Now we get to "Why the low-carb diet is the only one for me..."
It all started in 2001 when I decided to go back to college to finish my degree.
As a student I had almost-free use of the University Health Center and it turned out that the same (fantastic) doctor I'd been seeing the whole time I was in college ten years previously was still there. I quickly made an appointment for an annual exam during which I talked to her about my weight issues, my irregular periods, my excess facial hair, and just about everything I could think of. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were sitting at her desk and without speaking she turns to her computer and starts typing. I didn't know what was going on but I waited and after a moment she turned back and said, "I think you have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. Everything you mentioned fits. Let's do some tests and go from there." She printed out a sheet about PCOS and scheduled our next appointment.
When I got home I started researching PCOS on the internet. There wasn't a lot on the web about it back in 2001, I think I was even still using Yahoo's search engine. (I was a late Google adopter, I liked the searching categories Yahoo provided.) One thing I did find was that along with the results I got about PCOS I was getting results for something called Syndrome X. Over the next weeks and months I dove down many search result rabbit holes, finding anecdotal accounts, research papers, and explanations of human biology. I borrowed books from the library on all those subjects, sat in bookstores reading books off the shelf, and I wrote notes upon notes upon notes. Eventually I took all my research and synthesized it into an informal research paper during which I followed the breadcrumbs from PCOS being caused by high levels of testosterone, that was in turn caused by high levels of insulin, that was in turn caused by insulin resistance, that was in turn caused by a history of desensitizing oneself to eating carbs by, you guessed it, consuming too many carbs over long periods of time. (I'm not a doctor OR a biologist, but that's the basics I have learned from my seventeen years of extensive amateur research.)
At that point I picked up a dog-eared copy of The Atkins Diet at a local used bookstore, read it and discovered that Dr. Atkins had actually figured most of it out years before. That's when I knew I had to try it. Yeah, no, it didn't work out. The Atkins Diet was too labor intensive for me at the time and even though I lost ten pounds the first week I just had lots of negatives weighing (bad pun) against me at the time, like a bad financial situation (bread and Kraft Mac & Cheese is cheaper than steak), low self-esteem and motivation, limited time, and by that point I'd already found a new boyfriend, even with all my extra weight. It wasn't until 2008, when I ballooned up to 290, that I really started to panic.
Tomorrow: The proof is in the pudding...
-----
Oh look! I just found a modern website that summarizes exactly what I discovered doing my own extensive research 16 years ago. Click on the image to get visit the website.
As a student I had almost-free use of the University Health Center and it turned out that the same (fantastic) doctor I'd been seeing the whole time I was in college ten years previously was still there. I quickly made an appointment for an annual exam during which I talked to her about my weight issues, my irregular periods, my excess facial hair, and just about everything I could think of. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were sitting at her desk and without speaking she turns to her computer and starts typing. I didn't know what was going on but I waited and after a moment she turned back and said, "I think you have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. Everything you mentioned fits. Let's do some tests and go from there." She printed out a sheet about PCOS and scheduled our next appointment.
When I got home I started researching PCOS on the internet. There wasn't a lot on the web about it back in 2001, I think I was even still using Yahoo's search engine. (I was a late Google adopter, I liked the searching categories Yahoo provided.) One thing I did find was that along with the results I got about PCOS I was getting results for something called Syndrome X. Over the next weeks and months I dove down many search result rabbit holes, finding anecdotal accounts, research papers, and explanations of human biology. I borrowed books from the library on all those subjects, sat in bookstores reading books off the shelf, and I wrote notes upon notes upon notes. Eventually I took all my research and synthesized it into an informal research paper during which I followed the breadcrumbs from PCOS being caused by high levels of testosterone, that was in turn caused by high levels of insulin, that was in turn caused by insulin resistance, that was in turn caused by a history of desensitizing oneself to eating carbs by, you guessed it, consuming too many carbs over long periods of time. (I'm not a doctor OR a biologist, but that's the basics I have learned from my seventeen years of extensive amateur research.)
At that point I picked up a dog-eared copy of The Atkins Diet at a local used bookstore, read it and discovered that Dr. Atkins had actually figured most of it out years before. That's when I knew I had to try it. Yeah, no, it didn't work out. The Atkins Diet was too labor intensive for me at the time and even though I lost ten pounds the first week I just had lots of negatives weighing (bad pun) against me at the time, like a bad financial situation (bread and Kraft Mac & Cheese is cheaper than steak), low self-esteem and motivation, limited time, and by that point I'd already found a new boyfriend, even with all my extra weight. It wasn't until 2008, when I ballooned up to 290, that I really started to panic.
Tomorrow: The proof is in the pudding...
-----
Oh look! I just found a modern website that summarizes exactly what I discovered doing my own extensive research 16 years ago. Click on the image to get visit the website.
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