How My Nutritional Evolution Saved My Life
Over the past 17 years my nutritional approach has consciously evolved. This evolution has been propelled by changes in my knowledge base as well as driven by specific health challenges. The arc of this change has gone from a quest to lose weight and be healthier to enhancing the quality of my life so that I can survive and thrive from metastatic breast cancer.
In 2004 while I was studying in an advanced Naturopathy degree program, I was learning a great deal about natural nutrition and began to pay more attention to the nutritional foundation for my general health. We began following the South Beach Diet Developed by Arthur Agatston. The diet’s focus on lower glycemic foods, lean protein and nutrient dense vegetables was helpful for me to experience an initial weight loss. But once we stopped the initial phase of the diet and began relaxing some of the parameters, my weight began to creep back up. This was very frustrating, so I consulted with an Integrative Physician who suggested I had a gluten intolerance. We gave up wheat/gluten and increased the amount of corn products we were eating, which just made me feel worse.
By 2008, we got a little more serious about eating whole foods and began looking at different approaches like The Whole 30 (Dallas and Melissa Hartwig) way of eating. During this period we also dabbled with raw food principles but were eating and cooking more whole food meals. This naturally lead us to discover the Paleo (Robb Wolf) and Primal Blueprint (Mark Sisson) worlds in 2013. We jumped into a Primal way of eating with both feet and found increased health and vitality.
As we aged we found a natural progression from a Primal way of eating to the Ketogenic way of eating. This was in 2016. Initially, we tracked our macros but found this process to be somewhat cumbersome (or so we thought at the time!), so we just “winged it” and focused on whole, lower carbohydrate foods, a modest amount of protein and some fat. I was not routinely testing my blood glucose or ketones, but guess that I was probably moving in and out of ketosis.
In November, 2019 I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. This was shocking news, especially since I had few symptoms from the cancer having spread to my bones. At the time of my diagnosis I was working with an Oncologist who said the only option for me was a cocktail of medications for palliative care. Immediately after my diagnosis I found information on metabolic approaches to cancer using ketogenic nutrition and lifestyle practices. We mentioned this to the Oncologist, who quickly discounted it as an approach and said there was no research to back up the use of these approaches. She said the best I could hope for was to take the cocktail of medications and that it would “buy” me about two (2) years (maybe more, maybe less) of life.
I found a new Oncologist, one who understands, supports and encourages the use of a ketogenic lifestyle as part of a standard of care approach. Now, when I see him the doctor runs down the list of possible side effects from the medications I am taking and he continues to be amazed at how well I am tolerating the treatments. In addition, the Oncologist is quite pleased at how well the combination of the ketogenic lifestyle and the standard of care treatments have worked to significantly reduce the presence of disease in my body. This has all been accomplished through a well-formulated therapeutic ketogenic diet/lifestyle that has included many of the Ancestral principles we first learned about in the Primal Blueprint.
When I was first diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, I was asked what my ultimate goal was. My reply was: to have the best quality of life for as long as possible. A year and half into the expiration date the first Oncologist gave me, I am thriving in part because of my nutritional evolution.
