I bringing?
I stopped thinking of myself as the battlefield. I started thinking of myself as part of the crew.
There’s a hard truth underneath this. At the point of diagnosis, these immune cells often aren’t working well. The gun is loaded. The hand holding it isn’t necessarily steady.
So the condition of my biology wasn’t a wellness sideshow. It was part of the operation.
Not a cure. Not an alternative. Not instead of anything.
A teammate.
The three levers
Once I understood that, the question stopped being “what can I take?” and became “what actually determines whether my system works?”
It kept coming back to the same three things.
- The microbiome — the trillions of organisms that regulate inflammation, train the immune system, and produce a huge share of the signalling molecules your body runs on.
- The mitochondria — the part of every cell that decides how energy is made, how much oxidative stress is generated, and how a cell responds when it’s put under pressure.
- The environment — everything I could control around both. What I ate, when I ate it, how I moved, how I recovered, how I slept.
Nothing here is exotic. It’s restraint, timing and consistency, applied to biology that’s been studied for decades.
Fasting: timing the stress, not avoiding it
I ran a 65-hour fast straddling each chemo infusion. The full breakdown is in Fasting, Chemo, and the 1% Fight.
The thinking is that fasting pushes healthy cells into a protected, low-growth state, while cancer cells — which tend to keep their growth pathways switched on regardless — don’t downshift as cleanly. Fasted healthy cells batten down the hatches. Stressed cancer cells don’t get the memo.
Autophagy sits underneath all of it — the cell’s own recycling programme, which switches on under nutrient stress. It isn’t a switch that flips at a magic hour. It’s a process, tied to how long you’ve fasted, how you’ve trained, how you’ve slept.
The refeed afterwards mattered as much as the fast. Whatever damage chemo does to the gut, a chaotic refeed does more.
HBOT, cold and heat: forcing adaptation
Hyperbaric oxygen, ice baths and sauna sit in the same family for me — controlled, short bursts of physiological stress that force the body to adapt rather than simply cope.
HBOT increases the amount of oxygen dissolved in the blood, well beyond what haemoglobin alone carries. Cold and heat both trigger the body’s own repair and antioxidant systems — which struck me as a better route than supplementing those things in from outside.
I’ll write a dedicated post on the exact protocols — sessions, durations, timing around cycles — because that detail deserves its own space.
Movement: medicine for a system with no pump
This is the one people underestimate most.
As I wrote in You’ve Got Cancer, the lymphatic system — the network that clears cellular waste and runs immune surveillance — has no pump. No heart equivalent.
It moves only when you move. Walking. Breathing deeply. Muscles contracting. The diaphragm working.
Resistance training and cardio weren’t about performance during treatment. They were about keeping that drainage system running, protecting muscle against the wasting that chemo and steroids cause, and giving my mitochondria a reason to stay efficient rather than deconditioned.
I paired it with lymphatic work every single day, treatment or not — seven short mobility and stretching exercises, then manual drainage massage.
Muscle isn’t vanity here. It’s your buffer. It’s part of what determines whether you take a full dose on schedule or whether the dose gets cut.
The goal was never to train hard. It was to never stop moving. Some weeks that meant a gym session. Some weeks it meant a lap of the garden.
Feeding the terrain, not fighting it
The diet side — detailed in The Red Pill Moment — isn’t a cancer diet. It’s a microbiome diet. Thirty-plus different plants a week, fermented food daily, no seed oils, no ultra-processed food.
The removals mattered as much as the additions. Alcohol, refined sugar and ultra-processed food came out entirely. Not because I think a biscuit causes lymphoma — because they add metabolic noise, and when you’re trying to read your own signals, noise is expensive.
The supplement layer is covered in The Supplements. Antioxidants stayed out of the chemo window completely, because flooding the system with them while chemotherapy is deliberately using oxidative stress against cancer cells makes no biological sense.
And meditation was the least measurable part of the protocol and possibly the most important. Chronic stress hormones suppress immune surveillance and increase inflammation. That isn’t wellness-industry language, it’s basic endocrinology. Twenty minutes a day of deliberately down-regulating my nervous system was as much a part of this as anything I swallowed or fasted through.
The rule underneath all of it
One rule governed every decision.
If I couldn’t explain why I was doing something, when I was doing it, and when I’d stop — I didn’t do it.
That rule removed far more than it added. It kept out the exotic compounds, the miracle protocols, the confident men on the internet, and the constant background hum of have you tried this.
Doing less feels wrong when you’re frightened. It feels like leaving something on the table.
But in complex systems, restraint prevents more harm than enthusiasm creates good.
The goal was never to out-clever the medicine. It was to get out of its way — and to hand it the best possible version of me to work with.
What I’m not claiming
I won’t pretend this was a controlled experiment. One body. One diagnosis. One run through it. I changed a dozen things at once and I received excellent conventional treatment throughout.
Nothing here separates what the protocol did from what the drugs did. Anyone who tells you they can do that from a single case is selling something.
What I’ll say is narrower, and I think it holds:
The treatment was going to recruit my immune system whether I helped or not. The microbiome, the mitochondria, muscle, sleep — these influence how well that system works and how much treatment a body can take.
Those were the things I could control. So I used the control I had.
The tumour is gone. Complete metabolic remission. I can’t prove which 1% mattered most.
I’m not sure it matters. The point was never any single lever.
It was giving up on none of them.
Where this leaves you
None of this is heroic. That’s rather the point.
No single input moves the needle much. A walk. A fasted morning. A vegetable you didn’t fancy. An early night. Individually close to worthless — which is exactly why they’re so easy to skip.
But they compound. That’s the whole idea behind the one percent.
And here’s why Part 1 and Part 2 belong together.
Your friends and family can’t take the drugs for you. But they can walk with you. Cook for you. Get you to bed at a sensible hour. Sit in the car park while you’re in the chair.
Every single thing on this list is easier with a teammate.
Doctors fight the disease. Everything else — the walking, the eating, the sleeping, the showing up — is a team sport.
In Part 3: what changed permanently after remission — and why the real work starts when the treatment stops.