All my life I’ve been a little too heavy, with blood pressure that’s a little too high, and blood sugar that has been trending upward. There have been better and worse times, but no diet that I’ve tried has ever stuck. It never made sense, it was too hard, and it always seemed that I simply didn’t have the willpower or character to be “normal” sized. I would get too hungry, I felt like shit, or my cravings would eventually take over and I wouldn’t care anymore.
I also watched my father struggle with the same things his entire life. He’d be told to go on no salt diets, low calorie diets (the lowest one he went on over the years was 400 calories a day!), etc. He never really got sucked into the real fad diets, but suffice it to say, nothing ever worked for him, either. Eventually he was eating a low fat, balanced diet every day, even on the days he went to dialysis because his blood pressure and diabetes had effectively killed his kidneys.
Now that I was continuing to follow in his footsteps, I was getting anxious to try anything that I had not tried before that might buy me some more time before what I thought of as the inevitable. I didn’t eat candy, I hadn’t kept chips in the house for ages, and I only drank about half the milk I used to.
So one day I thought, “I’m going to go to a cosmetic surgeon and see if I can have the fat sucked out of my belly area.” I know there are more technical ways to say it, but that’s actually what I thought. “If I can lose twenty pounds that way it will certainly help for a few years, and maybe this time I can keep it off.” Unlikely I know, but still worth a try. Hell its only money, and I know how much weekly dialysis cost Dad.
To make a long story a little shorter, the doctor told me my fat was not a candidate for liposuction because it was intra-abdominal, not subcutaneous. The only way to lose this fat was the old fashioned way. HOWEVER, and here’s the part where the thirty minute consult I had with her was worth every moment, she suggested I look at Keto diets and intermittent fasting. Not only that, she suggested a book by Dr. Jason Fung called THE OBESITY CODE which is a totally new way of looking at existing experience, studies, and data on weight lose and coming up with a different answer.
Now Dr. Fung is a nephrologist. For those of you that don’t know what that is, lucky you. I visited my father’s nephrologist with him regularly for the last eight years of his life, as his kidneys failed and then as he went through years of dialysis.
If you’ve experienced this, I’m sorry. If you haven’t, I hope you never have to. They (nephrologists) are great doctors, doing marvelous work, and dialysis gave my dad many additional years of vitality that we all appreciated. But if you never have to have an appointment with one, nor worry about blood sugar levels or excess weight, you are truly blessed.
Finally to my point. Dr. Fung lays out a completely detailed and logical analysis of what the true driver of weight is…namely hormones, and specifically, insulin…and does it in a way that is interesting and understandable for a person without a medical degree.
Not only that, but he lays out the methodology that is completely capable of controlling insulin, this weight, while not having to starve. He proves, without a doubt (in my mind at least), that the age old saying of “weight gain or loss is simply the net result of calories in minus calories used” is a useless statement.
Since I’ve started the keto diet I’ve lost 14 pounds, I’ve never been hungry or low energy due to diet, and my blood sugar, which put me into type 2 diabetes status last year, has been totally under control with no surprises.
