About Gabe
My deepest laboratory was always myself.
I didn’t learn this from supervising other people’s fasts. I learned it the long way — in my own body, over thirty years.
I’ve been teaching since 1996. Thirty years in the room.
I started fasting in my early twenties — a Master Cleanse someone offhandedly mentioned, lemon and cayenne and maple and water, which I laddered up slowly: three days, then five, then seven, then ten. The first few days were always hard, and then something would shift. I kept coming back not because I’d read that I should, but because of what I noticed each time I did.
For fifteen years I studied with Pichest Boonthumme in Thailand — the lived source of the Sen lineage. Most of what I understand about the body listening, I understand first-hand, sitting with him, not from a book. That’s the part I can’t fake and won’t pretend otherwise about.
I spent years inside wellness centers, watching. People arriving heavy and hopeful, struggling around day three, transforming around day seven or ten — and then, the hard part nobody talks about, going home. I trained as a health coach through IIN. I’ve had more conversations about food, hunger, and what people are really after than I could count.
When you take The Question, you’ll meet four hungers — movement, work, love, and something larger than yourself. I didn’t invent them. I graduated from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, where they’re taught as the four Primary Foods: physical activity, career, relationships, and spirituality — the nourishment that has nothing to do with what’s on your plate. The idea quietly rearranged how I understand well-being. I just say it in my own words. They call them Primary Foods; I call them the hungers food can’t feed.
And I changed my mind about a lot of it. I was vegan for years, certain it was the answer — until I noticed chicken actually made me feel good, none of the heaviness I’d been told to expect. I dropped red meat almost entirely, because I sleep badly when I eat it. The point isn’t the diet. The point is that I kept listening, and the body kept revising what I thought I knew.
What I never did — and what I’ll never claim — is run hundreds of people through supervised medical fasts. That’s not my authority and it’s not this brand’s. My authority is simpler and harder to fake: my own body, used as the instrument, for thirty years.
The line at the centre of all of it
The credential is the time. That’s all, and it’s enough.
In 2005 a rare window opened: a month with Pichest, then Pattabhi Jois, then B.K.S. Iyengar a few months after. But the fifteen years with Pichest are the ones that taught me to listen. Provenance, not name-dropping.