About William Fox
My story doesn't begin with sickness. It begins with adrenaline.
It begins with a belief so deeply wired into me that I never questioned it: if you work hard enough, you can fix anything. You can carry anything. You can outrun every problem if you're willing to push harder than the next guy.
That belief shaped every decision I made. Carpentry became my identity. Productivity became my validation. Sweat became proof that I was doing something right. Rest felt lazy. Slowing down felt dangerous. Pushing through felt noble.
December 2005: The Breaking Point
I flew to Victoria, British Columbia, for 2 weeks that was supposed to change everything. This wasn't curiosity anymore. This was action. This was the first real step toward the next phase of my life.
The day before the flight, something twisted sharply in my stomach. I ignored it. Took Pepto. Told myself it was nerves. That's what I always did. The next morning I was late, heart pounding, rushing through the airport in a familiar state of controlled chaos. I boarded the plane already unwell and told myself to push through.
By the time I landed in Vancouver and took the ferry to Victoria, my body was in full revolt. The pain was relentless. I couldn't keep food down. I couldn't sit through meetings. I couldn't stop running to the washroom. Every attempt to hold it together failed publicly and repeatedly.
I ended up in Victoria General Hospital. No virus. Nothing contagious. Just a clear warning that something was deeply wrong. I wasn't losing money. I was losing control of my own body.
That moment cracked something open. But it wasn't the last collapse. By 2010, the economy shifted. Work slowed. I was fighting a two-front war: a rental property bleeding money and a home for my young family that I was desperately trying to hold together.
Walking away from the construction business I built with my own hands felt like tearing out a part of myself. Selling the first home I'd ever owned—at a loss—felt like losing my footing as a man, a husband, a father.
And failure doesn't disappear when you ignore it. It settles into the body.
January 2013: The Diagnosis
During a severe flare, I went to the hospital again. The diagnosis came quickly: Severe Inflammatory Bowel Disease. High-dose Prednisone. And later that year, during my daughter's baptism, everything collapsed again. I was admitted for seven days.
That was the moment the suffering stopped being something I could muscle through. I wasn't exhausted because I wasn't strong enough. I was collapsing because the life I had built was unsustainable.
The medication calmed the symptoms, but I could feel the truth underneath it. Drugs could put a lid on the fire, but they couldn't rebuild the foundation that had collapsed beneath me.
So I started learning. Desperately. I read medical papers, patient accounts, nutrition research. And no matter how wide I searched, the answers kept circling the same roots: chronic stress and food that my body no longer recognized as food.
I became what I jokingly call a grocery-store inspector. I read every label. Every ingredient. Every oil, additive, preservative, and artificial filler I had ignored my entire life. It was empowering and infuriating at the same time.
But knowing what to eat was only half the battle. I didn't have the energy to execute it alone. That's when my wife stepped in. Without drama. Without resentment. Without hesitation. She took the rules I was learning and turned them into daily life.
For the first time, I understood a kind of strength I had never been taught:
Strength isn't doing everything alone. Strength is allowing yourself to be supported. Strength is treating your own life as something worth protecting.
That was the real turning point. Not the diagnosis. Not the drugs. Not the plan. The turning point was love—for myself, and from the people around me—finally becoming stronger than my need to endure.
The Five Pillars
Once I began learning, the chaos started organizing itself. What I needed wasn't another rule or another burst of motivation. I needed structure—something stable enough to carry real life, stress, setbacks, and years of wear without snapping.
The same way a building depends on its core supports, the human body depends on a few fundamental systems working together. That's when the Five Pillars became clear. Not as a theory. As a post-mortem.
Eat Move Laugh is the system I built from that collapse. It's for people who've tried everything, who know what they "should" do, but whose bodies won't cooperate. It's not about perfection. It's about safety.
When your body feels safe, everything else becomes possible.
Ready to begin?
Start with the system that makes sense—Eat, Move, Laugh, Love, Learn.