About
Alan D. Martin
Founder, Health by Habit. Former 30-year tech executive. Nine procedures in fourteen months. He rebuilt from the source — and wrote the roadmap.
30+
years in high tech
9
procedures in 14 months
140 lbs
of joint pressure removed
0
surgeries since Sep 2023
The Starting Condition
Nine procedures in fourteen months.
Alan spent decades building businesses while his health quietly eroded. Chronic back pain. A deteriorating knee. An ankle that changed how he moved. At 59 he was walking with a cane. At 63 he was scheduling spinal fusion.
He had been through the standard sequence: primary doctor, orthopedic surgeon, pain specialist, physical therapist, neurosurgeon. Each managed their piece. Nobody stood back far enough to see the pattern — that the inflammation driving all of it had a source nobody had seriously addressed.
The low point came during a six-hour managers meeting. About four hours in, he couldn't feel his legs. Not pain — just absence. That week he stopped working.
He took a year off. Then he started asking different questions.
The Bahamas, 2022. The dive trip that changed the direction.
The Turn
A conversation in a boat galley.
He was sitting in the galley of a liveaboard dive boat in the Bahamas when a fellow diver — a functional medicine doctor — told him to stop treating symptoms and start treating the source.
She explained that chronic inflammation doesn't come from bad luck. It comes from what you're putting into your body and what you're asking it to run on. She told him about a book called Good Energy by Dr. Casey Means.
He felt angry. Not at her. At the years spent going from specialist to specialist, each one managing their piece, nobody asking what he was eating or how he was sleeping.
He bought Good Energy before leaving the Bahamas and read it on the flight home. Then he read Built from Broken by Scott Hogan and Atomic Habits by James Clear. On September 1, 2023, he and his wife Viveka flew to Nosara, Costa Rica and decided they were done waiting.
The Rebuild
What two and a half years of actual work looks like.
The protocol wasn't complicated. Sleep first, food second, movement third — in that sequence, for that reason. The results were not overnight. They were cumulative.
Hang gliding, 2024
Colorado River, 2024
Back on the mountain
Daily work, 2025
140 lbs
of joint pressure removed — 35 lbs lost, 4 lbs of pressure per pound.
<8%
body fat — the core strength required to end the back pain.
35%
improvement in eyesight — an unexpected side benefit of cleaning up the source.
0
surgeries since September 2023. The last procedure was the last procedure.
The Life
Costa Rica was the reset. It became the baseline.
The six months in Nosara were not a vacation. They were a controlled experiment in what happens when you remove the environment and the habits that built the problem, and replace them deliberately.
Alan and Viveka have been together for years. She was with him through every procedure, every setback, and every morning he decided to start again. The rebuild was his work to do — but it was not done alone.
“The decision was about diet and habits and commitment. It was also about location, pace, and who you are when nobody's watching.”
The Work
What he does now.
Alan writes, speaks, and builds tools for men over 50 who are in the same position he was in 2022 — managing symptoms, outsourcing decisions, and slowly running out of road on that approach.
Health by Habit — the book — publishes November 15, 2026. It covers the complete framework: three parts, nine chapters, a clear protocol for building a health practice that fits a real life. Not a research paper. Not a supplement ad. The roadmap he wishes he had been handed at 50.
The Rewire Reset is the live version — an immersive week in Costa Rica for men who want to rebuild the way Alan did, with the benefit of someone who has already been through it.