Wendy Speake’s The 40-Day Sugar Fast: Where Physical Detox Meets Spiritual Transformation is a good book with a specific premise: give up sugar for forty days, and pay attention to what surfaces when the thing you reach for is gone. Baker Books published it in November 2019.
Say the obvious thing first
This book was not written for men. Speake writes and speaks primarily to women, and much of her ministry is aimed at mothers. The daily readings reflect that audience in their examples and their voice. An earlier version of this review presented the book as a resource for Christian men and never mentioned any of this. That was misleading, and we are fixing it.
Can a man use it? Yes, and some do. The core idea does not depend on your sex: you are using food to manage something, and removing it for forty days makes the something visible. But you should buy it knowing you are not the primary reader, and that some of the illustrations will not be about your life. If that will bother you, buy something else.
How it works
Forty short daily readings, each pairing the physical experience of coming off sugar with a spiritual point and Scripture. Speake’s argument is that the fast is not really about sugar, and that the cravings are diagnostic. She is direct about her own history with it. The writing is warm rather than clinical, and it is not a nutrition book. There is no meal plan here and it does not claim to be one.
Two corrections
An earlier version of this page said the book includes habit trackers and daily challenges. We could not confirm habit trackers in the book itself. There is a separate companion product, The 40-Day Fast Journal, sold on its own and also sold bundled with the book. If tracking is what you want, that journal is the thing you are actually looking for, and you have to buy it separately.
More seriously, an earlier version quoted the book directly, attributing to it the line about detoxing being as much about what you put in as what you take out. We could not find that sentence anywhere in the book or in any listing, and we believe it was fabricated. It has been removed. We are not going to put words in an author’s mouth to make a review sound better.
Bottom line
A solid forty-day fast with a real spiritual point underneath it, written by a woman for a mostly female audience. Worth reading if the premise convicts you and you can read past the intended audience. Buy the journal too if you want the tracking. If you want a fitness or nutrition program, this is not that, and looking here for one will disappoint you.
View The 40-Day Sugar Fast on Amazon
View the book and companion journal bundle on Amazon