Changing My Diet - On the Metabolically Broken

I have Hyperprolactinemia and Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) one of the many problems with this condition is that it's horribly under diagnosed. The other is that this is not a problem rooted in the ovaries, but it is a pituitary gland disease. For this particular disease the pituitary gland swells and it secretes excess prolactin. Since I'm not a doctor, I suggest you use Google from someone qualified to get more information.

My main point is that I have this disease. It went undiagnosed for so long that it ended up breaking my endocrine system, but now that my hormones are managed I'm feeling better.

However, my body is still pretty broken in that my triglycerides are off the charts and if I don't get them down my endocrine nurse is going to have her own heart attack. I also have tragic blood sugar issues. The disease also caused me to gain weight, which I now need to/want to lose.

But right now my body is pretty messed up metabolically and along with the disease  the root of this is....dum dum dum...in my childhood. I know, you're shocked.

So when I was 9 I was told by my mother that I was fat. Because she is just a kind and loving mom like that.When I look back on photos I realize I wasn't fat, but reality and my childhood were not really in agreement anyway.

She kept telling my I was fat, which was super helpful to me in both the development of my sense of self as well as wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do about it. She was the person who fed me. I was 9. It wasn't like I had the wherewithal to go do some research on body development and nutrition.

My mom decided to take me to a doctor that  "helped" overweight children and he put me on the tragic 1,000 calorie, low fat, high carb diet that helped make my body the trainwreck it is today.

I was on this diet of horrors until I was in my 20s and my lovely husband helped me to get a grip on reality. Unfortunately the damage had already been done and this along with my disease left me confused and lost.

In my quest to get healthy while I was sick I did lots of research on nutrition, micro-nutrients, alternative diets, etc. My family and friends had the poor pleasure of living with me through the many trends of no sugar baking, putting kale in everything and a whole lot of other nutrition ploys I tried in an attempt to stop feeling like I'd been run over by a car.

So now my body is healing, but I'm still not healthy. I need to change the way I eat so I can get the triglycerides down, manage the blood sugar and lose the weight.

So I'm on Atkins. Which sucks. Atkins is a low carb diet that should include veggies and starts at 20 grams of carbs a day. I have found that I need to stick to less then 12 grams of carbs a day or my body goes off ketosis, which is how you can measure weather Atkins is working or not.

So my body is so metabolically broken that it freaks out if I have really any carbs at all. I think that is so weird. It also means that I eat meat and eggs. That's pretty much it. I dream of brussel sprouts, but if I try to eat one, my body goes of ketosis.

This means that my body is SOOOO sensitive to what I eat that it is like dealing with a twitch control on a video game. One little push and my avatar falls off a cliff.

For a woman raised that veggies are better than anything, fat's the devil and carbs are great. This is a huge shift for me. I keep trying to sneak veggies into my diet, but then my body freaks out. It's so weird!

So I now have a list on my fridge of what I can eat so I stop trying to add in veggies and I'm stuck on this for probably a year. That seems to be how long it should take for my body to reset and stop flipping out.

I am not happy about this. So when you eat your brussels sprouts and your beets think of me kindly.