At 21 I was told by my gynae I had PCOS and that I was ‘probably insulin resistant’. I had no idea what that meant and in those days few people really did – I was lucky to have had such a progressive person advising me I guess! I immediately went onto a Low GI diet, did masses of research and have been mostly on that since then. No sugar, but fructose, fruit, low GI grains and other similar things formed part of my strict diet for over a decade – anything low GI was safe. I lived by that GI list – cut High GI foods out nearly entirely, and started much more regular exercise. People would roll their eyes when I started talking about the GI list back then. I’m sure the some of you reading this post know that feeling very well.
I had always been the one, even before this, that was buying the health bread at university while my friends were on white Sarmies. Perhaps even then in my size 8 skinny bell-bottoms and late night parties chased by green juice mornings, I had always known.
From that point on, I did everything ‘right’ and kept going relatively well on this for nearly a decade, controlling my PCOS symptoms with exercise and ‘healthy’ eating. Kind of well. I read everything I could even the largely unsupported LCHF theories back then, taking some seriously but mostly trusting ‘good sound scientific advice’.
Slowly towards my late 20’s things showed up a bit more for me – I picked up exercise and weight. After falling pregnant with my son I really committed to a life of health, research and medicine in whatever form was needed – I quit my job and danced fulltime at one point all day long to keep the emerging worrying symptoms at bay and look after my health and body responsibly, but weight keep creeping on. It slowly became an obsession of mine – I studied different diets and lifestyles around the world and looked back in time at ancestral diets on different continents, wanting to understand why the more I exercised, the more weight I seemed to gain. I tried nearly everything. Detoxes for long periods even fasts of different kinds. I studied the spiritual aspects of health and weight, had ceremonies to thank my weight for what it had taught me, loved it and my body. I even started a clothing range for women that didn’t have sizes because of how hard it had been for me over the years watching my figure grow in dress sizes. I became a role model for women to embrace themselves and love their curves and fell in love with my body as it was. But I still had health issues and I still wanted to find out more about this metabolic condition I seemed to have ‘got’ that no one else in my immediate family had as seriously. I tried Herbal concoctions. Weigh Less. Patrick Holford. Gillian McKeith. Atkins. I had the biggest repertoire and knowledge of diets of anyone I know. I was a walking encyclopedia of the GI list. Then the GL list. The injection diet. I went to a dietician and counted broccoli for months and it made no difference. I don’t think she believed me that I had stuck to her plan, but I had. One morning during the diet I stopped at a deli to buy forty croissants for my niece’s naming ceremony and guess who I bumped into, carrying this all: her. I was ashamed to be seen with treats, even if they weren’t for me!
I travelled to the East in search of medicine that would explain my health condition sitting in a queue for six hours at a famous traditional medicine man and was sent home with a strange diet of pork stew and fried foods, which I tore up being vegetarian at the time. I wrote to my teacher asking for help and expecting some mystical answer to why I couldn’t fix this rooted in the stars. He replied suggesting I consult a dietician. And so it went. Circles around each other of this story. My Taiwanese partner told me that women in Taiwan eat fried foods to lose weight and I thought he was joking. On my quest for health, I was a committed vegetarian for about 17 years – some of the time on no animal products and sometimes on fish and eggs. I got lots of rolling eyes then too for not fitting into the Braai culture in South Africa at that time. It was like no one really understood back then I was eating for my life. For the last few years of that time I lived mainly on soya and lentil type products, all low fat, trying harder and harder to get better.
This health journey is still even now a hard one to talk about for me – people don’t seem to understand and would say things like ‘just eat less and exercise more’, but in my case, that really didn’t seem to help. I thought I was mad. I come from a country, culture and society that rewards Thin and punishes anything other in women in often overt and often quite subtle ways. Often if I shared my story I felt shame and don’t think people believed me necessarily some of the time. I am the same. I find myself constantly needing to ‘catch myself’ from judging people by the way they look, even if it’s a very subtle perception. The truth is that people that haven’t Had to go on a health journey may never understand this complicated journey of self discovery and love, and indeed there are some lucky people who will be fine living on Coca Cola and sugar for their entire lives unaffected and don’t need to entirely ‘get it’. My father is one of them. He is 84, plays squash three times a week still and takes six sugars in his tea, washed down with a chocci biscuit usually and lives on sugary drinks mainly. Whenever we talk about weight he says ‘there is nothing healthier than sugar’. It may be true for him, but I now know its not true for me. Any for many, many others like me.
So, I just stopped sharing my story for a long time. I wasn’t lying to myself and hiding Kit Kat wrappers under my sheets or sneaking in late night KFC box meals and couldn’t be bothered trying to justify myself to many people that didn’t understand. I was genuinely doing the work and eating according to the guidelines of what is healthy. At one point I had a housemate that was a personal trainer. After a few weeks he moved in, unprompted, he said to me: Jayne I have been watching your diet and you really eat healthily. I think what you need to do is add a few apples a day to your diet and this will help you lose weight. The hardest part of it was the shame of not being able to ‘get it right’ and ‘fix it’.
Naturally, I was Livid. Then I tried it. I also committed to a six week spinning challenge with at least one daily spinning class and gained six kgs. I also took up yoga, meditation and weight training and running around that time. Slowly the penny started to drop that there was something bigger that I hadn’t ‘got’ here. Some breakthrough moments were when I tried the Atkins diet and felt instant energy. I didn’t stick it out because of the endless opinions about it not being healthy to do for long. Another interesting clue was when I travelled through Switzerland and let go of my diet for one holiday, indulging on cheese fondue and wine for weeks. And lost 10kgs.
A game changing time for me was a few years ago when I got really sick and felt Terrible. I went to my doctor for tests and a day later he called me on my cell phone. ‘Hi Jayne. Can you walk or drive right now?’ I was in Woolies at the time with my son. ‘Umm yes why?’. ‘Get in your car now and drive here immediately please’. Oh god. Not a great call from a doctor to get. He said my iron levels were so low he didn’t know how I was even standing and put me on two drips of iron there and then. I left with a prescription for anemic medication that was over four times the usual dose – the pharmacist rang him to check if it was right before giving me the prescription. None of the later supplements worked or made much difference and after six months of trying to correct my iron, my vegan kinesiologist told me I must go and eat a steak. After 17 years of being a committed vegetarian, this felt like a subtle death sentence for me. I cried and forced that first bite of an organic ostrich fillet down with lots of sauce. Within weeks of starting to eat meat consciously, my iron levels were normal again. From my years of incorrect ‘healthy’ eating, I also developed deficiencies in Vitamin D and B12. I am learning that the LCHF lifestyle is full of really conscious people that care a lot about the earth, its animals and the way they are treated. Mainly because they care a lot about themselves and what they eat – they understand pasture reared and ethical slaughtering as much as any vegetarian I know and take a genuine pride and interest in what happens to all the species animal and vegetable that they eat. They care about GMO foods and all sorts of very ethical questions. They really care about themselves and their health too. I still eat occasional conscious red meat now because my body feels like it does well on it. Its still hard for me ideologically and only for now and then. Each time I do it I offer gratitude to the animal that I am consuming and accept I am a part of the big circle of existence and come from a history of human beings that have lived an omnivorous journey and evolved in this way. I say sorry and thank you regularly to animals harmed by the mechanization of our eating in the past time in history and make very careful choices about what I eat and from where. I also know this is a luxury most South Africans don’t have.
My doctor in the UK told me I couldn’t take metformin so I didn’t and re-committed to lifestyle changes. I developed gallstones during my pregnancy with my son and had to have my gall bladder removed when he was five weeks old, losing that precious time with him to breast-feed and bond, in agony.
A few years later I was told I had non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. ‘How is this possible?’ I asked my gastric-enterologist? I was the fittest I had ever been – that was the year I did 64 full days of dancing as part of my teacher training programme and general commitment to work on my fitness and health. His reply was the same thing I always heard: buy a new pair of trainers, hit the road and get more into lettuce.
So, naturally, I did. It didn’t really help much and I felt like I was in a cycle of poor health. I developed anxiety from this journey and wondered if I would be around to see my son’s tenth birthday with my health in that state it was despite all my efforts. I struggled to wake up in the mornings without a good few coffees and was the heaviest I had ever been.
Like so many others struggling with their health and weight, I was exercising more and more. On my teachers training in Devon I watched carefully what people ate, how much and when. It didn’t seem to correlate: the slimmest seemed to eat the most in a lot of cases and were the ones going back for seconds most meals. It was a great affirmation for me over that year that I wasn’t doing anything ‘wrong’ to my body and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way I was understanding diet. I tried a diet with under 500 calories a day at one point, never cheated once, and lost 100grams in about 4 weeks, that was when I really decided I was done trying so hard. My hair and nails had stopped growing and I felt like it was time to go onto metformin, despite a commitment to myself to find medicine through nutrition and lifestyle.
Of course, I got The Real Meal Revolution as soon as it came out. I read it with tears in my eyes in Exclusive Books in Hyde Park I couldn’t wait till I got home – it all made total sense. It explained my journey and I knew I was not doing this all alone. As we have seen in the past years, we are truly not alone. The thousands and thousands of people it has helped save and change are living testament to this truth: we are all different and yet the same.
Every day I read stories from all over the world of people who have gone of long term medications, reversed diagnoses of all kinds that felt like death sentences to them and many many endless ones of remarkable weight loss. It blows my mind.
Within a week of Banting, I started to wake up again at sunrise. Alert. Alive. Feeling ready for life. For the first time in longer than I ever remember. Like my son does. Soon after that the first few tough carb-free days, all the symptoms of blood sugar fluctuations vanished: afternoon slumps, emotional fluctuations, PMS, foggy head after more than 20minutes of concentration, moodiness when my blood sugar was down, IBS, hunger. My hair got shinier. The painful cracks I had been suffering with on my heels went away within a month. Then something else happened. I could, with no effort, run double the distance I used to with no extra effort. Its still early days but I have started to feel better about my life again – less worried about my health, rarely ‘down’ like I used to when I was eating in a way that poisoned my body. I started to feel like I was going to be ok. Like I had a future and like I could be a mother again. My skin cleared and for the first time in years, people would say to me ‘you look great’. I started to see people’s health with new eyes – I let go of the stories I had held that I still had more work to do on myself to lose those kilos and my feelings that others also struggled had things to ‘figure out’ emotionally and finally got the basic science of it all. I gave away all the diet books I had on my shelf and threw out a cupboard full of very expensive supplements, tonics, drops: you name it I had tried it. I no longer feel like I need even the basic ones I used to take that someone had told me was the reason for my many health issues I had dealt with. I didn’t want to give them away even and perpetuate this story that we need endless supplements – they all went into the loo two months into my own banting journey.
I still have a long way to go and a lot of years of ‘wrong eating’ for me to reverse. I may never go back to optimal health, but I believe its possible and see endless examples of it. I have communities online that can answer my questions instantly – I no longer need to save up for some specially trained expert to take expensive test, give me expensive supplements that I have to pay off and worry so much – I have all the tools I need to create a better life right there, in my kitchen now.
The Noakes Foundation is a genuinely purpose-driven place, asking genuine, critical questions that humanity, and I, feel deserves robust good answers to. Prof Noakes shared his own health story and journey with such authenticity and truth that it helped many – possibly millions – to empower themselves and start their own journey to truth and to find their own medicine. In that same way, his generosity of spirit combined with his commitment to real scientific truth and to challenging beliefs for the better has created something really powerful: a foundation consisting of a group of people, much like me (albeit with far better grammar and several more titles in front of their names of course) that are genuinely committed to helping the world get better.
We want to know how to fix what went wrong with our diets and ultimately our health in the process. We know we need to test this as broadly as possible in a way that makes clear sense and explains the rhetoric and answers the scientific questions responsibly. We want to answer questions and help each person find the answers to their own health that honour their unique ancestry, dietary needs and their bodies. In order to do this we have to detach from the masses of emotion and rhetoric that Banting seems to stir in people and really allow the science to give us answers to questions our forefathers seemed to know and teach their children and that factories, marketers and advertisers took from us which is fundamentally about how to eat and how to use food as our medicine.
To me personally, Banting could also be called ‘what our grandmothers knew about diet that got taken from us’. Or Real Eating. Or A Whole New Life. I know for sure I am not alone. I am open to being wrong and to things changing. I am finally really onto something that has helped my own health after a long time of searching in a lot of wrong and a few right places. Mostly, I want to keep learning, growing and getting better for myself, my child and the future generations of humanity.
We need your support to do robust, critical research into the LCHF lifestyle and would love ideas of how you can help and be involved.
I can’t wait to meet you, somewhere, on this journey and hear your story.
Love
