Editorial source note
How Fasting Changed My Attitude on Alcohol, Drugs, and Medication
Joe traces his path from a Vicodin habit to a no-medication stance, argues that food self-control extends to every substance, and recounts losing his sister to overdose.
Related principles
An editorial summary of views Joe expresses in the linked video. The original recording remains the primary source for his full words and context.
Detailed notes
A closer look at the ideas, examples, and reasoning Joe presents in this recording.
Where Joe's fasting philosophy meets medicine
This recording extends Joe's self-control framework past food into drugs, alcohol, and medication, and it contains some of his most charged personal positions. He opens with repeated disclaimers — he is not a doctor and is not telling anyone to quit their medication — and then describes where fasting has taken him: "pretty much close to" anti-vaccine, anti-medication, and anti-doctor. He states that he personally will take no more antibiotics, medications, or vaccines, including a COVID vaccine if one arrives, recommends the same while explicitly inviting viewers to decide for themselves, and cites the 1955 polio vaccine incidents as his caution about early vaccines. These are Joe's personal convictions, presented in the recording without medical support.
His recent hospital visit anchors the theme. During minor surgery to remove a cyst, Joe says staff kept postponing him and apologized by explaining he was unlike anyone else in the building — no medications, "perfect" blood levels — which he took as vindication. He regrets allowing an antibiotic into his IV, saying his body reacted badly and can fight its own battles.
The Vicodin years
The center of the video is autobiography. After weight gain wrecked his left foot, surgery in 2006 left Joe out of work for months and briefly addicted to Vicodin, alongside Darvocet and Lyrica — a stretch he summarizes as a twelve-pack of tacos washed down with four beers and a pain pill. He warns that prescription pain relievers hook ordinary employed people because doctors have prescribed them freely, and adds a self-test: if the mere mention of Vicodin lights you up, that is a bad sign, because no one should want to be numbed.
His turning point was an afternoon feeding ducks with his two-year-old daughter: three hours in the sunlight during which he forgot his pain and, in his words, had aspirations outside himself again. He then tapered by gamification — how long can I go before the next pill — and says OMAD and the weight loss finished the job, flipping his identity from patient to someone on the winning team.
Victims, winners, and a family loss
Around the story Joe builds his larger argument: society, doctors included, teaches people to be victims, and the same principles that govern food govern drugs, alcohol, sex, and gambling. Expectation shapes outcome — a child cries only when an adult gasps, and Joe claims his rare headaches resolve within hours when he walks or lifts instead of taking Motrin. He praises Greek and Roman physicians for engaging patients' whole lives, and reports talking his own blood pressure down from 179 over 112 to 136 over 76 without medication, declining the prescription offered.
The video's gravest passage is the death of Joe's sister by overdose in February 2020 — a heroin addiction he says began with prescription drugs that a pharmacy kept dispensing under their deceased grandmother's name despite the family's reports. From there his line hardens: no one is ever a better person from alcohol or any mind-altering substance, and what should stimulate you is perspective, not a modified mind. He closes with what he calls real positivity: choosing to be a winner rather than a loser, since wanting attention as a victim is, in his account, what keeps people sick.