How I Finally Lost Weight With Dysautonomia/POTS

haleysnipes

Mar 20, 20235 min read

Getting diagnosed with a chronic illness has a way of turning people's lives upside down. Often, you cannot do many of the things you used to enjoy, and the things you can still do are much harder; but today I am going to tell you how I took back some control of my life and finally lost weight with Dysautonomia.

How It Started

I was an athletic child. I started martial arts when I was eleven, got my black belt when I was fifteen, and was active in the gym until I started at university. However, when I started at university, my health began to slip until I eventually got diagnosed with Dysautonomia.

My Dysautonomia was debilitating for at least a year after I got diagnosed, causing my health and fitness to decline further. Between the time I started university and the time I got married three years later, I gained 50 pounds.

When I started college, I weighed 120 pounds. Over the next three years, my weight yo-yoed between 135 and 150 as I tried to get back down to my original weight. I gained 50 pounds in total, but I lost 20 through yo-yo dieting at various points along the way.

No matter what I tried, I could not seem to get my weight to stay under 145 pounds. I would go on a diet for a couple of weeks and lose some weight, but then my health problems would get in the way and I would have to rest and eat normally again until I felt better. The problem was, by the time I felt better, I had lost the motivation to keep dieting. This cycle continued for three and a half years.

Facing The Problem

About two months ago, I finally decided that enough was enough when I realized that I was beginning to develop pre-diabetes. All the yo-yo dieting and poor eating habits had finally caught up to me and I had to either change or continue getting worse. I knew I did not want to try and juggle diabetes along with my POTS and Fibromyalgia, so I was determined to find a way to make weight loss work with Dysautonomia.

In the past, I had tried the standard method of eat less, eat healthier, and move more; but that just does not work very well when you are living with a chronic illness. Eating less did not work because of my hypoglycemia (if I went more than a few hours without something sugary, my blood sugar would drop as low as 50 mg/dl where it should have been at least 80 mg/dl). Eating healthier was a challenge because of financial constraints, and moving more was difficult because of my illnesses.

So, I was in a challenging spot. I was trying to do what had worked for me in the past, but it just was not possible anymore. That was when I started researching other methods. I read “The Fast 800” by Dr. Michael Mosley to learn more about fasting, weight loss, and diabetes.

The Fast 800

In his book, Dr. Mosley talked about the benefits of rapid weight loss and fasting for fixing blood sugar issues and helping to put type 2 diabetes into remission. I was already familiar with intermittent fasting because it is something I used to do quite often before I got sick, but this book detailed a safe and effective way to diet with certain medical issues.

The book mostly talks about fasting and weight loss in terms of pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes, but there is some research on the benefits with other medical conditions as well that I found very interesting. Dr. Mosley’s approach talks about doing modified fasting by cutting calories down to 800 a day for a short period of time in order to lose weight rapidly. This rapid weight loss then causes your body to drain fat from your organs (the bad fat that causes diabetes), helping to reverse the problem. Now, doing the full 800 calories a day approach seemed a little too extreme for me, but I was interested in trying a modified approach.

The modified approach that I came up with was to start off with doing 800 calories every other day and then work from there. I did this for about a month with some success. My blood sugar improved enough for me to not need to snack between meals, and cutting calories every other day had helped me lose a few pounds, but it still was not quite the results I was hoping for.

What Finally Worked for Me

Around this time, me and my husband happened to realize that we were spending way more money than we were supposed to on groceries, so I came up with an idea: since I was already doing a modified fast every other day, why not just turn it into a full fast?

I already had several years of experience with intermittent fasting, so fasting every other day (also known as alternate day fasting, or ADF) seemed like a reasonable next step. I figured if I could fast every other day, that I would not only lose weight faster, but also save some money in the process. If I was only eating 50% of the time, my food would cost 50% less.

I gave it a try for a week doing three 36 hour fasts and had fantastic results. I lost 4 pounds, my blood sugar stabilized even more, I was no longer bloated, my skin cleared up, and I saved some money in the process. I had finally found something that could work for me.

Alternate Day Fasting

Alternate day fasting is a method of fasting in which you do not eat for one entire day. When you are fasting, you can have only plain tea, water, and black coffee. When you are not fasting, you can eat what you want until you are satisfied.

An alternate day fast takes about 36 hours because you stop eating the first night after dinner, and do not eat again until breakfast on your feed day. An alternate day fast would look something like this:

Disclaimer: Alternate day fasting is generally considered safe, but you should always check with your healthcare team before starting any new diets. Certain medical conditions and/or medications may not be suitable for fasting. You should research carefully before deciding if alternate day fasting is right for you.

By following this pattern of alternate day fasting, I was finally able to start losing weight consistently after three and a half years. Overall, it is one of the easiest diets I have done, but there are also some challenges that come with it. Here is a list of pros and cons I have found with alternate day fasting:

Conclusion

"The Fast 800" was written by Dr. Michael Mosley and discusses the benefits of fasting and weight loss for managing diabetes and pre-diabetes. Alternate day fasting (also known as ADF) is a method of intermittent fasting in which you do not eat for 36 hours at a time. When I decided to try and lose weight while managing my Dysautonomia, I found that a combination of "The Fast 800" and ADF was effective for weight loss with 4 pounds lost in my first week of ADF and 8 pounds in total lost so far. While this diet has been useful for me, everyone is different and all dietary changes should be discussed and considered with your healthcare team before you implement them.

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