My issues surrounding weight and body image began when I was about eight years of age. I did not realize at that time that this was by design or for my own purpose. I call it my own “life’s design” meaning that this situation creates a certain experience for me. Unfortunately, we only understand life after we’ve lived it, and this realization has taken me about fifty years to figure out. (I’m glad the realization finally hit me and not in another fifty years!) My journey has been really life-affirming and I realize now that life is just getting better and better for me. And, news flash. It is getting better for you, too. I’ve just changed how I measure “better” and found that to be the key to living well: Perspective.
At about eight years old, I went on my first diet. My parents were new to this country when I was born and desperately tried to assimilate. (In their home country, they learned first-hand about how being different could get one killed.) As their first-born child, I had the joys of being their first for “life in the U.S. with children”. Textbook first-born. I recall being called into the nurse’s office from my fifth grade classroom at the local elementary school, and being weighed with comments and hushed tones; it left me feeling “less than,” abnormal, or wrong. I was EIGHT YEARS OLD! When the school told my parents that I was too heavy, they acted on this information and treated me as an adult would be treated. Larger than most children, I always felt clumsy or top heavy – even today. My size was concerning to my parents as something that was wrong with me, like it reflected a lack of self-monitoring so that precipitated my first diet. This was also my first meeting with fat bias – from those adults who, frankly, should have known better. My mother, struggling with her weight her entire life, did not want her children to suffer or to not fit in. What was my weight? 78 pounds. My height? A little larger than normal. What I did realize then is that I did not “fit” the mold of a child’s body which left me feeling ostracized, different or wrong. This perpetuated my increase in weight so that I could hide or not be seen, blend.
I remember quite a bit about my childhood and being overweight. Unfortunately, everything else is a blur. Isn’t that interesting? I remember the time my mother was told what a shame it was that I was so heavy, or that I had such a pretty face that it was a shame that I was……wait for it…..ok….let’s say this all together in hushed tones so no one knows…shhh…she doesn’t realize it….fat. That sense of shame, guilt and failure has plagued me my entire adult life; it was created by external factors taking advantage of a really lost little girl. (Today, as an adult, one would look at my life and not even realize that these feelings are still with me.) I struggled with body image issues exacerbated during my school years by boys who thought it okay to remark about my weight, or girls who were almost worse, teasing me unmercifully for being what they feared. Here is that word again: fat. Painfully shy, I began to come out of my shell at about sixteen only to add layers of clothing, fat, and emotions so that I became lost in my own body issues…and angry enough to lash out. At about twenty-three, I began to turn a corner in my own self-actualization journey. This journey was not without its own pitfalls yet, through it all, I’ve realized that I’ve come out better as a result. I’ve really enjoyed the highs and lows of living in this time and on this planet as it taught me about myself and gave me the experiences I need to be at this point in my life. Throughout it all, this backdrop of my early childhood experiences has set my own personal stage for my life. Instead of lamenting on what cannot be changed, I recently began to change my thinking about these experiences – and, finally, focused on what I was meant to learn by these experiences, not how I felt at the time. Before this realization these carryover emotions had only succeeded in creating a weird mental “soup” that was not helpful to me today and, yet, was extremely helpful for it focused me on “outside the box” type of thinking about my issues. So, without the bad, I could not see the good. I realized that I was failed by the medical establishment in the treatment of my fat. My weight was seen as a personal failure or a lack of control when, in reality, it was an effect of the larger and emerging medical issue.
Here is a bit of my medical history. In the late 70s and early 80s, I began to have gut issues in my teens along with cystic acne. Treatment? A course of antibiotics for MONTHS. No relief but major stomach problems which, fueled by my mental anxiety, took center stage. At 16, I was told to drink antacids when I had a sour stomach. Between this time and the late 90s, I was relatively healthy, smoking, and prone to bouts of seasonal allergies. During this time, my weight crept up and up. Fad dieting has been my life story where I’d lose a little weight, have a health issue, feel sorry for myself, and eat. On my 30th birthday, I was diagnosed with depression and body dysmorphic disorder; Happy Birthday to me!! I began a cycle of Prozac and treatment that made a significant improvement. This experience gave me a taste of what “normal” must feel like – and I wanted it!!
In the late 90s, I began to experience dizziness upon standing and felt extremely unwell. My jaw was tight and I began to grind my teeth, creating severe jaw pain that hurt my entire head. I snored very heavily and slept very soundly yet poorly. My skin was odd with tags, discoloration, and just poor tone. At this time, after a five-hour glucose tolerance test, I was diagnosed with metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance. When I asked what pills I should take, my doctor said that they really didn’t treat this. What? “Isn’t there a pill for everything?” I naively inquired. He looked confused as did I, mentioned something about diet, and that was it. So, not understanding fully the diagnoses, I went back to my old habit of self-blame and hyper-criticism, and this cycle continued for decades. My health was up and down with stomach issues, gallbladder removal, blood pressure, and just feeling yucky all of the time.
At this point, I was just ignoring my health because, after all, if there wasn’t a pill to treat me, I’m not really sick, am I? I was very interested in alternative medicine and bought into the hype of a pill as a cure there, too. At the crux was this mistaken belief: If I was just a better person, I would not feel this way. After all, I could not actually see the effect of my long-term health was doing on my body except for my weight which had steadily increased over the decades. That was an old problem of my own making, right? I had bought into the idea of Western medicine being the only cure available to me even though I sought alternative solutions, I still had the “pill will cure” mindset. In a precipitous series of events beginning in 2003, I was diagnosed with a severe vitamin D deficiency and psoriasis. The vitamin D test result goal was 30 – which was the lowest in the normal range; my score was 8. The psoriasis appeared as a small spot on my lower leg that would not heal. Not correlating the two together, continued as I was, adding a vitamin D supplement – my pill panacea – when I remember to take them.
Another decade passes of the same. However, my psoriasis became extremely bad in 2012 when, during a particularly stressful period of time, my health began a further decline. Stress took its toll. Because my scales only appear on my elbows and calves, my doctor did not want to use oral drugs as the patches covered about twenty percent of my body. I used steroid creams for a while which had very limiting success. I sought medical advice from top hospitals in New York City on whatever “this” was that was covering my lower extremities. Then, an interesting thing happened on one of my visits. The steroid ointment had worked for me so well that I could no longer see any lesions yet, when I stopped using the ointment, the psoriasis came back — and angrier than ever. These scales were taking on a life of their own! In my next visit, I asked my doctor at the big hospital why, when I stopped using the ointment, the scaly patches would return – and be worse. She really didn’t have an answer. Then I asked the loaded question: Why, if this steroid cream does not resolve the matter, was I using this stuff? I wanted a cure, not a stop-gap measure. That was when she shrugged and pretty much told me that this was the way my psoriasis treatment would be, or there was no known cure. I began to wonder just why would I take or apply a drug that doesn’t cure this situation but just puts a bandage on it? After asking about a possible dietary correlation, my doctor also told me that there were some studies about diet relationship but nothing conclusive. This is when I realized that the entire medical establishment is based on treatment of a condition, not prevention. Prevention or self-help cannot be monetized; therefore, there is no interest in providing a patient with information for them to use or institute. Again, this caused a struggle in me as I had no idea where to turn. Then, I got the luckiest diagnosis ever: thyroid cancer.
Hello, thyroid cancer, for you have taught me well on my journey. In 2016, my dentist found a lump in my throat during my annual examination. I was found to have a parathyroid tumor that was leeching calcium from my bones. (A decade prior, I had fallen and broken my rib during a dizzy spell.) The parathyroid tumor required I have surgery to remove it. It has also grown into my thyroid which required a partial removal of that organ as well. My thyroid was found to have cysts which were biopsied and found to be benign. During the surgery, however, the hospital tested the tumor and the portion of my thyroid that was removed. This is standard in any parathyroid tumor removal to ensure the entire mass had been adequately removed; it was, and, with it, they uncovered my cancer. Yes, my thyroid cancer was diagnosed by total accident even after multiple biopsies due to the cysts. By this time, however, I had been studying food, nutrition, and diet for so long that I knew of a possible correlation between my poor diet and my health. After all, it does not take a genius to realize that, if you power your body with bad fuel, you get bad results. However, just what is considered “good” fuel was something I struggled with. I’ve learned that I just need to pay attention to what my body is telling me.
In the past four years, I’ve run the gamut of research on food and disease. Today is May the 5th, 2021, and I just now realized this morning that all of these apparently random health issues: acne, depression, cancer, psoriasis, high blood pressure, hair loss, obesity, gut issues (gallbladder, ulcer) and my brain fog all correlate right straight back to my diagnosis of metabolic syndrome from the 90s. Now, isn’t THAT a pretty picture? I think I just accepted that I’m going to age, that my body will decline and decay, and then I get to move on to my next journey. What’s that saying? “No one gets out alive?” Sure, that is true. However, we have the power to choose how we age, how we live life, and if we think we can help ourselves through small changes and a new mindset. On this morning, while watching a doctor on YouTube, he discussed having too much insulin in the blood, or the 7 Skin Signs of INSULIN RESISTANCE (Root Cause 2021) Not sure how this came into my view but I thought, heck, I wonder if he mentions psoriasis. What I didn’t know is that I’ve had ALL OF THESE, and had no idea that these issues correlated to the my prior diagnosis of insulin resistance (metabolic syndrome). In the past, most doctors would just tell me to lose weight. What they didn’t understand is that my weight was a sign of the overall issue, not the cause.
The idea of weight as a factor needs to really be examined; I believe this stems from a medical bias against people who are overweight. Don’t you think that, if I could, I would lose weight? Huh? Don’t you think I want to wear cute clothes, fit into nice jeans, and feel normal? The idea of telling me to lose weight really doubled down on my depression and body dysmorphia. I’d leave my medical appointments feeling so bad that I just wouldn’t go back after failing time and time again.
My issue IS the insulin resistance, or hyperinsulinemia that was diagnosed twenty-five years ago. Being chronically resistant to insulin causes all kinds of stuff that I’ve just tried to manage without much information and success. You know, though, I’ve seen this term – hyperinsulinemia – used in my patient workups and my medical charts. I never really understood just what was being discussed and believe it related to my weight, or my weight caused the excess amount of insulin in my blood. When I explained this to my husband, he asked why wouldn’t the large NYC hospital know about the diet correlation to my psoriasis? Why is it that I can go for years, suffering, only to be made aware of this by a random YouTube video? I don’t know the answer to this which is why I’m being very forward and honest in this post. How does this happen?? The lack of dietary guidance that I received should be criminal. Or, the fact that a pill could not be dispensed to me stunted my medical treatment for the medical establishment determined that I could not be helped. There is no money in changing my diet…unless, of course, you have a diet plan for sale AND that plan involves reduced calories because I obviously cannot control myself seeing as I am obese. Right. I will put my plate to yours any day and show you how you eat more than I do. Hands down. What I’ve learned and finally assimilated is that my body responds differently than your body does to the same food.
Speaking of food, this is how I can (and will) fix these ailments. Low carb, no sugar, high fat. Or, the Ketogenic diet. Of course, the professional dieter that I am, I’ve done Keto, Paleo, AIP….you name it. These have all been done in the name of losing weight so my health issues go away. This really isn’t the right way of thinking for me and may have contributed to my lack of permanent success. For some unknown reason, understanding that I’m doing this for my own health – and not for any weight loss reason – seems to be more motivating for me. What is curious for me, too, is the idea of intermittent fasting as a part of my plan. I plan to let me body go through all of my stored insulin without feeding my body more carbohydrates. Being home in the Pandemic has made me realize that I don’t really feel very hungry during certain times of the day yet I eat meals anyway because the clock says it is lunch time – and you don’t want to see my “hangry.” I also eat because I’m bored which I’ve realized is a frequent state for me. I like being busy and creative, and those outlets have been stunted in my life through my negative mindset. I’m unwrapping my creative side in many ways and am so enjoying a return to myself that my heart just bursts with good feelings.
Today is now May the 7th, 2021, and I wanted to include a little update on fasting. For the past two days, I’ve been working on fasting in the mornings when I am busiest and have noticed a slight difference in my energy – all positive. Both of these issues are part of Dr. Ken’s discussion so I’m returning to study this a bit more and take matters back into my own hands…and mouth. After fifty years, it is about time. The moral of my story: Never give up for life just gets better and better. Rename “failure” to be “event” for failure adds a feeling to something random. Be vigilant to see it through, and coach yourself as you would do others: kindly and lovingly. Peace.
Note: If you have read this far, thank you. I wanted to add a few scientific journals on information that I wish my doctor had discussed with me. This is a discussion of my own personal experiences and realizations. There is a wealth of data out there.
Patients with psoriasis are insulin resistant
Metabolic syndrome, hyperinsulinemia, and cancer
Ketogenic diet in endocrine disorders: Current perspectives
The Wobble 