Hi! Just joined the forums here but I’ve lurked for awhile. Love the podcast! I’m on facebook & have been helping Karen Ogilvie run the Impulsive Keto groups, recently started podcasting with her on the Impulsive Ketocast which is a ton of fun and hugely educational for me.
Storytime- my whole life I was obese, my mom’s obese, my dad’s obese, my brother’s obese, my aunts & uncles are not all obese but some of them, yeah. I figure my ancestors survived regular starvation in the shtetl on 2 beets and a potato, so if we lived in a situation of food scarcity I would totally be in great shape whereas my sister-in-law who devours cases of twinkies daily and remains 105 lbs would die right off. But alas we are surrounded by abundance and my genes are not ideal.
I was a happy 245-lb fat chick until early 2014 when I got my diabetes diagnosis – 12.1 a1c. My doctor gave me metformin and told me to eat better and check back in a few months. Well, I lost some weight and between that and the metformin I got my a1c down in the 6s. Great job said my doctor, but my a1c numbers started creeping back up and the doc prescribed more metformin, then glipizide, then my kidneys started having issues and the cholesterol numbers were bad. That’s ok said my doctor, diabetes is a progressive disease and that’s how it goes sometimes, as he calmly prescribed more drugs.
It was mid-summer 2015 when that happened. A few days later i was at Six Flags with my family, most of whom didn’t even try to fit into the rides that required tight safety harnesses. I love rollercoasters though. Well, the safety harness closed over my gut but it took two of the ride operators to slam it into place. I could feel their contempt. Later that day, I heard one of my diabetic, morbidly obese aunts had to call 911 because she’d fallen and couldn’t get up on her own. Wake-up call finally hit me – I could not keep going down this road.
I did research and found keto on reddit, then nearly killed myself with severe hypoglycemia… ugh glipizide, such a horrible drug. My doctor said yeah that was a common side effect, just keep orange juice on hand. Well I fired that guy and got a keto-savvy doctor. In short order I was able to discontinue the glipizide, metformin and although it took a year for my kidney numbers to normalize, they healed too.
With 100 lbs of weight lost I had a bunch of loose skin that kept getting infected. In June 2017 I got it cut off! My weight’s been stable at 145ish for the past 1.5 years now. I follow the Impulsive Keto method of intermittent fasting and meals of meat + two veg, more or less. My HOMA-IR’s been tested at 0.5 which is as good as it gets, my cholesterol’s great, my bp’s great, everything’s great (er except for some thyroid and anemia issues). Currently trying an experiment with alternate-day fasting, no food Monday/Wednesday/Friday, so basically 3 44-hr fasts during the week, to see if I can shake my body off this 145 set-point and lose anothr 10 pounds or so just out of vanity really. We’ll see!
I also saw a therapist to delve into my psyche and figure out long-term weight/health maintenance strategies. The key for me is to always have new goals, to monitor myself, and to participate in communities where I make friends that understand and share the same health goals Nice to meet y’all.