Since I’m new here, although not really new to keto, it seemed this was a place to introduce myself.
If you’re new to keto, you might find my story this useful, or inspiring, or terribly depressing, who knows. I’m not you.
This is a ~30 year story, so its going to be a little long.
Anyway, this story begins in roughly 1980. I was from a family where I’d grown up poor, eating food that was generally classifiable as carbs, wrapped in or topped in carbs, possibly with sugar on top.
That’s not an exaggeration by the way, we had meat once a or twice a month if lucky, and never as a main dish. This isn’t blame to my parents, they call those years their era of poverty, hunger, and dirt. I saw those tax returns once, the idea that they kept 6 kids fed on that kind of money in southern California is frankly amazing.
So as you might guess, I’m one fat kid out of 5 obviously fat kids. One of us takes after my dad, and he’s almost certainly more of a thin outside, fatty inside.
So, despite lots of sports, activity and trying even at that young age to control my weight, I was still heavier than I wanted to be.
In high school I played football, wrestled, and did track and field. This plus the miracles of youth and early (ish) post puberty hormones fleshed my out into a 6’5” behemoth of a kid that was a little stocky, but very muscled. I had a 38” waistband, which is already big to some of you.
Diet at home was still pretty much carbs wrapped in or topped by more of the same. The family had more money, but I think the habits were set at this point.
Once I moved out on my own, I started to eat a little better (but really, not much). I also picked up a new vice, soda.
If you’ve seen that sugar film… rest assured I do not have dew mouth. However, the amount of soda I drank, its only luck and a late start and good dental habits that kept it away.
I got into a night job, and most nights, I went through 2-4 2 liter bottles of generic cola, per shift.
Then I moved into another job where I drove around a large area (if you’re in the US or have a US map, you could figure out this driving area by pointing at Salt Lake City, UT, drawing a line to Elko, NV, and then another 50 miles, and calling that your western boundary. A line at the Canadian border, and calling that the northern border. The southern state line of Utah for the south, and Rock Springs, WY, plus about 100 miles, but not any of Colorado. This was an area covered in cars. Some of you will be able to guess what company I worked for.
So anyway, I started spending my whole days in the car, minus a little work at a destination, and if lucky, being home some nights. I don’t think I drank any more soda, but I didn’t drink any less. I was stopping at pretty much every gas station on those lonely roads and filling up the half gallon mug, and sometimes the car.
As you might imagine, I started to need bigger pants. And then bigger shirts. I wasn’t really thinking about it, but this size increase was accelerating. By this time it was 1996, and I’d long since left behind the athletic build of my youth. Now I was just a big fat guy. Oh sure I still had muscle, though less of it. But that muscle was well hidden in an ever increasing layer of fat. I felt hungry most of the time, and whether I was just saying oh well, and having a candy bar, or eating something I thought of as a healthier option, the reality is that it was all forms of mostly sugar.
At this point I had a 48” waist band.
I ended up getting a sort of promotion to work in Atlanta, GA. Since it was the sort of promotion you take or find a new job, the wife and I (oh yeah, I’m married, she’s pretty great, more on her later) moved to Atlanta. We decided that we’d give Atlanta 5 years, get some good meat on our resumes, and then head home, which to us was back west, at least west of the Rockies.
A long list of nice, shitty, and every type of job in between ensued. The only real common denominator is that every not so long I was ending up needing a wardrobe refresh as my pants or shirts got too small for me (AKA, I got too big for them). At this point I was in 54” waistbands.
I should note that this whole time from about 1994 on, I tried a lot of ways to keep the pounds off, watched calories like a hawk, ate only “healthy” foods, etc. This would occasionally slow things down, and sometimes I even managed to drop some pounds, never lasted. It isn’t that I wasn’t aware that I was becoming this monstrously fat person, it was that nothing I was trying was helping, aside from sometimes slowing things down. In fact, the very best it ever was (in retrospect) was about 1 year around 95-96 where my work situation made it such that I ended up pan frying a stack of crappy grocery store hamburger patties and eating them with mayonnaise on them. I know I know, I didn’t realize that was probably the best I’d eaten in my whole life. Burgers are probably my wife’s favorite all time food, so I latched my nearly nonexistent at the time cooking skills onto it, and made some kind of burgers every night for months on end. I do not recall if I cared about the grease, but I knew they were really tasty, and it was practically the first time I’d made something really tasty at home. This to passed, and old bad habits returned. I used sugared soda in excess, usually for the caffeine to try and manage being tired all the time.
In the year 2000 I went in for a “routine physical”
The doctor had already looked at me and given me the disproving gaze fat people are so used to seeing.
I got some blood drawn. The nurse looked confused at it, and held it up to look at it. It was, for lack of a better way to put it, just a bit milky. I hadn’t had blood drawn since high school, but I was pretty sure that was weird.
The doctor brought me into his office an asked me to sit. I was in my mid/late 20s, so I assumed I was about to get a lecture on managing my weight.
Instead he told me I was probably going to die soon. They had a lab on site, so while he was telling me about my impending death, at some point one of his employees came in with one of my vials of blood and some paper work.
I recall some things from this visit very very clearly, and others not so well, I’ll stick mostly with what I do recall.
The blood had been centrifuged, and had a solid crust of fat on top of it. He held it at me and said “This is really bad. This isn’t supposed to happen. He pointed at a thin layer of kid of frothy looking stuff under the fat. “That is supposed to be the top. That’s white blood cells” I wanted to reply and let him know that I’d seen blood drawn and centrifuged many times growing up (mom was a nurse, and I had medical aspirations before I decided I wasn’t OK with up to half a mil of debt). Mostly I was just still processing his matter of fact pronouncement of my impending death.
He pushed one of the pieces of paper over to me and pointed at it. My triglycerides were 1286. He stabbed at it with his finger, “I didn’t know this test went that high.” I don’t recall exactly what he said about other cholesterol numbers, except that he said they were very high.
He asked about my diet, and I told him what I ate, and how much soda I drank. He flat out said that I must really drink a lot, because if I wasn’t constantly very well hydrated, I probably would have had a stroke by now.
He told me I needed to cut out all meats, all eggs, all cheeses, all fatty foods period. He told me I needed to make sure I was getting enough healthy grains(I know, it seems like such a cliche looking back now), and that I needed to get these numbers under control or die. He wrote me a prescription for lipitor and told me to come see him again in a month if I was still alive. To this day I don’t really know if he was just that dramatic, or if he really meant it.
He made no mention (well, I don’t recall any mention) of diabetes or insulin, but self testing since then has revealed to me that if I wasn’t type 2 diabetic already , I was about to fall off that cliff. To this day I am fairly insulin resistant.
Well, as you all know, I’m probably here to talk about it because I didn’t just accept that advice. I went home and started researching on my own. I cant recall how I found it, but I found references to the Atkins diet, and some of the studies Dr. Atkins used to come up with and or verify his ideas.
I don’t recall if I talked to my wife about it much. Probably a bit of an oversight on my part. I decided that I would try this Atkins style eating full bore for a month. Thus began a really, really, bad 2 weeks. I didn’t know about “keto flu”(don’t like that term, not a flu, or even an infectious disease, and there are things you can do to speed it along). I had mostly only read about the induction phase, figuring I wouldn’t have time to do more than that before the next appointment.
The first thing I did was throw out(well, actually I gave them away to a coworker, which I suppose wasn’t much a gift) all my sugared soda, which at the time was Pepsi that I would stock up on, as I lived in Coke Central. I think it was 10 bottles or so.
I realized within a day that I had too much of a caffeine and soda habit to go cold turkey. I tried a lot of diet sodas, and for quite a while thereafter it was diet Dr pepper. I still drank way way too much of it, but at least it wasn’t more sugar. Scrambled eggs, bacon, rib eyes, etc. Since I was of the opinion that I might literally be having the last month of my life, we went out to lunch and dinner every day. Dinner every night was a 16oz medium rare rib eye or prime rib with steamed broccoli and real butter. Lunches were almost the same except I usually had to settle for either a 10 or 12 oz of the same. My wife did and does prefer sirloin (bleh).
A month passed. I didn’t have a scale at the time, but I did notice my belt needed to go down a notch. This was the first time that had happened in a while. Certainly the first time on that belt.
I went back to the doctor. He was happy with the way my numbers were going. My triglycerides and lipids overall were still high, but the blood looked like normal blood, and he liked the way it was going.
He asked how I was feeling on the lipitor, and I screwed up and told him what I’d been doing. I tried to explain things, but did a bad job, and he, well I don’t know that he was “angry” at me, but that’s how it seemed.
I went back two months later and the numbers looked better and I was nearly 30 lbs down from the 385 I had been at.
I didn’t lose weight fast compared to some people’s progress, but the fact that I WAS losing, was very novel, and started to catch attention from my coworkers. Back then my wife and I were DINKS, so we still ate out a lot, and that was pretty much how I managed to stay what I would call low carb medium fat probably too much protein.
The big help was when my boss decided to try it. He got great results, and suddenly it got, well not popular, but at least I wasn’t alone when well meaning coworkers would sit there with a plate of paste, sip their tea with so much sugar it had a crunch to it, and tell me how my steak or ground beef patty with cheese was killing me.
I got down to 250, and couldn’t seem to break that barrier very well. To be fair, at this point my estimated lean mass was around 230. I would drop a few lbs, and then any little thing would put me back to ~250. I was pretty much OK with this.
Fast forward to 2010. I’ve been pretty much right on the track and eating low to no carb, probably a little too much protein, and medium fat, for years. I had small setbacks, and had gone off the “diet” a few times and gotten back on when the weight started piling up again. In general, things were good.
I suffered a traumatic food injury that I wont go into too much detail, aside from to say it was nearly cut in half along the second toe, about 3 inches back, a little past the ball of my foot.
The recovery did not go well. I went from walking 10 miles a day at times, to being trapped in a recliner with my foot elevated constantly. This is no dig on my wife, but she was not much of a cook, and by that I mean, I don’t recall if she could cook anything.
I made a hugely foolish mistake. When the doctor said a 6 week recovery time, I took that to heart, and after looking at our food options, decided that I’d just have delivery, and try to keep the carbs under control.
That was… a really bad call. Without a blow by blow… in no time I was ordering whole pizzas… and finishing them myself. At first I told myself it was just till I got recovered, a time which seemed to get further and further out. The recovery had several issues, and from that injury in late 2009 and surgery to repair it in early 2010, I didn’t stand for 2 years, and I didn’t walk for nearly four. The reality that my rapidly increasing weight was not making things easier for my foot was not lost on me even then.
Long story short, in those nearly 4 years, I had ballooned into being bigger than I’d ever been. The worst thing is that I KNEW what I needed to, and should be, doing. But I just kept making bad calls and listening to the sugar powered hamster wheel of rationalizations.
I’d tell you what I weighed. By the time I could even stand, I’d grown beyond the capacity of my scale that could go to 440 lbs. For various bullshit reasons… I didn’t get back on Atkins or keto eating. Cost, time, effort, it was all honestly addiction logic, and without eminent death on the line, (although lets be honest, I might not have been quite back to the soup for blood I’d had once before, I am sure I wasn’t OK). I managed to be able to walk just in time to get a new job that let us move back west. We’d planned to be in Atlanta for 5 years at the most to fill out our resumes, and then move back west. It had been 13 years at that point. In short, we were GOING to take that job and get back home. The reality that my father in law didn’t have much time was a big contributing factor.
While I’d been watching my belly grow, I’d also been researching low carb dieting. It was around then (early 2013) that I discovered ketogenic eating, which I thought of as doing Atkins right. I had re-read the old book and realized that I’d never really understood that fat was not bad, nor to be avoided. I hadn’t exactly avoided it, but I had a life time of training tilling me to minimize it without even thinking. So because I still had addict brain, I kept putting it off.
I finally started fixing my diet shortly before we started the drive out west. It wasn’t perfect, but I had a lot of experience with what I could eat, and how to make a low/no carb meal out of what was available. We very carefully made the drive in 4 days, with no more than 8 hours a day on the road, and plenty of breaks. Which was good, because while I was past initial sugar burn to fat burn transition, I wasn’t much past it, and my overall energy level and well being was all in the toilet. I was pretty much a huge grouch the whole time.
Fast forward a couple months. I decided that food alone wasn’t going to do it. It really was helping a lot, and my belt was getting more loose, which was good, as my 58inch waistbands were so tight I could barley put them on for a while there. I was actually so numb to it all that I was at that point “oh well, 60 inch waistbands come next” as though that’s not a horribly unhealthy shape to be.
I started to try and think how I could speed things along . I was losing weight and feeling a bit better as time went on, but it was just so slow, and I hated how terrible I felt most days.
I recalled my doctor mentioning that I could work out with a exercise bike, if I could handle it. This had been years before, and at the time, I really couldn’t handle even that load on my foot.
By now I was walking around, if not very well. I bought a bike. I assumed at my weight I would kill that bike in 6 months, but maybe I’d get some exercise in the meantime. The first time I rode it, I rode less than half a mile, at a slow pace. I truly thought I was going to die. I stood there for several long minutes and just gasped for air. Then I rode back, even slower. I still arrived breathing very hard and feeling my heart pounding. That I had recently moved from 13 years at around 100 ft above sea level to 4500 ft wasn’t helping things at all.
I happened to find an old livestock scale. I cannot speak for its accuracy, but it listed me at right around 460 lbs, this being after I’d cleaned up my eating and been losing inches at the waist for a couple months.
I kept at it, riding as hard as I could every day (which was often not very hard), until I could ride 3 whole miles at a decent pace (maybe 10mph) without stopping. I know right, amazing.
At this point I had my food situation not perfect, but much better. I started to ride my bike to work every day, totaling about 5 miles round trip.
Fast forward from then to now, this morning I weighed in at 297, my blood work looks good, and I regularly ride 30-60 miles, and sometimes more. I do my big rides on a Greenspeed Magnum recumbent trike, which was important as I got it when I was around 380, and didn’t want to break it. I still have that first bike, and its still my daily rider for getting to work.
I don’t count calories, and I never have (well, not since before 2001). I eat till I don’t want more, and then I stop. I’ve gotten better over time at incorporating fat, which was a weakness before. I wasn’t avoiding it, I just didn’t do a good job adding it consistently. Along the way I became a bit of a self experimenter, and more than a bit of foodie, even though 90% of the time I am a total lazy keto kind of guy. Since around 350lbs, my wife and 3 kids are eating keto with me, which has made it much easier on the home front.
I know this was super long, but if you’ve got any questions, I’d be happy to answer them.
TL:DR, got an informal imminent terminal diagnosis a long time ago, fixed it with low carb, did well for years, screwed up for years, back on keto in late 2013, down over 160lbs so far, still going. If you’ve got questions about all the ways I screwed up or did things right, feel free to ask.
