Doing a medical 180

When Janice talked to me about becoming a health coach over a year ago, I thought she would be great at that and gave my wholehearted endorsement…little did I realize that it would change my life and completely change my approach to medicine.

Part way through her training she came across “The Obesity Code” by Jason Fung and asked me to put my “doctor hat” on and read this book critically. Let’s just say I was VERY skeptical. “Sure” I thought, “Someone’s cracked the ‘code’ on obesity…just another fad diet.” But then as I read, Dr. Fung covered major medical studies I had been familiar with for years, and he started talking about diabetes reversing and even taking people off their insulin. Whoa. I have to be honest; in over 30 years of practice I never took patients off insulin (unless maybe they had gastric bypass or something as drastic) and I was never trained that diabetes was reversible. Could it be?

Intrigued, I set off on a major review of the science. If this was real (which I doubted) there should be proof. Plus, it has to be safe. What I found was astonishing. In the 40 years since we embarked on the “low fat diet” as being healthful, the science has been quietly stacking up to show that we had probably just made a big fat mistake. Fat was not the villain we thought it was and by replacing fat with carbohydrates we were going from the fire pan into the fire. We actually had made things worse. Indeed, obesity has gone from 15% to almost 40% and over 70% of Americans are overweight. Diabetes has gone up an astonishing 900% in this same time interval!

For the past several months I have been instituting this new low carbohydrate lifestyle change with patients and many are coming off their insulin and other medications, lowering blood pressure, losing weight, and a host of other healthy benefits. I have been totally amazed! I don’t have a drug that will do this!  With Janice providing the ongoing support and practical guidance, I am excited to get this message out to more people. Change is possible IF we live as God designed us to!