A Nurse’s Story
I thank Dr. Lustig for his work in the area of obesity and explaining the pathophysiology of it. For the first time in my life (I’m in my 30s) I feel like I’m actually making some gains on becoming a healthier person in society.
I am a nurse. I come from a poor family (high stress environment) with a mother who didn’t know how to cook and would feed us rubbish and give chocolate to keep us quiet. The family also has a history of obesity and type 2 diabetes. My mum put me on a low fat high carb diet to lose weight when I was 10 years old because that what the dietitian told her to do.
I ended up developing disordered eating, then progressing into an eating disorder (ED) – binge eating then progressed to bulimia. I didn’t have body dysmorphia. I knew I was overweight and wanted to lose the fat to be healthy. I don’t want diabetes like my family has been scared with. Mum is pre-diabetic with fatty liver disease.
So after being diagnosed ED I enrolled myself in all of the courses/dietitian and counselling I could to fix this issue. But it never seemed to work. I was always told that I need to address the psychological issue as to why I binge. All that fluffy shite that is involved with ED recovery. I never really felt there was an issue. To me it felt like it was a bad habit learnt. The dietitian would put me on an eating plan that would require me to eat regularly and snack every day. So that was a minimum of 6 meals a day. I would always feel hungry and would feel like I was genuinely going to lose it if I didn’t get some KFC or chocolate into my mouth. I even exercised my butt off. I became very fit but the weight wasn’t shifting.
After going over the work of Dr. Stephan Guyenet, Dr. Jason Fung and yourself, I can now see where everything has been going wrong.
Your talk on how sucrose is metabolised in the liver and how the brain is effected made perfect sense to me! After getting myself off fast food (yes, I had some amazing withdrawal symptoms) and started working on my nutrition, leptin and insulin resistance, I have noticed a difference in my hunger levels and the way I look at food. Yes, I still feel like chocolate here and there, but it’s not an overriding must-eat-it-or-I-will-kill-
Hand on my heart, I truly believe that our modern diet and even the development and recovery process for ED is a direct result of our modern diet. I’m sure that there is a small percentage of people that have genuine psychological eating disorders, but I think a great majority of ED is induced by the modern diet. All I wanted to do was avoid the food, then I would go through the withdraw of it, then I would binge on the food to make myself physically feel better. Even the recommended 6+ small meals a day was making me come undone. I now see it was because it was keeping my insulin levels up and keeping me hungry. It’s not natural to 6+ meals a day. And this has come about from the food industry trying to sell more.
I am angry at the food industry for doing this to society because money is more important the health of its people. But at least I know have the knowledge of the physiology of why my body was acting the way it did. It was only trying to survive not work against me.
So where am I at these days? I’m slowly losing weight and my hunger cues are slowly normalising. I get hunger pangs still (as to be expected), but they are not painful and I don’t feel nauseated by them anymore. It’s just a gentle reminder now. I’m craving healthy wholesome food and now realise we don’t actually need too much food to live a healthy life.
So I just wanted to say THANK YOU!!! keep going with your awesome work. It is making a change. I really hope I can one day give back to the community with the knowledge I now have.
