A new book by Gary R Barbee · Coming Fall 2026
You are the person everyone counts on. This is how you stay that way.
Feed Your Vitality is a book for executives, managers, parents, and anybody whose day belongs to other people. Four systems: eat real food, move without a gym, take back your calendar, lead the way you would want to be led. Same job. Same pressures. Different life.
Founding readers get the launch price.
The book is not out yet. Put your name down and on launch day you get it at the founding price, the lowest it will ever be sold, before the page goes public.
One email a month until launch. No spam. I hate it more than you do.
Sound familiar?
You are winning at work by every metric your world measures. And still:
The fog rolls in so reliably you schedule around it. Which means you have quietly accepted that a quarter of your working hours run at half speed.
Anybody in your company can spend your Tuesday. There is an approval chain for every dollar and none at all for your hours. Your calendar shows it.
You are home, technically. Someone who loves you says "you sound tired," and you say "I'm fine," and you both know it is the smallest lie of the day.
This is not a willpower problem. It is a systems problem, and systems are what you are good at.
Four systems. One flywheel.
Diets fail. Gym memberships quietly become donations. Productivity systems die by February. They are bolt-ons, strapped to a life that was designed for depletion. The book installs something else: four systems that feed each other, in the order that makes each one pay for the next.
FEED
Eat like your output depends on it
Real food from real sources. The kitchen audit, the greatest hits menu, a butcher who knows your name, and the end of the 2:30 crash.
MOVE
Build movement into the day you already have
No gym required. Walking meetings, ten minute laps, the seams of your afternoon, and the research on why that is genuinely enough.
FOCUS
Your calendar is a balance sheet
Audit it like one. Deep work at your peak hours, zombie meetings purged, and evenings that actually belong to the people in them.
LEAD
People first, at work and at home
Your habits are the culture whether you meant them to be or not. Run them on purpose and build a company that does not eat its people.
Every claim in this book about food, movement, sleep, and attention traces back to published research. Every story in it is true, including the embarrassing ones.
Then you run it in ninety days.
The book closes with a sequenced rollout. One quarter, three phases, milestone reviews, and a risk plan for travel weeks and holidays. You have run this exact project a hundred times. This time the initiative is you.
The audit, the kitchen, the menu, the lunch system, one real source. The afternoon crash starts softening inside two weeks.
Movement built into meetings you were already having. The calendar audited, re-budgeted, and defended. Deep work moved to your peak.
Your why on paper, the family block protected, one team practice launched, and the original audit retaken and set side by side.
What founding readers get
Three things, and no games.
- 1The founding price The lowest this book will ever sell for. It goes to this list and nowhere else, and it is honored on launch day whether you read the email at 6 a.m. or at midnight.
- 2The door opens for you first The list gets the link before the page goes public. I am selling this book direct rather than through the big retailer, so the first print run is a real number and not a marketing prop.
- 3One email a month. That is the whole deal. Something worth reading, not a countdown timer. Plus a heads up before launch day so nothing lands on you cold. Unsubscribe in one click and I will not chase you.
Coming after the book
The Vitality Letter
Once a month I write a letter. It gets printed and mailed to your actual mailbox, because the last thing your life needs is another email. One idea worth going deeper on, the research worth knowing, a seasonal food playbook, and one experiment to run.
Read it on the porch. Phone in the other room.
Written by one of you.
I am not a doctor, a nutritionist, or a guru. The shelf is already full of those, most of them with better hair. I am an executive who was winning at work and losing everywhere else: drive-thru lunches, a calendar anybody could spend, a 2:30 crash I had built my whole schedule around, and a family getting whatever was left of me at the end of the day.
Then I watched somebody I love give a company thirty-five years of nights and weekends, retire, and get about a year.
So I rebuilt how I eat, how I move, how I spend my hours, and how I lead. One small system at a time, over years, with the research checked behind every claim. My alarm goes off at 4:25 tomorrow, and most days I actually get up.
Gary R Barbee
A man who has never once regretted the walk
Fair questions.
Is this another diet book?
No. There are no macros, no points, and no app photographing your dinner so it can shame you later. Food is one of four systems, and the food chapters are about design rather than discipline. What is within arm's reach at noon decides what you eat at noon, so we change what is within arm's reach.
I do not have a spare hour. Anywhere.
Neither do I. That constraint is the entire design brief. Almost nothing in this book asks for a new hour: meetings become walks, lunch gets packed in four minutes, the calendar gets audited the way you would audit a budget. It re-plumbs the hours you already have.
Who is this book not for?
If you want a thirty day transformation, this will disappoint you. If you want a guru, the shelf is full of them. And if you are looking for permission to quit your job and move to the woods, that is a fine book, but somebody else wrote it.
This is for the person everyone counts on, who intends to keep being that person, and would like to survive it.
When does it launch, and what does the founding price actually mean?
Fall 2026. The founding price is the launch day price offered to this list and only this list, and it is the lowest the book will ever sell for. I will tell you the number in advance so you are not making a decision inside a five minute window.
Nothing in your life is standing still.
The way you eat, the way you move, the way you spend your hours, and the way you treat people are all compounding right now, in one direction or the other. Pick the direction.
Lock in my founding priceTakes about twenty seconds. One email a month until launch.