Ketogenic Diet, Metabolic Syndrome and the Keto Flu
3 years ago, almost to the day I gave up drinking alcohol and started on a journey to heal and repair my body. Along the way I discovered that I had cancer. I attacked this aberrant disease as an attacking marauder and was able to defeat it without too much bloodshed.
It’s easy to look back at how you were with dismay and a certain amount of contempt for yourself if you have been successful in turning the corner and arriving at a new and better place. If you have arrived at this “better place” you also have the luxury of objectivity and the sense that you have climbed the mountain ranges, crossed the flooded rivers and been battered by the sun and that anything ahead of you looks easy.
When I began my transformation back in February 2019 I weighed about 108 kgs, I was pre-diabetic, had high blood pressure, a fatty liver and the thought of going for even a 30 minute walk was almost offensive. I ate whenever I wanted to, sometimes even omitting to eat because I was far too stressed and busy. On days like this I would arrive at 3 pm and feel like my blood and vital organs had been sucked out of me and replaced by stagnant mud. Even when I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner supplemented with snacks I still felt like this. I slept in as late as I possibly could but never felt like I awoke refreshed.
Under all of this “disrepair” I was still essentially me. I may have been a bit depressed at times and I certainly looked forward to making myself numb each night with a formidable quantity of vodka but I was still able to interact with people and glean just enough pleasure out of life to justify going on.
Oh my god, it sounds horrible and yes it was but I had it all justified and if anyone prodded me about my health I got defensive and always had some bullshit excuse that I was stressed and had so much to get done.
The food I ate was mainly “healthy” and good quality but what was lacking was any workable and applicable knowledge of how my body worked, what pre-diabetes actually was, what a fatty liver was a manifestation of, why my blood pressure was always high and I needed to take tablets to get it lower.
When I look back I see a drowning man, panicking and flailing his arms to stay afloat but for some ungodly reason one who was deep down far too ashamed to ask for help. Not that I even knew who I could ask.
I had been seeing a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, a Chinese herbal doctor but underlying all of this I had no chance because I lacked any substantial knowledge about my body. My doctor told me that I was pre-diabetic but failed to explain what this meant. maybe she didn’t know herself. I was also told that I had a fatty liver and once again, as bad as it sounded I had no idea what a liver surrounded in fat did to my health.
Fast forward 3 years and that is all in the past. I now weigh 80 kgs, my blood pressure is perfect most of the time, my liver is working as it should, I feel pretty fit for a man who is 70 and I wake up feeling refreshed and full of life. I can even look in a mirror and feel OK about what I see.
What did I do?
I’m not going to write the whole story in this post. Needless to say it would fill a book. What I do want to talk about briefly is the food/eating protocol that I adopted and the knowledge that I learned along the way.
The key factors to my transformation are a) adopting and following a healthy ketogenic diet and understanding why I was doing it b) having an understanding of what metabolic syndrome is and maybe even more importantly, what insulin resistance is. Sounds simple! To be honest, yes it is but at the same time it took a huge amount of discipline, hard work, persistence, study, exercise, changing my cooking style and my eating habits and schedule. It meant changing the way I lived my life completely and being 100% committed to sticking to the regimen that I chose to follow.
If you want to improve the quality of your life I strongly recommend that you watch the following podcasts/YouTube clips that go over some of the basics that I talked about above.
The best advice I can give you is that you have to take full responsibility for your own health no matter what, you can’t blame anything or anyone else for the condition you are in and secondly that you continue to improve your knowledge of how your body works, what it needs and how you can apply this data to your own life.
It’s hard at the start, it gets easier, you must continue and not compromise. It is worth all of the effort and hard work that is ahead of you.
