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→And it became even more unlikely when the bombs started dropping.

→As a fellow Serb, Dr. Cetojevic could understand as well as anyone what my early life was like—what my family once had, what we’d lost, what we’d struggled so hard to overcome. A boy like me, growing up in Serbia, becoming a tennis champion? It was unlikely in even the best of circumstances.

→Dr. Cetojevic and my father had mutual friends—Serbia is a small country, after all—and six months after my disgrace in Australia, we arranged to meet during a Davis Cup match in Croatia. Dr. Cetojevic told me he thought food sensitivities were not only the cause of my physical breakdown but were playing a role in my mental state as well. He said that he could give me the guidelines that would help me create my own diet—the right diet for my body. He asked me about how I ate, how I slept, how I lived, and how I had grown up.

→He knew it wasn’t asthma. Something else was wrong with me. And the answer, he guessed, was food. More specifically, he guessed that my breathing issues were the result of an imbalance in my digestive system that was causing a buildup of toxins in my intestines. Which is a heck of a diagnosis to make from 8,700 miles away.

→By sheer coincidence, a nutritionist from my home country of Serbia, Dr. Igor Cetojevic, happened to be flipping through the channels at his home in Cyprus when he came across my match in the Australian Open. He was no fan of tennis, but his wife liked the game, and she suggested they sit and watch. And they saw me collapse.

→But I wasn’t a hypochondriac, or an asthmatic, or an athlete who just folded when the matches got tough. I was a man who was eating the wrong way. And my life was about to change. Who knew that the lowest point in my career would turn out to be the luckiest?

→I had allergies, and on days when it was humid or the flowers were in full bloom, they would be worse. Yet what was happening to me didn’t make sense. Asthma strikes as soon as you start to exercise; it doesn’t come on three hours into a match. And my problem couldn’t be conditioning. I worked as hard as anyone on the circuit. Yet in the big matches, against the best players, I would hold my own through the first few sets, then collapse.

→Since the age of thirteen I’d felt constantly stuffy, especially at night. I would wake up groggy, and it would take me a long time to get going. I was always tired. I felt bloated, even when I was training three times a day.

→On that day in January 2010, the tennis commentators thought they knew what was happening to me. “His asthma is acting up again,” they said. And yet, as I double-faulted into the net, unable to breathe, I couldn’t possibly know that I was experiencing something very different.

→Make no mistake: Your body will tell you different things than mine tells me. We’re all different—we all have distinct fingerprints, remember? But the most important thing we can all do is listen.

→In fact, what really inspired me to write this book is knowing that I can show you how to change not just your body but your whole experience of living—in just fourteen days. You will wake up more easily and feel more energetic, and you’ll begin to see a difference in your appearance. Soon you’ll be able to listen to your body, follow its cravings, and understand what it wants you to avoid.

→But changing what you eat isn’t the end of it. You’ll also learn to change the way you eat. You’ll learn to sync your food with your body’s needs, giving it exactly what it wants, when it wants it. And you’ll learn how combining the right diet with proper stress-control techniques will improve the function of your body and your mind. You’ll become more relaxed, more focused, more in control of your life.

→Here’s how it works. You start by eliminating gluten from your diet for two weeks. (This is simpler than you think, as you’ll read a little later on.) After that, you attack the excess sugar and dairy in your diet for two weeks, and see how you feel. (Here’s a hint: You’ll feel great.)

→Bottom line: I figured out which foods hurt me and which helped. It’s not that difficult; I’ll show you how (see chapter 4). Once you know the correct foods to eat, when to eat them, and how to maximize the benefits, you’ll have a blueprint for remaking your body, and your life.

→Once I did, everything changed. And I don’t mean just my tennis career. My entire life changed. You could call it magic—it sure felt like magic. But it was nothing more than trying different foods to find the ones that worked for me, and applying that knowledge to my daily diet.

→I had to learn to listen to it.

→Imagine you’re hammering a nail into a plank of wood, and you accidentally hit your thumb. It hurts, right? Your thumb gets swollen and red and angry. That’s inflammation. Now imagine that occurring inside your body, where you can’t see it. That’s what happens when we eat foods our bodies don’t like. When I fell apart at the Australian Open, my body was telling me that I was beating myself up from the inside out.

→No. I was heavy, slow, and tired because I was eating the way most of us eat. I ate like a Serb (and an American)—plenty of Italian food like pizza, pasta, and especially bread, as well as heavy meat dishes at least a couple of times a day. I snacked on candy bars and other sugary foods during matches, thinking they would help to keep my energy up, and figured my training schedule had earned me a handful off every cookie tray that passed by. But what I didn’t realize was that eating this way causes a phenomenon called inflammation. Basically, your body reacts to food it doesn’t like by sending you signals: stuffiness, achy joints, cramping bowels. Doctors have linked inflammation to everything from asthma to arthritis to heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

→I’m proof of that. For my entire career, I’ve played tennis for three to five hours almost every single day. I’ve competed in as many as ninety-seven professional tennis matches a year against the greatest players in the game. On days when I’m not playing, I still practice on the tennis court more than three hours, work out for another ninety minutes in the weight room, do a yoga or tai chi session, and, if I can, fit in some running, biking, or kayaking as well. And yet even with that training schedule, I was slow, easily winded, and a little overweight. My point is, if you think you’re just going to exercise away your troubles, you’d better think again. I was training at least five hours a day, every single day, and I still wasn’t fit enough. Was I carrying an extra nine pounds because I wasn’t exercising enough?

→If you’ve been exercising to get fit, control your weight, and improve your energy, you’ve probably already figured something out: It’s really hard.